She glances sideways at her colleague, who is folding monster bras under a FUNCTIONAL CAN BE SEXY sign. I smile at them both warmly, like I’m spreading my arms open wide, like these are my sisters. They smile back doubtfully. What, am I mocking them?
I feel her following me as I weave my way through the boleros and heavy chain-mail dresses that make up Evening Wear, so I grab a couple of dresses off the rack at random. A striped caftan. Something gold and shoulder padded for old times’ sake. I’m about to head for the fitting room when I spot a calf-length midnight blue velvet dress with puffed sleeves cinched with rhinestone buckles hanging on a rack close by. I pull it off the rack and replace the others, turn toward the saleswoman, who has indeed been trailing me this whole time.
She looks at me, uncertain. Do I want a fitting room? Really? I really do?
I nod. Yes. I do.
She leads me back with palpable reluctance.
The fitting room is exactly as I remember it.
All mirrors and merciful lighting. The door, thick and bolted, made of reinforced steel that goes right to the floor. No terrible smurf I can’t see on the other side of this wall, squawking for a size 0 or an extra-extra small. Apart from the heavy rustle of thick thighs straining against slacks, everyone’s silent. Through the wall, I hear a woman tell another woman that the pants look fine, no, no, they look just fine. Inside, there’s a wide padded bench so you can see if something embarrassing happens when you sit down. The bench I used to sit on with folded arms in a monster bra the color of gunmetal. All the sweater sacks and stirrup pants I was supposed to be trying on lying at my feet like kicked cats. Shaking my head. Being difficult. My mother and the saleswoman knocking on the door. Let’s see! Or sometimes my mother would come in with me and sit there, watch me change into and out of things. It looks fine, she’d say. She said that every time except once, when she turned away, attempting to mask her disgust at the sight of the fresh mess of red stretch marks across my stomach. Even though she had the same marks on her own stomach, she couldn’t bear seeing them on me. Hadn’t she tried, in her way, to spare me from inheriting her fate? I can still see them now in the mirror, faded.
I hang the dress on a hook on the back of the door, run my hands over the fuzzy velvet. Give or take a few details, this is more or less the dress. An updated version bearing the brunt of the latest trends. The same midnight blue shade my mother said was “black enough, Jesus,” knowing no dress sold in this store was ever black enough for me. The same buckles, affixed lamely to the puffed sleeves, that I remember trying so hard to rip off. I even got Mel’s aunt, who was a seamstress, to try to remove them legitimately. She stood there under my armpit for nearly a half hour, a frowning Slovenian elf, a cigarette dangling from her hairy lip, pulling and pulling on the buckle, then shaking her head like a doctor at a lost cause. No, she said at last, I cannot remove without damaging sleeves.
So do it anyway, I wanted to say. But all I said was, Oh.
Meanwhile Mel stood nearby like an innocent bystander, corseted in brocade and fishtailed in velvet, switching from a concerned expression to sneak pleased peeks at herself in the full-length mirror. In three hours from that moment, I knew I’d be watching her wrapped around some mangy Goth boy on the dance floor, her front laces undone, her skirt hitched up high, while I leaned against a nearby wall watching and counting the minutes to pizza on the sidewalk.
I take the dress off the hanger now, hold it up against me.
I ended up getting some action in it, if you can believe it. Fetish night at Savage Garden. A silver-shirted boy with sea urchin hair. Mel had dragged me there against my will, then spent the whole night making out with some man who resembled a melancholy pirate. I was wearing this velvet atrocity, feeling hideous, leaning against a wall, German industrial music deafening my ears, watching a half-naked woman affixed to a wooden cross get lashed repeatedly in the middle of the dance floor. And he came up to me. First he downed a pitcher of beer, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then he came up to me. I thought surely he’d go for the emaciated girl in the black halter to my left, but no, it was me he was walking toward, me he took outside and pushed against a brick wall, my face he cupped between his hands to the point where I nearly couldn’t breathe. But what was most beautiful? Was how he put his hands up that terrible dress, ripping it on the side, it was so tight. Oops, he said, but I didn’t mind, in fact, it gave me an idea. And when I asked him to he tore at the buckles. Tore them off both sides with one swift movement, while my hands clutched his hair. The sound of those rips. The clink clink sound of the rhinestones hitting the dirty, spit-strewn pavement was the single most erotic experience of my life, until Mel tore me out from under him.
It looked like he was assaulting you, she told me later on the streetcar home.
Well, he wasn’t, I said.