Seeing my face, she says, “Those she didn’t even ask me to touch. You can’t even see those. But I did raise the lining hem for her again, see?”
Fuck fuck fuck. Safety pin, do you have one?
“This, though.” She points to a jagged hole on the hip.
Jesus.
“I couldn’t fix this because it’s not on the seam, see?” Then she pokes her finger through the hole and wags it back and forth, shaking her head.
Stop that! My mother’s anger rising in my throat. Her hands itching through mine to take a swipe at this woman’s wagging finger. “I see.”
I watch her run her fingers along the frayed sleeves, the sagging neckline, the holes in the armpits, all lost causes according to her.
“Nothing you can do about that,” she says each time she points to a rip, a fray, a hole, raising her chin to look at me through her narrow little frames. “I told her.”
I nod, a heady mix of rage and shame spreading through my chest like fire.
“Now, here.” She turns the dress around and shows me the back.
I look at the new black buttons she’s sewn down the spine. There are only two of the original buttons left at the base, small, dainty iridescent bulbs like pearls. “I told her I might not have something like these,” she says, waggling the two pearly ones like they were dubious anyway, fanciful.
“Don’t touch those.” The words come out of my mouth like a cough, my mother’s low growl suffusing my own hiss.
“Excuse me?”
I stare at the buttonholes, worn from all the give and tug they’ve endured. I see the expanse of my mother’s back, the red imprints of zippers and too-tight buttons on her skin along the spine.
Can you button this for me?
Giving me her back and putting her hands up in the air like she was being arrested.
You can’t do it, she’d say after a while, her raised arms beginning to sag downward, her spine going slack.
Hang on, I’d say.
Okay I’ll stop breathing. Here. Try now.
“But here’s the real problem,” the woman continues. She points to a small cluster of holes by the hip that look like the dress was gored on one side by Freddy Krueger. “I mean, what even happened here?” There’s accusation in her voice.
The rage in me dies abruptly, momentarily.
“I don’t know.”
“Well.” she says, pushing the dress across the counter toward me, “Nothing I can do about it.”
“What do you mean nothing?” I push the dress across the counter toward the woman. “Surely something?” I add in a quieter voice, one that sounds like my own.
“Nothing,” she says, shoving the dress back at me.
“Nothing.” The word falls from my lips like a stone.
And that’s when it comes back to me in stereo: mothers of various sizes, mothers of varying hairstyles—permed in the eighties, waved and wispy-banged in the nineties, choppy in her final years—but always the same plummy mouth twisted, the same face contorted by outrage and shame, storming out of glass doors with the same broken, balled-up dark dress in her fist. Tossing it into the backseat of the car and slamming the door with a violence that always made me jump. Screeching out of the parking lot while the seamstress behind the counter within, always with the same tape measure around her neck, the same glasses on the far end of her nose, either watched through the window or didn’t. My mother driving without a seat belt all the way home, the car making a little dinging noise she ignored.
Nothing, all these versions of my mother told me when I asked what happened, shaking their heads, their fingers frantically turning the radio dial for a song, any song, to fill the car.
My cell phone starts ringing again. Or maybe it’s been ringing this whole time.
“Go try another place,” the woman’s saying now. “They’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you.” She’s looking at me as if daring me to accuse her again.
I could snatch the dress the off the counter and head to the door like I actually have another place to go. Can see my mother looking at her, poised for more fighting, or maybe at this point she’d be ready to give it up.
Well. That’s that, isn’t it?
I nod. Suddenly I feel very tired. Like I could sleep for a hundred years.
“Look, I won’t charge you for the hemline repair, just the cleaning, okay?” She says it more softly now.
“Okay.” But we both know the dress is beyond cleaning. Even before this woman removed the plastic, it smelled pungently of my mother. I watch her put the plastic covering back on.
“Tell her I tried, okay? But maybe not to bring this one back in again.”
Good choice, the funeral director said when at last I pointed to one of the vessels at random. Elegant. Tasteful. And who doesn’t love blue?
She takes it off the rack and into her arms, gently now, like it’s a maiden, Snow White fresh from her glass coffin. There is such great care in the gesture that it brings another mother back to me briefly. One I didn’t see very much. Happy. At ease in her flesh. “I’ll tell her,” I say.
She’ll Do Anything