The Dress on the Gift Table
The dress stopped about four inches short of each shoulder.
I was holding it up against myself at the kitchen counter, the way you do, pinching it at the seams, and the tissue paper was still sliding off the box onto the linoleum. Dusty rose. Cap sleeves. A little row of covered buttons down the back that somebody at a factory had sewn on very carefully.
The tag said size 8.
I have not been a size 8 since the tenth grade. I was a 16 that morning, the same as I had been since our daughter was born, and everybody who had ever stood next to me knew it. Especially the woman whose return address was in the corner of that box, in slanted blue cursive so perfect it looked printed.
“Mom, is that one for me?”
Katie was at the table with a bowl of cereal, her feet hooked around the chair legs. She was nine. She was looking at the dress the way a nine-year-old looks at anything pink that comes in the mail.
“No, baby. It’s from Grandma Phyllis. For the party.”
“It’s kind of little.”
“It is kind of little,” I said.
That was when I saw the note.
It was on her good stationery, the cream card stock with her initials pressed into the top so you could feel them with your thumb. She had not tucked it in the tissue. She had pinned it to the collar with a straight pin, right through the fabric, so there would be no chance of my missing it.
I can still say it by heart.
Jill. I ordered the size you ought to be. Six weeks is plenty if you are serious. It is time you lost the weight. I kept the receipt, so there is no sending it back. Phyllis.
I read it three times standing there. The first time for the words. The second time to make sure I had not put a meanness into it that was not there. The third time because Katie had gone quiet behind me, and I needed my face to be right before I turned around.
“What’s it say?”
“It says she hopes I like it.”
“Do you?”
“It’s a pretty color,” I said.
I pinned the note back exactly where she had put it. I do not know why I did that. I could have put it down the disposal with the eggshells. Instead I found the two little holes her pin had made in the collar and I put the pin back through them, and I folded the dress into its tissue, and I set the box on top of the refrigerator where Katie could not reach it.
Then I packed her lunch and drove her to the day camp at the church, and I went to work, and I answered the phone at Dr. Hess’s office for eight hours in my regular voice.
We lived in a split-level on Elm Street, the tan one with the maple out front that dropped its leaves all over the Hendersons’ side every October. Scott grew up six blocks from that house. When we got married he told me, very proud, that he had never lived more than a mile from his mother.
I thought that was sweet at the time. I was twenty-five.
Scott got home at 5:30, same as always, smelling like fiberglass from the trailer plant over in Nappanee. He kissed the top of Katie’s head and opened the refrigerator and stood in the cold of it, looking for nothing.