The Salmon-Pink Cocktail Dress
THE
SALMON-PINK COCKTAIL DRESS
Orphaned at twelve, brought up by relatives, she had money from her parents’ estate and all the expectations of presenting herself to the world as slender and bright-eyed and made-up and coiffed just so.
She also had no one to tell her they loved her even if she didn’t paint on eyeliner or put curlers in her hair at night.
Buying dresses helped with that, at least for a little while.
The thrill of looking at them, of feeling the fabric, admiring the cut, then buying them and taking them home let her indulge in the fantasy that she had an opulent life in which someone looked forward to seeing her and taking her to glamorous places – rather than her real life stuck in the back room of her relatives’ dark suburban home, listening to the dunny-can man in the lane that ran alongside her window.
At the party, she nervously held her martini and didn’t drink it. She’d never had one before – barely even had a glass of wine – and didn’t want to risk becoming drunk amongst so many strangers.
Her friend was circulating, chatting and flirting, while she stood as inconspicuously as possible near the fireplace and read the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece.
‘I haven’t written any this year,’ said a baritone voice to her right.
‘Hm?’ she said, turning to see a dashingly handsome man with thick eyebrows and thicker hair. She felt the martini glass tilt and saw liquid drop on his shoes.
‘I’m so sorry!’ she cried, sure he would think her the clumsiest girl alive.
But he laughed and said, ‘I’m not.’
His eyes flickered and she thought he was looking her up and down. ‘That’s a beautiful dress,’ he said. ‘And you look beautiful in it.’
She almost spilled more martini then, so taken aback at the first compliment a man had ever paid her.
They were married six months later, and after her first child was born and her body changed shape she realised she would likely never fit into the salmon-pink cocktail dress again.
She gave the dress to her Woollahra friend, who had admired it, and she kept it for years, her daughter wearing it to a school dance before it ended up stuffed in the back of a closet.
Then the family moved, and the contents of the closets were mostly thrown into garbage bags without a second glance and donated to charity.
The dress hasn’t found a home since but its solid construction has held it together all these years. The fabric has faded a little, yet someone could still make something of it, this pretty dress full of movement and promise.