There wasn’t anyone else in Edie’s store. Pru felt like she’d been sprung from jail. She spent an hour trying on various outfits. There were things that hadn’t been in, the last time she was shopping—peasant blouses and asymmetrical skirts. Edie sat in a chair outside her dressing room, eating from a cup of noodles with chopsticks. Every now and then Pru came out to show her something, so Edie could make pronouncements. They were like Annali with her Barbies, Pru thought. When she saw the Pucci print blouse with a pair of Capri pants and Pru’s blue Keds sneakers, Edie said, “Oooooh. I never would have put those things together, ever, in a million years.” The tag on the blouse said that it was almost three hundred dollars. Despite what McKay remarked about her extravagance with clothes, Pru actually did bat an eye at this. A few months ago, she reflected, she wouldn’t have.
“You look fabulous,” Edie declared, around a mouthful of noodles.
“This is not my life,” Pru said. “When would I ever wear this?” She stood on a little box in front of a three-way mirror. She had to admit, she looked impossibly glamorous. Even in the Keds.
Edie waved the chopsticks at her. “Try something else.”
Pru was still considering the blouse and chatting with Edie by six o’clock, when two women came in. They were obviously heading home from their jobs as, perhaps, cultural attachés, from the look of them. They were slim and well-dressed in that funky/ elegant style of Edie’s shop. Clearly, they had money. “Lucia and Ramona,” Edie said, getting up to kiss them, too.
“Oooh, a dress-up party,” one of them said, and headed right back out to the liquor store across the street. Lucia wanted to try on the blouse and Capris that Pru was wearing, so Edie helped her find the size twos. Ramona returned with two bottles of champagne in a paper bag. After Edie went to the back room and found some plastic glasses left over from the store’s opening, she kept bringing Lucia and Ramona things to try on, while Pru poured champagne and suggested accessories. Lucia liked a two-hundred-dollar beaded evening bag that Pru found; Ramona, three-hundred-dollar chandelier earrings. By the time Edie opened a second bottle of champagne, Lucia and Ramona had spent almost a thousand bucks.
“That was fun,” Pru said, after the two women had gone tottering tipsily down the street together, shopping bags clattering on their looped arms. “You should make champagne a regular thing.” She hung the three-hundred-dollar Pucci print blouse back on its wooden hanger. Maybe it was because she’d just worked so hard for the modest income she’d made, but suddenly, three hundred dollars seemed like a ridiculous amount of money for a blouse. It was almost her entire grocery bill for the month.
“I never thought of getting my clients drunk before.”
“You could advertise it,” Pru suggested. “Champagne Night at Edie’s. Come in for a free glass of champagne and see the new stuff. It’d be the most stylish event in the District. Of course,” she added, “a sale at the Gap could be considered the most stylish event in the District.”
Edie nodded, thoughtfully. “It’s not a bad idea. You were great with them, by the way. You were born for retail sales.”
Pru didn’t think so. She associated “sales” with desperation and the kind of faked enthusiasm that meant you were about two seconds from a serious suicide attempt. To be very honest, she thought it a little beneath her. But later, Edie called and said that if she would help out on the first official Champagne Night at Edie’s, she could wear anything she wanted from the store. Pru found her fabric lust outweighing her pride, and agreed.
An hour before the party was supposed to start, Pru stood before the three-way mirror in a bronze satin movie-star gown, cut on the bias. It had come in only the day before. The plunging neckline and the diagonal swoop of satin made her body look amazing. She blushed to see herself in the mirror. Edie had purchased ten bottles of a good, cheap champagne, and at six o’clock on the nose women began streaming in, filling the shop with the sound of their throaty, reedy voices.
Pru spent the evening running around with her arms full of clothes. Many women came just to chat and drink champagne, but others were grateful to be told what to wear. They were the ones, she found out by talking to them, with the big jobs and busy lives and the tired everything: tired hair, tired eyes, tired shoes. They would be total bitches at work, you could tell. Pru rustled around in the satin gown, bringing them soft flats with butterflies on the toes, mohair sweaters in impossibly delicate colors, hydrangea-print pouf skirts that hit just below the knee. The women’s eyes softened and their lips parted when they saw her coming, as if her arms held exotic flowers. Edie went around filling everyone’s champagne glasses and ringing up purchases. Her little helper guy patiently folded everything into lavender tissue paper and popped them into brown bags adorned with the purple EDIE’s stickers. After two hours the attitude became pretty loopy, with half-dressed customers parading around in front of the windows overlooking busy Connecticut Avenue.
Pru felt as though she’d discovered a secret gift. She seemed to know what to bring in to the dressing room. She didn’t have to schmooze the customers. She found that if you just concentrated on the best feature of each one, you could make her look like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d even come up with her own mantra: “If you love it, buy it. Don’t worry about the cost.” Edie wanted her to persuade the customers not to rely on their
