“Well, that’s just sad,” Juice says. “You shouldn’t ask someone out because of their clothes.”
“I think Wharton meant something more than that,” Phoebe says. “I think she wants us to think about the secret things people reveal through their clothing choices. Like when we admire someone’s dress or jacket, we’re really admiring something else.”
“Like their body?” Juice asks. “Like how much money they have?”
And yes, yes. But no.
“Clearly you’ve never fallen in love with a man because he wore the same leather belt every day,” Phoebe says.
Juice laughs. “Wait, you fell in love with a man because of his belt?”
“My ex-husband wore it on our first date,” Phoebe says. “I remember admiring how the leather was smooth and tan, and then I kept noticing him wear it again and again.”
It was a good belt, Matt told her when she finally asked about it, said he bought it when he was eighteen, and that he hoped to keep it until he died. And she could see it all, how this man would care for this one belt his whole life, how he would walk the perimeter of their house each night, making sure the doors were locked and the cups were in perfect order in the cabinet.
“Did he?” Juice asks.
“Yes,” Phoebe says.
“Then why aren’t you still married?”
“He had an affair.”
“Oh. Like Albert Schuyler?”
“Like Albert Schuyler.”
“Did he build his mistress a building, too?”
Phoebe chuckles. It feels good to finally laugh about it for real.
“Not quite,” she says.
“So you were wrong about the belt,” Juice says. “He didn’t take care of you forever.”
“No,” Phoebe says. “But I was not wrong about the belt.”
Phoebe remembers the last night she spent with her husband, watching him undress for bed, rolling up the belt into a little ball. Here was a man who took care of everything, she thought. A man who folded his laundry with the precision of a dressmaker. So why couldn’t he take care of this, too? Why did she believe that somehow he could always save her, like her womb was a cupboard with cups in all the wrong places? A place her husband would rearrange, if only he could get to it.
“The belt revealed what we both wanted him to be,” Phoebe says. “But we can’t always be what we want every second. And that’s okay. That’s just life, you know?”
Juice picks up her boots and stares at them like they look different to her now.
“What do you want your boots to say about you?” Phoebe asks.
When Juice doesn’t say anything, Phoebe worries she’s lost her, that this might be too much for the kid, the way she used to worry about losing her students when they fell silent in class. Because their silence during the pandemic was excruciating. Their silence sounded like proof that they hated her, proof that they couldn’t wait to leave, too.
But Phoebe had not always felt that way about teaching. When she first started, she loved it so much, she often felt bad for the parents of her students who didn’t get to know their children in the way Phoebe sometimes did. Because a professor was in a unique position to open students up. They seemed inclined to trust that when Phoebe asked a question, it was leading somewhere worthwhile. It was nice, Phoebe thought, how often they went with her. How they trusted her to be a good professor, and she trusted them to be good students who sat in silence not because they hated her but because they were thinking.
So she decides to trust in Juice’s silence. She does not retract her question or apologize for it. She just waits, until finally, Juice speaks.
“I guess I want people to know that I don’t care what my feet look like,” Juice says. “That I’m not like Lila at all.”
“What are you like?”
“Like my mom.”
“What was she like?”
“Really fun,” Juice says. “We used to paint a lot together. She used to let me use my hands and feet and walk all over the canvas like a monkey. And once we all built this mini-sculpture of our house out of pancakes. And after we ate it all, my mom was like, Uh-oh, where are we going to live? We laughed so hard. And sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t even remember that day. It’s like he’s totally forgotten her.”
“He hasn’t forgotten her,” Phoebe says. “Trust me.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because he talked to me about her just this morning.”
“Really?” Juice says.
“Really,” Phoebe says. “And you can tell your dad these things, you know. You don’t have to rely on your boots to do all the talking for you.”
“Well, that’s good,” Juice says. “Because they’re actually getting kind of sweaty. It’s really hot out.”
Phoebe laughs, picks a pair of Tevas off the shelf, and holds them up. “What about these?”
AT THE OTHER boutiques, Phoebe tries on dresses that hug her body. She stands in the three-way mirror of the dressing room and admires herself in a plum-colored floor-length dress. It feels good to be wearing a form-fitting dress, to see the outline of her body again.
“What do you think?” Phoebe asks Juice. She steps out of the dressing room.
