The Dress I Wore and the Seat I Kept
What I did with the legal pad
I did not sleep that Sunday night. I sat in Gordon’s chair in the front room with the lamp off.
I was angry, the way you are angry at weather that has taken a crop, with no one to shout at. And then I thought about her face at the table. She had not looked ashamed of me the way you are ashamed of something dirty. She had looked ashamed the way a child looks holding a note from the teacher, afraid of what it will do to somebody she loves.
Somewhere around two in the morning I got up and turned on the lamp and opened Gordon’s Bible to the place his mother had marked, and I read the verse I have read at every hard hour of my married life. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.
Strength and dignity are her clothing.
It does not say expensive. It does not say polished. I read it four times.
In the morning I called my sister-in-law Lois, who has lived a quarter mile down the road since before I came to this farm, and I told her all of it. Lois is seventy, and she raised four boys, and she has never in her life been surprised by anyone.
“Well,” she said. “That’s a hard thing for a mother to carry.”
“I want to say no. And I want to say yes, so she never has to apologize for me. And I want to say I am somebody already.”
“Donna,” Lois said, “you can say yes to the dress and still say no to the lie. They aren’t the same thing.”
That was the sentence that settled it. I could give my daughter the dress, and the place in the line, and my quiet. Those were hers to ask, and a mother can give her child a great deal. But I could not give her a lie. I would not say I was retired, and I would not say I was nothing, because she would be the one to carry that, not me, for the rest of her life.
I called Ashley that night.
“I’ll wear the dress,” I said. “I’ll stand wherever Camille puts me. I won’t bring up the farm unless somebody asks me straight out.”
I heard her breath let go on the other end of the line.
“Thank you, Mom. Thank you. I knew you would.”
“But if somebody asks me what I do, I will answer them. Kindly. And I’ll tell you right now, honey, I’m not going to say I’m retired. I raised you to tell the truth, and I’m not going to quit in front of company.”
The dress
Camille had found the shop. It was called Margaux’s, in the center of Glen Aldridge, with a single dress in the window on a gold stand and no price tag anywhere, which any farm woman can tell you is the price tag.
The three of us went on a Saturday in April. I put on my good navy slacks and my church blouse and drove up on my own in the truck, because I did not know what else to do except arrive in the thing I owned.
The woman in the shop led me to a room with a three-way mirror and a velvet bench, and she and Camille went through the rack like they were dealing cards. One had a tag I turned over while no one was looking.
“This one,” Camille said, and held up a column of pale beige silk with long sleeves. “It’s so quiet, isn’t it? It disappears into the room. Mothers of the bride shouldn’t compete.”
I stood in the mirror in that dress and I looked at a woman I did not know.
She was not ugly. I want to say that. She was neat and she was fine and the silk fell where it was supposed to. But she looked like the wallpaper at a funeral home. She looked like a woman who had been told to stand still.
“Isn’t it perfect?” said Camille.
Ashley was watching me in the mirror with her hand over her mouth, and her eyes were wet.
“You look so pretty, Mom,” she said.
“It’s a lot of silk,” I said.
Camille took my elbow outside on the sidewalk and spoke low. “One more thing, and please don’t take it wrong. For the hair. I’ve booked you a chair at my woman’s salon the morning of the wedding. Just a little shape. Something to soften.”
But on the drive home I stopped the truck at the gas station outside Kankakee, and I sat there with the engine running, and I thought, They are all so kind to me. They are all so very kind. And not one of them has asked me a single question.