Fitting Room Three

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Before Her Daughter’s Wedding
by Blair Lennox

This bonus scene contains spoilers for Before Her Daughter’s Wedding. It takes place in February, between Chapter Eighteen and the Epilogue. Extremely explicit. 18+ only.

Fitting Room Three

MAREN

The text came on a Thursday, at 4:51, while I was teaching a carpenter with a rebuilt index finger how to pick up a dime.

Tomorrow. Shop closes at six. I’ve got the keys till ten. Stage door on Mercer Street. Bring nothing.

I read it twice and put the phone face down on the treatment table, and the carpenter, who was sixty-three and had been married forty years, looked at my face and said, “Good news?”

“It’s a fitting,” I said.

“Course it is,” said the carpenter, and picked up his dime on the first try.

The Lyric Repertory Theatre is a red-brick barn of a building on the east side of the river, built for vaudeville in 1911 and saved from a parking garage in 1979 by a committee of very determined women. Willa had been its resident cutter for six weeks. I’d seen the outside of it twice, from the car, dropping her off in the dark of a January morning. I’d never been in.

The stage door was propped with a fire extinguisher. Inside it smelled of sawdust and old velvet and the particular dusty heat of stage lights that have been switched off but haven’t forgotten. I followed a corridor painted the color of weak tea, past a callboard with a sign-in sheet and a laminated notice that said LAST ONE OUT CHECKS THE GHOST LIGHT, and up four flights of iron stairs that rang under my shoes like a bell tower.

At the top was a door with a paper sign taped to it in handwriting I’d have known anywhere. COSTUME SHOP. KNOCK. YES, YOU.

I knocked.

“It’s open,” Willa called. “It’s always open. That’s the whole problem with this place.”

It was the biggest room I’d ever seen her stand in.

The whole fourth floor, under a roof of iron trusses and long skylights gone black with the February night. Eight cutting tables in two rows, each the size of a dining table for twelve. A wall of thread, hundreds of spools on pegs, sorted by color into a long gradient that ran from white through every shade of everything to black. Industrial machines under dust covers. Racks and racks of clothes. And everywhere, standing in ranks like an audience that had come early, dress forms: forty of them, fifty, wearing the half-finished costumes for a Restoration comedy that opened in March. Silk coats with their sleeves pinned on. Bodices boned and laced. A green gown so wide in the hip that its form had been moved into the aisle to make room.

Willa was at the far end, under the only lamp that was on, at a cutting table with a roll of brown paper across it. Black trousers. A black shirt with the sleeves rolled twice. Her yellow tape round her neck, a pencil through her hair, a pincushion on her left wrist. Her right hand bare. No splint in the daytime anymore.

She looked up when I came in, and her whole face changed, and I stood in the doorway of her room the way she stands in doorways, and let her look.

“You came in your work clothes,” she said.

“You said bring nothing. I took that to include an effort.”

“Good.” She put her pencil down. “Come here. I want to show you.”

She showed me all of it. She took me by the hand down the rows of forms, and told me who every costume was for, and which actor had a scoliosis curve she’d built the coat to hide, and which leading lady had cried at her first fitting because nobody had ever cut her a bodice that let her breathe. She showed me the thread wall and the steam irons and the mill-end cupboard she’d been given the only key to. She showed me her name, typed, on a laminated card on the side of the first cutting table, W. GRANT, CUTTER, and she touched it with one finger as she walked past, lightly, the way I touch Tom’s frame on Elise’s mantelpiece.

“It’s yours,” I said.

“It’s mine.” She stopped walking. “Monday to Friday, eight to six. Nobody hands me anything I haven’t agreed to. I cut, and they say thank you. I’ve measured a hundred and nine people since January.” She turned round to face me. Her hand was still in mine. “Nobody has measured me.”

I understood her a second before she reached up and took the tape from round her own neck.

She held it out to me.

“Twenty-two,” Willa said. “You know them now.”

The fitting rooms were along the back wall, three of them, with heavy red curtains on brass rings. Fitting Room Three was the largest. A carpeted box to stand on, the height of a stair. A chair in the corner. And a mirror in three panels, floor to ceiling, angled so that whoever stood on the box could see herself from the front and both sides at once, and behind herself, and behind that, repeating away into the glass in smaller and smaller copies like a corridor with no end.

She’d turned the lamp on in there already. She’d thought about the light.

“Take everything off,” I said. “Then stand on the box.”

She’d said those words to me once, at her own table. I watched her recognize them.

She undressed in front of the mirror, and the mirror undressed her too, three times, from three sides, and then all the smaller ones behind. The black shirt. The trousers, folded, because she’d caught it off me. Plain cotton, a plain bra, and then nothing, and she stepped up onto the box and stood there with her arms at her sides and her chin up and her eyes on mine in the glass.

She was blushing. Willa Grant, who has knelt at the feet of two thousand naked women and never once looked away, was blushing from her breastbone to her hairline.

“You don’t look at yourself,” I said.

“I look at fit.”

“You look at everyone else’s fit.” I came up behind her. On the box she was a little taller than me, and I put my chin on her shoulder and looked at her in the mirror, at the two of us, me in my grey trousers and my navy clinic fleece, her bare to the skin. “You’ve never once stood in one of these and looked at yourself the way you look at a woman you’re about to cut for. Have you.”

She didn’t answer. Her breathing had changed.

“Arms out a little,” I said. “Breathe normally.”

“I always breathe normally.”

“Everybody says that.” I passed the tape round her ribs and drew the ends together at the front, over her breasts, and let my knuckles rest there. “Then they hold it for the waist.”

I measured her.

I did it the way she’d taught me without meaning to, every time I’d watched her: quick hands, flat touch, the tape doing the talking. But I didn’t talk to the tape. I talked to her ear. I read every number into it, low, as if each one were news.

“Bust. Thirty-four.” My knuckles across her nipples on the way down, slowly, and in the glass I watched them draw up tight and dark. “Underbust. Twenty-nine.” A shiver went down her that I felt through the tape. “Waist. Twenty-six and a half.” My arms right round her. “High hip, thirty-four. Full hip. Thirty-seven.” I let my thumb ride the crest of her hipbone where the tape lay, and pressed, and she made a small sound that went three ways round the mirror and came back.

“Look at her,” I said.

She looked.

“Not at me. At her. That’s the woman I see. Every time you walk into a room ahead of me. Look at her.”

Shoulder to shoulder. Across back, my lips at the top of her spine. Nape to waist. Bicep. Wrist, and her pulse was going like a sewing machine on the straight under my fingers, and I told her so, and she laughed and it cracked in half.

By fifteen her eyes kept trying to close.

“Open,” I said. “Watch. You made me watch, in a tower. Twelve feet away. Now it’s your turn, and I’m closer.”

By eighteen I was on my knees on the carpet behind the box with the tape at her waist and the end of it running down the outside of her thigh, and I could see her in the side panel, and the panel behind that, and in every one of them her thighs were trembling.

I brought the tape round and laid it along the inside.

“No dress needs that one,” Willa said. Her voice had gone to almost nothing.

“I know. I invented it.” I pressed my mouth to the inside of her knee. “I’m told I’ve an excellent imagination.”

I took that measurement with my mouth, the whole way up, slowly, and when I got to the top I didn’t stop.

She came the first time standing up.

I’d stood back up behind her by then. One arm across her waist holding her back against me, the box giving her the height so that her ass pressed against my belly through my trousers. My other hand between her legs from the front. She was soaked. She’d been soaked, she told me later, since I said take everything off, and I believe her, because two of my fingers went into her to the knuckle without the slightest resistance, and she gasped and her head dropped back onto my shoulder.

“Eyes,” I said.

She opened them.

There were three of her. Four, five, eleven, a whole corridor of women with their heads thrown back on a grey-haired woman’s shoulder and a hand moving between their legs. The near one, the real one, had her lips parted and her chest flushed and her eyes black and wet, and she was looking at herself as if she’d never been introduced.

“There you are,” I said into her ear.

I fucked her slowly with my fingers, deep, curled, the heel of my hand flat and grinding on her clit, and I didn’t let her look away once. I talked to her the whole time. That she was beautiful. That I’d never seen anything as beautiful as her in that mirror. That every man and woman she’d cut for since January had stood exactly where she was standing and not one of them had been half as lovely. That I was proud of her. That she was mine. That she was very, very good.

She said my name. She said please. She said I can’t watch this, and I said you can, and she did.

When she came, she came with her eyes open on herself, in three mirrors, the sound of it going up into the iron trusses of that enormous dark room and rolling round the dress forms and coming back to us. Her knees went. I held her up. I kept my fingers in her and my mouth at her ear through every pulse of it, and in the glass I watched a woman I loved take something for herself and not apologize for a second of it.

“Good girl,” I said, when she could hear me.

She laughed, wet and wrecked and shaking. “Not fair.”

“Entirely fair.” I eased my fingers out of her and held them up in the mirror where she could see them, shining. “You told me to bring nothing. I brought my hands. That’s my job.”

“Your table,” I said, five minutes later. “The one with your name on it.”

“Maren—”

“You asked me here to be told. I’ve been told by you for five months. I’ve learned a great deal.” I took off the clinic fleece, and dropped it on the chair, and didn’t fold it. She watched me not fold it. “Lie down on it.”

She lay down on it. Naked, on her back, on nine feet of scarred maple under the one lamp in that whole cathedral of a room, with a roll of brown paper crackling under her shoulders and her pattern for some actor’s waistcoat half drawn beside her head. Forty dress forms stood round us in the dark like a congregation.

I undressed. Properly. Trousers, blouse, everything, and I left it in a heap on the floor by the table leg, and I climbed up onto the table and knelt over her, one knee either side of her head, my hands braced on the maple.

She looked up the length of me.

“Oh,” Willa said. “Oh, fuck.”

“Hands on my hips,” I said. “And your mouth on me. Now.”

She put her mouth on me.

I’d never done it like that. Not once in fifty years. Kneeling over a woman, lowering myself onto her face, taking it. Her hands came up and gripped my hips and pulled me down, and her tongue went flat and slow through me from bottom to top the way she’d taught me in a clawfoot bath, and I put both hands flat on the cutting table and rocked down onto her mouth and heard a sound come out of me that no patient of mine would ever believe I could make.

She was greedy. That was the surprise. All the patience she’d had at the doorway, at the buttons, at the bath, gone. She held me down on her and licked and sucked as if she’d been starving, and when I lifted a little to breathe she dragged me back with her hands and made a noise of protest against me that I felt right through to my spine.

“Slow,” I gasped. “Willa. Slow—”

She didn’t slow. She put two fingers into me from underneath and sucked my clit between her lips and I stopped being able to say anything at all. I rode her face on her own cutting table with her name on a card at the end of it, my thighs shaking, my head bowed, the lamp swinging very slightly on its chain above us, and when I came it was so hard I fell forward onto my hands and my hair came down round both of us and the brown paper tore under my palm.

She didn’t stop. She held my hips and kept her mouth on me, softer, softer, until it took me again, smaller, from underneath the first one, and I shuddered and swore at the iron roof and finally pulled away and collapsed on the maple beside her.

We lay there side by side on her table, breathing, looking up at the black skylights.

“I tore your pattern,” I said.

“I’ll cut another one.” She turned her head. Her mouth and chin were wet. She looked absurdly pleased with herself. “I’m extremely good at it. I’m told I’m the best cutter in three counties.”

“Who told you that?”

“My sister. And the artistic director. And a woman in a fleece who just came on my face.”

I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the table.

It was twenty to ten when she sat up and said, “There’s one more thing.”

She got down off the table, naked, and walked away from me into the dark between the forms. I propped myself on one elbow and watched her go. I watched her stop beside a form in the far corner, by the window, that I hadn’t noticed because it was wrapped in a muslin sheet. She pulled the sheet off.

It was red.

Not a bright red. A deep one, the color of the inside of a pomegranate, of good wine held up to a lamp. Silk with some weight to it, cut on the cross, falling from the shoulders of the form to the floor. It was only basted. Long white tacking stitches ran down every seam like the dotted lines on a pattern, and there were pins in the bodice, and the back was open.

“For the spring concert,” Willa said. “In May. The director told Ruth, and Ruth told me, that you’ve got the solo again.”

I couldn’t say anything.

“You wore black in November. You said the blue was mine.” She didn’t look at me. She looked at the dress. “This one isn’t mine. This one’s for being looked at. By four hundred people. In a stone church. On purpose.”

I got down off the table.

I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember standing in front of it, and putting out my hand, and touching the silk at the hem the way she’d touched it in the sail loft, two fingers and a thumb, letting the hand report. I remember that my hand was shaking.

“Put it on,” Willa said. “I need to check the fit.”

“I’m not wearing anything.”

“That’s how I checked the last one.”

She took it off the form. She stood behind me and lifted it over my head, and it came down over me like water finding its level, warm from the lamp, cool everywhere it touched. It was too long; it pooled round my bare feet. The back was open from the nape to the base of my spine.

She picked a pin out of the cushion on her wrist and put it between her teeth.

And then she knelt behind me, and began to pin the back closed.

I stood in that cold huge room in a basted red dress with nothing under it, my thighs still slick, and felt her fingers at the base of my spine, and the cool slide of steel through two layers of silk, and her knuckles against my skin, and her breath at the small of my back. One pin. Another. She worked her way up me the way she’d worked her way up a slate-blue dress in a linen room in a storm, and I put my hand out and found the shoulder of the nearest dress form and held on to it.

“Is this the pin exception?” I said. My voice was not steady.

“There’s a pin in my mouth,” Willa said, around it. “The door’s open. Anyone could walk in.” She slid the next one home, at my waist. “I believe those are the rules.”

“There are no rules.”

“There are always rules,” she said. “We just write them ourselves now.”

She finished the back. She came round to the front of me and knelt down on the bare boards at my feet, and looked up at me, and took the pin out of her mouth and put it back in the cushion.

Then she lifted the hem of the red dress, and put her head underneath it.

I held on to the dress form. I held on to it so hard I felt the pins in its own costume bite into my palm. Under the skirt, in the dark, her hands were on the backs of my thighs, and her mouth was on me again, and I was already so sensitive from the table that the first touch of her tongue made my knees buckle and I had to catch my weight against the form and it rocked on its stand. All I could see was red silk, and the dark room, and the forty patient forms watching from the shadows, and down at my feet a shape under the skirt, moving.

“Willa,” I said. “Willa. Darling. I’m going to—”

She pushed my thighs apart with her hands and took my clit into her mouth and sucked, and I came standing up in a dress she had made for me to be looked at in, with my hand fisted in the shoulder of somebody else’s costume and my head thrown back and her name going up into the roof like a note I’d been trying to hit for thirty years.

At two minutes to ten we heard the security guard on the iron stairs, three floors down, whistling.

We dressed faster than either of us has ever dressed for anything. Willa got me out of the red silk without losing a single pin, God knows how, and hung it back on its form and threw the muslin over it, and I got my trousers on inside out and didn’t discover it until the car. She smoothed the torn brown paper flat on her table and laid a pattern weight on it. She switched off the lamp in Fitting Room Three. In the mirror, as the light went, I saw the two of us side by side, flushed and dishevelled, three times over and then smaller and smaller, all the way back into the glass.

The guard was a large, kind man named Dennis who carried a flashlight he didn’t need. He met us on the second-floor landing and looked at Willa, and at me, and at my hair.

“Late fitting?” he said.

“Very late,” said Willa.

“Get it right?”

“Not yet,” Willa said. “I’ll need her back.”

Dennis nodded as if that were a perfectly ordinary thing to say about a woman with her trousers on inside out, and went on up the stairs to check the ghost light, whistling.

Outside it was snowing. Mercer Street had gone white and quiet under the streetlights, and our breath hung in the air, and Willa took my hand on the step without looking round first to see who was watching, and we stood there for a moment in the snow.

She took her phone out of her pocket. She looked at it. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night.

She switched it off.

“It’s the weekend,” she said. “I don’t take calls.”

“What about messages?”

“Not from anyone.” She put the phone away, and put her arm through mine, and turned us toward the river and the bridge and the bakery on the other side of it. “Except you. You can tell me anything you want. Any time.”

“I want to tell you something now.”

“Go on.”

I stopped walking, in the middle of the pavement, with the snow coming down.

“It fits,” I said.

Willa laughed out loud in the empty street, and the sound went up between the buildings and came back off the brick, and I listened to every bit of it, and didn’t let go of her hand.

Haven’t read the full novel yet? Start with the door between Rooms Nine and Ten.

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