A Dress for Generations

The soft white plastic wrapper is long and rectangular. I can see through the plastic a little, as through a frosty window, to the work of lace, silk, and silver beads. The wrapper has no plastic smell anymore. Somewhere between all that time it spent under my great grandmother’s bed and all those moves it has followed us through, it must have collected so many other smells that now it has no smell at all. With my hands against the wrapper, I can feel the wonderful work inside. The top is thin and the bottom is massive, like a plush pillow for a giant. I can feel the circular wires of the hoop skirt also. Long ago, we got the plastic wrapper out of the attic. I thought about her being fresh in love and about me being fresh in love. I wanted to look at the dress, but Mom said we might get it dirty, and, besides, it was probably yellowed. Even so, I already wanted this to be my wedding dress, too, though I didn’t get to look at it. The last time my parents cleaned out the attic, I was eighteen, and I kept asking, “Have you found Mom’s wedding dress?” When they finally found it, the wrapper was smashed into a cardboard box. After all those years, the zipper on the wrapper still revealed the lace, silk, and silver beads. It was still so white. Mom helped me put it on. The sleeves of lace roses fit all the way down my arms and up to the perfect place on my chest, and the lace graced the carpet and extended into a magnificent train. “It fits perfect,” Mom said. Daddy said, “You look beautiful.” In that moment, I was my mother ready to step out bravely at age nineteen and commit to a life that had become my own life, and I was myself, ready and not ready, waiting still. “But do you think can we get those traces of soil out that are on the train?” If it’s been so well preserved through moves to town and moves to the country and move to apartments and moves to farms, who knows but that it might have been preserved all the while for me?