Final Option

summer. Next to it was a much longer inventory, generated by Jeannette’s computer, indicating what I already owned.
    I genuinely liked Jeannette, even while I resisted her persistent attempts to open me up to the world of fashion. I knew that clothes meant different things for different women. For my mother and her friends they were the building blocks of an obsessive quest for perfection. Absolutely thin, perfectly groomed, debagged and desagged, they scrutinized each other’s clothes like adversaries searching for a weakness. For other women, clothes were fun, or the fabric of dreams, or the means to an end—attraction, seduction, or acceptance.
    And for me? For me they are a part of the business of being Kate Millholland. My job demands that I dress a certain way. Being a Millholland, I am expected to do it better than most. I like conservative clothes that don’t gather much attention—my mother already has the franchise as the family fashion plate. But if I don’t dress well it jars people, takes their attention away from where I want it to be.
    We started with evening clothes which, like bad tasting medicine, Jeannette knew were best to get over with first. From there we worked our way through a number of suits, casual clothes, shoes, a new raincoat, and even a cocktail dress of black silk that Jeannette insisted I take home and wear that night.
    By six I had made a substantial dent in my assets and acquired a young headache. I lay down on the couch while Jeannette finished up her paperwork. I looked at the rack of clothes that Marina, the seamstress, had pinned and marked for alterations. At least, I told myself, I was done until the fall.
     
    When I got home Claudia was there, but she was behaving strangely. As soon as I opened the front door I heard her in her bedroom, bumping around and cursing.
    “Claudia?” I called out. “Are you all right?”
    Her reply was muffled, but definitely obscene.
    When I reached her room, I saw her standing on a chair inside her closet, groping for something on a high shelf. She was wearing a backless sundress and a pair of cowboy boots. Except for the weekend that her parents had come to visit, I’d never seen my roommate dressed in anything but a set of surgical green scrubs. They were all printed with the words “Property of University of Chicago Hospitals” across the chest. Over time I’d come to accept that stamp as a fitting caption for this stage in Claudia’s life.
    “Oh, it’s you,” declared my roommate, extricating herself from the closet.
    “What is going on?” I demanded, looking incredulously at the heaps of clothes lying on the floor. Claudia plunked herself down on the bed and sighed.
    “I have hit an absolute low point,” she groaned. “What are you talking about?” I inquired with a growing sense of alarm. The Claudia I knew was a rock—a surgeon in training—leading a life consumed by work and stripped to essentials. She was always to be found at the hospital, asleep in bed, or occasionally sitting in a vegetative state in the living room, semicomatose from exhaustion, as a prelude to either of the aforementioned activities. Claudia in a dress represented a truly extraordinary turn of events.
    “Claudia, what are you doing?”
    “You’re not going to believe it. I have a date.”
    “A date?” I echoed. Claudia did not, as a rule, socialize. The woman barely had time to sleep and eat. “If you have a date, that’s great.”
    “I haven’t told you the worst part. He’s a dermatologist.”
    “Really? What’s his name? What’s he like?”
    “What’s he like? He’s a dermatologist. The lowest of the low. A man whose entire medical specialty can be summed up by the axiom: ‘If it’s wet make it dry, if it’s dry make it wet.’ I can’t believe I’d stoop this low just for sex.”
    “What has gotten into you?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.
    “I was having lunch in the cafeteria today. It was ten in the morning, but I knew it was lunch because it was hamburgers and mashed potatoes. Anyway, there was a group of us sitting together, too fried even to talk. I started to look at everyone’s hospital I.D. We all wear them clipped to our scrubs—it’s a rule. They take your picture the first day you arrive at the hospital.
    “So there I was looking at these pictures—of people with tans, people who’d brushed their hair and were smiling, for God’s sake. And then I looked at us in the flesh. Hell,