Contrivances, livre ebook

For Derek PATRICIA Sholem Krishtalka 2012 Patricia PATRICIA WAS PUTTING ON A DRESS , but she was not going out dancing. She was staying in; she was playing hostess. Patricia liked putting on dresses for occasions that did not normally require them. Tonight, it was required, yet held for her, because of her proclivity, a different meaning than she assumed it did for others. The dress was a costume. It was this way, to be sure, for all women, but, still, it was different for her: it was, she imagined—she hoped—an abutment for wit. Patricia’s dresses held discourses. They were old dresses, some from fifty years ago—her grandmother’s ones, for instance, that had, in their day, been shown at, well, dances. Dances and many proper social outings: they had certainly been tools of status. But when Patricia wore them she was not in them for that. The one she wore tonight was of thick, cobalt-colored silk and announced, with all its might, that it had been a graduation dress. It, in Patricia’s opinion, was at once the most comfortable thing in the world and the most awful of traps. And how could it not be both, given what it had been intended, always, to do: to decorate, to flatter, to give the illusion of mobility? Yet Patricia allowed herself to feel free, to enjoy the room the dress provided her legs. She was not about to censor her movements to conform to its shape.