CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

I only wish I loved bus terminals as much as I’d loved the Lily Playhouse.

—

When the day came for the actual demolition, Peg insisted on being present for it. (“You can’t be afraid of these things, Vivian,” she

said. “You have to see it through.”) So I stood alongside Peg and Olive on that fateful day, watching as the Lily came down. I was not nearly as stoic as they were. To see a wrecking ball take aim at your home and history—at the place that really birthed you—well, that takes a degree of spinal fortitude that I did not yet possess. I couldn’t help but tear up.

The worst part was not when the façade of the building came crashing down, but when the interior lobby wall was demolished. Suddenly you could see the old stage as it was never meant to be seen— naked and exposed under the cruel, unsentimental winter sun. All its shabbiness was dragged into the light for everyone to witness.

Peg had the strength to bear it, though. She didn’t even flinch. She was made of awfully stern stuff, that woman. When the wrecking ball had done all the damage it could do for the day, she smiled at me and said, “I’ll tell you something, Vivian. I have no regrets. When I was a young girl, I honestly believed that a life spent in the theater would be nothing but fun. And God help me, kiddo—it was.”

—

Using the money from the settlement with the city, Peg and Olive bought a nice little apartment on Sutton Place. Peg even had enough money left over after the purchase of the apartment to give a

sort of retirement subsidy to Mr. Herbert, who moved down to Virginia to live with his daughter.

Peg and Olive liked their new life. Olive got a job at a local high school working as the principal’s secretary—a position she was born to hold. Peg was hired at the same school to help run their theater department. The women didn’t seem unhappy about the changes. Their new apartment building (brand new, I should say) even had an

It was an unlikely match, but she had never stopped looking out for me—in terms of salvaging treasures from the bottomless Lowtsky’s bins—and I, in turn, had delighted in watching this kid grow up into a charismatic and fascinating young woman. There was something quite special about her. Of course, Marjorie had always been special, but after the war years, she blossomed into an atomically energetic creative force. She still dressed wildly—looking like a Mexican bandito one day, and a Japanese geisha the next—but she had come into her own, as a person. She’d gone to art school at Parsons while still living at home with her parents and running the family business—while at the same time making money on the side as a sketch artist. She’d worked for years at Bonwit Teller, drawing romantic fashion illustrations for their newspaper ads. She also did diagrams for medical journals, and once— quite memorably—was hired by a travel company to illustrate a guidebook to Baltimore with the tragic title: So You’re Coming to Baltimore! So really, Marjorie could do anything and she was always on the hustle.

Marjorie had grown into a young woman who was not only creative, eccentric, and hardworking, but also bold and astute. And when the city announced that it was going to knock down our neighborhood, and Marjorie’s parents decided to take the buyout and retire to Queens, suddenly dear Marjorie Lowtsky was in the same position I was in—out of a home and out of work. Instead of crying about it, Marjorie came to me with a simple and well-thought-out proposal. She suggested that we join forces in the world, by living together and working together.

Her plan—and I must give her every bit of credit for it—was: wedding gowns.

—

Her exact proposal was this: “Everyone is getting married, Vivian, and we have to do something about it.”

She had taken me out to lunch at the Automat to talk about her idea. It was the summer of 1950, the Port Authority Bus Terminal was inevitable, and our whole little world was about to come tumbling down. But Marjorie (dressed today like a Peruvian peasant, wearing about five different kinds of embroidered vests and skirts at the same time) was shining with purpose and excitement.

“What do you want me to do about everyone getting married?” I asked. “Stop them?”

“No. Help them. If we can help them, we can profit from them. Look, I’ve been at Bonwit Teller all week doing sketches in the bridal suite. I’ve been listening. The salesclerks say they can’t keep up with orders. And all week I’ve been hearing customers complain about the lack of variety. Nobody wants the same dress as anyone else, but there aren’t that many dresses to choose from. I overheard a girl the other day saying that she would sew her own wedding dress, just to make it unique, if only she knew how.”

“Do you want me to teach girls how to sew their own wedding dresses?” I asked. “Most of those girls couldn’t sew a potholder.”

“No. I think we should make wedding dresses.”

“Too many people make wedding dresses already, Marjorie. It’s an industry of its own.”

“Yeah, but we can make nicer ones. I could sketch the designs and you could sew them. We know materials better than anyone else, don’t we? And our gimmick would be to create new gowns out of old ones. You and I both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that’s being imported. With my contacts, I can find old silk and satin all over town—hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France; they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there—and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller. I’ve seen you take good lace off old tablecloths before, to make costumes. Couldn’t you make trims and veils the same way? We could create one-of-a-kind wedding dresses for girls who don’t want to look like everyone else in the department stores. Our dresses wouldn’t be industry; they would be custom tailored. Classic. You could do that, couldn’t you?”

“Nobody wants to wear a used, old wedding dress,” I said.

But as soon as I spoke these words, I remembered my friend Madeleine, back in Clinton at the beginning of the war. Madeleine, whose gown I had created by tearing up both of her grandmothers’ old silk wedding dresses and combining them into one concoction. That gown had been stunning.

Seeing that I was beginning to catch on, Marjorie said, “What I’m picturing is this—we open a boutique. We’ll use your classiness to

make the place seem high tone and exclusive. We’ll play up the fact that we import our materials from Paris. People love that. They’ll buy anything if you tell them it came from Paris. It won’t be a total lie— some of the stuff will come from France. Sure, it will come from France in barrels stuffed full of rags, but nobody needs to know this. I’ll sort out the treasures, and you’ll make the treasures into better treasures.”

“Are you talking about having a store?”

“A boutique, Vivian. God, honey, get used to saying the word. Jews have stores; we shall have a boutique.”

“But you are Jewish.”

“Boutique, Vivian. Boutique. Practice saying it with me. Boutique. Let it roll off your tongue.”

“Where do you want to do this?” I asked.

“Down around Gramercy Park,” she said. “That neighborhood will always be fancy. I’d like to see the city try to tear those town houses down! That’s what we’re selling to people—the idea of fancy. The idea of classic. I want to call it L’Atelier. There’s a building down there I’ve been eyeing. My parents told me they’ll give me half the payment from the city when Lowtsky’s gets demolished—as well they should, having worked me like a stevedore ever since I was a babe in arms. My cut will be just enough to buy the place I’m looking at.”

I was watching her mind work and whip—and honestly, it was a little scary. She was moving awfully fast.

“The building I want is on Eighteenth Street, one block from the park,” she went on. “Three stories, with a storefront. Two apartments upstairs. It’s small, but it’s got charm. You could fake that it’s a little boutique on a quaint street in Paris. That’s the feeling we’re looking to create. It’s not in bad shape. I can find people to fix it up. You can live on the top floor. You know how I hate climbing stairs. You’ll like it— there’s a skylight in your apartment. Two skylights, actually.”

“You want us to buy a building, Marjorie?”

“No, honey, I want me to buy a building. I know how much money you’ve got in the bank—and no offense, Vivian, but you couldn’t afford Paramus, much less Manhattan. Although you can afford to buy into the business, so we’ll go halfsies on that. But I’ll be the one who buys the building. It will cost me every dime I have, but I’m willing to shoot

of effort to make one. My gowns were especially time-consuming because I wasn’t starting with bolts of clean, fresh fabrics. It’s harder to make a new dress from an old dress (or from several old dresses, as in my case), because you must disassemble the old dress first, and then your options will be limited by how much material you are able to glean from it. Besides which, I was working with aging and fragile textiles—antique silks and satins, and ancient spiderwebs of lace— which meant that I had to use an especially careful hand.

Marjorie would bring me sacks of old wedding and christening gowns that she scavenged from God knows where, and I would pick through them judiciously, to see what I could work with. Often the materials were yellowed with age or stained down the bodice. (Never give a bride a glass of red wine!) So my first task would be to soak the garment in ice water and vinegar to clean it. If there was a stain that I couldn’t remove, I’d have to cut around it, and figure out how much I could salvage of the old fabric. Or maybe I would turn that piece inside out, or use it as a lining. I often felt like a diamond cutter—trying to keep as much of the value of the original material as I could while shaving away what was flawed.

Then it was a question of how to create a dress that was unique. At some level, a wedding gown is just a dress—and like all dresses, it’s made of three simple ingredients: a bodice, a skirt, and sleeves. But over the years, with those three limited ingredients, I made thousands of dresses that were not at all alike. I had to do this, because no bride wants to look like another bride.

So it was challenging work, yes—both physically and creatively. I had assistants over the years, and that helped a bit, but I never found anyone who could do what I could do. And since I couldn’t bear to create a L’Atelier dress that was anything less than impeccable, I put in the long hours myself to make sure that each gown was a piece of perfection. If a bride said—on the evening before her wedding—that she wanted more pearls on her bodice, or less lace, then I would be the one up after midnight making those changes. It takes the patience of a monk to do this kind of detail work. You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

Fortunately, I happened to believe that.

—

Of course, the greatest challenge in building wedding dresses is learning how to handle the customers themselves.

In offering my service to so many brides over the years, I became delicately attuned to the subtleties of family, money, and power—but mostly, I had to learn how to understand fear. I learned that girls who are about to get married are always afraid. They’re afraid that they don’t love their fiancés enough or that they love them too much. They’re afraid of the sex that is coming to them or the sex that they are leaving behind. They’re afraid of the wedding day going awry. They’re afraid of being looked at by hundreds of eyes—and they’re afraid of not being looked at, in case their dress is all wrong or their maid of honor is more beautiful.

I recognize, Angela, that in the great scale of things, these are not monumental concerns. We had just come through a world war in which millions died and millions more saw their lives destroyed; clearly the anxiety of a nervous bride is not a cataclysmic matter, in comparison. But fears are fears, nonetheless, and they bring strain upon the troubled minds who bear them. I came to see it as my task to alleviate as much fear and strain as I could for these girls. More than anything, then, what I learned over the years at L’Atelier was how to help frightened women—how to humble myself before their needs, and how to lend myself to their wishes.

For me, this education started as soon as we opened for business.

The first week of our boutique’s existence, a young woman wandered in, clutching our advertisement from The New York Times. (This was Marjorie’s sketch of two guests at a wedding admiring a willowy bride. One woman says, “That gown is so poetical! Did she bring it home from Paris?” The second woman replies, “Why, almost! It comes from L’Atelier, and their gowns are the fairest!”)

I could see the girl was nervous. I got her a glass of water and showed her samples of the gowns I was currently working on. Very quickly, she gravitated toward a great big pile of meringue—a dress that resembled a puffy summer cloud. In fact, it looked exactly like the wedding gown that the swan-thin model in our advertisement was wearing. The girl touched her dream dress and her face grew soft with

longing. My heart sank. I knew this garment was not right for her. She was so small and roundish; she would look like a marshmallow in it.

“May I try it on?” she asked.

But I couldn’t allow her to do that. If she saw herself in the mirror wearing that dress, she would recognize how farcical she looked, and she would leave my boutique and never come back. But it was worse than that. I didn’t so much mind losing the sale. What I minded was this: I knew that this girl’s feelings would be wounded by seeing herself in that dress—deeply wounded—and I wanted to spare her the pain.

“Sweetheart,” I said, as gently as I could, “you’re a beautiful girl. And I think that particular gown will be a bitter disappointment for you.”

Her face fell. Then she squared her little shoulders and bravely said, “I know why. It’s because I’m too short, isn’t it? And because I’m too plump. I knew it. I’m going to look like a fool on my wedding day.”

There was something about this moment that went straight through the heart of me. There is nothing like the vulnerability of an insecure girl in a bridal shop to make you feel the small but horrible pains of life. I instantly felt nothing but concern for this girl, and I didn’t want her to suffer for another moment.

Also—please remember that up until this time, Angela, I hadn’t worked with civilians. For years, I’d been sewing clothing for professional dancers and actresses. I wasn’t accustomed to normallooking, regular girls, with all their self-consciousness and perceived flaws. Many of the women whom I had been serving thus far had been passionately in love with their own figures (and for good reason) and were eager to be seen. I was accustomed to women who would shed their clothes and dance around in front of a mirror with joy—not to women who would flinch at their own reflections.

I had forgotten that girls could be anything but vain.

What this girl taught me in my own boutique that day was that the wedding-gown business was going to be considerably different from show business. Because this little human being standing before my eyes was not some sumptuous showgirl; she was just a regular person who wanted to look sumptuous on her wedding day, and who did not know how to get there.

But I knew how to get her there.

I knew she needed a dress that was snug and simple, so she wouldn’t vanish in it. I knew that her dress needed to be made of crepe-backed satin, so it would drape but not cling. Nor could it be a vivid white, because of her somewhat ruddy complexion. No, her gown needed to be a softer, creamier color—which would make her skin look smoother. I knew that she needed a simple crown of flowers, rather than a long veil that would—again—hide her from view. I knew that she needed three-quarter sleeves to show off her pretty wrists and hands. No gloves for this one! Also, I could tell just by looking at her in her street clothes where her natural waist was located (and it was not where her current dress was belted) and I knew that her gown would need to fall from the natural waist, in order to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. And I could feel that she was so modest—so mercilessly self-conscious and self-critical—that she would not be able to bear it if the slightest hint of cleavage was revealed. But her ankles— those, we could show and so we would. I knew exactly how to dress her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, and I quite literally tucked her under my wing. “Don’t you fret. We’re going to take good care of you. You will be a spectacularly beautiful bride, I promise it.”

And so she was.

—

Angela, I will tell you this: I came to love all the girls I ever served at L’Atelier. Every last one of them. This was one of the biggest

surprises of my life—the upwelling of love and protectiveness that I felt toward every girl I ever dressed for her wedding. Even when they were demanding and hysterical, I loved them. Even when they were not so beautiful, I saw them as beautiful.

Marjorie and I had gone into this business primarily to make money. My secondary motive had been to practice my craft, which had always brought me fulfillment. A tertiary reason had been that I really didn’t know what else to do with my life. But I never could have anticipated the greatest benefit this business would bestow: the powerful rush of warmth and tenderness that I felt every single time