After the Reunion Read Online Free PDF Page A

determined to do it only if it was fun too. She had been earning enough for her needs working as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s, but she had become bored. Walking to and from her job she would look at the little boutiques, particularly the ones on Madison Avenue, and think idly how she would have done that window differently, or carried more interesting merchandise; and eventually the idea took hold that she really wanted to have a boutique of her own.
    There was one she’d particularly had her eye on, in the Seventies, which carried very expensive, very tacky evening dresses, the kind worn by old ladies who also wore henna-colored mink coats. When she saw a sign in the window that it was going out of business she wasn’t a bit surprised, because she figured their clientele had probably all died off. She went immediately to the real estate person and embarked on the first business deal of her life.
    Her father had left her a significant amount of money. She used it as collateral against a loan, named the new boutique after herself, and began demolition and renovation. She wanted it to be comfortable—the sort of place customers would stay in for hours. There were nice dressing rooms with good chairs to sit on, and plenty of hangers, and best of all, room to move around. Everything was done in white and no-color beiges, with slightly tilted mirrors to make you look tall and thin, but not so distorted that people would get home and decide the dress that had looked so chic in the store was really a mistake.
    She remembered when she was a little girl her mother had taken her to stores where models actually came out and modeled clothes for you. At the time that had seemed very glamorous. Now it was an artifact of the past, but she intended to recreate it. And there would be tea served in the afternoons, with little sandwiches and pastries, and in the mornings of course there would be coffee and croissants. Never mind that the maid who brought these refreshments into the dressing rooms was the same kid who unpacked and hung up the stock, or that the model doubled as the salesgirl, or that Annabel hovered around giving all that nice personalized attention to the clients because she couldn’t afford two salesgirls … when her boutique finally opened it was a success.
    None of this would have worked if it hadn’t been for the clothes, or Annabel’s sense of style. The talent to put together a marvelous-looking outfit from a bit of this and a piece of that, which had started her on her career so long ago, was still Annabel’s strong point. She could tie a scarf just so, add a belt, take something away, put an Anne Klein jacket with a Perry Ellis skirt and prove that the colors and patterns blended perfectly. Her stock was not large, but it was eclectic, from Chloe to unknowns from SoHo. She might show up at work in an Adolfo suit with a T-shirt under it. “Why not?” she’d say. “Fashion is to be enjoyed.” And because she did enjoy it, and wore her clothes with such flair, people came out of her boutique having bought much more than they’d intended to but happy about it.
    She had been right about the hard work. Annabel’s was open six days a week, from ten to six, so she had to be there at nine in the morning to open the store and often couldn’t leave until nine at night. At the beginning she did everything herself, from doing orders, reordering, bookkeeping, and even cleaning up. She did the window displays, and changed them every other day. She designed her own logo, the paper, the bags, the boxes; simple raised white on white. She’d discovered that—given a choice—people didn’t particularly like carrying shopping bags with ads on them in the street, but if you gave them a neutral, good-looking shopping bag they’d reuse it over and over until it fell apart. So, in fact, her Plain Wrap was her own ad.
    She was using an accounting firm now, and her two helpers looked as if they were going to stay around for a