Hanging by a Thread Read Free

duke it out for air rights. Nikky’s personal handiwork, would be my guess. The devastation is even more grotesque in the harsh winter daylight blaring through the wall-to-wall windows overlooking the Hudson.
    The woman is a total nutcase, but she’s a successful nutcase.
    â€œWhere is it, where is it?” I hear the instant the door shooshes closed, cutting off Valerie’s next “Ohmig—” Before I can answer, Jock, the draper, lunges at me, snatching the box from my hands with only a glancing leer at my wool-swathed chest. “You got a size 8, right?”
    Having done this at least a dozen times in the past year, I do know the drill. “Yes, Jock,” I say, yanking off my hat and shrugging out of my father’s camel topcoat, then one of his Pierre Cardin suit jackets (both altered to fit me), wedging the lot into the mirrored closet next to the showroom doors. I tugdown the hem of one of my mother’s Villager sweaters, circa 1968. The dusty rose one with the ivory and blue design across the yoke. Starr has already informed me she wants it when she gets big. We’ll see.
    My desperately-needs-a-trim layered hair crackles like a miniature electrical storm around my head. My Telly Monster imitation. This does not stop Jock from grabbing me, plastering his (not exactly impressive) crotch against my hip and planting a big, sloppy kiss on my cheek. Then he’s off to do what a draper’s gotta do. I hope, for his sake, he got more out of our little encounter than I did.
    Oh, Giaccomo Andretti’s basically harmless, his lothario complex notwithstanding. He’s just a bit doughy and married for my taste. And his view of his skills as a draper is a tad skewed. Jock sees himself as a world-class pattern maker. That he hasn’t draped an original pattern since Dinkins was mayor is beside the point.
    Not that the Versace will be recognizable once its progeny have Nikky’s label in them. She’s not stupid. The lapel will be wider or narrower or ditched altogether; the skirt will be longer or shorter or slit up the back if this one’s slit up the sides; the fabric will be a print if this one’s a solid or solid if this one’s a stripe, silk instead of linen, a fine wool instead of gabardine.
    In other words, this so-called “designer” doesn’t have an original idea rattling around underneath her Bucks County Matron silver pageboy. Her “classic” fit is derived from, quite simply, other designers’ slopers.
    Yep. By three o’clock this afternoon, Jock will have carefully dissected the Versace and traced the pattern from it. By noon tomorrow, Olympia, Jock’s best seamstress, will have so carefully reconstructed it no one will ever know it was apart. And by the next morning, I will have returned said suit to the salesgirl, with the sorrowful explanation my sister didn’t like it, after all.
    And for this I spent four years at FIT.
    Divested of my contraband goods, I hie myself to what passes for my office this week—a banquet table crammed into a corner of the bookkeeper’s office. Apparently my boss can’t quite figure out what I do or where to put me. She only knows she can’t do without me. Or so she says. Which is fine by me. Making myself indispensable is what I do best.
    And yes, I’ve asked for an office. Repeatedly. Nikky keeps saying, “You’re absolutely right, darling, I’ve simply got to do something about that….” and then she promptly forgets about it.
    Before you ask, “And you’re here why?” two words:
    Benefits package.
    A stack of new orders awaits me. In Nikky’s completely indecipherable handwriting. Of course, even if the woman weren’t writing in some ancient Indo-European dialect, since she routinely leaves out things like, oh, sizes and colors…
    At least, these seem to be mostly reorders. So in theory, if I look up the stores’