In principle, the door chimes when someone walks in so that Mom can come forward and greet them. In reality, the sound is weak, and half of the time Mom doesn’t hear it when she’s absorbed in her work that demands a lot of concentration.
As we get closer, I notice Max grimace at the unpleasant smell of Mom’s glue. That brand is the bestcompromise we’ve found between quality, olfactory comfort, and price. We can’t afford the brands that score high on all three accounts.
She’s toiling on a painted nineteenth-century silk fan. She’s been fixing a series of these with tulle and glue since the beginning of the month.
Right now, she’s applying a layer of glue to one side of the fan. Next, she will flip the fan over and brush the glue through the tulle onto the silk. With her hands moving with speed and precision, she’ll repeat the meticulous gestures—opening, brushing, letting it almost dry, folding, reopening, flipping—until the entirety of the silk is lined with tulle. When she’s done, the fan will be usable, and the defects won’t show unless one inspects it with a magnifying glass.
I approach her cramped workstation. “Mom?”
“Lucy?” She looks up at me, delighted then worried. “Everything OK?”
“All is good, Mom!”
Carefully she sets the fan down and we hug.
Half turning, I point behind me. “This is Max, an antiques dealer from Paris… and a friend.”
She does a double take. I would too, if I were her. She’s never heard of this “friend” before, and she knows that my friendships take months or years to form. Never days.
I hate lying to Mom. Still, there’s no way I’m introducing Max as my boss. The day after Jerome dumped and fired me, I put on a show in Mom’s kitchen, swearing to the universe with Mom as my witness that I will never again let a boss of mine get into my panties. Or into my heart. Or anywhere near either of those locations.
Max bows lightly, European gallantry personified. “Bonjour, Madame!”
“Renée, please,” Mom says, studying his face with curiosity. “Lovely to meet you.” She must be dying to askwhat our visit is about, but she’s too polite to pose direct questions.
He points at her unfinished work. “It’s a beautiful fan you have there.”
She waves dismissively. “It’s a cheapish bone fan made from horn. When it dries you can read the political slogans printed on the silk.”
“Slogans, huh? Well, I guess no object is too frivolous to serve as a propaganda prop or be exempt from doing its civic duty,” he says, chuckling.
She smiles. “If you want to see a really beautiful fan, I can show you the one I restored last week?—”
A well-dressed woman comes in, and Mom scampers toward her. The woman says she’d like to purchase an art nouveau fan in good condition.
While Mom locates the boxes and shows her the goods, Max looks around. “It’s cozy in here.”
“If you want to say ‘small and stuffed to the gills,’ go ahead and say it.”
He refuses to take my bait, pointing instead to the glass display on his right. “Are those for sale?”
“All the fans here are for sale,” I say. “The problem is, there aren’t enough people willing to buy them.”
“Why not?”
“Can you name somebody in your social circle who uses a fan?”
He hesitates for a split second. “Not in every circumstance.”
“At the opera, maybe? But how many people frequent the opera?” I sweep my hand around. “This used to be a flourishing business. It was still viable in the sixties when Gran took over. But these days, our client base is limited to collectors, drag queens, theater costume directors and theoccasional woman in her early fifties suffering from hot flashes.”
“Were hot flashes more common in the past?”
“No, but there were no electric fans, coolers, or AC. Besides, women used fans to signal wealth and give themselves an air of refinement.”
He offers me a bemused smile. “Now that you mention it, virtue signaling has replaced wealth signaling as a form of self-promotion.”
“You may be on to something there, Sherlock,” I say with a wink.
