Synopsis: Intimate Apparel

by Lynn Nottage

Lower Manhattan, 1905. In her room in the boarding house run by Mrs. Dickson, the African-American seamstress Esther Mills designs and stitches elegant lingerie. She resists Mrs. Dickson’s well-intentioned efforts to make a match for her. At 35, longing for love, she refuses to marry simply for the sake of being married. Unexpectedly, Esther receives a letter from George Armstrong, a man from Barbados working on the Panama Canal. He learned of Esther from a man from her church and, in his loneliness and boredom, has written to her, hoping she will write back.

One of Esther’s clients is the socialite Evangeline Van Buren. Mrs. Van Buren is unable to conceive, and she consoles herself for her husband’s disapproval and neglect with brandy and her unlikely friendship with Esther. Since Esther is illiterate, Mrs. Van Buren reads her George’s letters and writes answers to them, pouring her own yearning as well as Esther’s into the replies.

Esther buys her fabrics from Mr. Marks, an orthodox Jew from Romania. His life is as lonely as Esther’s; his family, including the fiancée he has never met, are still in Romania. In their appreciation of the artistry that distinguishes the finest fabrics, Esther and Mr. Marks have forged a bond that might be called love—although his religion forbids Mr. Marks even to touch a woman not related to him.

Another of Esther’s clients is Mayme, an African-American prostitute with the talent and the desire, but not the opportunity, to be a concert pianist and composer. Esther makes similar camisoles and negligees for her and for Mrs. Van Buren—it titillates Mayme to wear what the fine ladies wear, and it titillates Mrs. Van Buren to wear what the Tenderloin girls wear. To Mayme, Esther reveals her own dreams—the ambition to open a “beauty parlor for colored ladies” (every year for 18 years she has saved a hundred dollars, which she keeps sewed in a crazy quilt on her bed—and the love growing between her and George Armstrong. With Mayme doing the writing, Esther sends a frank, sensual letter to George, and soon, he asks her to marry him.

Loving him “as much as you can love a man you ain’t seen,” Esther consents to the marriage. For Mrs. Dickson, who tried for years to interest Esther in a man, this is not really a happy occasion, since she doesn’t trust the long-distance courtship and regrets losing her favorite boarder.

Esther breaks her news to Mr. Marks by asking him for the silk for her wedding dress. He makes her a gift of the exquisite fabric. George and Esther are married.

Three months pass. Despite his fine suit (a gift of his wife) and his skill with construction machinery, George is unable to find any but the most demeaning work. In his frustration, he neglects Esther and wheedles small sums from her savings. He would like her to dig deeper into the savings to finance his purchase of draft horses that could be hired out to construction jobs, but she refuses.

Now that she realizes there is no love in her marriage, Esther finds her relationship with Mr. Marks increasingly painful. She and Mrs. Van Buren quarrel over the impossibility of a real friendship across the vast social gulf that separates them. And George, with Esther’s money in hand, finds his way into Mayme’s boudoir of business.

Mayme has no idea who this man is, but she is deeply attracted to him. When she tells Esther of this special customer, Esther realizes it is George.

She dresses in the alluring lingerie she makes for other women and attempts to seduce her own husband, but George rejects her. Everything about New York humiliates him, including his inability to get work and his life as, as he sees it, a kept man.

George suggests that if Esther will believe in him enough to give him the money to start his own business with the draft horses, he will be the faithful husband she wants. Overcome by the tenderness of the moment, she hands him her entire savings. His moment of ardor gone, he can’t take his eyes off the money. Esther confesses that she didn’t write her letters and knows now that George didn’t write his either. He admits to paying an old man to compose them. He cries out that just because he didn’t write the words, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel them. But Esther can’t abide his touch, and he runs out to purchase the horses—even though it is night.

Esther forces Mayme to realize that her favorite customer is George. The night before, Mayme saw him gamble away a large sum of money. Esther persuades Mayme to let him go, since the man she thinks she knows is no more real than the man Esther thought she knew.

Esther goes next to visit Mr. Marks and reestablishes her friendship with him. Finally, she returns to Mrs. Dickson’s boarding house, reclaims her old room and, with the lightest touch to her belly, sits down at her old machine to sew.

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