Work Text:
“It’s called Home Ec, not Home Wreck,” Greta Keene snickers to her tablemates.
Beverly crosses the classroom to take a seat at the big, round top table farthest away from her gang. She’s not going to let Greta ruin the one not entirely awful part of this school year for her. Well. It’s not actually a school year. It’s sort of pointless, really. While the police and the court iron things out, she’s a ward of the State of Maine- and since they’d rather not pay someone to babysit her full time the next two weeks, they’re forcing her to go to Derry Junior High during the day. Since none of her grades or other class topics will be following her to Portland, Home Ec is the one opportunity she has to do something lasting with her time here. A unit on civics won’t do her any good if Portland’s class is covering geography, but a handmade shirt is still a shirt.
Beverly puts her Caboodle case down on the table in front of her and pretends to be fascinated with its contents instead of listening to Greta’s running commentary on her appearance, her summer, and the updated laundry list of boys Greta has decided she’s blowing. She snaps the buckle open and unfolds the trays, reaching in for her scissors which she draws out, daggerlike. Try me, Greta. She checks the mirror in the lid, since a Caboodle case is technically a makeup box, and sees Greta blanch. The bell rings and she lays them down, close at hand, before the teacher can look up from her desk.
“Is everyone in the right place? This is room 209,” says Ms. Gaston. She lifts her glasses on their chain and puts them on to read roll call. There’s a titter from Greta’s table when she reads ‘Marsh’ out loud of course, but this is Beverly’s second class with Ms. Gaston. She’s already ingratiated herself and these assholes are strangers, so Ms. Gaston whips around at them with a forbidding look. “Quiet during roll call... Putnam. Peters. Simmons. Tremblay?”
“Here," says the last student.
“That should be it then,” says Ms. Gaston, making a mark on her book. She comes around from behind her desk to close the classroom door, but two boys scurry through first.
“Sorry we’re late,” one of them pants. Beverly looks up to see it’s Stan, still bandaged and offering up a yellow slip. Eddie stands beside him, doing the same.
“-We got excused from P.E. because of this,” Eddie waves his casted arm in self explanation, “-and Stan’s face, you know. They don’t want him to get a staph infection while he’s still got open wounds or MRSA or gangrene or-”
“I see.” Ms. Gaston takes the yellow slips and points to Beverly’s table, the least populated in the classroom. “Why don’t you two take a seat and I’ll add you to the roll.”
Stan trudges over like he’d rather risk it with the gym mats, but Eddie gives Beverly a comradely smile when he pulls out his chair. His smile doesn’t last, of course, when it’s discovered what unit of Home Ec this is.
“I was hoping we’d be doing checkbooks and appliance repair, or at least cooking,” Stan complains as the teacher passes out fabric scraps and drops a box of pins to each table. Some pop off and scatter onto the table.
Eddie scoots his chair back a few inches. “No one said anything about needles.”
Half so that she doesn’t have to hear about it, and half because she really does love these two knuckleheads, Beverly lets the boys borrow her very own, private pin cushion that only she has ever used along with her own collection of hand needles, and her thimbles. She likes sewing better without the thimbles, anyway. She's been building up a blister on her middle finger that would make a rock guitarist jealous.
“There’s a trick for tying a knot,” she shows them behind Ms. Gaston’s back. It’s not the way they’re being taught. “You pinch and roll, like this.”
"Do we have to lick it like that?"
"No, I guess not."
"Knot," Stan corrects, raising a skeptical eyebrow as he rolls the thread between pointer and thumb. "Oh, I got it!"
"Pfft."
Beverly’s boys are the first students besides herself to present tidy, knotted needle and thread to the teacher. When they receive their instruction to make a practice pillow, she does her best not to roll her eyes as Stan painstakingly marks out his basting with a ruler and pencil, and advises Eddie when his thread gets tangled. Twice. Beverly finishes her little project before the rest of the class, while Stan is still measuring as if his pillow will need to be airtight to survive the vacuum of space.
"You don't need a stitch between every molecule, you know."
Eddie has given up trying to sew right-handed and instead clubs the fabric to the table with his cast as he pricks along with his left. “How are you so fast?!” he asks.
“I used to take in my mom’s old dresses to fit myself,” she shrugs. Her mother taught her how to separate a skirt from a bodice and make a new, Beverly-sized pinafore, and how to cinch a sleeve into a gathered cuff, and hem pants correctly, too. Mom liked the softening impact this had on her otherwise tomboyish wardrobe, while Beverly liked that it made her resourceful and adaptable.
“Don’t you look pretty,” Mom would say, admiring her handiwork. Meanwhile, Beverly would look in the mirror and see all the problems she had solved and the pockets she had added to carry her knife and lighter. Dressing up pretty got you the negative attention that she was already drowning in, but outfitting yourself made you like Batman or whatever hero the Loser boys worshiped for their clever costumes and gadgets.
"Yours is so neat. Stan's is going to be perfect." Eddie frowns at his pillow. “Mine's all janky. This is impossible. I’d do better back in gym trying to climb a rope with this f-” he catches himself mid-swear, remembering the summer is over and they’re back in school. He sighs. “I hate this cast.”
“Sometimes you just have to start over, Eds. Atleast you didn't cut anything off yet.” Beverly hands him a seam ripper. “I’ll rethread for you.”
-
Four years out from high school Beverly would have liked to be graduating from college, but they don’t exactly hand out scholarships to troubled orphan girls who can’t write inspiring essays for shit. Instead, she’s working in a New Hampshire Market Basket and only half way through an Associate’s in Business Management. It’s slow going; taking classes in the morning, working in the afternoon, and struggling to sleep at night. The nightmares she’s had since childhood haven’t let up, and since the State couldn’t force her to go to counseling past the age of 18, she hasn't been making any headway. In a bitter, self deluding way, she’s sort of glad she’s not studying something she actually cares about. Not that she knows what she should be saving it for, but she has so little energy to spare.
Then she sees it while she's on campus one day; a pamphlet for the community theatre that uses the college's auditorium. They need crew and a seamstress for a production of Carousel, and while she knows she can’t prove that anybody should give her a shot with words, she does have a closet full of alterations she can show off.
She gets the job. It only pays a stipend to mitigate travel expenses and meals, but it comes with other rewards. Finally, Beverly likes something again. Or maybe for the first time. The last few years have been sort of gray, and while she imagines that before the nightmares she must have been happy as a child the way all children have a baseline that by necessity sits above grocery store worker, she can’t remember it. She supposes memory is just like that. There are hand stitches she doesn't recall the name of but knows when to use them. Some things are just instinct. But she likes making things. She likes being able to hold something in her hands that didn’t exist until she summoned it forth, inch by inch. It’s a kind of recovery.
When the designer sees that she can handle more than alterations, she’s entrusted with whipping together a set of gingham petticoats. She spends hours at the ruffling foot, gathering what must be miles of yardage and fixing them to skirts in alternating colors. She drops them off at a dance rehearsal and leaves with the number of the choreographer. She gives him a call because she likes his strong, long legs. At least until three months later when she’s on the ground and he’s kicking her and shouting and Who does she think she is? Does she think she’s gonna do better than him?
She doesn’t take it personally. She doesn’t let anything get that close.
He gets a better gig at a regional theater, and Beverly’s already on to the next show. Then the next, and the next. Gowns and frock coats and kimonos fly by. Eventually, three years have passed and she has a degree she’s doing nothing with, and the designer she started under decides to retire and suggests her as a replacement. It pays about the same as Market Basket, so she quits her job there and supplements with some piecework for a tailor shop, instead.
She irons creases into a series of suit pants while watching CSI. She likes to think that if they ever found her dead in a ditch, they’d know her profession by her scarred, calloused fingers. Who they’d call when they identified her body was a mystery. She supposes her production manager would miss the petty cash and receipts that were in her undoubtedly stolen wallet, but her interpersonal attachments are few and far between. Either she has to keep a professional distance from the people she works with constantly, or the rotating door of new actors, dancers and singers come and go faster than she can develop a sense of loss.
Eventually her rinky dink little theatre’s budget starts to dry up, and Beverly knows she needs to head to greener pastures. She saves up her money to get as far away from New England as possible. Getting out of Maine had been a start, but it’s not enough. She cuts every expense except cigarettes and spends a few months couch surfing until she’s got enough for a ticket to California.
She trades cigarettes for dried cherries the summer she spends sweating in a Ventura garage, sewing samples for some health nut wannabe fashion designer who doesn’t even know what a welt pocket is, but has Hubby’s Money to burn. She doesn’t allow Bev to smoke near the fabric but lets her dog keep running through, shedding on the gabardine. It’s only a few weeks, and she figures she shouldn't smoke near a cutting table anyway. Triangle Factory Fire, right? Like most of Beverly’s resolutions, her commitment to dried cherries only lasts about as long as that gig’s paycheck, but the high she gets from seeing a collection she built in a magazine is one she coasts on all the way to LA.
She drapes for a theater company owned by the talentless child of some screen legend or other and picks up shopping and assistant gigs from the designers that come through. She gets really good at scouring thrift stores and estimating measurements just off of someone's picture. She doesn't know how she went from scanning cans of tuna to sewing new bands onto hats once worn by Cary Grant, but she's not complaining. Then a boyfriend sprains her wrist so badly that she has to drop the draping and can only do the shopping work for a few weeks.
Usually Beverly chips nailpolish as fast as it can be applied, but she gets manicures while she's healing because the included hand massage is cheaper than physical therapy. At the salon, she stumbles her way into a string of personal stylist gigs. Initially she thinks it’s going to be all vintage couture and being on speed dial for red carpet- if only. It turns out to be more along the lines of weeding cargo pants out of the wardrobe of every struggling stand-up comic in Studio City who’s never had a girlfriend to take that bullet for them. She never knew how many men her age didn't own a belt! Against all odds, she hits it off with some of her style-ees, and even attempts to ask one out before realizing he’s a figurative closet-case as well as a literal one. At least hanging around with the only people in Hollywood hustling more thanklessly than her gets her a tip for some television work.
She gets attached to a sitcom that winds up re-conceptualizing and dragging her back to the East Coast, but at least she lands in New York. It's sort of cool. NBC is the first employer she’s had that people recognize when she tells them what she does for a living, and she kind of missed having four seasons of weather in a year, so she sticks it out even though it's not exactly what she wants to be doing. Film work is built on the maxim of Hurry Up and Wait, so she reads a lot books during breaks on set. Mostly horror by some new up and comer. She usually misplaces it or someone will steal her book before she can read the ending, but maybe it's for the best- leaving off while there’s still a few characters left alive. She gets enough death in her dreams.
When her show is cancelled she stays on with her designer for their next TV project, then the next. By the time she gets the invitation to her ten year reunion in Portland, television has all but lost its shine. She’s not any closer with the people from high school than the cheap dry cleaner she uses on 46th Street, so she junks the letter. The reminder does make her stop and evaluate where she's at, though. Working on these modern wear shows where everything is purchased rather than built is numbing. Beverly misses actual construction work. She’s sick of battling it out with Studio Services and so when she gets wind of a new show at Bravo, she hits her rolodex. By now, she knows some people who know some people. For the first time, she puts together a design portfolio.
During the interview/audition process she gets to meet the fashion department head from Parsons. He knows one of her designers at NBC and seems impressed that Beverly has assisted someone so hard to please. It feels like a double edged sword. She’d always thought that he liked her because she’s not really a designer, like his previous assistants. Beverly doesn’t try to design on top of his design, she just supports the work. Unfortunately, what they’re looking for here is the people who do go over the top. She explains to skeptical looking producers that, yes, this is how she typically dresses. Like every other costumer she knows, she’s stuck in a Blazer + tee + maybe a scarf = I Don’t Have To Think About It sartorial rut. She’s too burned out from putting clothes on other people to worry about herself. If its on-camera sex appeal they’re looking for, they’re just lucky she left her fannypack at home.
In the end they decide her personality is too low-key for reality television, but one of the technical advisors pulls her aside. Turns out she’s just perfect for a job supervising wardrobe for his upcoming runway show. If she can prove they have a good working relationship there, maybe she can work on his next line. She buys a top shelf handle of whiskey and eats a whole bag of dried cherries to celebrate.
Meanwhile she’s still got the itch to get back to the sewing machine, of course, but she can’t commit to the hours required for a Broadway costume house while she’s intermittently travelling to exhibitions. She needs some one-off work. Luckily, there’s a market for that just about everywhere, and she figures that after a few years of working with actual prima donnas she can handle bridal. She takes a part time position at Kleinfeld in the alterations department, where she can get her fill of lace and taffeta, even if it’s always in white.
One of the sales people she works with, the sort of diehard romantic she’d always imagined the wedding industry was staffed by, convinces her to try online dating. As an experiment, she casts a nationwide net after making her profile, just to see what sort of match rises to the top of the heap. Unsurprisingly, it's a lot of creative career types, most of whom are hiking in their profile pictures, blurring green as she scrolls through. A man in Atlanta with curly hair and the username cygnusolor_ jumps out at her purely for being photographed in black and white. She likes his profile and strange sense of humor, so she sends him a snarky joke, even though he’s far away and not really her type. He sends her back a poem about sewing shirts by a recent Poet Laureate. During the day, she thinks of the poem as she drapes a floral brocade.
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly/ Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked/ Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme/ Or a major chord.
At night she has stress dreams about load in at one of her old theaters, but instead of frantically unzipping garment bags and finding lost costumes, inside are the same dead strangers she always dreams of. The five men who she couldn’t describe upon waking, no matter how many times the nightmare recurs- five strangers and then cygnusolor_, soaking wet and tinged with blood, his curls plastered to his forehead.
She stops messaging him after that.
In her downtime, Beverly teaches herself AutoCAD, so she can be fully qualified when that job on the next collection comes around. At work, a Kleinfeld bride built like a wrecking ball refuses to listen as Beverly kneels at her feet, pinning her gown. She’s yelling into the phone at her fiance about her special day, laying on a guilt trip to rival Around The World In 80 Days, while Beverly pleads with her to stop moving and lifting her arms so she can get a level hem. It only makes the bride more irate and fidgety. If she had ever learned to fight back, Beverly might yank the phone out of the woman’s hands and tell this poor man to run, but instead the bride treads on her hand in her tantrum, crushing two of her fingers. Beverly cuts the rings off her own swelling hand with the tinsnips they use for corsetry and quits that day. More time to brush up on AutoCAD, she supposes.
Her fingers are back to normal when she starts patterning for her new position. It’s the best she’s felt in ages. She loves the geometry, and the trial and error of prototyping. In fashion, there’s not the same expectation that some future costumer will want to reuse a stock dress, so the insides are cleaner and more finely tuned. Within two years, she sees people on the street wearing off-the-rack versions of garments she developed, and while she’s seen her work on living, breathing people before, she had always expected it, because she was watching rehearsal at the theater, or checking in on her show on the TV. It’s like getting an unexpected letter from a friend in the mail.
Well. It would be, if she knew what that was like. All her mail these days is digital, same as everyone else. Nothing special, just work, junk, and messages from Match.com. Everytime she checks her inbox she thinks that she should close her profile for awhile. There have been some tepid first dates, here and there, some month-long affairs that never went anywhere- but nothing good enough to outweigh the scary, close calls she keeps having. For some reason, Beverly is like a magnetic pincushion; she catches every prick you throw at her. The night she stumbles back into her apartment without shoes and her knees scraped to shit, she finally deletes her account.
She licks her wounds for a year or two and focuses on her work. She comes out on the other side thinking maybe she’s through with men. With the same experimental attitude she might take to tailoring a jacket out of bubblewrap, she asks out her favorite lesbian, an old lighting designer friend. They get drunk and tease and squeeze until they fuck a few times, but before Beverly can figure out if it’s really for her, it falls apart. She always wants to square off about how misogynistic the fashion industry is, as if Beverly doesn’t know. In her experience, most things have a dark side, and it’s not like hanging lamps for David Mamet is activism, either. Beverly just wants someone else to bankroll the $300/yd bolts she sews, man. Maybe if she was still cranking out petticoats for some off-off Broadway show it could have worked out, but it doesn’t.
She keeps on sleeping alone. She keeps having nightmares. Above all, she keeps her nose to the grind. She puts together a few collections of her own, and within less than a decade of coming to New York, she’s the sort of successful where she has an accountant, a lawyer, and house on Long Island. If she’s honest- it might be too much. More of her day is paperwork than she’d like, so she puts out feelers to sell the label and a bidding war erupts. Although she plans on stepping back, Tom- the buyer, offers her whatever position she’d like at his company.
Her default move in a conflict or crossroad is always to please, to say yes. Later she marries him because he asks, and she’d never gotten that far before. He asks her to grow her hair longer, and she does. He asks her to sell the house in Long Island, and she does. When Tom asks her if she’s trying to make him jealous, hanging off of an old actor friend like that, she thinks (hopes?) it’s just banter and foolishly says yes to that too.
She doesn’t go home for five days. She cuts her hair to chin length so she can't be dragged around by it again. She holes up in her studio and sits at her machine, fighting with the thread tension. It keeps snapping, and no matter what screw she turns, something is wrong. She sleeps on the couch in her office, and in the morning she changes into some clothes hanging in her office closet that Tom had gifted her and she never bothered to bring home. He likes her to look pretty, in silk with a bare neck, but do you know how hard it is to get blood out of a protein fiber? That's a fucked up thing to think. It doesn’t shock her to realize that she always expected this. She always thought this was what she deserved. She’s not good at fighting back, not with words and not with her fists- scarred as they are. She must want this. If she wanted any different, then maybe she ought to have married one of her gay friends like that kook with the garage in Ventura. Tom shows up at the office with her favorite chocolates and an idea for a new and exciting line of rompers. She goes home, and when she leaves again, its never for as long as that first time.
She keeps things afloat with pleasantries and professionalism. Sometimes she even likes Tom's work and convinces herself that means she likes Tom, too. Sometimes that's too much of a leap.
Like she has a thousand times before, Beverly runs down a mental list of clothing she’ll need when she hangs up with Mike. She slings the strap of a backpack on one arm and ransacks the the bureau. A few changes of socks and underwear, three shirts, and a reliable, beat-in pair of jeans. She takes the lone pair of sneakers down from the shelves full of apology shoes that Tom buys and she never wears. Besides her wallet and a phone cord, that’s all she needs. She can wash the shirts in a hotel sink if she’s got to, and the jeans will keep. She can wear them over and over until they get so stiff with salt and sweat that they can stand up on their own, run along beside her, and demand to know why she let it get this bad. How could she forget that she has always been able to fight back?
Maybe it’s not the first time she’s walked out- hiding at work when it was a company they ran together always sucked her back into seeing him again and making peace, then coming home- but this time... This time she can remember a different home. Like the bad tension on her sewing machine, the best thing she can do is rethread the whole damn thing. Top to bottom. Change the needle, too.
-
When they come back with dinner for everyone, Ben corrals the boys out of the recovery room to eat while Beverly delivers Eddie’s toiletry bag. She’s sure that the hospital would hook them up with most of its contents in a pinch, but she’s not about to deny someone who very nearly died two days ago the comfort of his own nail clippers.
“Did I miss any new upgrades while we were out?” she asks. She leans against the railing on the gurney and watches him pick through the bag.
The others have been calling him Eddie 2.0, like he’s the Bionic Man since his surgeries. The doctors had had to rebuild the wall of his stomach and part of his colon, throwing out words like ‘graft’ and ‘polymer’ to the wide-eyed Losers. To Beverly it sounded a lot like putting a new lining in a dress, but it was hard for some of the others to get past the tubes that protrude out of his body without making jokes.
“Depends on your taste in beards. Could be an upgrade or a downgrade,” Eddie grumbles. He scrunches his neck uncomfortably to scratch his cheek on his shoulder. “The nurse said she’d help around the stitches but they only having fucking Barbasol here, no wonder hospitals always smell like grandpas...” He finds his own travel sized bottle of shaving cream and relaxes, as far as Beverly can tell. It’s a little hard to get a feel for his mood when a cocktail of painkillers have slowed down his motormouth to the speed limit observed by most average people.
“How you doing, buddy? Cold, hungry, gotta pee? Need somebody to sedate Richie so you can get some sleep?”
Eddie snorts and zips his bag closed, handing it off for Beverly to put on the side table. “Cold, actually.”
Automatically, she circles around to the foot of the bed and begins unfurling the blankets. They’re those loose waffleknit ones with the thick satin edging that must be exclusively produced for hospitals and nursing homes, these days. She can’t remember the last time she saw one in the wild. “We can always ask for more. Or I can hit up Walmart and get you something with a pinstripe to match that johnny.”
Eddie sighs in relief as she pulls the blankets up for him. He hates being babied the same way she hates being expected to dote on people because she's The Girl rather than offering affection on her own terms, but this always seemed to cancel out between them. The vulnerable parts of their personalities were too alike not to appreciate a little solidarity.
“I would give anything for a hoodie right now, but the zippers feel like a fucking sawblade on my drain and I can’t get my arms into a pull over.”
“So you’d like a Snuggie, then,” Beverly smirks. “I’m sorry but I can’t be seen with anyone who would wear such a thing.”
“Oh, haha,” says Eddie. He shimmies into the covers and lets her tuck him in to his chin on one side. “Why didn’t I pack any cardigans... Did anyone pack cardigans? Mike’s a goddamn librarian he must have a few...”
“I’ll take care of it. I've got an idea.” Beverly bends down and kisses his head.
She’s heard of adaptive clothing before, of course. It didn’t come up much in high end fashion, but now and then working in theatre and film you’d run into a character that had to have only one arm, or an actor with some mobility limitations that made it difficult to get dressed. There were suits tailored to lay nicely if the wearer was using a wheelchair, and lines of children’s clothes made without irritating tags and seams, too. She always chucked in some money if she saw a Kickstarter for such things on Facebook.
Her phone says the nearest Joann’s is in the neighboring city, and she can get to it with a good two hours to shop before closing. She can buy one of those hundred dollar junker machines, a serger, and a bolt of sweatshirt jersey and then get to work. The bar at the Townhouse would be a comfortable height for a cutting table if she cleared it off. A sensitive abdominal port was just a mechanical problem like any other Beverly ran into- to be worked out during prototyping.
Who knows? Maybe after she sells her share of the line to Tom she can start a new one. Sometimes you just have to start over.