After brunch (French toast), they went to the dry cleaner’s, which smelled of even more chemicals than Nana’s furniture polish. Annamae said, “I’ll wait outside,” and stood on the sidewalk while Nana dropped off her cleaning.
The dry cleaner’s display window held an enormous white box shaped like a book. The lid was hinged open so you could see inside, where, instead of words, an oval window let you peek at the torso of a satiny white gown fitted on some sort of mold to make it look like it was on an actual woman’s body. A woman’s body that had been sawed in half by a magician. On what was meant to look like the inside front cover, in cursive so ornate you could barely read it, it said Make Your Day Last Forever.
It was like one of those crazy books from Art Explorers. Not the ones they’d made themselves, but the sculpturey ones Leslie had shown them on her phone. The glory of it: to think that the secret world of a book could be unlocked with a knife. The invertedness of it: to think that by cutting away, you could create more. That something lay beyond the flatness of paper, the flatness of words. Hadn’t one of the books opened to reveal ocean waves and a many-masted sailing ship rising up from the pages? Hadn’t another been carved in such a way that you could gaze upon a spiral staircase that seemed to wind down, down into a whole other world below the surface?
What a disappointment it had been when she’d tried it herself with the paring knife and gotten yelled at.
When Nana came out, the bell on the door tinkling behind her, she saw Annamae gazing at the display and mistook the reason for her interest. “I remember I loved to look at wedding gowns, too,” she said. “Starting around your age.”
“I don’t really care for them.”
Nana made a flabbergasted face. “You are a preternaturally serious girl.”
Annamae was not offended. The opposite.
“Well, in any case,” Nana went on, walking not toward the car but toward a little plaza where the sidewalk widened and had been appointed with trees and benches, “I remember staring with great longing into the window of the bridal shop on my way home from school.”
“Longing for what?”
They sat on a bench. The branches were frilly with young leaves.
“That’s interesting, Annamae. You’re right. I guess it wasn’t really longing for a dress. Although I did think they were beautiful. And it wasn’t—it wasn’t really a longing to get married. Certainly not at that age. You’re eleven?”
“Twelve.”
“Still.” Nana stuck out her legs and crossed them at the ankles. Pigeons pecked at a piece of bread with mustard on it. “Now that you get me thinking, I suppose it was probably more of a generalized longing. The bridal gowns were some kind of—oh, I don’t know, reveille—”
“What’s that?”
“You know.” Nana doot doot doodle-ooted the melody. At least three passersby looked over and smiled. “That bugle song they play in the army to wake up soldiers. Maybe the bridal gowns weren’t really what I desired. They were just the bugle.”
“What do you mean?”
“A kind of call, waking me up to a longing I’d never experienced before.”
“But what was the longing for?”
“Well … I suppose it was to see what the future held in store.”
“You said you didn’t believe in fortune-telling.”
Nana laughed. “I hope I’m never cross-examined by you in a court of law. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a longing to know. Maybe it was just a longing to be on my way.”
“On your way to what?”
“Whatever I was headed toward.”