Buying a dress

Anything that goes along the river is automatically a thing of comfort. The highway has two stoplights in the middle of it, and everyone thinks that they're silly and writes their congress person about them, but I love them. They give me a chance to inspect the state of that lonesome and wide river, the light that hits the base of the bridge, all the colors that the water can turn on Saturday afternoons, the boats that look so silly that I mistake them for toys.

The highway - Route Nine - is a thing of comfort. Nine is a much more slippery and comforting number than the stocky and overwhelming Eighty-Four or the intimidating double digits of Ninety-one and Ninety-five. Nine feels thick with familiarity, while Eighty-Four is only thick with tractor trailor trucks and Ninety-One with bad memories of guard rails. Nine is slim, and I keep expecting the road to just pull up to my house.

While I love Nine South, I avoid Nine North. Nine south spells promises of home, rivers, stoplights, long island sound, the inn where we ate brunch and talked about sailing. North means only the sprawling expanse of concrete and retail, the Mall. Left to my own devices, I avoid the Mall. The Mall makes me thirsty, gives me blisters, and depresses me. I'll go, though, when there's a need: my father's birthday, times when my friends in need of clothes and socializing, a dress to wear underneath my graduation gown.

I vetoed on the spot anything hot pink, dresses that had checkered prints, dresses that were made with fabric that looked like a hologram, formless sacks my mother thought would look fine over my hips. I tried to avoid the unpleasant process of stripping my soft and comforting jeans and trying on gaudy and overpriced sun dresses, but my mother would hear nothing of it. The first three fit on me, and weren't even terribly uncomfortable.

They did, however, show every detail of my stomach. "That won't do at all," my mother gasped at the tight blue dress, as I rejected the third set of formless and shapeless linen dresses she had brought for me. "There isn't anything that wrong with this!" I said. I wasn't thrilled about the blue dress, peppered with the tiny white flowers. "You look like a hulk in it," my mother said. I stripped out of it, hardly able to look at myself in the mirror because I was afraid I would burst into tears.

I caught a glimpse of my hair, though, and then my sad eyes. When I had brushed out my hair in the morning, it had become a mass of flax and silk. Each brush stroke shattered a few sparks, and they cracked and fell to the ground, and my hair felt loose in the middle of the humid day. In the dressing room, pulling off the blue dress and pulling back on my grey t-shirt, my hair was matted. It was a rat's nest. The ringlets that had been underneath it were limp. The flax had gotten lumped together, tangled, and smashed down. No show of sparks, no light and flying hairs. And my eyes were pathetic.

There's a continuum of reactions when I'm upset. I was somewhere between bursting into tears and throwing a temper tantrum. I did neither, thankfully, but made some pithy comments about the reasons that I own five gray shirts and enough blue jeans to last me an eternity. Dragging my mother with me, who was still clawing at the rack of flowery linen dresses, I left the department store.

Finding a dress that fits right is a pain and a half for any woman of any size, I suspect, and these biyearly hunts for a decent dress for me always leave me upset. One piece of clothing to fit over all of me? Must be a joke, I always think. Every girl I know has such a strangely distinct and unique shape that the even numbers can't even begin to touch on. Part of it is a matter of size. The department stores seemed only to stock dresses up to fourteen. I held in my hands a silk and gauze beige dress, a dress that was diaphanous incarnate, and wanted to cry because it was only left in a size four. I ran my finger tips along the edge of the gauze, and sighed, and felt the back of my throat contract with anger.

Probably because the process was so entirely upsetting, I don't think I've ever felt so wonderfully relieved to find a dress that fit me perfectly. A white shift, starched and almost stiff, but perfect for wearing under my gown at graduation. Fit my hips perfectly and was only slightly loose around my chest. Even better was how beautiful it felt to find a store that had nice and classy clothes that fit me. "This will do quite nicely," I thought. "At least, until I get my personal tailor." While I was wandering around that rare store that stocked my size and up, wondering why I'd never set foot inside it before, my mother was muttering to herself "Yes, yes, but there isn't enough linen, for crissakes!"

In the mirrors of the store, I noticed that I looked like myself again. Not the misshapen and hulking thing, with trunk like thighs, matted and tangled hair, and blemishes on my chin. Not perfect and beautiful, with irridescent skin and smooth curves like the plus size models that papered the wall behind mel. Just like me, though, and it was comforting. Smiling a sly smile, with hair that flopped haphazardly but never looked like roadkill, and with eyes that looked something sheepish and something relieved. A little lumpy, a little quirky, a little unkempt around the edges. With the hair that my girlfriends cut and the round face I inherited from my maternal grandmother.

2000-06-18, Buying a dress

before / after

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