From Half the Kingdom, 2013

Has the Madison Avenue saleslady missed her cue? Her facial expression undergoes an alteration. There was a game with which Joe used to amuse little Bethy. He would arrange his face into the tragic mask and wipe it away with an upward sweep of his open hand, revealing his comic grin. The saleslady’s smirk registers her readiness to be of service to a customer who might turn out to be live one: If the young lady has brunette coloring, these golden notes would be a perfect accent.

                  “She’s reddish blonde, like San Giuliano.”

                  Beautiful, and which this color, believes the saleslady, would particularly complement.

                  “I think you are right,” agrees the customer, “except that tea-colored silk would radically disagree with my daughter’s politics.”

                  The smile goes out and reveals the look, on the Madison Avenue saleslady’s face, of terminal discouragement. She’s no youngster; her salary makes for a sorry living without commissions from the sales to the customers traveling abroad or away in their houses on summer ponds, or near the ocean beaches. Her look of defeat accompanies Jenny on the escalator to the upscale floors. It hangs like an odor about the collections with designer names known to those in the know about the human genius that expresses itself in winged cotton blouses partnered with nine-inch see-through skirts and coats of many colors that it wouldn’t occur to you and me to put next to each other — embroidered cloths / Enwrought with golden and silver light / The blue and the dim in the dark, and the speckled, stippled, freckled, dappled stuffs which — the saleslady was right the first time — Jenny is not going to buy, and Bethy will never wear the tea-colored gown to Cinderella’s ball.