My Life in Clothes Read online

  My Life in Clothes

  Other Works by Summer Brenner

  Fiction

  I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex

  The Missing Lover

  Presque nulle part

  One Minute Movies

  Dancers and the Dance

  The Soft Room

  Poetry

  From the Heart to the Center

  Everyone Came Dressed as Water

  Fiction for Young People

  Richmond Tales, Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle

  Ivy, Tale of a Homeless Girl in San Francisco

  My Life in Clothes

  stories by

  Summer Brenner

  Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

  My Life in Clothes

  Copyright © 2010 by Summer Brenner

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Versions of these stories first appeared in Exquisite Corpse, New Blind Date, Processed World, Pangolin Papers, Shuffle Boil, and Web del Sol.

  Book layout by Elizabeth Davis

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  Brenner, Summer.

  My life in clothes : stories / by Summer Brenner.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59709-163-3

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R386M9 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2010025155

  The Annenberg Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  Pasadena, CA

  www.redhen.org

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Ella Baff, Felix Brenner, Laura Chester, Linda Norton, and Jane White who read versions of this work and generously provided me with their thoughtful comments.

  for Nancy

  Foreword

  Despite my mother’s efforts to tame me, I resisted, holding onto my creature nature until the day she informed me I would no longer be running naked in the yard or showering with daddy. It took a few scoldings before I was transformed from colt to show-pony: a proper reflection of whichever laundered, starched, pressed, brushed, straightened, zippered, tied, and buttoned garment was placed upon me.

  The first dress I adored was pimpled dotted-Swiss, the color of lemonade, worn on the occasion of my fourth birthday. Next was delicious apricot taffeta strewn with flocked leaves. At ten, the treasure in the closet was kitten gray linen accented with a pink velvet collar and sash. Every year, there was an excursion to downtown Atlanta to buy a pair of Capezio party shoes, gracefully-shaped velvet flats with straps that crossed the instep and hooked onto two ivory buttons.

  My high school wardrobe was underwritten by summer jobs, and after my first year of college, I was hired to counsel teens leaving home for schools in other climes.

  As I got older, income decreased and ingenuity increased. I discovered my calling as a sartorial dowser, gifted at excavating treasures from thrift stores, flea markets, and sidewalk free boxes. After terrible trials and errors, I learned to sew. Riding west across the continent, I embroidered and crocheted. I constructed a skirt of ragged suede scraps which proved too heavy to wear; and an aubergine jerkin covered in cowry shells, part Elizabethan, part Sioux.

  Either lost or recycled, almost nothing of these efforts remains except the stories. I shall let them tell you about My Life in Clothes.

  When in doubt, wear red.

  —Bill Blass

  The Dressmaker

  In 1903, my grandfather, Moshe Auerbach, walked from Tavrig (Taurage) in Lithuania to Germany. He walked to escape the Czar’s army. It was said after twenty years of military service, no one returned from the Czar’s army a whole man. He walked with money (sewn into his shirt) which he traded for a ticket (on the SS Breslau) to sail to America. He was eighteen years old.

  Moshe intended to disembark in Mobile, but because of yellow fever, the port was quarantined. Instead, he returned by ship to Baltimore and followed the trail of his four brothers (Simon, Charlie, Philip, and Ralph) from Maryland to Atlanta. He began as a peddler, traveling by mule-drawn wagon to small country towns and sharecropper farms, selling notions: pots, pans, needles, spools of thread, brushes, and brooms.

  “Jew man here!” was the cry throughout the countryside.

  Moshe Auerbach, Americanized to Morris Abelman, was determined to become a success. He opened a retail grocery store beside Piedmont Park. He became a wholesaler. During the bonanza years of the 1920s, he established a mill to manufacture chicken feed and flour. The mill thrived, especially in the Great Depression, when few people could afford store-bought bread and returned to home-style baking.

  By 1933, after decades of toil, Morris Abelman was a rich man. He wintered in Miami Beach at the Roney Plaza. He summered in the mountains outside Asheville.

  On weekdays, he donned a tailor-made silk suit, a starched Egyptian cotton shirt, and a Rep Stripe tie. Every morning he ate his bowl of stewed prunes (his motto: no grease, no gravy) and afterwards was chauffeured to his mill in downtown Atlanta, an address so desolate it could have been a hundred miles rather than a short drive from the Abelman mansion in Druid Hills.

  Puritan Mills was located beside Buttermilk Bottom, a black section of town (the eponymous name alone indicates what a sour place it was). The houses in Buttermilk Bottom were virtually huts, their windows often covered with cardboard, their roofs with tar paper. The front yards and hilly unpaved roads were red Georgia clay that turned slick and nearly impassible in the rain.

  Puritan Mills was a one-storey brick office building and an attached warehouse that abutted Magnum Street, a narrow strip of asphalt that accommodated loading docks as well as parked trucks. At one end of the congestion was a view of Atlanta’s burgeoning city skyline, and at the other a sausage factory whose offal smells made us gag.

  The entrance to Puritan Mills was hardly suggestive of a fortune. It opened directly into a warren of windowless cubicles. The women who worked in the office were white, but my grandfather had a kitchen constructed in the back of the warehouse where two black women baked all day. They baked and taste-tested biscuits, pies, and bread. They tried out new combos of baking powder, flour, and salt. My grandfather wanted to find and patent the formula for the perfect self-rising biscuit. In the 1950s, a trio of country musicians sang a jingle on TV, a testimony to perfection:

  My-T-Pure self-rising flour

  My-T-Pure is all y’all need

  After Morris had established himself as a merchant, between his station as immigrant peddler and lofty manufacturer, he married Anna Aron of New York City. Twelve years his junior, she was beautiful, penniless, stylish, and shrewd. On the eve of their engagement, Morris promised her a maid, and from that day forward, my grandmother would live by the credo: A woman’s maid is everything.

  Anna’s two insatiable passions were shopping and gambling. She played canasta twice a week and mahjong on Saturday. While traveling, she preferred cruise ships with slot machines and card tables. In Florida, she frequented the horse races at Gulfstream and the greyhound races in West Palm. Whether it was a trip to the Orient or Aegean, what titillated her most were the bingo scores.

  When she visited Paris, she wrote a postcard home: Drove by the Louvre today. My parents howled, and even as a child, I understood why the observation was so painfully funny.

  Anna returned from her travels with trunks of bibelots: alabaster eggs, lace fans, porcelain figurines. Once her own house was filled, she filled her daughters’ homes. Af
ter Peggy and I were born, she indulged us with foreign dolls (outfitted in their native costumes) and dresses from Italy and France.

  Anna also passed along her beauty secrets: stiff egg whites mixed with Witch Hazel for facials; blueberries applied to eyelashes as dye; perfume never sprayed directly on the body but in the air so it could mist over skin and hair. Anna would leave this world a redhead, carrying on the tradition of my great-grandmother, who dropped dead at eighty on the New York subway en route to the beauty parlor.

  Most interesting to Peggy and me was the family dressmaker, Mr. Emile, who worked out of a cluttered studio in Garden Hills. It was obvious no one ever swept or tidied up. Threads and shreds of fabric littered his floor. However, underneath the disarray pulsed lively possibilities. Bolts of material, boxes of buttons, boards of piping and braid, waiting to be transformed into his creations.

  Mr. Emile was an unusual and dramatic sort of man: the way he spoke, the way he dressed. He and my grandmother liked to nestle together (almost intimately) on a chintz-covered bench and pour through magazines, exclaiming (joyfully or with disgust) over the latest fashions. They conferred about his upcoming projects for her: a black organza sailor dress, a cut-velvet evening suit, a pleated chiffon blouse.

  When grandmother had finished her business with Mr. Emile, he kissed us girls on both cheeks, a habit he told us he’d acquired in the finest couture houses of Paris. He kissed Anna on the back of her hand, waving us off with a handkerchief.

  Anna said he was her favorite person in the world.

  While our grandmother had resources for almost anything, there was no help for my grandfather’s aging. It was on a return trip from Europe that Morris first showed signs of wear. At Customs, he failed to declare his Patek Philippe watch (purchased the week before in Geneva). After the watch was confiscated for inspection, he began to cry. He could not be consoled. Although he was assured by officials that the watch would be returned, he wept like a baby.

  Then, at Passover, Morris began to tell the story of his great-uncle, a man kidnaped by robbers and released unharmed because of the beauty of his voice. “And you know what the robbers did to him?” he chuckled as he bounced my baby brother on his thighs.

  “I know! I know!” I shouted, waving my arms.

  “The robbers said if he don’t give them all his money, they going to chop up his body and sell it for sausage.”

  “No, grandpa, that isn’t true!” Peggy cried.

  “They took out a big butcher knife,” Morris continued. “They took the middle finger first. They cut it off.”

  “No, grandpa!” we protested. We wanted to hear the real story of how he sang so beautifully the bandits let him go.

  “They call him Christ killer,” Morris hissed. “He begin to sing in pain.”

  “No, grandpa!”

  “They tell him if he don’t stop singing, they cut out his tongue.”

  “Marguerite! Edith!” Anna shrieked. “Your father is losing his mind.”

  The next week, it was confirmed. Morris was diagnosed with dementia. Arrangements were made for him to leave Atlanta. He went to live in a sanitarium in the center of the state where over a half-century before he had sold buttons and pans.

  “I know you,” he said to everyone he met.

  “Yessir,” they replied.

  “You my brothers,” he insisted.

  “Yessir,” they reassured him.

  “Leave these men alone,” my grandmother whispered. “They’re schvartzes.”

  “It don’t matter,” he said. “They my brothers, too.”

  When Morris Abelman died, the service filled the city’s largest funeral home. A hundred cars followed the family limousine into the cemetery.

  A few days after his death, Anna debated who could distract her from the trouble (grief mingled with inconvenience) of losing a husband of forty years.

  “I’m going out,” she told her maid.

  Mr. Emile stood at his studio window, staring at the scuffed shoes trudging by. A monotony broken by a pair of expensive alligator pumps that belonged to Anna Aron Abelman.

  “Mr. Emile,” she cried with relief, taking her seat on the bench.

  Mr. Emile went to his work table. Anna liked listening to the rhythmic clicks of the pinking shears. It recalled the years she rode the subway downtown to work as a secretary. She was sixteen with a wardrobe comprised of two serge dresses (navy and gray), a crepe wool skirt, three blouses (two cotton, one silk), three sweaters, a jacket, two hats, one hat pin, and a threadbare coat.

  “I supported my mother and sisters when I was a girl,” Anna shrugged. “But who wants to work?”

  Mr. Emile looked up from yards of dove-colored gaberdine. “I like to work,” he said.

  “You do what you want.”

  “I surround myself with beauty,” he smiled.

  Anna glanced at the chaotic room. She saw nothing beautiful about it. “When I was a child, I looked into the future of an ugly life.”

  “You did well,” he said.

  “My mother, she had nothing. My father was a bum. My daughters, who never washed a stocking in their lives, they don’t know what ugly is.”

  On Saturday, Peggy and I were dropped at our grandmother’s to keep her company. She was dressed in black which we understood was the color of death and mourning (we were still too young to wear black).

  “There’s no ice cream,” we complained. In summer, Anna always made us foamy ginger-ale floats. In winter, she served warm coffee-milk with sugar.

  We set out from her elegant apartment on Peachtree Street, down Ponce de Leon Avenue to the Piggly Wiggly. We passed bars and decrepit resident hotels. Friendly drunks stumbled by. Old people and cripples asked us for money. Except for Buttermilk Bottom, I had never seen where poor people lived. I never knew poor people were sometimes white.

  “It’s ugly here,” Peggy said.

  On steamy nights in Harlem, Anna’s mother led them to the roof of the tenement house where there was usually a breeze from the river. They slept on the roof, and all night the smell of tar wove through the girl’s dreams. In the morning, her face and hands were streaked with soot.

  “You don’t know ugly!” Anna burst out.

  “Grandma?” We wondered how we had offended her.

  She folded her arms around our shoulders. “What I come from, what grandpa came from,” she said, “it’s in another world.”

  Accessories to Crime

  Soon after my tenth birthday, my mother, Marguerite, took me on a tour of Europe. Not the grand tour of debutantes but a two-week jaunt in the company of a dozen exemplary citizens from Atlanta: middle-aged, church-going professionals, bankers, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and their wives.

  My mother stood out among the matrons. She was younger and slimmer as well as beautiful with sophisticated taste and a short, chic haircut. For evening strolls through the capitals, she wore a charcoal gray wool suit with a voluptuous gray fox collar. For bus rides and days tramping through museums and palaces, she put on camelhair slacks and a matching cashmere sweater. In whatever attire wherever we went, she drew the attentive gaze from men of every nationality.

  For Marguerite, it was Harrods that confirmed we had arrived in Europe. “At last, we can go to Harrods!” she exclaimed with an ardor reserved exclusively for clothes.

  Harrods sounded so muffled to my ear. Had the L accidentally been omitted?

  “Harolds?” I timidly asked.

  “Har-RODS,” mother snapped. “The finest store in the entire world.”

  Before the Tower and after St. Paul, between lunch at The Savoy and tea in Piccadilly, mother hailed a black cab, as big as a sarcophagus, to carry us from the Strand to Brompton Road. I stood on the sidewalk in awe, staring at Harrods’ flags, crests, and crenelations. My mother was positively correct. Harrods was the finest store in the entire world.

  In May, few winter coats remained on the racks. In my size, there was only one, fabricated from heavy, coarse,
Scottish wool, faintly purple like boiled rhubarb, and thoroughly unbecoming. Its single redeeming feature was a half-dozen carved wooden buttons that I immediately began to twirl.

  “Stop fidgeting!” mother commanded. “If you don’t ruin it, next winter you’ll be glad to have a coat from Harrods.”

  From London, our tour flew to Brussels where we were met by a bus, a driver, and a guide. Oskar was historian, polyglot, and hedonist, who promised to introduce the Georgian provincials to European wines and risqué art. Although a child, I would soon be privy to both.

  The itinerary transported us by bus across Belgium, along the Rhine, and into Switzerland. Wherever we stopped, I acquired a postcard or cloisonné charm to remember the quaint towns, the castles and churches, the rivers and farms, and the cuisine so different from my own.

  Late spring outside Bern was an inspired combination of wild flowers and snow-capped peaks. Our hotel was a chalet, decorated with wide shutters and painted barge board. I pranced across its lawn and passed two Alpine days with my middle-age companions, clambering around mountainsides and eating fondue.

  On the morning of our departure, I overheard my mother cursing in the bathroom.

  “I can’t get the goddamn thing off,” she cried.

  I peeked through the door. Armed with tweezers and hairbrush, Marguerite hovered in a contorted position over a brass and porcelain faucet handle attached to the bathroom sink. As soon as she spied me, she threw the hairbrush at the floor in a pique and tried prying the handle loose with her hands.

  “Why?” I asked in alarm.