The Dress on the Gift Table
The fifth one was navy. A wrap dress, three-quarter sleeves, with a skirt that moved when I turned. I came out in my sock feet and Brenda looked up from her phone and did not say anything for a second.
“Well, there she is,” she said.
I turned to the three-way mirror.
I had not really looked at myself in a long time. I looked at pieces. I checked whether a blouse was pulling. I looked the way you look at a thing you have been told is a problem.
That afternoon I looked at all of me at once. A woman of thirty-six with her hair down and good shoulders and a daughter’s worth of softness around the middle, in a dress that fit her like it was glad to.
I looked good. I knew it in the mirror.
“How much?” Brenda asked.
I checked the tag. “Sixty-four dollars.”
“Buy it before I buy it for you.”
The girl at the register was folding it into a bag when Brenda leaned on the counter and said, low, “So. The other one.”
“It’s a gift,” I said. “From Phyllis to me. She was very clear she wanted it at the party.”
“Uh huh.”
“So it should be with the gifts.”
Brenda looked at me for a long moment. Then she started to smile, slow.
“You’re not going to say one word, are you?”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “She already wrote it.”
The party was the second Saturday in October, at the VFW hall out on the state road, where Don had been a member since before Scott was born.
Dark paneling. A drop ceiling with a water stain shaped like Michigan. The flags in their stands up by the little stage, and under everything the smell of forty years of Friday fish fries that no amount of Pine-Sol will ever get out.
I got there at five, an hour before anybody. Lisa had done the centerpieces the night before, red carnations in mason jars. The sheet cake from Martin’s was already on its table with Don and Phyllis, 40 Years piped across it in red. A hundred and twenty folding chairs. I had helped Scott and his dad set up every one of them on Thursday.
The gift table was just inside the door, on the left, where you could not come into the hall without walking past it. Phyllis had picked the spot herself.
I spread the ruby cloth. I set out the card box, which Lisa had covered in white paper and silver bells. I put my notebook and my pen at the end.
Then I went out to the car and got the wreath stand from my front hall.
It is a plain black iron thing, about three feet tall, with a hook at the top. I hang a grapevine wreath on it at Christmas. I set it in the middle of the table, toward the back, and I took the dress out of its box. I had put it on a padded hanger from my own closet.
I hung it on the hook.
I smoothed the skirt down. I turned the collar so the card faced out, square to the room, at just about the height of a person’s eyes when they bend to set down a present. The straight pin caught the light a little.
That was all. I did not make a sign. I did not add an arrow or a word of my own. I stepped back to the door and looked at it the way a guest would.