IN THE PICTURE on my parents’ bedroom wall, my mother’s wedding dress, a rich, dark velvet, flowed from her shoulders to just above her ankles. Though my mother avoided sentimentality and wasn’t prone to saving things with no daily use, she’d kept the dress in the back of her closet. Throughout my childhood, it was the most beautiful article of clothing in the house. On winter afternoons, I’d climb inside the closet and rub my cheek against the velvet. The dress had weight to it, and a soft, deep nap that invited you to touch and hold it like a liquid shadow in your hands.
By 1938, the year my mother and father were married, Saskatchewan had suffered eight years of drought. The fields were blowing away, there were relief lines at the CPR station, yet my mom as a young bride-to-be, with her mother, caught the train from the country to look for a gown at Kling’s Ladies Wear on Railway Street. Though Mom had gone into Swift Current with her siblings and parents countless times before, this was a special journey—at twenty years old she had never owned a store-bought dress. My grandmother Ford, known for her deftness with a needle and thread, had sewn her three daughters’ clothes, some of them from flour sacks, but for this occasion she’d somehow scraped together enough money, perhaps from the scarce eggs and cream produced in that dry year, to purchase a modestly priced gown. She didn’t know if she and her treadle machine could handle a material fancier than they were used to, and besides, her middle daughter deserved something special.
Mom had sent home the little money she’d earned from helping her future mother-in-law do her spring cleaning and cook for the men on the threshing machine bringing in the thin fall crop. To pay for a perm, Grandma contributed a duck and a chicken Mom could sell to the Chinese café in Swift Current. The chicken died on the way, and Emerson, the man who would become my father, gave his betrothed the extra twenty-five cents she’d need to pay the hairdresser to create her curls.
Dust was blowing on my parents’ wedding day. I imagined my mother running her hands over the blue-black velvet, brushing it clean in the foyer of the church before she walked down the aisle. She and Dad were going to live in a small grey shack abandoned by a homesteader. It stood across the road from his parents’ farm. The reception was in their new place, and that morning she’d peeled potatoes and turnips, made stuffing for the turkey and baked three raisin pies. Her older sister had put the roaster in the wood stove just before the wedding started. Grandpa Ford had bought some beer, enough for the ten or so men who’d be crowded into the one-room shack. Just before the wedding party arrived from the church, both the bride’s and the groom’s younger brothers found the stash of bottles in the root cellar and downed every one. It was before my father’s drinking days, so it wasn’t a tragedy for him, but Mom said my grandfather was ready to take his horsewhip to their hides.
Even after I’d left for university, I’d sometimes seek out the dress on my visits home. I was relieved to find it in its old spot, unchanged and darkly beautiful. Running my hands over the spill of velvet in the closet, I pictured the guests shoulder to shoulder, wanting to brush against the bride. My mother was so gorgeous in the pictures, and I hoped she knew it for that one autumn day, because I never heard my dad or anyone but me call her pretty. Though she’d smile when I told her she was a knockout in a new pair of slacks she’d bought for curling or a Christmas sweater, I knew she didn’t believe me. I thought about my father during that long-ago reception, resting his arm around her shoulders, feeling the texture of the cloth, and later sliding his hands over the rich smoothness of her hips and down her legs. The velvet, the colour of pooled ink, must have drawn the moonlight into its folds and dewlaps as it lay draped on a chair by the bed, the couple in one another’s arms, their lives together stretching in front of them full of promise like the gifts they’d unwrapped earlier that day, bright with newness and good cheer in that hand-me-down, make-do time of drought and failure.
The morning after their wedding night, Mom had told me, she shook the dust out of the bedding and hung her dress on a wooden hanger on one of the nails pounded into the wall. She then caught a ride with her older brother to Success to buy a big bottle of formaldehyde from the general store. Back at her new home, in the biggest pot she could find—probably the roaster used to cook the turkey for the reception—she boiled the formaldehyde for hours on the stove. The night before, the shack had been jumping with bedbugs. The deadly home remedy killed the biting insects, and for the next few days, she and my father had to deal only with the dozens of mice that left their small hard droppings on the plates and cookie sheets and chewed the doilies Mom had embroidered for her scanty trousseau.
The velvet must have soaked up the funeral-home scent; it would have overpowered whatever perfume my mother’s neck and shoulders had brushed into the fabric. By the time I buried my face in its softness, that mortuary odour was gone, and the dress had taken on the more delicate smells of time passing: traces of meals cooked on wood stoves and then electric; the musty closeness of mothballs; lilacs bursting with fragrance in the front yard; years of dust from the fields, the gravel roads and the backyard plots of potatoes. No female scent was left from the hours the dress had graced my mother’s body, no smell of my father’s sun-brown hands remained in the fabric, no whiff of the physical love that made my brother and then made me. I returned to the dress in the back of the closet not for its smell but for its texture, for the midnight opulence of its blue. It held the memory of my mother’s young beauty, her hopeful smile in the photographs, her small flight into a life that had to be better than those hard years on the farm.
When she tried the dress on in the store, my mother told me, it was the first time she’d seen herself in a full-length mirror. Turning to the left, then the right, she stood on her toes and looked over her shoulder at the waterfall of velvet spilling down her back, almost touching the floor. She said it was like something from the movies, the watery swirl of Ginger Rogers’ hem as she dipped and spun for Fred Astaire.
LIKE MY MOTHER, I was twenty when I married for the first time. By then, 1968, no bride wore anything but white. Mom and I looked for my bridal gown at the two stores in town that sold them, Christie Grant’s and Yvonne’s Ladies Wear. Yvonne’s was considered an upscale place. When I was twelve, I’d gone there to buy Mom something for Christmas, with money I’d saved from working at the swimming pool. The owner, watching me slide the hangers along the racks to look at blouses, announced in a voice everyone could hear that I didn’t belong there and should leave. I hadn’t been back since.
The dress we chose was a sleeveless, straight gown with a princess waist and a long matching jacket. I thought it elegant in its simplicity, no lace, beads or ruffles. Its material was satin-like and puckered, like the surface of a pool dimpled with raindrops. Although my fiancé and I were paying for our small, no-frills wedding, like her mother my mom insisted on buying my dress. She didn’t have eggs or cream to sell; she used money she’d saved from cleaning houses.
Though Mom was a spit-and-polish housekeeper, no one could make the cellar in our rented house on Herbert Street look clean, and she worried about my white dress brushing the steps and floor every time I needed the toilet. She’d arranged for me to use the Crawfords’ house to change into my finery. Two hours before the wedding, I walked across the street with my dress, wrapped in tissue, draped over my arm. Mr. and Mrs. Crawford met me at the door as if I were an honoured guest. I felt comfortable with them, though my mother had mixed feelings. Ross was a hearty, friendly man, Berta was hard-working and unassuming, and though they had three daughters of their own, they’d helped me with tuition for my first year at university. They’d done it anonymously, through the school principal, but Ross soon told my mom they’d been my benefactors, lending me the $200 she didn’t have. Over the years we lived across from them, they’d watched the effects of my father’s drinking on Mom and me. They’d followed my high school successes in the local paper, gone to my school plays and, without saying so, concluded I was capable of rising above my station.
As landlords, the Crawfords weren’t as generous. When Mom asked them to pay for a gallon of paint so she could brighten up the kitchen, or suggested that a light be installed in the cellar stairwell because she was afraid one of us would stumble in the dark and fall, they expressed anger at her temerity and refused. They ignored the gaps in the fence around the yard, the collapse of the front steps, the thinness of the insulation. It was so cold inside the house that the northern wall in my bedroom was furred with frost on winter mornings.
Standing on the pale carpet in the Crawfords’ upstairs guest room, I stared at my tall, chic self in the mirror on the closet door. The straight lines of my dress and the bun on top of my head that tamed my curls added inches to my five-foot-three frame. The dress was pristine and cool, as if the fabric had been cut from newly fallen snow. I wore white satin shoes and the string of cultured pearls my fiancé had given me the night before. He was a working-class kid like me, and I knew he’d chosen the most refined thing he could imagine. They’d come in a black velvet box shaped like a flattened scallop shell, and a tiny diamond chip shone in the centre of the clasp.
No one looking at me would have said I didn’t belong in this fancy house, this large, sun-filled room with its tulle curtains and pale-yellow bedspread with four, not two, pillows, an abundance I’d never seen. I floated pearled, pale and untouchable down the hall to the gleaming bathroom, turned a glass doorknob and stood in front of the three-sided mirror above the sink. There were matching white towels and washcloths by the tub and pink roses from the garden on the counter. The soap in its own little dish was shaped like a fully opened rose. I knew Mrs. Crawford had done her best to make her house pretty on my wedding day. I bent to smell the blossoms. For reasons I didn’t understand, the beauty made me feel like weeping, as if I’d inhaled the thorns, not the perfume. I was trying so hard to escape who I was and where I’d come from, to love the man I’d chosen with all my heart. I wanted to fit in, to do what all my friends were doing, to be a “good girl,” not a fallen one.
One reason I was getting married was to break my maidenly state: I was tired of saying “no.” My mother was relieved. She wouldn’t have to worry about an unwed daughter’s pregnancy any more, and she could see that the honour-roll young man I’d met at university had two things strongly in his favour: he wasn’t a drinker, and he had a steady job teaching high school math and physics.
Walking down the aisle in my white gown, I knew I was doing something wrong, something untrue to myself, though I couldn’t have said who that self was or would turn out to be. My husband was a good man, and it would take me ten years to learn the last thing I wanted then was goodness. I wanted sparks and conflagration. I wanted to strike big wooden matches and burn my fingers. If I’d bought a dress to leave that marriage, it would have been bright red with a wide skirt that swished and swirled as I strode away.
Sometime in my late twenties, I called to ask Mom if I could wear her dress to an art gallery opening. She’d cut it up for cushion covers, she told me. I was stunned, even more so when I saw the cushions. She hadn’t taken the time to sew a smooth seam in the covers, and rather than buy proper stuffing she’d bent and folded two old pillows into the corners. The cushions were lumpy and their colour didn’t match anything in the room. Was she simply being thrifty? Was she sick of her dress and what it stood for?
I was never able to remember what I did with my own wedding dress. Surely I didn’t leave it behind in the blue metal trunk Mom bought me when I turned eighteen and moved from home to go to university. Surely it didn’t sit in the basement of the house I’d owned with my husband, waiting for him and his new wife to find it. He’d met her at the high school where he and I both once worked. She taught home economics and designed and sewed her gown by hand. People said it was a masterpiece, nothing like it in the stores.
My husband did one thing that made my parents partly understand why I’d had to leave him. In August, ten summers after that day in the Crawford guest room, I packed up my car and headed down the road to Winnipeg to be with Patrick, the man I’d later marry. At the end of September, my parents drove out to the acreage where my first husband still lived. They’d come to dig up the potatoes we’d let them plant that spring. It was a huge plot of earth, and as they pulled up to it in their car, they saw that the whole thing had been rototilled, the potatoes split into small pieces by the spinning blades. There was nothing left to harvest. For two farm people who’d survived the years of drought, there couldn’t have been a surer sign of bad character.
If it’s true that our spirits exist pre-birth in some kind of ether, looking down, I’m sure I chose my mother when I saw her in that dress, the material so plush it briefly held the strokes of fingers. In spite of the harshness of the setting, the failed crops and dust, I picked the prairies as my home because she lived there; I opened my eyes to the startling light pouring around her as she stood on the church’s top step. Just before she walked through the door to stand by my father, did she look up and meet my gaze? Did she sense me then and draw me to her? From the day of her wedding, I waited for my time to live inside her, the velvet she had chosen the same colour as the dark water that would hold me ten years later in her womb.