Page 22 of Melt With You

No, she didn’t look like a girl at all. She was wearing her favorite nightgown – a knee-length T-shirt that had once belonged to her older brother – and a concert T-shirt from The Police that she would kill to have today. But something wasn’t right. She was a thirty-eight-year-old woman in a teenager’s bed. Sighing, she knew she had to do something.

How long was she going to be here?

She had no idea. The house was hers for a month. That would give her the time to to figure out what she ought to do. She went downstairs to fill up the Mr Coffee as she took stock of her situation. What if she were stuck for eternity? While she waited for the coffee to brew, she considered her options.

Go back to sleep and hope she woke up in 2008?

She’d already tried that. Sleep didn’t seem to affect the hallucination in the slightest. In fact, this was unlike any dream she’d ever had. She went into the bathroom, and when she put her hand out, she could touch the cold surface of the porcelain sink. As she drank her first cup of coffee, she could sit and watch the second hand tick on the kitchen clock. There was none of that wavy quality she often had in dreams. No switching landscapes, moving with ease from one scene to another. No ability to fly, to speak a foreign language, to be naked one moment and clothed the next.

This was like real life.

But twenty years in her past.

So what should she do? She shook the question away, replacing it with another one: what would Violet do?

That was easier to answer. Violet would be proactive. Yes, she felt more upbeat at the thought. Doing something – anything – that sounded good. Then she looked down at her T-shirt. First she had to find something to wear.

Coffee cup in hand, she went upstairs to her mother’s closet and looked inside. Nothing there for her. She and her mother might have been about the same size, but they had never shared the same tastes. Her mother was in advertising. In 2008, she dressed in the top designers, but in the 1980s, well, Dori had to give her mother credit – she’d worn what every high-powered working woman wore: assorted blazers fitted with the most enormous shoulder pads created by mankind.

Dori ran her fingers over the stuffed shoulders on each of the suit jackets. What was the point? To make women resemble linebackers? The square shoulders stood at attention even on the hangers. She delved further into the closet, looking in bewilderment at the shirts, each one with a floppy bow to tie at the neck. How had her mom dressed in these clothes without laughing herself silly? Ah, well, maybe that’s what the marijuana was for. Maybe her mom had needed to be stoned in order to get dressed every day.

When she stared down at the shoes, a smile played over her lips, recalling that, yes, her mother was one of the many women who would wear sneakers over her nylons for the stroll to work, only changing into her ugly high heels when she’d arrived at the office. How utterly appalling. There was no way she would do that, no way she could make the clothes here suit her needs.

So what should she wear instead?

Prior to the reunion, she and Violet had cruised the internet for hours looking at 80s clothes – now considered ‘retro’ – when deciding what they wanted to wear. She remembered the acid-washed denim, the smell of bleach in the air when she and Vi had tried to dye their own pants to be cool. Hadn’t worked out that well, if she remembered correctly. They’d ended up with odd splotches of white against the dark background. Not the same as acid-washed at all. But why had they wanted the look in the first place? As far as she could recall, it was a horrific fad.

As were legwarmers.

And parachute pants.

And hair teased so high it added four or five inches to a girl’s height. How odd was that? Now, Dori added height with heels. In the 80s, girls had added height with hair.

She took one more look at her mother’s clothes before shutting the closet door. Although she knew it was the logical next step, she didn’t want to go into her own closet. It felt too strange to be in her own bedroom, like visiting a museum. She was scared to touch things, to move things.

Finally, she returned to her suitcase and looked through the clothes, pulling out the 80s outfit she’d packed for the costume night. She slid into the outfit she’d brought for the event she and Violet had skipped – the slouchy purple suede boots, the striped purple and white miniskirt, the two shirts to layer – and then looked at herself in the mirror.

She eyed her reflection. Would the women at The Beauty Box recognize her? She didn’t think so. She had worn glasses all through high school, after all. And her hair was silver-streaked now. Besides, she had twenty years on her former self. She might look similar, but in no way had time stood still.

One last look. She thought that while she might not blend with the dress-for-success crowd, she most definitely looked the part of the girls at The Beauty Box. Remembering Gael’s words, she headed back out the door, key in her pocket, and started to walk downtown.

Could she pull it off?

Yes, she thought, she could.

Rowan arrived at Dori’s house moments after she’d left. He knocked on the front door for several minutes, but got no response. As he was walking down the path, a neighbor who was out watering his roses asked if Rowan were looking for the Martins.

Rowan nodded.

‘They’re away for the month,’ the neighbor told him. ‘Nobody’s here.’

How would she do it? Present herself at the counter and say that her cousin had told her they were looking for help. She wasn’t sure she’d be in town long, but she’d be happy to work on a freelance basis. That sounded believable to her. What about an employee application? She couldn’t use the same Social Security number as the one she had in real life, could she?

Bette solved the problem for her, delighted that an answer to her unpublished Want Ad had simply walked in off the street. ‘I’ll pay you in cash,’ she said. ‘Is that all right? Then I don’t have to hassle with the government.’

They got on smashingly from the start. Dori remembered how cool Bette was. She’d always been in awe of her boss. Now that Dori was interacting with her as one grown-up to another, Bette was a peer rather than an idol. And Bette was impressed with the names of the musicians and models Dori had worked on. Some celebrities had staying power. And she had done up several movie stars for photospreads in magazines like Rolling Stone and Vogue.

‘This is going to seem pretty small potatoes for someone like you,’ Bette said, looking around the tiny beauty shop with the two-station salon in the back.

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