The Wardrobe Shift
The lock turned from the inside before her knuckles landed. He stood in the frame with his jacket already on, silver watch, the charcoal suit she could have picked out of a police lineup. "Close the door."
Her bag went down on the guest chair. The door clicked.
He circled his desk without sitting and looked at her the way a building inspector looks at a wall. "Walk to the window. Back to me."
The office was eleven steps each way; she counted them out of spite.
Halfway down the second leg she understood what he was doing, and her face went hot ahead of her temper.
She stopped in front of him. He was looking at her legs by then, and he took his time about it, and he let her see him take his time.
Under that look the charcoal skirt felt thinner than it had in her own bedroom.
"The skirt is four inches too long," he said. "The heels are one inch too low."
Kaylee glanced down at the same skirt she'd worn all month. "It's a normal skirt."
"The role changed on Thursday." He slid a cream card across the mahogany, thick black type, a Delancey address. "There is a boutique there. It opens at ten. Your lunch is yours."
"My knees report to you now?"
"The floor reads you before it reads your work." He sat and drew the first folder of the day toward him. "Skirts will sit no lower than four inches above the knee. Standing and seated."
The words — standing and seated — went through her and came out somewhere low, and she hated the route they took through her body to get there.
"Visibility is a standard here," he said to the folder. "I maintain my standards. Heels no lower than three inches. The corridor is long."
"The corridor is long," she repeated.
He initialed the margin. The gold pen scratched. "You will wear the first of it this afternoon."
"And if I wear what I want?"
He turned the page. The retort was already up her throat — policy, precedent, three years of dressing like a professional — and she swallowed it, and the effort of the swallowing showed in her neck, and he watched her manage it before his eyes went back to the folder.
She took the card off his desk on her way out, mostly so she wouldn't be leaving it there.
The boutique on Delancey was smaller than its prices.
A woman with a tape pinned at her hip asked if she was dressing for an occasion.
"A job," Kaylee said. It even qualified.
The dress was black and plain and hung like it promised nothing.
In the fitting room it broke that promise politely: the hem settled at mid-thigh, four obedient inches above her knee, and she stood very still and read the price tag instead of her own legs.
At the register she heard herself add a pair of black lace panties, the kind with no practical purpose, the kind a person buys for an audience.
Her hand had done it before the rest of her voted.
Three-inch heels came off the shelf by the mirror, her size, no asking required.
She changed on the sixth floor, in the far stall of the executive restroom, her old clothes folded over the door hook.
The new dress settled against her and the air-conditioning went straight to every inch of her the hem left bare.
In the mirror above the sink, a woman looked back with brown legs and no work face on at all.
She tried the work face. It wouldn't go on.
The lace sat warm at her hips and already stuck.
She was wet before the zipper finished traveling, and she peeled the cloth straight anyway, watching herself do it.
This was the part she was supposed to hate: that he had said four inches and her body had said yes before her mouth got a vote.
She pulled the knot out of her hair and let the curls fall loose.
The woman in the mirror dressed for a man's eyes and knew it.
She left the stall with the hem where it was.
Her heels came down on the marble in a new pitch, higher and cleaner than the old pair, and the carpet swallowed them at the mouth of the executive corridor.
The hem brushed mid-thigh with every step, black silk on bare skin, there and gone, there and gone.
A man from legal held a door for her and lost the end of his own sentence.
She caught only the shape of her name in what he managed next, because his eyes had gone to the hem and stayed there through the whole of her passing.
His ears went red above the collar. He held the door longer than the doorway needed, and she walked through the middle of all of it and let him close it behind her.
One of the analysts looked at the hemline, away, then back with something flat and disapproving, and returned to her printing.
Every look landed somewhere on Kaylee and she felt each one land, and her fingers twitched toward the hem once to tug it down and she made them come back empty.
Autumn looked up from her monitor and her mouth opened and closed. "Okay, wow. New dress."
"You like it?"
"I like it fine. Who's it for?"
"Me. Radical concept."
Autumn lowered her voice and turned her chair to block the aisle. "Babe. If Adams has got you dressing for him—"
"He's not making me do anything, Jenks."
"Uh-huh." Autumn's eyes went to the hem and climbed back up carrying the whole argument she was swallowing. "You look amazing. That's all I'm saying."
"That's plenty." Kaylee picked up a routing slip from the tray, one she had no use for, and walked it toward the end of the floor at an unhurried pace.
Cooper's office sat at the end of the glass with the skyline behind it.
He was at his desk with the day's correspondence squared in front of him, pen moving.
As she came level with the panes, his pen stopped mid-word.
He never lifted his head, and being watched by a man who wouldn't grant her even that followed her the full length of the glass and turned the corner with her, into her shoulders, into her stride, which had changed somewhere back by the elevator and hadn't changed back.
At 4:41 his email arrived, four words, same as the night before: My office. Five o'clock.
She left it unanswered and watched the wall clock do its work instead, the second hand taking its time about it, every single revolution.
At 4:58 she let herself into his office.
The door stood open on an empty room, the desk clear, the day's light going bronze at the edges.
She carried her coffee to the glass and stood with the skyline coming on, the city lighting its windows floor by floor below her, and the pane gave her back a woman standing at the end of the corporate week with her lips parted and her curls down and her hem high, dressed to someone else's four inches.
Footsteps crossed the carpet behind her, unhurried, taken by the same carpet that had eaten hers all day.
In the glass, his reflection arrived at her shoulder and stopped.
The lock turned. Her hem stayed exactly four inches above her knee.