The Reason My Mother Wore That Dress

The night of the dinner, I got to the restaurant early with Aaron. Corinne was already there, at the head of a long table, in charcoal silk and pearls, and she rose to greet me with a cool cheek and a cooler smile. Aaron’s aunt was there, and an uncle, and two of Corinne’s friends from the club whose presence at a family engagement dinner I never did understand except as an audience.

My mother came in ten minutes later, and my heart dropped through the floor.

She was wearing an old floral dress. Faded blue with small washed-out flowers on it, the hem a style from decades ago, the fabric soft and thin the way fabric gets after a hundred washings. I had not seen that dress in years. I had assumed she had thrown it out. It looked wrong in that room the way a wildflower looks wrong in a crystal vase, and I felt every eye at the table move to her and then, worse, move to me.

Corinne looked my mother slowly up and down. Then she gave the smile she gave, the one with no warmth in it at all, and she said, “Oh. How comfortable.”

Two words. That was all. But I have thought about those two words more than I have thought about almost anything anyone has ever said to me, because of everything that came after.

I wanted to disappear. I hate that about myself now, but it is true. I sat down and I wanted the floor to open. My mother took her seat with perfect composure, thanked the server, unfolded her napkin, and behaved, as she had promised, like a woman who knew exactly how to conduct herself at dinner. Which she did. She was more graceful than any of us. But all I could see was the dress.

Corinne, having found her target, went to work on it the way that kind of woman does, with small cuts, each one deniable on its own.

She mentioned, to the table, how much the wine cost, twice. She talked at length about the club, about the renovation of the club, about who had said what at the club, in a way designed to make it clear that my mother had never seen the inside of a place like it. When the server described the specials, Corinne turned to my mother and said, with exaggerated slowness, “The sea bass, Sandra, is the fish. In case that wasn’t clear.” She asked, in front of everyone, whether my mother would prefer they order her something “simpler.” She complimented my mother’s dress in a voice that made the whole table understand it was not a compliment, saying it must be nice to be at an age where a woman could stop caring what people thought.