5. Marnie
Marnie
The dress appointment has been on the calendar since June. Adele's, on Grand, the second Saturday of August, eleven o'clock, four people: April, me, Drew's sister Bex and my niece Katrin, who's flying in from Denver and has been the loudest person in the group chat for eleven weeks.
April calls me a few days before and does that thing where she talks about the weather first.
"You want her to come," I say.
"I didn't say that."
"You called me to talk about a cold front. April, you don't know what a cold front is."
She exhales. "Is that awful? That feels awful."
"Bring her."
"Mom."
"Bring her. It's a store, honey, they have chairs." I'm at a red light on 62nd Ave and I hear how flat my own voice sounds so I put some air into it. "She never got to do any of it. Let her do one."
And so she does, she invites Sherry along and again I can’t fight that nagging feeling in my stomach that makes me both scared for my family and guilty for being so closed off. I need to relax, to let Sherry into our lives, for April’s sake.
I just wish it didn’t feel like such a warning.
Adele's has good natural light, terrible coffee and a woman named Pauline who has been doing this for thirty years and can read a room like a card counter.
Sherry arrives ten minutes early, sits in the second chair back, and takes out a small pack of tissues she's clearly bought for the occasion.
She's flawless.
I mean that in every direction. When Katrin asks a nosy question she deflects it.
When April comes out in the first dress, mermaid, wrong, deeply wrong, Sherry says, "You look gorgeous," and then adds, "but I'm not the one who has to dance in it," which is exactly right and gets a laugh.
Pauline asks whose account the deposit is under and Sherry says "Marnie's," before I open my mouth.
Dress four is a disaster. Five is close.
Dress six comes out and the room stops.
It's satin. Plain. No beading, no lace, a bias cut that makes my daughter look like something out of a photograph from 1971, and she walks out onto that little platform with the shoes she brought in a tote bag and she doesn't look at the mirror.
She looks at me.
Every single time in her life, from the first day of kindergarten to the interview suit to the ultrasound picture Drew hasn't seen yet because there isn't one yet, she has checked my face before she checks anything else.
I nod, because my throat is gone.
And April bursts into tears on the platform, and Katrin starts screaming, and Bex is filming, and Pauline is already pinning at the hip because she knew twenty minutes ago.
I go up and fix the strap and April grabs my wrist and says, "Don't cry, if you cry I'm going to ruin it," and I say, "I'm not crying, my eyes are just wet," and my daughter makes a sound like she's been hit.
Behind us, in the second chair, Sherry Corbett is crying too.
Not faking it, not using emotion to get at our money.
This is the real deal and I feel guilty once more.
She's got her hand flat over her mouth and her eyes are red and she's looking at the two of us on that platform with an expression that I recognize immediately, because it is the exact face I would make watching somebody else's daughter check somebody else's face.
She just found out where she stands.
And God help me, I feel sorry for her. Real sorrow, all the way down. I feel it in the same body that noticed March 12.
Both things are true. Nobody warns you that both things can be true at the same time and neither one cancels the other.
I’m already getting tired of feeling like a jerk, but I’ll keep playing nice for my daughter.
Afterward Pauline takes April into the back to write up the alterations and Sherry catches me by the coffee urn.
"Marnie. Can I ask you something."
"Sure."
"I'd like to pay for it."
I look at her.
"Not, God, not to make a point." She's got her hands up slightly. "I have some money put away. I've been putting it away for a while and I never knew what for, and now I do, and I'd like to be the one who buys her that dress."
"That's a kind offer."
"It isn't. It's a selfish one." She smiles, tired. "I'd just like there to be one thing."
I want you to understand that I take a full breath before I answer. I think about it like a person, standing next to a coffee urn that smells like a church basement.
"It's already covered," I say.
"I know it's covered. I'm asking you to un-cover it."
"Sherry." I keep my voice easy. "When she was little we told her that when she got married we'd pay for the dress and the flowers and she'd pay for the rest. That's been the deal since she was about ten. It's a stupid thing that's been sitting in our family for sixteen years."
Something moves across her face and goes away.
"Of course," she says. "That's lovely. That's really lovely."
"You could do the shoes."
"She has shoes."
"She has one pair of shoes, and by October she'll have four, and every one of them will be a crisis." I mean it as a kindness. It comes out fine. She laughs.
But she doesn't take it.
Keith gets home at seven. He heard about it before I could tell him, which is the first small strange thing, because I have the video on my phone and I've been waiting all afternoon to show him April on that platform. I get it ready to hit play, but he stops me to talk before I have time.
"April called me," he says. "Sounds like it went great."
"It did."
He puts his keys in the dish. Loosens his collar. Then, mildly, the way you'd mention the recycling: "She wanted to buy the dress."
"She told you that?"
"She texted me. She was worried she'd overstepped." He gets a beer out of the fridge. "You could've let her do one thing."
The kitchen is quiet except for the ice maker.
"That's what she said," I tell him. "Word for word, actually."
"Well." He shrugs. "Maybe because it's true."
"Keith. We told April when she was ten that we'd buy her dress."
"I don't remember that."
"You were sitting at the counter at Fern Street eating peanut butter out of the jar and April was doing that magazine quiz."
He looks at me and I can see him not finding it. Twenty-two years of small things and he's got a hard drive that holds server configurations from 2009.
"It's a dress," he says. "It's not a big deal, not a hill to die on.”
"I'm not on a hill. I offered to let her buy the shoes."
"The shoes." He laughs, one syllable, and it isn't a nice one. "That's generous."
I set down the dish towel.
"What are we doing right now?"
"Nothing. I'm saying the woman has been apologizing for almost twenty-four years and she asked to buy a dress and you said no, and I don't understand why that's the one thing you needed to keep."
"Because it isn't a competition," I say. "I'm not competing with her."
And Keith, my husband, who has never in his life said anything to me with the intent to wound, says:
"Then why are you acting like it is?"
There's a version of the next ten seconds where I say something smart.
What actually happens is I stand in my kitchen holding a video of my daughter on a platform in a satin dress that I will never show him, and I realize that in twenty-two years of marriage this is the first time anyone in my house has looked at me and seen the second wife.