LOUISE PINS THE LAST fold of blue silk to the headless dress-form, checks the floor for stray pins, and drapes her measuring tape across the dummy’s shoulder, careful to avoid the amputation line marked by white stitches. Nearby, the blades of her scissors glint in the light. They, too, will need brushing off and putting in a safe place.
“Thank you very much,” she whispers, not that she’d be heard over the clamour of the radio. Louise puts up with the country music the rest of the girls favour, as they hunch over their mannequins with pins clenched in their teeth, humming along. But how they can concentrate on their work is beyond her.
She looks out the window onto the busy street below. On such a day as this, with the sun high in the sky and the slightest breeze to cool her skin, Louise can’t resist walking to the park. Surely she’ll find a bench in a quiet corner where she can sit and eat her sandwich, perhaps even read her book undisturbed. Days like this one are made for exactly that, a small pocket of peace and quiet.
It’s a superstition of hers to leave things just so, and to thank the mannequin, as she has read the medical students do the cadavers from which they learn. Every time Louise makes a dress, she imagines the personality that it will drape; it helps her to bring the fabric to life, make it into a thing of beauty. And so, with each new commission she re-names the dress-form. She hasn’t yet thought of one for it this time around, but as the dress takes shape, the name will come.
Louise glances at the dressing mirror, pats her hair, and reaches in her purse for her lipstick. Squinting, she sees the ruddy-cheeked redhead of her youth. If she stands up straight and holds in her tummy, she nearly reaches the dress-form’s shoulders.
“Be right back,” she says in a low voice. After all, it would feel foolish if she let anyone overhear her talking to a mannequin.
The park is as Louise hoped, filled with people strolling around the pond, pushing baby carriages and sitting on benches, gathering rays of the elusive sun. It’s been a cold, wet spring, but today’s sun paints a thousand shades of green around her. Louise shuffles along the gravel path, admiring a rhododendron bush bursting with blossoms of a shade you’d think could only be produced in a plastics factory. A nearby wild rose sends its spicy perfume into the air, bringing Louise a childhood memory of climbing the rocks at Pebble Beach. A brief yearning grips her, and she stops for a moment with her eyes shut, thinking about rubber-toed sneakers, two-piece bathing suits, and the smell of a fresh Band-aid on her scraped knee.
A bus rumbles by, the Number Seven, which later today will take Louise home to her tidy apartment. She shakes a fleck of gravel from her sandal and continues on her way.
There is a vacant bench in the shade of a willow tree, facing the pond. She sits at one end and reaches into her purse for her sandwich, turkey breast and Cheez Whiz, with a papery slice of lettuce in the middle. After her first bite, Louise pulls out her book and removes the bookmark. She is near the end, a romance about a feisty middle-aged schoolteacher who finds herself on a remote island locking horns with a resident fisherman (widowed, his wife having drowned falling overboard during a storm) whose teenaged son refuses to stay in class. Already they’ve fought, kissed, argued, made love, and fought some more. Now the fisherman has enticed her on a dare to join him for a day on his fishing boat. If she can prove herself handy with a line, then he’ll insist on his son going to school. When Louise finishes this one, she’ll add it to the box of romances she’ll eventually donate – anonymously, of course – to the church rummage sale.
As she turns the page, there is a thump and the bench joggles. A dreadlocked young man wearing a faded yellow shirt has hurled himself onto the far end, and is fiddling with his music gadget, from which wires travel to his ears. He turns and smiles, large, even teeth white against his dark skin and lively eyes creasing his cheeks. Louise smiles back. He isn’t as young as she’d first thought.
“How’s it goin’ today, madame?” he asks.
“Just fine, thank you,” Louise says. “Lovely day.”
“It is indeed lovely,” the man says in a booming voice. “Lovely, indeed – ha-ha!”
With that, he slaps his thighs in a calypso rhythm.
“My name is Badini, if you please,” he says.
“Oh, Mr. Badini. How nice to meet you. I’m Louise.” She looks at her sandwich, hungry, but not sure it would be polite to continue eating.
“Louise. My favourite auntie’s name was Louise. It is a beautiful name. And please, it’s just ‘Badini’. No ‘Mister’.”
Badini’s words carry a sing-song cadence in what, to Louise’s ear, sounds almost like an Irish lilt, like Mr. O’Connor, who taught arithmetic at her high school. But she knows he isn’t Irish; he must be from one of those Caribbean islands.
“Oh, thank you,” she says, breathing a half-giggle. “Badini is a nice name, too. Where is it from?”
Badini points to his head, then his heart.
“It comes from in here, Louise, from right inside. It is mine alone. But you may use it.”
Then he claps his hands, throws his head back and laughs in a rich and inviting bellow. Louise smiles at his gangly looseness, his easy smile. The freedom of choosing his own name. Badini is obviously a man to whom joy comes easily.
They have settled into a companionable silence, Louise reading her book and finishing her sandwich while Badini sits with his arms draped over the back of the bench. His eyes are half-closed and a beatific smile plays across his wide lips as his head nods in rhythm to whatever the ear buds are bringing him. It’s peaceful in the park, just as Louise had hoped.
She closes her book and looks around. An elderly man makes his way gingerly, inching his walker along the footpath with a rhythmic scraping sound. The call of an angry duck grumbles from across the pond, and at the bench across from her, two young men hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes. One of them is wearing a plaid cap, and the other has on a shirt in the same plaid, blue shot with pink and yellow. Louise can’t help noticing this; anything to do with fabric, she notices. Like the worn linen of Badini’s shirt, a faded mustard colour that would look terrible on anyone else.
Louise opens her purse and reaches for her lipstick, but her attention is caught by an unexpected flash of light. She pulls out her scissors, with their long blades perfect for cutting bolts of cloth. She shakes her head – she must have put them in her purse by mistake before leaving the shop. She slips them back in and grabs the lipstick.
Louise sneaks another look at Badini, and lets her mind wander. What if she were the schoolteacher, and he the fisherman? Would they find the happy ending she knows is coming to the couple in her book, perhaps snuggled on the floorboards of his boat with the smell of fish to keep them company as they gaze at the stars above? Her face warms. She enjoys thinking these thoughts as much as she enjoys the smooth glide of pink lipstick.
A denim mini-skirt with long, tanned legs attached gets in the way of Louise’s view of Badini as a young woman, staring intently at her phone, slowly turns and aims her tiny rear end at the space in the middle of the bench. Without taking her eyes from the screen, she sits down. Louise hardly feels the bench move. She adjusts her trousers and pulls her purse closer, and looks at the girl, whose lower lip hangs slightly in front of the upper, shiny with gloss. She is beautiful, with her streaked-blond hair tied back, and her eyes like slits hiding in a cloud of kohl. She is slim enough and stylish enough that she could be a model, or a mannequin in a store window. Louise thinks of the blue silk draped on the dress-form back at the shop, and in her mind’s eye the dress begins to come to life, sleek and formfitting and magical, befitting a prom queen.
The girl looks neither to the left nor the right, but suddenly frowns and punches the keypad with her thumb, and with a toss of her ponytail, whips the phone to her ear.
“’S’me. Crystal. Yeah, yeah,” she says, her words uttered in a monotone staccato. “I dunno. No, yeah. No. Rully, she said no.”
Louise has never understood how people don’t seem to mind that the whole world can hear their half of a conversation, without being embarrassed. She hopes the girl will finish her call and move on, or better yet, move on and finish her call.
“Yeah, last night? We went out for steak sandwiches? And it was rully-rully good.”
Louise allows a stab of irritation. She could certainly do without this intrusion – all she wanted was a quiet lunch at the park. She leans back and sneaks a look at Badini, who seems oblivious, his head nodding and his eyes still half-closed.
“Yeah. Yeah,” the girl, Crystal, continues. “Then he bought me this jacket? And it was white with fringes? And it was rully-rully nice.”
Louise clears her throat and stares at the girl, who gives her a cold glance and then studies her thumbnail.
“Then we went out? And he put away four beer? And he got rully-rully drunk.”
At the other end of the bench, Badini’s eyes have opened and he’s watching the girl with interest. By now the blood is pounding in Louise’s scalp. Crystal has ruined her lunch, her quiet time with that nice man. All that mundane and stupid yapping is sending her blood pressure through the roof. She glances at Badini, who shrugs and winks at her. Briefly her face warms at his wink, at their mutual understanding, but the moment passes and as the girl keeps droning into her telephone, Louise’s fury spreads like a dirty fog. She sighs loudly and shakes her head. When the girl turns away from her, this time the bench does bounce with the deliberate force of it. Louise scowls and stares at her back – you can count the ribs beneath that skimpy tank top – but what’s happening now? Badini is smiling. At the girl! And the girl is tossing her hair, flipping her ponytail in Louise’s direction.
“I gotta go, ’bye.” A pause, then, “That was my girlfriend? Melissa? She’s rully-rully nice.”
Badini’s brilliant smile opens full-throttle and he holds out his hand.
“How’s it goin’ today, mam’zelle? My name is Badini, if you please.”
Louise can practically hear the steel drums clanging off him, and his dreadlocks are probably filthy. Badini, my foot, she thinks – his name’s probably David Smith. She yanks open her purse and throws in the lipstick. There is a satisfying ping of metal striking metal.
Louise glares at the ponytail. Looks down at the cutting scissors gleaming in her purse. She thinks of her nameless dress-form, drenched in blue silk, and wraps her fingers around the cold steel.