The Dress From the Cedar Chest
It did not look like my wedding gown anymore. It looked like a girl’s dress. Simple. A sweetheart neckline with two wide straps. A fitted bodice and a skirt that flared out just a little from the hip and stopped at the knee. It was the color of fresh cream in a glass bottle.
We had saved twenty-two of the seed pearls and sewn them along the neckline, just a small curve of them, like a smile.
“Go get your daughter,” Mom said.
Makayla came out of her room in a T-shirt and her pajama pants. She stood in the kitchen and looked at the dress on the pantry door, and she put both hands over her mouth.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, through her hands. “Mom.”
She went in the bathroom to put it on. We heard her fighting the zipper, which was new, which we had put in that afternoon. Mom called through the door, “Don’t you yank it. I’ll do it.”
Then Makayla came out.
My daughter walked into our cold kitchen in her bare feet, in the dress I got married in, with her hair still damp from the shower and her arms a little out from her sides like she was afraid to touch it. And I could not breathe.
“Stand right there,” Mom said. “Arms out. I need the hem.”
Makayla stood in the middle of the kitchen and held her arms out. Mom got down on her knees on the linoleum, which at sixty-six is not nothing, with her pincushion on her wrist.
I sat back down at the machine with pins in my mouth. There was a long strip of satin left from the train, and I was turning it into a sash she could tie at her waist if the wind came up on the hay rack.
Cory had come home early from the elevator that night, at eleven. He stood in the doorway in his jacket, and he did not say a word. He just put his hand on the door frame like he needed to hold onto something.
Mom pinned the hem. She was slow about it. Slower than I had ever seen her pin anything, and my mother can pin a hem on a moving toddler.
Grandma’s veil was folded on the chair behind her. Mom had taken it out of the cedar chest that afternoon to show Makayla, she said. Once I saw her reach back and put her hand on it, and then put something in her lap. Her back was to me.
I didn’t ask. I figured she would tell me if she wanted to tell me.
“Turn,” Mom said, and Makayla turned slowly in the middle of the floor, and the satin caught the kitchen light and threw it all over the walls.
“Now get down,” Mom said, “and take it off very carefully, and I’ll have this hemmed by morning. Jessica, go to bed. You look like the wrath of God.”
Friday the school let out at one. The parade lined up at one thirty in the parking lot of the Lutheran church, which is at the top of Main Street, so the floats can roll downhill past the bank and the Legion and the Casey’s to the football field.
Makayla changed in the church basement bathroom, where I had changed for my own wedding eighteen years before. I helped her with the zipper. I fixed one strap. She put on the little pearl earrings that were her great-grandmother’s and a pair of white canvas shoes, because Mom said nobody climbs a hay rack in heels.
“Do I look stupid?” she said, looking in the bathroom mirror. “Be honest. Everybody’s going to be in blue.”