Excerpt: ‘Dress, Memory’, By Lorelei Vashti

This is an edited extract from Lorelei Vashti’s memoir Dress, Memory, which is out now through Allen & Unwin. 

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There was constant chattering, conversing, narrating in my head. I felt as if I was a character in a movie, one I knew the arc of well. You come to New York to make it and not everyone does, but for some reason you’re one of the ones who will. I stood outside the apartment where Dorothy Parker had lived, went to the EastVillage where Madonna had grown up, to St Patrick’s Cathedral where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were married. All the places people had lived and been and stepped made my own story feel bigger because it seemed somehow connected to all these other great ones.

The American publishing scene was so different from the Australian one. New York editors had starry careers; to me, they seemed like rockstars. One morning I had a meeting with a publisher and that same night I saw him being hilarious and witty on a TV talk show. Their work might have been invisible, like all editors’ work was, but they weren’t. They were celebrities and personalities in their own right, and I wanted to be like them.

At last I got a callback at a major publishing house. A smiley, smartly dressed editor walked me around the floor, introducing me to my soon-to-be-colleagues in the children’s book department. Through the office windows I caught a glimpse of New York outside—the buildings were swaying and I felt giddy, my grin stretching so wide it was starting to hurt. I was taken to the Human Resources department where the HR director placed form after form in front of me, explaining my insurance benefits, leave policies and employee entitlements.

‘And every year you and your family will get free passes to the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink!’ she said chirpily.

This is it, I thought, my heart tightening in hope and disbelief. It’s actually happening.

The smiley editor saw me out. ‘Now, just to let you know, I still need to go through the paperwork with my bosses,’ she said. ‘But as far as I’m concerned you’ve got the job.’

I went home and waited to hear back from her. After a week of silence, I finally rang her. Someone in HR eventually picked up my call and explained they were sorry but they just couldn’t hire an Australian: it was too complicated, the paperwork too dense. I was shattered.

There’ll be more, I reassured myself. I’m in New York. There’s got to be more. Jobs, men, everything. But I was discovering that there were two sorts of days in New York. The days when everything seemed possible, where people would stop on the street and tell me that I had a lovely smile, or I’d be given free tickets to a show, or someone would invite me to their place for dinner. The other sort of day was when I got shoved on the street, or an unexpected amenities bill appeared and threw my entire budget into disarray, when I didn’t have enough money even for a bagel and it seemed such a struggle just to climb up the stairs from the subway platform to the street.

I was broke. I started working ten-hour shifts at a small but popular restaurant with a celebrity clientele, and lived off the tips. The city instantly turned around for me. I was once again the Australian Girl Who Moved to New York. I skipped around the restaurant happily, my shiny red ponytail swishing as I bussed food out to customers. I worked six days a week and continued going for publishing interviews on my day off. It was hard work, but it made life easy again.

The customers at the restaurant where I worked were a combination of celebrities and tourists who hoped to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. There was a door list and a door bitch to enforce it, and regulars who always ordered the same thing.

Movie stars and models, screenwriters and photographers had their meetings there, scripts were pored over and deals were done. I was starting to think that my big break could happen here, in this restaurant, not at an interview in an office. Once again, it seemed like anything could happen.

I had to train myself not to gush when sending orders to the kitchen: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s smoked chicken sandwich, Terry Richardson’s salmon pot pie. It was tempting to make snap judgements about well-known celebrities according to how they treated me as a waitress. I felt almost disappointed to discover that most famous people are generally just polite or taciturn, except for Josh Hartnett who is polite and taciturn and a bad tipper.

It became usual to hand Heath Ledger his coffee, who was well-mannered and quiet and always ordered it to go.

On a quiet weekday afternoon, while people ate their late lunches and early dinners, I served a girl sitting by the window. She had flowers pinned in her hair with two braids running around her head like a halo, the same way I often did mine.

‘She’s Australian too, she’s going for a job here,’ the manager told me. I decided to take it upon myself to give her some tips for getting the job, and went over and started talking to her.

She got the job, but she never ended up working a day in the restaurant because the very next week a huge story broke across the city. A young guy, a graphic designer, had seen a girl on the subway and fallen in love with her. He made a website called ‘NYC Girl of My Dreams’ in a bid to find her and posted a drawing he’d done of her, complete with her distinctive braids and flowers. The media loved it. Within 48 hours of the website going up she’d been found. I watched her on Good Morning America and everyone at the restaurant was talking about it the next day. I seethed at the unfairness of it. I was meant to be the Australian Girl Who Moved to New York!

That night I could barely drag my body up the stairs to my room. I was exhausted. I opened up my computer to check my email, and there was one from an old friend, sitting there like buried treasure amid all the unreplied emails from my family and friends. She had organised an interview for me with a writer. He needed a research and administration assistant.

This was it: my final chance to stay in New York.

The dress was blue and it had a stunning feature at the collar—a big bow of transparent lace that made me think of a butterfly. The fabric of the skirt overlapped to hide peekaboo embroidered white flowers that were revealed when you walked. I felt botanical in it. I’d bought it at a second-hand store in Soho a couple of months earlier, unable to resist it after I’d taken it off the rack and held it in my arms. I’m always astonished at how dresses can survive so many years but they do; while the bodies inside them age, they stay young and shapely and full of hope. The dress made me think of wise-cracking, forties secretaries, of the smart glamour of Norma Shearer and the other actresses in The Women, my favourite film. In it I felt neat, smart and capable. The night before the interview I hung it up beside my work uniform for the next day and crashed into bed.

All day I didn’t have to put on an act of smiling. My tips at the end added up to more than I had ever earnt before. In the cramped change room I wriggled out of my uniform, going over in my mind what to say at the interview. I carefully drew the dress over my head and held up my arms to poke them through the sleeves. I pushed my head through the neck and carefully tugged at the fabric to get it down over my bust. The skirt fluttered to sit just above my knees. I turned to face the mirror.

It felt wonderful. I pinched together the two edges of the zip that ran down the side of the dress and cautiously tugged on it. Nothing. Changing positions and using the other hand, I pulled the dress in tighter with my free hand and held my breath, but the zipper wouldn’t budge. If I tugged any harder, it would snap. Defeated, I flopped down on the bench seat.

The dress, originally made to fit an undernourished war bride, had fit me in the change room of the shop months earlier, but it didn’t anymore. I tried to compose myself, dug out the jeans and jacket I had worn to work that morning and pinned my hair up into plaits on top of my head. I put on lipstick and plodded to the WestVillage café where I’d arranged to meet the writer, and waited. Until now I’d always felt the possibility of being the next big thing, and now, the dream, the cliché of making it in New York, finally felt very close to being over. I ordered a tea and sat at the window.

If we click, we do, I reasoned, and if we don’t, we don’t.

Then I saw him, Malcolm Gladwell, recognisable from his profiles in The New Yorker and the back covers of his books The Tipping Point and Blink, his navy windcheater zipped up against the cold. Gladwell had done lots of research on first impressions. If anyone could tell how desperate I was, he could. Knowing that made me more nervous. I started to fidget. I flashed him an enormous smile when he walked in so he would know it was me. He shook my hand and sat down next to me. I sipped at my tea; he didn’t order anything. He explained he was looking for an assistant to help him with research, to keep his appointment book, that sort of thing.

I nodded eagerly, saying ‘Absolutely!’ to everything.

He asked me what my favourite book was; I said Franny and Zooey. He nodded, polite and taciturn like every wellknown person I’d come across here. There was a silence. I worried that it was the wrong book, that I was the wrong girl.

Feeling my plaits pinned tightly to my scalp and pulling my hair back painfully, I felt like everything about me was wrong. I started reciting the same story I was always telling strangers in New York. I felt the words lunge out of me like some unstoppable purge: ‘You see, Malcolm, there’s the E-3 visa and no one knows about it so it’s been really hard to get a job.’ I rambled on and he sat kindly listening until I was finished. He thanked me for my time and said he’d call me. I stayed back to pay, to let him escape, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed in case we had to walk in the same direction. I knew he wouldn’t call.

The next day I went to work at the restaurant for the last time. I walked past an apartment where a crowd bubonic with cameras had gathered to watch them bring out the dead. The collective contagious grief at the sight of a body under a white sheet, the rolling of wheels. I asked someone who it was and they murmured the name of my most polite customer, Heath Ledger. I felt infected by the same weirdly personal–impersonal sadness that now seemed to plague the entire neighbourhood. New York had turned again. It was time to go.

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Dress Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses is out now through Allen & Unwin.

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Lorelei Vashti is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. She is a contributor to the popular Women of Letters series, blogs at ‘Dress, Memory‘, instagrams from @loreleivashti, and tweets from @LoreleiVashti