R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

Months later, Lola was dead. The veterinarian’s name was Dr. Ramos, and his certificate was from a university in Guadalajara, a Mexican city near the town where my father had grown up. Dr. Ramos laid out Lola on a cold aluminum table — whimpering kennels all around us — and waited for my mother and me to say good-bye. Then he held up a large black trash bag and unceremoniously pushed her inside. She was stiff, legs out, like a pig on a spit.

Having only just entered middle school, I had never seen death before, but I didn’t cry. My mother, on the other hand, was choking on her own fluids, a wad of crumpled tissue pressed to her face as tears escaped her chipped red fingernails. Later I learned that she’d suffered a miscarriage before my birth, and in the months afterward my father had given Lola to her as a small comfort while they tried again.

She peered into the black bag and buckled, the fat flapping beneath her arm as she groped blindly for my shoulder. Her watery eyes must have mistaken wetness on my own face, because she pulled me close against her and shakily assumed responsibility for my consolation. “It’s okay, hijo ,” she choked. “Lola was safe and happy for many years. She had food and a place to sleep—” she swallowed a placental wad of phlegm “— una buena vida .” A good life.

And after that I did cry — not for Lola, it was too late for her — but for myself, because somehow from the depths of my mother I had emerged wailing and alive, and now in that black trash bag I saw my own future foretold: I would be trapped in Corpus Christi my whole life, where I would have food and a place to sleep, and eventually die. Una buena vida .

That night I left the library books in my bag and crawled into bed alone while elsewhere in the house the usual sounds were muffled. No Coronas snapping open, the television turned down, then just the mournful howl of the vacuum cleaner eliminating the last of the dog hairs. Alone for the first time without Lola, I twisted into a fetal position under my paper-thin sheets. Eyes squeezed shut, I clasped my hands together and begged with all my might for Jesus to come out of the picture on the wall, lay his body over mine, and hold me.

“Lord, please save me from this place.” I dug my palms against my eyes. “ Dios mío, ayúdame .”

WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE HOFFMAN-LYNCH BUILDING FOR MY interview, I handed the security guard my Texas ID and received in return a printed pass. Four years ago, my name had been Elián San Jamar. Now my ID read ETHAN ST. JAMES, a name born of my own willful determination that, despite the conspiracy of my birthright, I should have a second chance in the world. Through these letters I upheld myself to the solemn promise of a new identity that defied the bleakness of my former existence. I thought briefly of my own ghost as I reached out to claim that pass and my rightful destiny. Like a victorious soldier on his passage home, I clutched it and watched the future soar as the battlefield shrunk far behind. This was the long-awaited homecoming.

“When you get to the twelfth floor, you can wait in the lobby,” the guard instructed me. “Somebody will come get you.”

I pressed my thin frame against the turnstile, half-expecting that it would press back, then, easily— click! — the metal bar rotated and I was on the other side, one step closer. Black marble underfoot, I stood with a row of elevators on either side of me. Digital panels flashed scarlet numbers as beautiful people were transported to and from the twelfth floor, the floor that housed Régine —the only floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building that mattered. I held my breath, trembling hands at my side, trying hopelessly to be discreet as I swiveled around. Peering back toward the lobby, I saw a few women engaged in boring chatter — ordinary-looking, like a bunch of office supplies on a desk. One of them badly needed to re-dye her roots, which looked like the revolving fringe inside a car wash. They had nothing to do with Régine .

An elevator pinged. The chrome gates parted. Raised to an immortal height on Corinthian stilettos, two long all-black pillars towered before me adorned with cell phones and structured handbags, and topped off by white faces like Narcissus flowers.

Now, these —these women had come from Régine .

“—spattered red paint all over her!” exclaimed one, her lips the color of Gorgon’s blood. “Afterward she moaned to the cameras, ‘It’s not even fur — it’s only pony-hair!’” They both laughed as they circled around me, trotting fast. Together, sliding their sunglasses over their eyes, they hit the turnstiles— bam! — and reconvened into a canter, clip-clopping toward the glass revolving door. In a daze, I stepped into the elevator and pushed the button, hardly believing that in a moment I would be rocketed skyward to the heavens from which these beauties had descended.

The only other noteworthy floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building housed Régine ’s teenage sister, who sagely reassured high schoolers that they would fit in by pairing their Converse sneakers with five-hundred-dollar dresses. Every other floor existed merely to make the building taller. There were several men’s fashion magazines — widely known ones, I guess — but their intended readership skewed toward hopelessly unfashionable “guy’s guys,” the adult approximation of the neighborhood boys I had grown up with, who had graduated from bouncing around their own basketballs to watching other people do it on TV, and needed to be taught every month how to tie a Windsor knot.

Having long ago mastered the fundamentals of men’s fashion, I was dressed that day in a wine-red suit — one of my favorites — and was trying to decide whether to undo the last jacket button when a woman joined me in the elevator. She was older, with gray hairs drawn into her businesslike bun and a mouth crowded by severe wrinkles. The twelfth floor button already radiated, but she pressed it once more for several seconds, as if she believed she could force it to move faster. I never understood why anybody did that, as if without the influential push of their own finger the world would get lazy and forget to rotate.

My excitement rose with the elevator as I gazed at the woman’s impeccable outfit. She wore a black dress shirt and matching pencil skirt, with no frills or fun of any kind, yet unlike my clothes — which, despite being tailored to fit, still gave away their outmoded Salvation Army origins — hers gave that special impression of being very expensive, somehow sewn more precisely with a finer thread on a sharper needle, then selected right off the back of a runway model months in anticipation of the general trend. Her three-inch heels were black patent leather, shiny enough to have been unwrapped from their box that same morning.

“Your shoes,” I gestured, unable to help myself. “Divine.”

She didn’t reply. From the mashing of her thumbs on the keyboard of her cell phone, she could have been playing a game with a timer, but more likely she was preoccupied by something a hundred times more thrilling; an e-mail about ostrich-leather handbags or candidates for the cover of the September issue. I figured then she must not have heard me, so I repeated myself, more clearly, “I like your shoes!” the words as bright and crisp as a soap bubble.

The elevator pinged at our destination. She turned her face toward the parting doors and said simply, not to me, but to the air before her, “Christian Dior.”

My little bubble spun around, stunned, and quietly burst as she disappeared through a set of glass double doors. On one side of me now loomed a floor-to-ceiling television — showing runway models walking on a loop — and on the other side, a huge red logo: RÉGINE .