:: Rex and the City

By Lee Harrington

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The Decision

In New York City, on a daily basis, millions of women are faced with an existential conflict: what to wear. And on this particular day, on the last day of life as I knew it, meaning my last day of life without a dog, I too faced this conflict. It was the first Saturday of June 1997, and Ted and I had planned to take a day trip out to “the country” (which is what New York City people call the far reaches of Long Island). All week I had been planning to wear a pink linen dress from Paris, with a matching pink hat. To me, it was an outfit that suggested innocence and femininity, a certain je ne sais quoi. But when I pulled said dress out of the closet, I discovered that there was a big dark sticky stain on its backside. Gum or something. From the subway system, no doubt. One of the great risks you take, in New York City, is sitting down.

“Oh, no,” I said to Ted. “Look!” I held up the dress to show him.

“Well, find something else to wear,” Ted said. Ted was the live-in boyfriend: handsome, talented, responsible, and too smart for his own (or anyone else’s) good.

“How many weeks have I been walking around with gum on my ass? The last time I wore this dress was to my interview at that literary magazine.”

“I’m sure nobody noticed,” Ted said. “Just find something else to wear. And hurry. We’re supposed to be at Chip’s by noon.”

Chip was one of Ted’s best friends from college, which was a place they called “New Haven.” Chip had been promising for months to take us to the Lloyd Neck Country Club—one of the most exclusive country clubs in the entire Tri-State area, and perhaps the world. And today, finally, we were going! All week long I had looked forward to a day of grand food and fine wine, served to us on silver dishes by waiters with white gloves, followed by some late-afternoon sunbathing by the Italian-tiled pool, where more white-gloved waiters would bring us chilled mango daiquiris, and then perhaps a shirtless George Clooney (who was rumored to belong to Lloyd Neck) would stroll past our cabana and I could say to people that I had seen his naked chest.

But what to wear? I had no Plan B in the wardrobe department. And to top it all I was feeling fat. I had gained seven pounds since Ted moved in seven months ago, and there seemed no end in sight. To either predicament. I liked to blame the weight gain on love, however (rather than on the fact that Ted and I drank sangria practically every night). There is something about being in love—the cushion of it, the safety—that simply adds weight to my body, as if the very gravity of the emotion has a substance that grounds you to this earth.

Despite all that, I still wasn’t willing to accept that the weight gain was permanent. Therefore I refused to buy anything in a size ten.

But all the dresses that hung in my closet were size eight or smaller. And Ted was breathing down my neck. So I went with the old standby: the little black dress. (An LBD never fails to de-emphasize the bulge and emphasize the legs, and what woman in New York doesn’t have great legs?) My LBD had a square-cut neck and scooped sleeves and fell just above the knee. I paired it with a Wonderbra and a pair of hip Italian platform sandals and voilà! I was ready.

“Okay,” I said to Ted. “I just have to brush my teeth and then we can go.”

Ted came out of the bedroom and shook his head when he saw me. “You can’t wear that.”

We lived together for the same reason most young uncertain-about-each-other couples cohabited in New York: because separately we couldn’t afford to rent a decent apartment. Marriage, I suppose, was a p-p-possibility, if only another M-word could enter the equation on my behalf: maturity.

“Why not?” I said.

“You can’t wear black to Lloyd Neck.” Ted was wearing a pair of khakis, loafers, and a crisp yellow Oxford shirt, buttoned one button too many at his neck.

I lifted my chin. “I can.”

“No, I’m telling you, you can’t. Why don’t you just put on a polo shirt and those white Bermuda shorts we got for you at Brooks Brothers last week?”

“I don’t want to look dowdy,” I said. I was twenty-nine years old and already terrified of such things.

“Who’s going to care?”

“I’ll care,” I said. “Besides, this dress is fine. It’s cute.” And then I set about the task of finding the right handbag to go with my black dress. Deep down, of course, I knew that Ted, having been groomed at some of the nation’s finest country clubs himself, was probably right about my outfit. But something in me that day didn’t want him to know I knew he was right. It was more important to look thin.

Ted stood right behind me as I opened my wardrobe. “What do you mean you have nothing to wear? You have a whole closet full of clothes.”

“This dress is the only thing that fits!” I said. “This is what I’m wearing. This is what I want to wear!” My voice rose as I spoke, and cracked, and Ted must have sensed that I was on the edge of something, something they used to call female hysteria, and because of that—and because, perhaps, my dress displayed ample cleavage—he let me have my way.

“Well, let’s hurry then,” Ted said. “If we get to Chip’s by noon, he and I might be able to get some golf in before lunch.” I smiled in triumph. Those Bermuda shorts, for the record, were a size ten.

©2006 Lee Harrington

Lee Harrington, columnist for The Bark, writes in prose that is witty and poignant. Ultimately a love story between humans and animals alike, Rex and the City is a hilarious romp of a memoir.

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