The Slinky Lilac Dress
THE
SLINKY LILAC DRESS
The dress was in the window of a boutique in Double Bay when its original owner walked past. She was heading for the Squire Shop, where she usually bought her jeans and jackets and shirts. She liked practical attire, but there was something about that dress …
As she returned to her car later and passed the dress again, she decided to at least try it on.
It was the sort of thing she would usually think too frivolous, and until recently she would have had nowhere to wear it.
But she was newly in love and her paramour had promised her dinners at nice restaurants and she wanted to dress up for him.
It seemed like paying tribute to him to make herself glamorous.
He liked her practical clothes – obviously, because that’s what he saw her in, and he made it clear he found her attractive – but dinners out required something else.
The dress was made of lilac silk and had spaghetti straps and an asymmetrical hem.
She’d need to wear high heels with it, the lady in the shop said, and she didn’t own any.
As it turned out there was just the right pair of heels in the boutique, and before she knew it she was leaving with the dress and the shoes and a little evening bag.
She and her paramour saw each other mainly during the week, and the occasional Friday night. On weekends he went to see his parents in Scone, up the New England Highway. She waited for an invitation to join him. Surely, given that he said he loved her, he’d want her to meet his parents?
The invitation to Scone didn’t come, but the invitations to restaurants did. When he asked her to join him at Beppi’s in eastern Sydney on a warm spring evening, she knew it was time for the lilac dress.
His eyes widened with delight when he saw her, and she was glad her instincts about dressing up for him had been correct. He kissed her on the lips then took her inside, beaming as if he’d won first prize in a competition.
That was until they were in the middle of their entrée and a man walked up, his nose bulbous with what was no doubt red-wine consumption, and asked how ‘the missus’ was.
The paramour looked nervous and avoided her eyes. He hadn’t ever mentioned he’d been married. How odd.
The bulbous-nosed man said he’d seen ‘the missus’ the other day with the kids at a school sports day – where had he been, the paramour? Surely work wasn’t so important?
She felt so foolish then, in her lilac dress with her little handbag under the table and her feet hurting from the heels she was wearing for the first time. Those weekends he was at Scone visiting his parents – he wasn’t really, was he? He was at home with ‘the missus’ and the kids.
How could she have wanted to be wanted so badly that she ignored what was clearly the truth? How could she have let her deep, constant desire to be loved bring her to the point where she was being humiliated in public?
After the man left, she picked up her bag then picked up her now former paramour’s glass of red wine and threw it over his face, not caring that some of it splashed on the lilac dress that she already knew she would never wear again.
The next day she wrapped the stained dress, the heels and the bag in plastic and shoved them into the nearest charity bin.