“I bought it brand new,” my grandmother began as I pried into her memory about her wedding dress. I furrowed my brow at this, confused. I’d frequented all of the thrift stores and resale shops in a tri-county area with this woman. I’d never in my life seen her buy something new for herself. Even most of her Tupperware came secondhand, saved from sour cream and spaghetti sauce containers. The thought of my grandmother, in her words, “picking the prettiest one from the bridal catalogue” was as strange and foreign to me as her reasons for excessive thriftiness.
Her hand lifted, hinging from the elbow that rested on her rocking chair, and her eyes closed slowly. She reached back into her memory and, for a moment, forgot I was there listening. She shook her head slightly, returning from 1952 to the living room where we sat. “Where did you say you found it?”
I don’t like to tell stories of my wedding or my marriage with my ex-husband—the pity it incites isn’t worth the anecdotes—but I like telling the story of the dress I wore.
I found the dress in an old Samsonite suitcase, not-so-carefully folded in an old bedsheet with the accessories stuffed haphazardly in a plastic bread bag. I immediately wanted to try it on, to feel the weight of its sturdy stain and yellowed lace. I held it to my body in the bathroom mirror of the empty house. I could only see from my neck up, but I thought it would look good on me.
I imagined the day I would try it on for real: my mom’s tears, my grandmother’s nod of approval, myself set in the form of the women that made me.
I folded it back, trying to crease it in the same spots as it was when I found it, and replaced the suitcase at the top of the closet. I was a high school senior and all my boyfriend and I could talk about was forever.
I had seen the dress in my grandmother’s bridal portrait where her young self holds silk flowers indefinitely. My mother has a similar picture in the same dress with the same smile and coached posture. The dress looks identical, like a paper doll’s dress fit onto younger versions of the women I recognize. I wanted a photo like that.
It’s not that my mom or grandmother pressured me to get married—in fact quite the opposite—but I craved an initiation into a womanhood that the dress seemed to embody.
At the time though, all I thought was that I loved this boy so much that I wanted to spend my life with him starting as soon as possible.
Years after first finding the dress, I made it to the end of a college degree, my mom’s requirement before she would give any kind of blessing. The boy, now just past the threshold of being a man, switched my promise ring for an engagement ring, and I told my mom I wanted to be the third wearer of the dress.
She responded with a measured, “if that’s what you want.”
I had expected a gush of approval or at least a tearful hug, but I forgot that my mom doesn’t deal in sentiment. She’s taught me through example that, for sensitive souls, the way to stay unhardened is to keep your heart guarded by its cage of ribs instead of on your sleeve or anywhere else a heart’s not supposed to be. A lesson that, despite my efforts, I never mastered.
A few days after her initially cool reaction, she helped me into the dress. Muffled by the still-creased layers of fabric, she began to tell me her own story of the dress: “Grandmother cut this dress up a few years after her wedding. She was going to use it for something.”
Her emphasis on something told me that this was like the collection of perfectly cut circles of fabric stacked in the closet, the box of tangled jewelry on the dining room table, the file cabinet drawer labelled “TO SORT.” In cutting the dress, my grandmother had a final project in mind, or perhaps deep in that part of her that leaves intentions without articulation, but she had stopped before anything more than a mess was made.
“We had to put it back together and take it in a bit so I could wear it,” my mom continued, “After my wedding, we just stuffed it into the suitcase. I guess if I’d known you would wear it, we could have preserved it.”
“Well, it’s in pretty good condition even having sat in a suitcase for years.”
I already knew that precious things were preserved better by the magic of forgetting.
The dress came over my head and we shimmied the waist below my bust. Set in its place, the dress cut off my already shallow breathing and I began to panic. My mom has lovingly spared me from surveillance of my body, from indoctrinating me with her own insecurities, from loading food with emotional consequences, but when I looked to her through the watery veil at the edges of my eyes, she said, “knowing Grandmother, she probably cut out the extra seams.”
I stared at the ceiling to stop the tears from betraying the excess feeling that was starting to spill.
“Get it off.” I whispered.
She pulled the whole thing over my head from the bottom hem and left me with the dress inside out on my bed. There it seemed a skeleton of my hope. For the first time, I noticed the dime-sized wine stain that had bled through the front of the skirt. I noticed the torn lace under the armpit. I noticed the doubt of my decision to get married at all.
I wiped my cheeks hard with the back of my hand and took a sharp inhale. I crawled my hands under the skirt and up to the shoulders and whipped the dress right side out. A thought came: If I can’t wear this dress then I don’t want to get married at all.
I shook it off, Jesus, Allison, that’s so fucking dramatic, and threw on my clothes to meet my mom in the living room.
“You ok?” she offered cautiously.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s make an appointment with a tailor.”
At our first appointment in the local bridal shop, the only place that would dare to touch our heirloom, we were given a room in the middle of the floor. Dresses with trains and tulle and taffeta surrounded us. The dress, limp in my hands, looked more yellow in this sea of white.
Other mothers and grandmothers paused their private performances to dote over the dress, over me, over my mom. They sighed and said things like “well if my dress looked like that I bet Lauren would actually want to wear it” and “how beautiful that you two can share this” and “you look just like your mother.”
While my mom took a seat, too close to these strangers for her liking, I followed the chipper stylist behind the curtain.
“How exciting that you’re wearing your mom’s dress. Is she so excited?”
“Uh, yeah. I think she is.”
“Amazing. Ok sugar, let’s get you into this thing.”
A quick catch in my throat made the next words tumble out like an avalanche.
“Ok. Um. So you know, last time it didn’t fit. Like at all. Like cut off my breathing kind of not fit. And we don’t know if my grandmother left any seam. And I don’t know if I’ll even be able to button... ”
The stylist put her hand on my shoulder, interrupting my spiral.
“That’s ok, and totally normal. Let me find you something that might make it a little easier.”
She disappeared and I heard my mom’s fake laugh from just beyond the curtain. The stylist reappeared with a long-line bra with a hundred little snaps.
“This should make it just a little easier to get it over you.”
“Ok.”
I turned around to I take off my sports bra, now feeling stupid that I put it on instead of the pretty one with the underwire. I clasped the first few fasteners and let her help me with the rest. Once secure, each inhale expanded against the plastic ribbing.
“Great, now we’ll just slide this over you. Dive right on through there.”
She held the dress open in a circle like my mom used to do with my Easter dress so as to not ruffle the hair she’d carefully curled. I poked my head through and we began the gentle tugging that brought the dress into place.
It felt a little better than it did the first time, though none of the buttons were even close to meeting. The stylist turned me to face the curtain and pulled it open. The moms and grandmas let out oooo’s and ahhh’s like a canned reaction from a live studio audience. The stylist looked at the dress but was talking to my mom when she said, “Yup, I can see here that we will need to take it out in a few places….maybe here and a little more here.” She pointed at my waist and my bust.
“My daughter is a little more gifted in that area.” my mom offered, landing the joke with the women sitting beside her. The stylist and I stayed silent, smiling. After a beat, I asked “do you need anything else? I’m ready to take it off.”
At the second appointment we were shown to a room with a door in the back. The dress hung with my corset on an embellished hook. A stout woman with a pincushion on her wrist met us and began to pin the now much looser dress in all the places I was unlike my mother and grandmother
“We had to take it apart so it fit you, honey. Torn right down the seam,” the woman laughed and traced the inseams with her palms. My mom followed her gestures attentively and made small talk about the age and condition of the dress. My thoughts wondered to my future sister-in-law who described birthing her daughter as “being torn at the seams.”
At the third appointment we were back in the curtained room. The stylists brought in the dress with such care that I wanted to tell her it had been stuffed in a suitcase for more than two decades.
“Alright dear, now let’s see the whole shebang.”
I pointed my arms above my head, trained now at this dress diving, and let it slide over me. The stylist paused at the long line of buttons. “Now they just make it look like there are buttons. Everything we have has zippers. This is a real heirloom.” She let out a sigh to reassure herself and started at the bottom button. I felt a snag and hear her gasp. Quickly she said, “I should get your mom.”
With a broken button in her hand, my mom began to tuck each button in its appropriate loop. In her hands, the task was more perfunctory than performative. It was as if she was braiding her own hair or scratching her own skin.
With a soft pat she declared “There. Much better than the first time we tried.” Both of us laughed until her hand went to the small stain. “I imagine that stain is more than 50 years old. I don’t think I even had wine at my wedding.” After a beat she added, “I’m sure we could get that cleaned.” She pinched the fabric around it to assess the damage, but I pushed her hands away and smoothed out the spot in question.
“It’s fine,” I said, imagining a twenty-year-old Grandmother.
“Well, it’s your dress now.”
The rest of the preparations were a blur and suddenly I was in the dress again standing at the back of the church. My dad steadied my free hand on his arm while the other struggled to keep the bouquet from shaking. As the music rose and the pews groaned, I pulled my hand away to smooth the wine spot on my belly, somehow its imperfection more reassuring.
I couldn’t see my mom or grandmother. They had taken their spots on the pew in the front.
Here, in this inhale before the vows and the cake and the champagne, the dress felt like a form in which my body finally fit.
As my husband drove to our hotel that night, I realized I only had the dress. I’d forgotten my luggage back at my parents’ and I had no other clothes to change into.
I barely got out the words “call someone” before my tears took over. I knew someone would bring me my suitcase, I knew soon I would be out of the dress, but I couldn’t stop the sobs from howling out of me.
My new husband made the necessary calls to his best man and turned to me, wiping the inky makeup from my face with a dirty shirt he’d left in the car.
“Do you want to go inside?”
I shook my head.
“I think we’d be much more comfortable inside.”
I set my jaw hard and stared out the windshield. He tried again.
“We can stay here but I think we’d be more comfortable…”
“I heard you. Let’s go.”
I slammed the car door shut behind me. I was mad at myself for forgetting my suitcase, mad him for no good reason, mad at the dress for being too precious a burden at the moment.
He pulled off his jacket and set it around my shoulders. I pulled it tight when we walked past another couple in the stairwell. We laughed for a moment about what kind of scene they must have seen and the stories they might imagine of the newlyweds who looked broken and terrified. But as soon as we were in the room, the tears returned and I couldn’t breathe. I laid on the bed flat to try to give my heaving lungs as much room as possible.
After waiting for what felt like an hour in this position listening to my new husband flip through cable channels, I launched myself up and hissed, “get me out of this fucking dress.”
He began the process of unbuttoning but paused after the first two. His silence threatened to bring back my tears but it was easier now to be mad then sad. I whipped around to shoot him a questioning look.
“I just am afraid of tearing something,” he said.
I turned back around and offered quietly “It’s ok if you mess up the buttons. Those are easy to fix. I just need it off.”
I wished he would call my mom to help me out of our dress for the last time, but it was just us and it would be just us from this point forward. Or that’s what I thought, standing there half unbuttoned missing my mom.
My marriage story got a different ending than my mom’s and grandmother’s. After five years of marriage, it was just me lying on a different bed in a different city trying to give my lungs enough room to breathe. But I wrote the story of the dress before all of that and I wrote the end of the story of the dress like this:
People often comment about the strong likeness I share with my mother. Some overly complementary men would even say we look like sisters. But we are not sisters. She and I are made of the same material, the same dark eyes and hard-earned love. The same material as her mother. Each new Reynolds woman is created from tearing the seams of the one before. Each one the same delicate lace and stiff satin, stitched with fresh thread for a new body.
I knew from the moment I took it off that I wanted the dress back in the suitcase. The bridal store pressured us to buy the preservation package, but I refused at every turn. The idea of trying to preserve the dress made it seem like I would expect my own daughter to wear it, to mature into a recognizable iteration of me. It made me fear that I would one day be torn at the seams. So we folded it a little more carefully into a new sheet, and we tucked its edges into the same suitcase. As I closed the clasps of the Samsonite, my ring clinked against the faded metal.
They say that, as they become women, girls become more like their mothers. But what they don’t say is that they are the same all along. A daughter’s self is sometimes secondhand.
The way I used to end the story about the dress lies about tucking it back into the suitcase we found it in, waxes poetic about a daughter’s self being secondhand from her mother and her mother’s mother, and spins the whole thing into proof that the day I wore the dress was the first day of my forever, like it had been for the other women in my family.
The truth is the marriage didn’t take and we hung the dress on a padded hanger next to the file of documents I’d need to change my name back after the divorce. The truth is there is more of me that doesn’t fit into that womanhood I imagined while looking at my mom’s and grandmother’s bridal portraits. The truth is that no matter how you dress it up a woman’s self is all her own.
This is how I end the story now:
It’s possible that the dress itself never fit, that my physical excess in comparison to my mom and grandmother points to some other excess, the type more allowed in 2020. It’s possible that the dress wasn’t meant to fit, and that my attempts and tucking myself inside of it were the opposite of what my mom or grandmother ever wanted for me. It’s possible that the dress doesn’t matter at all.
But it’s hard to know. It’s hard to know anything for sure about the women in my family. My grandmother died without me really understanding her at all. My mom continues to be an enigma to me in the subjects of motivations and priorities. I feel like I arrived at adulthood without knowing how I got here or why I was still wearing a dress that didn’t fit.
The way I end the story now is with a prayer that the older I get the less I’ll need the reassurance of the things given to me secondhand.