back to the dressing room under loads of clothes. Five minutes later, Sharmayne stuck her head out the door. “There’s no belt on the bottle-green D&G,” she said.
“I’ll get it,” Helen said. She found the belt in the stockroom, knocked once on Sharmayne’s door, and opened it. The former model was sitting naked in the silk chair. Helen froze. She had her first female flasher.
Christina had warned her about them. Catching sight of bare breasts and buns was an occupational hazard for the sales associates at Juliana’s. The customers had beautiful bodies, and they were used to exhibiting them. Tan lines were rare. Most women didn’t cover up when Helen brought in more clothes, even though she always knocked on the door and waited for them to say, “Come in.” But there was a kind of naivete to their nudity.
A female flasher didn’t show off her perfect breasts or trim thighs. She’d sit in the silk chair with her legs spread like a
Helen had asked Christina if these flashers were lesbians. “It’s not about sex. It’s about power,” Christina told her. “Flasher women are treating you like a servant, a nothing. They know you can’t complain. Do you think Mr. Roget cares if a clerk is harassed by a big spender?”
“So what do I do if I get one?” Helen had asked.
“Pretend she’s dressed. It pisses her off.”
Helen steeled herself for her first confrontation with a female flasher. Sharmayne is dressed, she told herself. She’s dressed in a jumpsuit. She’s . . . not sitting quite like a flasher. Her legs are closed. And what’s on her thighs? Some kind of weird stocking?
Helen couldn’t stop herself. She stared at Sharmayne’s thighs. They were ruined by rippling trenches and craters. The skin over the indentations sagged like an old woman’s. Worse, it was flaky-dry and blotchy.
A botched liposuction. Helen had seen those telltale ripple scars before, but never this bad.
“A former model,” Tara had called Sharmayne. With those scars, she was banished from the catwalk forever. She could never do anything but the dreariest catalog and department store work. When she saw the pity in Helen’s face, she turned defiant. “Admiring your boss’s handiwork?” she said.
Helen was speechless.
“Christina recommended the doctor for this liposuction. Said he never made a mistake. Except that day, he did. Turned out the good doctor had a little alcohol and pill problem. I was his wake-up call. He got treatment, and he settled out of court. I had to promise to never mention his name, but thanks to my lawyer, I can afford to shop here for the rest of my life.”
Helen could tell that wasn’t enough. Sharmayne fed on admiration. Once anyone saw her scars, it was gone. She was a starving rich woman.
“I make Christina wait on me,” she said. “Just to remind her. I don’t think I want anything today.”
Helen closed the dressing room door.
It took Helen and Tara half an hour to hang up all Sharmayne’s clothes. Tara was no bigger than a twelve- year-old girl, but she worked like a dockhand, hauling the heaviest loads. She had quit flipping and touching her long hair. She was too busy.
Tara knew how to sell clothes to Juliana’s customers, perhaps because she dressed like them. Helen would never have dared wear those snakeskin low-rise jeans or the matching top that bared her midsection. Helen would look like a hooker. Tara looked cute.
Tara admitted the sales job was harder than it looked. “I’m so tired at night I fall straight into bed, and Paulie has to massage my feet.” She held up one platformed foot with its shell-pink nails.
Then Tara picked up another blouse and buttoned it on a padded hanger. “Helen, when I’m a regular customer again, I promise I will put everything back on the hangers.”
In the quiet times between customers, Helen and Tara talked. Tara had been a Juliana’s regular for six years. She knew everything about everyone, even where Brittney got her endless supply of money.
“That’s such a sad story,” Tara said. She leaned forward, her long hair forming a dark veil. “She was engaged to this rich millionaire named Steve. . . .”
In Lauderdale, there were poor millionaires, who were mortgaged to the hilt, and those who were solvent. They were the rich millionaires.
“Brittney was supposed to marry Steve. She really loved him. They were going to be married at the Biltmore. A big wedding with a sit-down dinner. We were all invited. I had the cutest hot pink dress with these little spaghetti straps. I couldn’t bring myself to wear it after what happened.”
Tara looked sad, but Helen didn’t know if it was because of Brittney’s tragic loss or her own.
“What happened?” Helen prompted.
“Steve committed suicide right before the wedding. No one knew why. Brittney said that he’d been really down, but Steve would not tell her what was wrong. He didn’t leave a suicide note. He’d been drinking more than usual. They found his body in a canal near the Seventeenth Street Bridge. He left Brittney everything in his will: a two-million-dollar house in Bridge Harbour, stocks, bonds, and a lot of money.”
“If she has lots of money, why did she date a mobster like Vinnie?” Helen said.
Tara looked surprised that Helen would ask. “You have to have a boyfriend,” she said.
“What about the Golden Beach guy?” Helen said, remembering Brittney’s timely thank-you gift to Christina.
“Brittney didn’t fit in with his stuffy old friends,” Tara said. “His wife made a terrible fuss. Most wives know their husbands date, and they’re grateful they don’t have to . . . you know . . . but not this one.”
Helen knew, but she was still amazed by Tara’s priggishness. She couldn’t even bring herself to say something like “sleep with their husbands.”
Helen also noticed that Brittney’s Golden Beach boyfriend was married, and so was her mobster, Vinnie. Brittney liked other women’s men.
Helen enjoyed Tara’s stories. They made Juliana’s sound like a soap opera. This week was almost like a vacation for her, too. Helen could not forget Christina’s skimming, drug dealing, maybe even murder for hire. She’d closed her eyes to that once before, and now Desiree Easlee was dead. But she had only two days before Christine returned. She had to face that ugly reality.
When Helen came back from lunch, she found Tara staring at herself in the triple mirror.
“I need to perk up my tits,” Tara said. Her breasts looked plenty perky to Helen, and she said so.
“Do you really think so? I think they are a little droopy. Paulie has a plastic surgeon friend who says he’ll work on me for free. He wouldn’t make me any bigger, just put a little on top to tip them up again.”
“Tara, you’re perfect,” Helen said. “You saw what happened to Sharmayne. Why would you do that to yourself?”
Tara shrugged. “Everyone gets boob jobs. They’re like a visit to the gynecologist or something. Besides, I don’t want to lose Paulie.”
“Paulie is crazy about you,” Helen said. “And even if you did lose him, which you wouldn’t, there are other men.”
Helen didn’t add “other better men, who don’t talk about your breasts and buns in public,” but Tara heard her unspoken words.
“You think Paulie’s kinda crude, don’t you?”
Helen hesitated, choosing her words carefully. She waited too long. Tara said, “I’m running out of options, Helen. I got refused at a South Beach club. That’s never happened.”
“What do you mean, refused?” Helen said.
“I had to wait in line with the tourists and the nobodies, with the people saying, ‘I’m the owner’s personal trainer.’ ‘I’m his photographer.’ It was humiliating.
“I always get in. I wear the right clothes. I never wear cheap shoes. This time, the bouncers made me wait. That’s never happened before. Not in New York or LA. But it happened in South Beach. I’m losing it, Helen. I have to hang onto Paulie. He has money, and he cares about me.”
“Do you care about him?” Helen said.
“I care about surviving,” Tara said.
Helen felt sorry for Tara. That’s what all this high-risk surgery and dieting was about. Survival. Tara felt she only had one commodity to offer, her looks, and she feared they were fading.
“I came so close to making it,” she told Helen. “So close I could almost touch it. Then it all slipped away. It was because of September eleventh. I never told you what September eleventh did to me. I lost so much. I cried
