Then the yearned-for breasts, they simply kept growing, adolescence as horror story (isn’t it always?), the areolae spreading like a bruise, Sarah looking on in private shock, shielding herself with a rough towel in the postswim shower. They stopped, eventually, of course, though they hurt her back, sometimes. Those breasts are two of the many reasons she could never wear her mother’s gown down an aisle. There’s also her shoulders (those are Huck’s, too), broad and powerful, not an altogether bad thing, but the effect would be more pleasant if her waist tapered, as her mother’s does, even after childbirth twice over, Lulu in her pleated skirts like a paper doll. Lulu’s means of sustaining herself: occasional bites from a plate piled high, while she darts around the room, making conversation, before scraping the thing into the garbage disposal. She doesn’t need more than a few cubes of cantaloupe in the morning, a cup of tea with honey and lemon in the afternoon, a half of an English muffin, some desultory bites of a salad, the drumstick from the chicken, gnawed with a precision that’s somehow more like a lady than a rodent. Sarah requires more than this to survive, and she has learned to ignore, or not ignore, make peace with, or not wage war against, the excess. That excess, it sits comfortably on her body, everywhere: the slope of chin into neck, that bit from elbow to armpit, that swell just above the waist, with the humorous puckered punctuation of her navel. It’s there, from the back of the knees up: more cushion than she’d like, and it’s stubborn, this stuff, whatever she should call it. She goes to the gym. Nothing changes.
So, absent a hand-me-down dress, time to go shopping. This is no store; it is an atelier. The entrance unmarked like a therefore more sought-after bar or restaurant, the buzzer admitting her immediately. The far too beautiful Korean girl brandished a clipboard authoritatively, led Sarah to the sunny, well-appointed room, lined with rolling racks. Here, a clutch of overly complicated confections of chiffon and lace, for the bride young enough to still fancy herself a princess. There, a quintet of slinky silks wilting on velvet-lined hangers, too sexy by far, the sort of thing a movie star might navigate the red carpet in, the supplicant television correspondent demanding to know the designer’s name.
The Korean girl bats her lashes—such lashes, they have to be fake—and tells Sarah she has a face from the past. Neither insult nor compliment; oracular pronouncement. She leads Sarah to the rack she feels is right for her: dresses Jackie Bouvier might have worn. They are pretty, have a certain geometric propriety, a festive dignity, these flawless satins or cottons, in shades of cream and cloud so pure it seems they’ve never been touched, but of course, they were, lovingly worked over by the hands of unknown seamstresses somewhere far off. Even on their hangers they have a certain presence, that’s how powerful the very idea of the wedding dress is. Sarah selects two, and the Korean girl ferries them off to the dressing area, one at a time, the hook of the hanger held high in one hand, the excess of the dress draped lovingly over the crook of her other arm.
Putting on a dress this complex is a rite unto itself: unzipping and unhooking, slithering and draping, buttoning and fastening. This is a task for four hands, really, but she’s damned if she’s going to undress in front of that girl. She steps out of her flats, the ones that leave that terrible crimp across the top of her feet, and kicks off her jeans, not bothering to drape them over the back of the chair presumably provided for that purpose. She pulls her shirt off inelegantly—there’s no other way to do this—and catches herself, near naked, in the wood-framed mirror, for only a second. The dress hangs from a hook on the wall. Sarah struggles with preparing it for her body, understanding the architecture of the thing, locating its secret latches and recesses. She lifts it overhead, and lets it fall; it’s heavy with some unnoticed embellishment, with the solidity of its own expensive fabric, and slides down her body with a muffled but very satisfying sound. She considers herself again. The room is softly lit. The dress looks mostly like a white void, like a shroud. Her face looks rather as it always does. She’s disappointed.
It’s not the dress’s fault. The dress is lovely. It’s not right, though. She’s scared to take it off, scared to snag it, stain it, bruise it. Sarah shimmies out of it carefully, is fleetingly grateful that, with the garment over her face, she can’t see her body’s response to this improvised dance. She guides the thing back onto its hanger, tries the other one. This one is plainer, simpler, more straightforward, but the transformation is astonishing. If she looks past the red feet, the stubble on her legs, the interaction between the dress and her breasts (she’ll need a better bra, for sure), it’s actually quite—well, she looks like a bride, anyway. At last, a contender. This is her fourth time trying on dresses.