“I don’t care, it’s too hot,” Efnie complained. “Mamma, you can’t possibly expect us to wear all this!”
“I expect you to look like other girls at the dance, yes. I do not expect you to shed your undergarments like a Hottentot.”
“Mamma, it’ll be as hot as soup at that dance. You know half the ballroom windows at the Lakeside don’t open.”
“These are the dresses you have, and these are the dresses you’ll wear,” decreed Aunt Violet. “Look at Perdita, she doesn’t whine about a little heat.”
The door closed definitively. “I don’t have breath to complain,” Perdita murmured.
Efnie and Perdita were laced into the corsets they would wear that evening, canvas stiffened with thin steel boning. Under their corsets they wore chemises; over them, cotton and lace corset covers, then their petticoats. Perdita was fanning herself with the fan that belonged to her dress. The dress was pale pink, edged with a deeper pink ruching, and the fan was ostrich feathers, pink and plumy. The fan-feathers moved a languid suggestion of air. She didn’t feel at all like going to a party tonight. She felt a little sick; she hadn’t slept at all last night, thinking about the thing in the barn. Harry had stayed very late, so that she couldn’t call to Island Hill and ask Gilbert or Richard. They might have called, but they hadn’t, and she didn’t know. Only the memory of that horrible smell.
“You look like a flamingo in your dress, pink doesn’t suit you,” Efnie said critically. “You look all pale. And my dress is ten years out of style. Nobody wears big flared skirts like this anymore. Everyone will laugh at us.”
It was so hot that just standing still made the sweat come out on her. Girls weren’t supposed to sweat. Perdita pushed her hair up distractedly in a coil at the top of her head. If she fainted again, the way she had in the wedding dress ... “I don’t want to go to the party.”
“Of course you do. Mama is just saving money, giving you an ostrich fan to take to a party like this. Oh, Perdita, I want to go off and buy a dress, something that’ll really make the men take notice, so I can get a boyfriend like Harry. I want to dance with some man and have him know I’ve got a body, not a suit of armor. It’s too hot not to— Oh, Perdita, don’t look like that. Come with me, Mama has an account at that New York shop on Main Street, and I saw just the dress I want. ”
At the shop, Perdita stood smelling the air while Efnie tried on dresses. Scents of sachet, powder, sandalwood, perfumes. One of the shop assistants let her try one of the perfumes. “Ylang-Ylang,” the shop assistant said. “From Paris.”
It was astringent, alcoholic, with an undertone of musk and flowers. Perdita shivered. From Paris, from all the places she had never been. She sniffed her own wrist, smelling the perfume and beneath it the odor of her skin.
“Perdita, stop smelling yourself, that’s disgusting.”
She hadn’t thought of trying any dresses. One would be very like another to her. But if the dresses were like the perfume . . . “Please,” she said, “may I try one on?”
“Why do you want to?” Efnie muttered. “I mean— You’re engaged.”
Efnie did mean it, besides the inevitable You don’t have to be fashionable, you’re blind, but it made Perdita’s blood rise. “I do want to,” she said, low-voiced.
“Try that one then,” Efnie said carelessly, “the color suits you.”
Efnie’s tone made her suspicious, but the shop assistant agreed. In the changing room she unbuttoned her clothes and stepped out of them, down to her slips.
“No, the petticoat too,” the shop assistant said. “You don’t wear petticoats with this dress.”
“None at all?” she said in a small voice.
She stood up in her chemise alone, and the shop assistant slipped the dress over her shoulders. It was lighter than anything she had ever worn. There was a little weight from the beading around her neck and shoulders; otherwise it seemed as though the dress would float away. The shop assistant pressed the snaps together around her neck.
“That is right.” The shop assistant smiled with her voice.
“It’s pretty,” Efnie said almost with disappointment.
“But the one you’re wearing is your color, it’s simply you,” Efnie’s shop assistant gushed.
“What color is mine?” Perdita asked. “Is it pretty? If I get into the light, I can see it.”
In the light from the front window the color was like nothing she had ever dreamed of wearing: a color like the smell of sandalwood, like that perfume from France. It was a filmy brass or gold, a color from a foreign country, not a girl’s color at all. “Oh,” she sighed and ran her hand down the smooth, soft fabric as gently as if it were a lion.
“The silk is Chinese. The beads are amber and iron,” the shop assistant said. “And everyone at the dance will want to look like you.”
“That will be good for you!” said Perdita, pleased.
“Yes, my dear; although what they want to look like, they can’t buy. So we will pick you out the right shoes and fan to go with this, and— Are you dressing at the hotel? Good. Tonight Mary and I will come and dress your hair.”
The two girls walked back to the hotel, their purchases under their arms, while Efnie schemed how they would dress tonight without alerting Aunt Violet. “I don’t know I would wear that dress if I were you, Perdita. That color’s just unearthly.”
“Will Harry like it, Efnie? You know he doesn’t like anything too odd.” Who had she bought it for? Harry would think she was half undressed.
Richard would like it.
She thought of the two of them in the barn and for a moment shivered uncontrollably. She didn’t know whether it was because of the thing in the barn, or just because he would be there.
Really, she shouldn’t go.