The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule

People think letting a dress out means you pick a seam and there is more dress hiding inside. I had left myself five eighths of an inch, because I was twenty-two and thought I would be that size for good.

And old satin keeps its needle holes for life. Pick that seam open and you have a dotted line running down your ribs for the whole church to read.

So you let it out the honest way. You add to it.

I laid the dress face down and looked at the train. Chapel length, about four feet of it trailing off the back, good satin that had never touched a floor but one time. That was my fabric. Same bolt, same age, same yellowing.

I cut the train off first. It did not hurt the way I thought it would.

From the train I cut two long panels, shaped like a willow leaf, wide at the middle and coming to a point at each end. I opened the side seams of the dress from the underarm to the hip and set one panel into each side. Two inches a side at the widest. Four inches around.

I did it at night. The days belonged to the forty-one alterations on my book for June.

The sleeves came off the second night. I am sorry to say I did not save them. I cut new ones from the lace overlay on the train, plain, to the elbow, the kind of sleeve a woman of fifty-four is glad to have.

The bow went in a drawer. I may bury somebody in it.

On the third night I pinned up the skirt.

Tea length. That means it stops at the middle of the calf, about halfway between your knee and your ankle. You can walk in it. You can dance in it. Nobody steps on you.

Deb marked it for me with the chalk, crawling around the kitchen chair I stood on.

I took it off and laid it on the table and added two inches below the chalk for the hem. Then I picked up my seam ripper to take out the old hem, because you never cut through a hem you have not opened. You do not know what is in there. Weights, sometimes. Horsehair braid. Once, a ten dollar bill.

I slid the ripper under the first stitch at the side seam and started around.

My own stitches. I knew them. Small and a little too tight, the way I sewed before I learned to trust the thread.

I was most of the way across the back when the ripper caught on something that was not hem stitching.

I folded the satin back.

Inside the hem, on the part that turns under where nobody would ever see it, there was blue. Embroidery floss, cornflower blue, in a chain stitch about as tall as my thumbnail.

R.D.W.

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I sat down. There was not a chair behind me. I sat down on the floor.

“Carol Jean?” Deb said. “What? Is it moths?”

I could not answer her.

I had forgotten. That is the part I still cannot get over. I had not thought about it in twenty years, and then I turned back a hem and there he was.

It was the Thursday before the wedding. I was at my mother’s table finishing that hem by hand, and Roy came by after work, still in his county highway shirt with tar on the cuffs. He was not supposed to see the dress. My mother threw a dish towel at him.

He stood in the doorway with his hand over his eyes and said, “I’m not looking. I just want to ask her something.”