Mangle

mangle
verb, transitive. To mutiliate, disfigure or damage by cutting, tearing or crushing. Possibly derived from an Anglo-Norman French word meaning To maim.

Lana tapped at the dressmaker’s door breathlessly, barely able to contain her excitement. She had rushed here after work after the woman had called and reported that the skirt was ready for a fitting. As she waited on the stoop, she recalled the day she had first come here, the precious parcel of fabric in her arms. “I bought this while on vacation in Scotland,” she had told the dressmaker. “It’s my family tartan.” She had felt reassured when Mrs. Abernathy lifted the folds of woolen cloth almost reverently, eyes alit with admiration. They had looked at designers’ drawings of skirt styles until she had settled on one. Abernathy had measured her, then she had left.

That had been three weeks ago: a long stretch to cut out and baste a skirt, she thought, but perhaps Abernathy was swamped in work. The office manager who had recommended her had praised her highly.

At last, the elderly woman opened the door and smiled as she invited Lana in. When they reached the studio, Lana recognized her fabric, made up into a garment that was spread on the big cutting table, but she didn’t recognize the garment. It was nothing like the gored, bias-cut skirt she had chosen. It was ... a toga? She wasn’t sure. She moved to the table and stared at it, trying to understand. Abernathy had mangled the beautiful plaid, reducing it to patches of irregular sizes and shapes, then reassembled them into a large, shapeless drape that Lana was certain she would never want to wear in public. Mrs. Abernathy picked up the ... garment ... and held it out to her.

“Go ahead, try it on,” she told Lana with an eager smile.

Lana took it, unsure where the neckline was; not knowing how to react. She looked at the dressmaker uneasily. Did Abernathy actually believe she had made the garment Lana had ordered? Had the woman gone mad?

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.