Surely my mother did not come here, I thought, for her dry cleaning/alteration needs. Surely there was somewhere nicer she could have gone. I looked at the dry cleaning ticket again and sure enough, this was the address, and when I handed the woman behind the counter the stub, she didn’t blink, just turned around and disappeared into the back of the store.
That was at least an hour ago now. Since then, I’ve taken a hungover tour of the mini-mall. Smoked five and a half cigarettes in my mother’s Taurus with the window rolled down slightly, staring at the barred storefront through her streaked windshield, the scratched-off letters in the shirts/laundry/alterations sign, trying to think about nothing. Not the funeral director’s message on my voice mail, his tone striving for grandfatherly. Telling me it’s ready for me to pick up anytime. It meaning my mother.
Then I go back inside the shop, but she’s still nowhere to be seen.
I stand at the counter, tapping my foot, my eyes fixed on a dusty bell beside the ancient cash register. An almost irresistible urge to ring that bell creeps into my fingers. “Hello?” I call out.
My cell phone starts ringing. Maybe my husband wondering where I am, or else the funeral director again. Yesterday, I sat across from this man at a highly polished table, staring at the gold rings on each of his swollen pinkies as he explained the cremation procedure, his voice that time attempting to emulate an ocean wave, the serenity that is eternal slumber. I focused my eyes on his rings so I wouldn’t be blown apart by his words. I even felt myself nodding. Like yes, yes, I was interested, scientifically, in the combustion process, in how my mother would blow up in a box. How some of the ashes gathered might not be my mother’s. But all of the ashes gathered would be mine to keep, of course. In a receptacle of my choosing. We have several models to choose from, all quite tasteful, I think you’ll find. Here. And he slid a glossy catalog full of eyesores across the table for me to peruse. My task now to retrieve the least offensive of the ill-fitting options. I was used to hunting for that. So was my mother.
I let my phone ring.
“Hello?” I call again into the bowels of the shop.
No answer, no movement from inside the fortress of hanging clothes, not even a blink from the love seat man.
I ring the bell by the cash register. Nothing. I ring it again, harder.
“Jesus,” the woman says, at last emerging from the back, and I realize I’ve been pounding on the bell for some time. I stop mid-bang, my palm still raised over the bell like it could strike again anytime.
“You her daughter?”
“Yes.”
She gives me an appraising look but I’m in a black hole of a dress today, one in which you can’t discern tit from waist from hip.
I see she’s toting a dark dress shrouded in plastic by her finger crook. She’s holding it at a distance, at arm’s length, like I once saw a Mormon receptionist carry a cup of black coffee to her boss at an office I temped at. She hangs it up now on the chrome rack between us. Even before she does this, I recognize the dress. Deep blue like the hour between the dog and the wolf. An attractively scooped neckline. Sleeves and hemline a length and cut you would call kind. Buttons in back like discreetly sealed lips. Good give in the fabric. Double lined. The sort of dress that looks like nothing but a sad dark sack on the hanger, but on the body it’s a different story. Takes extremely well to accessories. My mother loved this sort of dress. At whatever weight she was—thin, fat, middling—she owned an iteration. I saw her wear it to work, lunch with friends, on dates, to movies, parties, funerals. I saw her wear it alone in her apartment for days on end. Scratch at a stain on the boob. Shit. The hemline begin to unravel. Fuck fuck fuck. Do you have a safety pin? Holes begin to appear in the armpits. Jesus. The sleeves fray. Well. That’s that, isn’t it? She wore it so much she’d wear it out and then she’d have to hunt for another, whip through the plus-size racks for something that fit just as impossibly well, that was just as dignified, just as forgiving in its plain dark elegance.
I look at it now hanging in plastic on the rack. Whatever desire I have to cry dies when I see a note on a yellow square of paper safety-pinned to the neckline with some red loopy handwriting on it. I’ve seen that yellow paper safety-pinned on this dress or one of its sisters before. Suddenly I’m business. My mother’s hands pointing to the note, wanting answers, please.
“What’s this?”
She sighs. Takes the dress off the hanger and spreads it on the counter between us. The smell of her perfume, her old sweat rises up ripe between us. There is my mother. Barefoot in her apartment, playing solitaire on her deck, splayed knees stretching the skirt, toes twiddling under the table. Lying on the sagging boat of her brass bed after a long workday, flipping channels, too tired to change. Asleep with her mouth open, her troubled breathing, the hemline hitched up and tangled around her legs.
She smooths down the fabric now, lifts up the hemline, exposing the myriad holes in the slip.