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Belle’s and her own clothes clean and her room neat. Belle was a neatness fanatic and their Brooklyn apartment had been as sterile as Belle’s reproductive system was.
    Belle and Arnold had been married for only a year when they adopted Karen. It had always been odd and embarrassing to Karen that she was older in years than her parents’ marriage, but they seemed not to discuss it, and so neither did she. Once Belle had joked that Karen had just come into the family fashionably late. Karen knew better than to ask questions. In fact, she had been taught to discuss nothing unpleasant or upsetting. Questions about her adoption were discouraged.
    Growing up had been all about keeping still, keeping clean, and keeping quiet. Arnold was himself a very quiet man and both he and Karen knew that if there was any talking that was going to be done it would be done by Belle.
    Belle was not, by any means, a neglectful mother. It was just that there were certain areas she had interest in and others that left her cold. There was much they did together. She read aloud to Karen.
    (After all, she had been a school teacher.) They took walks together, and shopped for clothes. Karen was always dressed to perfection, at least until she began to assert a taste very different from Belle’s.
    But up to the time she was eleven or twelve, she and her mother made weekly forays to downtown Brooklyn and ransacked Abraham & Strauss.
    More exciting to Karen were the special Saturdays when they went into Manhattan. Then they tore through S. Klein, Altman’s, Orbach’s, and Lord & Taylor’s before stopping for lunch at the Fifth Avenue Schraft’s, where Belle always ordered a celebratory Shirley Temple for Karen and a whisky sour for herself. They had been good companions on those trips and Karen had learned not only to wait patiently while Belle tried on a myriad of outfits, but also to critically appraise them at Belle’s request.
    Sometimes she wondered if that’s where her interest in clothes began.
    Had she always had a talent for fashion? Or had Belle developed it?
    Because, back then, Belle had always listened soberly to Karen’s assessment.
    If Belle was obsessed with shopping, Karen became equally engrossed in fashion. She collected dozens of paper dolls, and designed clothes for all of them, but paper wasn’t real, wasn’t sensual. She loved the feel of real fabrics and the numberless combinations of colors and textures.
    To this day, Karen believed that fashion began with the cloth, that within the fabric was the center from which she spun every outfit.
    Unlike Belle, she didn’t want to own clothes, she just liked looking at them and being around them. Karen felt as if she had grown up with her head tucked under a rack of clothing, surrounded by Belle’s rejects and selections, and that from her earliest times nothing had interested her more than the drape of a fabric, the contrast of piping, and the way a seam was cut.
    Back on Ocean Avenue, Karen had longed for access to Belle’s closet, a walk-in that was off-limits to her. In it, Belle arranged every garment based on its color, style, and use. Not all blouses hung together, the ones that were made to go with suits hung with their matching jackets.
    But all skirts were separated, for some reason only known to Belle, from the rest of their ensemble and lined up along one rod, all on their own.
    It was an arrangement as inflexible and confusing to Karen as the Dewey Decimal System at the Brooklyn Public Library. Belle’s shoes, scarves, belts, and stockings were all arranged in meticulous order. Her mother would have known in a moment if Karen had touched anything. Belle never wore slacksţshe was too short for them, she saidţbut she had dozens of silk dresses that Karen longed to touch and play with. Not to mention the hats. The closet was a place of wonders. But though mother and daughter shared shopping jaunts, they had never played dress-up. Belle wasn’t a playful