The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule
I did not put the dress in first. No seamstress would. I had plenty of scraps from the train, so I cut six strips of satin and six of lace and I ran tests for two nights, like a girl in a chemistry class. I hung them on the porch rail to dry, because wet satin lies to you. It always dries lighter.
The lace was the surprise. It was nylon, and nylon drinks dye like a field drinks rain. The lace strip came out two shades deeper than the satin strip beside it.
I stood on my porch at six in the morning in my robe, looking at those strips in real daylight, and I thought that was the prettiest thing I had seen in a long time. Pale blue satin, like a bird’s egg, with the lace over the bodice a little deeper, like a shadow on it.
You could not have bought that. Not for $640. Not for $890.
The night I dyed the dress itself, Deb came and we did it together. I wet it down first in the bathtub, because a dry dress takes dye in blotches. Then into the kettle, on the big burner, with the kitchen windows open and the thermometer I use for jelly clipped to the side.
“Stir,” I told her. “Don’t stop. If you stop it’ll settle in the folds.”
“For how long?”
“Half an hour.”
“Carol Jean, I’m sixty years old.”
“Then we’ll trade off.”
We traded off, five minutes each, with a long wooden spoon. Deb sang most of a hymnal.
I rinsed it in the tub until the water ran clear, eleven rinses, and hung it in the bathroom doorway with a box fan on it.
In the morning it was the color of the strip on the porch rail.
The old thread had not taken the dye, which I had expected. Seams sewn in 1994 thread stayed white against the blue, like chalk lines. So I went over every seam that showed with new thread, matched in daylight. That was three more nights.
The seed pearls stayed white. I left them alone. They looked like they were meant to.
The last thing I did was the hem.
I turned it up by hand, the slow way, a blind stitch you cannot see from the right side. And at the center back, on the inside, where the hem turns under and nobody would ever see, I took that strip of old white satin out of the drawer and I stitched it in.
White on the blue. His initials in the middle of it.
It took me twenty minutes. I thought about him standing in my mother’s doorway with his hand over his eyes.
“There,” I said. “You’re in it.”
I should tell you about Suzanne.
Suzanne is Kyle’s mother. Her husband Dennis has the insurance agency on the square in the county seat, the one with his name on the window, and they live in a brick house out by the golf course. They are comfortable the way a few families in every county are comfortable.
At the bridal shower, she said, in front of twenty women, “We have the photographer coming up from Louisville, so we’ll all want to coordinate. Neutrals. Nothing that jumps.” And she looked around the room in a way that landed on me for about one second longer than on anybody else.
I saw Brittany see it.
That, I believe, is where the list came from.