Hot Flash Club

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1 FAYE It was while Faye was gathering donations for the community tag sale that she realized, with a shock, that any stranger going through her house would think she was obsessive, anal-retentive, or, at the very least, eccentric. Although, if the stranger were a female around Faye's agefifty-fiveshe would probably understand what could appear to others as an unhealthy mania for clothes. Naturally, Faye's clothing hung in the large walk-in closet of her bedroom. Also, in the guest bedroom closet. And in the closet of her daughter's bedroom, for Laura was twenty-eight, married, and had left only a few of her favorite childhood things at home. Faye's clothes did not hang in the attic, because when she and Jack bought the house thirty years ago, they converted the attic into a studio where Faye painted. But more of Faye's clothes were hung, folded, or bundled in plastic wardrobes in the spacious linen closet at the end of the hall. So much clothing! She felt appalled, and slightly guilty. It wasn't just that Faye, like most women, changed her wardrobe for summer and winter and fall, or that, like many other women, she had casual clothes for daily life and some elegant suits for the various committees she sat on, and a few gorgeous dresses for the events she had attended with Jack, a corporate lawyer and head of his own prestigious Boston firm. It wasn't only that she had Christmas sweaters and tennis skirts and the black velvet evening cloak that had been her mother's, so how could she possibly part with it? Or that she'd kept the expensive, elegant raincoat she'd bought on a trip to London with Jack, where she'd torn the hem, stepping out of a black cab on the way home from the theater. She intended to mend it, but she hadn't yet found time to do so. In the meantime, she'd bought another raincoat or two, to serve until she mended the London one. It wasn't that during this long, gloomy spring, she'd bought, on an impulse, another raincoat, a rain slicker of cheery, cherry red. It was that she had so many clothes for so many seasons and reasons in so many different sizes. The size 12s were in Laura's bedroom. The size 14s were in the guest bedroom. The size 16s were in the linen closet. The size 18s were in her own closet, right next to her husband's clothing. It was his clothing that had gotten her started on this spree in the first place. One long year ago, Jack, her darling Jack, had died of a sudden heart attack, at the age of sixty-four. In the middle of the night, Jack had sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to Faye, "Don't forget" then clutched his chest and fell on the floor. Don't forget what? Faye wondered. It kept her awake at night, it made her walk right past her townhouse, it bit at her thoughts like a tack in her shoe. Don't forget I love you? Don't forget to tell Laura I love her? Don't forget to look in the secret door in the Chippendale cabinet? (She'd looked there and found nothing.) "He was sleeping," her son-in-law Lars assured her. "He might have been dreaming. He might have been thinking something nonsensical, the ways dreams can be, like don't forget to feed the giraffe." Now, a year after his death, her friends, and Laura, too, insisted that it really was time to part with his things. Laura and Lars had taken what they wanted. The rest, they reminded her, should not languish in her house when they could be useful to so many others. So Faye was diligently preparing to donate his clothes to