Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
SOMETHING BORROWED
LOUISA
Chandler drags me to Timeless Velvet, a vintage store that we frequent, usually more for a retro knit, or a fun piece of mercury glass which one day might give me lead poisoning.
It’s walls of old lace and florals, and smells like that, the memory of someone’s grandma’s garden.
Not any one particular flower, but the memory of a garden once tended, now just the fragrance untethered from its original source.
Grandmas also notoriously douse themselves in any floral scent they find, so it may actually be that I’m smelling.
While the rack of sequin pants near the window catches the afternoon light and throws it back across the hardwood floor in tiny fractured pieces, little disco planets orbit nothing but my feet.
We are on a very distinct mission. Having worn my one wedding-adjacent outfit earlier.
(Still wearing it, actually.) But that means that when we show up to the Justice of the Peace’s office, I’ll have nothing to wear that isn’t in my usual wardrobe of clothing.
It's not that I’m looking for something that screams bride, because I most certainly do not.
But I think for the purposes of Immigration, having the look of someone happy to be getting married definitely won't hurt.
“What about this?” Chandler holds up something that is more sleeve than dress.
“No way, I like my arms,” I say, as I do a serpentine motion from fingertip to fingertip. “I don’t think that’s me.” She agrees with a nod of the head, holding the length of the sleeve against her arm to assess.
‘What about this?’ is about the only question she has really asked me today.
Here’s the thing about Chandler: she is genuinely trying.
She drove us here in her car (which means I now have a perfume of acrylic paint and Febreze) and she made a playlist for us to listen to on the drive over to ‘hype us up.’ (Which ran the gamut of everything from “Marry You” by Bruno Mars to “January Wedding” by the Avett Brothers.
Subtle, huh?) Which, I’ll admit, even knowing full well this is a completely fake marriage, it worked more than it should.
She had a lot of questions, even doubt when I first told her.
She didn’t understand how everything changed overnight.
But she's someone who loves to believe in love, so that is what she’s choosing to do.
And now, she’s moving through racks of dead women's wardrobes without asking the question I think she is absolutely dying to ask.
‘Are you sure about this?’
Perhaps she’s holding herself back in an attempt at self preservation.
(Or maybe blind faith in me, because I think she’s perhaps one of the only to have it.) Really, it’s because the love she believes in above all else?
Our friendship. She has decided that what I need right now is not the question, but the company.
Which makes the fact that I have not told her the entire honest truth even worse. I told her the version that protects her (just like Hudson said) and I think it held. I think she believes me, or believes in me, enough.
My phone vibrates in my purse, and I pull it out to retrieve a message from my soon-to-be husband. (I’m trying on the term for size like I am these dresses.)
Angry Neighbor?
Dinner when you get home
(I really need to change his contact name.)
The word home hits with some discomfort.
He deployed it so casually, as if we’ve been sharing one for years, when in fact all we are sharing is an agreement, and previously it has only been a wall and resentment.
As if this is just the natural order of things, him thinking about dinner and me being the person he thinks about it for.
Maybe it’s strategic, for the paper trail. ‘Look, here's the text message where I asked my wife about dinner, see the timestamp, see the domesticity of it.’ That would be him, intentionally, logically, thoughtfully doing everything he needs to make this appear legitimate.
“How about this one?” She holds up a long cotton gown, doing a light spin with it to showcase its flow, but I just shake my head and the boho nightgown goes back on the rack.
It could have been cool with the right accessories, maybe even a flower-crown.
But I don’t think Hudson screams floral guy, a preference for things much more purposeful.
It also could have washed out my skin and made me look like a Victorian child that died from cholera and came back to haunt him from the grave.
dinner sounds good :) working up an appetite trying to find the perfect outfit for our wedding *bride emoji*
Angry Neighbor?
Wear whatever you want, Louisa
Daisy crown it is
Angry Neighbor?
I’ll call the florist
What are you planning on wearing, suit, suit, or suit
Angry Neighbor?
You ruined my favorite tie, so that's out
You have a favorite tie? That wasn’t in the folders
Angry Neighbor?
Retired it after an unsanctioned licorice tea baptism
(Oops.)
Pickings are slim, I might need to borrow it
Angry Neighbor?
Just wear your overalls
“This one?” Chandler asks again, pulling my attention from the texts, which were alarmingly normal. (Despite the fact we were talking about our wedding.)
Each time Chandler asks my opinion, it’s just slightly more defeated than the last. She holds up a silver sequin jumpsuit that’s magnificent.
(For someone else.) Then a white tulle dress, three sizes wrong, but she held it up with such excitement and hope that I instinctively said yes just to make her happy, but even that went back to the rack.
With each possibility pulled from the rack, I stood in front of the small mirror in the dressing room and looked at myself in other people’s histories.
Every time I did up a bow or a button, or Chandler pulled up the retro-zipper (even did up the laces of a corset), I felt like I was wearing a costume.
And the small voice in the back of my head relentlessly continued to point out, it’s because I am.
I am dressing up as someone’s wife.
I have known this from the beginning (seventy-two hours ago), but what is coming into focus no matter how vintage (discolored) the mirror is, is that I don't know that I want it to feel that way.
I run my fingers along the rack across the silk and polyester, across something stiff that might be brocade, all of it so dense with accumulated occasion, other women who stood in other mirrors and decided yes, this one, this is who I'm going to be at this moment. (Not me, not yet.)
All it took was a single form and a rubber stamp to say we are eligible to get married, to get married to each other.
Shows how little they know about either of us, but we walked out of there with a license to wed.
And by we, I mean Hudson, obviously he is the one responsible for it, because as we’ve learned I am not to be trusted with important paperwork.
I slide over another section of hangers, the pink taffeta is enormous and ridiculous and parts the rack like it's been waiting its whole life for an audience. While I know with certainty it’s the farthest thing from a wedding dress I can imagine, I split the hangers on the rack to see it properly, parting the pink taffeta sea.
It requires a level of center of attention I’ll just never be comfortable with.
Even on my fake wedding day. (Or I guess it's a real wedding day, fake marriage.)
But there, on the floor, having slipped from its hanger and given up on being found, is a soft cream-colored dress bundled on the floor.
Small and overlooked in the way that things become when they've been waiting too long.
I crouch to pick it up and it unfolds in my hands, awakening from hibernation.
“Chan.” My voice comes out quiet, afraid someone else might claim her before we’ve even gotten acquainted. “I think I found something.”
I hold it out in front of me, it’s short, kind of mod.
Not traditionally bridal, but in the right color scheme that will work for a courthouse wedding.
Maybe in another life it was a cocktail dress, hanging on the body of someone glamorous hosting a party in their very mid-century home.
It has clean lines, but also, there’s humor, like we are sharing an inside joke.
Chandler’s head appears from the dressing-room curtain, one shoulder bare, the velvet drape clutched to her collarbone, clearly not dressed but too excited to wait to see what I may have found.
The excitement she may hear in even the whisper of my voice begins to dissolve the held-back question of hers, turning it into something that looks more like hope.
“Hold it up!” she says excitedly. (See? Hype girl.)
I grip each strap and lift it against my torso.
It smells like it has been here longer than it lived in someone's closet, who knows how long it was in a puddle on the ground, whatever life it had before this shop, it has long since finished remembering. The color is a soft cream, whether by design or by time I can’t tell, but it's beautiful all the same.
There are small pearls flooding the hem that break out into clusters traveling upward, fanning out across the base of the dress like something growing, thinning as they climb until they dissolve midway into plain satin.
And like a snow flurry across the landscape of pearls, the softest single feathers sprout.
Not boastful, but a gentle, joyful reminder that this monochrome dress is anything but dull.
Chandler is very still. “Oh,” she says, just that. But it's her face that gives her away. My hype-girl stunned to silence, and we both know this is it. I look at the dress in my hands and think about the woman who wore it before, whoever she was. Maybe I will make her proud.