Alice Munros Best

shop – when she had to buy anything, like socks, she went to Callaghans Mens Ladies and Childrens Wear. She had lots of clothes inherited from Mrs. Willets, things like this coat that would never wear out. And Sabitha – the girl she looked after, in Mr. McCauley’s house – was showered with costly hand-me-downs from her cousins.
    In Milady’s window there were two mannequins wearing suits with quite short skirts and boxy jackets. One suit was a rusty-gold color and the other a soft deep green. Big gaudy paper maple leaves were scattered round the mannequins’ feet and pasted here and there on the window. At the time of year when most people’s concern was to rake up leaves and burn them, here they were the chosen thing. A sign written in flowing black script was stuck diagonally across the glass. It said:
Simple Elegance, the Mode for Fall.
    She opened the door and went inside.
    Right ahead of her, a full-length mirror showed her in Mrs. Willets’s high-quality but shapeless long coat, with a few inches of lumpy bare legs above the ankle socks.
    They did that on purpose, of course. They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then – they hoped – you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get.
    Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodices, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.
    It was two or three minutes before anybody came. Maybe they had a peephole and were eyeing her, thinking she wasn’t their kind of customer and hoping she would go away.
    She would not. She moved beyond the mirror’s reflection – stepping from the linoleum by the door to a plushy rug – and at long last the curtain at the back of the store opened and out stepped Milady herself, dressed in a black suit with glittery buttons. High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped, gold hair skinned back from her made-up face.
    “I thought I could try on the suit in the window,” Johanna said in a rehearsed voice. “The green one.”
    “Oh, that’s a lovely suit,” the woman said. “The one in the window happens to be a size ten. Now you look to be – maybe a fourteen?”
    She rasped ahead of Johanna back to the part of the store where the ordinary clothes, the suits and daytime dresses, were hung.
    “You’re in luck. Fourteen coming up.”
    The first thing Johanna did was look at the price tag. Easily twice what she’d expected, and she was not going to pretend otherwise.
    “It’s expensive enough.”
    “It’s very fine wool.” The woman monkeyed around till she found the label, then read off a description of the material that Johanna wasn’t really listening to because she had caught at the hem to examine the workmanship.
    “It feels as light as silk, but it wears like iron. You can see it’s lined throughout, lovely silk-and-rayon lining. You won’t find it bagging in the seat and going out of shape the way the cheap suits do. Look at the velvet cuffs and collar and the little velvet buttons on the sleeve.”
    “I see them.”
    “That’s the kind of detail you pay for, you just do not get it otherwise. I love the velvet touch. It’s only on the green one, you know – the apricot one doesn’t have it, even though they’re exactly the same price.”
    Indeed it was the velvet collar and cuffs that gave the suit, in Johanna’s eyes, its subtle look of luxury and made her long to buy it. But she was not going to say so.
    “I might as well go ahead and try it on.”
    This was what she’d come prepared for, after all. Clean underwear and fresh talcum powder under her arms.
    The woman had enough sense to leave her alone in the bright cubicle. Johanna avoided the glass like poison till she’d got the skirt straight and the jacket done up.
    At first she just looked at the suit. It was all right. The fit was all right –