The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule
Brittany grew up looking at that picture. When she was little she used to stand on the piano bench and put her finger on the glass and say, “That’s you when you were a princess.”
I stood there in the dark and I thought: I can’t buy a $640 dress. I am not going to ask my daughter for the money a month before her own wedding. And I am not going to be the one thing in her pictures she has to explain.
Then I thought about the cedar chest.
My sister Deb came over the next evening because I called her and said, “I need you to hold something and not tell me I’m crazy until I’m done.”
“I can do the first one,” Deb said.
Deb is three years older than me and drove a school bus for twenty-six years. She has never once kept an opinion to herself.
The chest was at the foot of my bed. Roy’s mother gave it to us. I had not opened it since the week after his funeral, six years ago that March, when I put his good flannel shirts in there because I could not give them away and could not look at them either.
The shirts were on top. I lifted them out and set them on the bed and did not let myself smell them.
Under the shirts, Brittany’s christening gown. Under that, a blue tissue bundle the size of a bed pillow.
“Carol Jean,” Deb said. “You are not.”
“Hold the end.”
We carried it to the front room and unrolled it across my cutting table, and there it was. Thirty-two years in tissue and cedar. It had yellowed a little along the folds, the way old white satin does, a color like the inside of a seashell.
Deb laughed out loud at the sleeves. I did too. You forget how big we wore them.
Later we dragged the chest itself up to my sewing corner, so I would have the tissue close to hand. It sat open behind my chair the whole month, under the little framed snapshot from our reception that hangs on that wall.
“She sent you a list,” Deb said. “This is not on the list. So why are you doing it?”
I had been asking myself that all day, over other people’s hems.
“Because I can’t buy what she wants,” I said. “And I’m not going to tell her that. She’d take it out of the honeymoon money, or she’d ask Kyle, and then it would be Kyle’s family buying her mother a dress to stand next to them in. I’d rather show up in a feed sack.”
“That’s pride.”
“Some of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
I put my hand flat on the bodice. I had sewn four hundred seed pearls onto that lace by hand, watching television with my mother, and every one of them was still there.
“The rest is that I know how,” I said. “I’ve made half the women in this county look right for their children’s weddings. I can do it once for my own.”
Deb looked at me for a while.
“Well,” she said. “It won’t zip.”
“No, it will not.”
It did not zip by four inches.
I was a size eight in 1994. I am a twelve now, and I am not sorry about it. Thirty-two years, one baby, and a husband who believed that a day without pie was a day somebody had wasted.