The sales girl at the dress store in the mall pulled a plastic bag over the lacy ankle-length dress. “There,” she said, tying the plastic at the bottom. “That should keep the rain off it.” We both looked out at the March drizzle. It was 1980, ten months after the rape, one month before I would become a wife. The salesgirl didn’t know that the ivory-colored dress with its peasant-cap sleeves and empire waist was for my wedding.
I’d told Mom, “I’ll buy my dress.” I went alone to this store. This is what I needed in those days after the rape. Simple. No complications.
It wasn’t really a wedding dress at all.
Mom did most of the preparation: making the cake and the silk-flower bouquets, paying for the bridesmaids’ dresses, arranging the reception. In this way, she took care of me, and we had something to talk about because we couldn’t speak of the terrible things.
At my bridal shower a few weeks before the wedding, the tables were decorated with my chosen colors: peach and gray. I sat at the head table, Mom and my sister-in-law on one side of me, Leanne and Cris on the other. Cris kept track of the ribbons, and Leanne made a list of gifts.
Leanne’s first baby was due a few weeks after the wedding. First comes love, then comes marriage, soon comes Leanne with a baby carriage.
This was the straight and certain path of her plans. She didn’t make a big deal out of being pregnant. I don’t remember her even talking about it that much. But then, maybe I never asked.
Big things were happening in the world too: the Iran hostage crisis, the crash of an airliner in Chicago with 273 dead. A Unabomber and IRA bombs and armed robberies. More would happen. In a few months, exactly a year after the rape, Mount St. Helens would explode. The ash covering Oregon would be pushed away by snowplows, and fifty-seven dead would be mourned.
I hardly noticed any of it. My vision had tunneled. The mind, the body, helping me avoid knowing any more than I already knew of the exciting, the sudden, the different, the deadly.
I kept my head down and followed the only plans I had, as though trying to find my way in my sister’s footsteps.
Here was love. Here came marriage.
The women of Condon watched as I opened gifts wrapped in silver-and-white paper, mostly careful not to break the ribbon. That tradition of counting possible future children. It felt real and not real. I was there and not there. Bold and insecure, happy and sad.
This box held the Pfaltzgraff stoneware I’d registered for. Mixing bowls, towels, utensils. A dish made of cut glass from Aunt Lena.
I admired each item in an honoring of the giver. At the end of the unwrapping, I stood and thanked the women and told them of the wedding plans. They smiled back at me with their done hair and powdered faces, their love for this girl of their town.
There was no empty chair saved where Nana would have sat, smiling proudly at her college graduate girl about to get married. Death happens in a moment, and the space you took becomes invisible. Only memory holds you here.
At the end of the speech I thanked the hostesses, who were friends of Mom’s and the mothers of my friends. The women around the table clapped. This was standing up, this was carrying on.
Back in Condon a month later, on the day before the wedding, Mom and Leanne and Cris gathered around me in my old bedroom. I tried on the lacy dress for them.
“I love it,” Leanne said. “But what’re you going to wear on your head? You need something.”
“I don’t want anything fancy.” In that year, anything complicated overwhelmed me. Finding the dress, writing the thank-you notes for all those bridal shower gifts, this was all I could do.
Leanne’s voice, so like my own. “Jackie,” she said, “it’s your wedding. You should look like a bride!” She looked like a soon-to-be mother.
Mom snapped her fingers. “I know what you can wear.” She opened the closet door and pulled out a box. “This could be your ‘something old’ and ‘something borrowed.’” She held out the half-moon Juliet cap she wore when she married Dad.
Something of hers, something simple. I took it and put it on.
The cap had turned with time to an ivory that matched my dress.
“It’s perfect,” Mom said.
Leanne looked at me in the mirror. “You should wear some lipstick.” She handed me a tube from her purse.
I put it on and stepped back to see the length of me in the mirror. I looked like a bride.
“Pretty,” Cris said.
Mom’s reflection behind me in the mirror. She moved the cap a little more forward on my head. Her smile. It would be years before I knew the hidden ways she watched over me after I was raped. Worried about how much I exercised. How rigid I became about what I ate. Looked for what might be lurking under my insistent way of moving forward.
On my wedding day at the United Church of Christ, Dad and I stood next to each other at the entrance to the chapel. I held the fan bouquet of silk flowers Mom had made. I took his arm and leaned in to his smell of Old Spice and alcohol. He swayed. His lids drooped at half-mast, what my mother used to say to describe his drunken eyes.
We both looked straight ahead at my four-year-old niece Tawna doing her flower-girl walk down the aisle. The light in the chapel was a powdery gold from the frosted windows that went the length of the church.
“Are you ready for this?” Dad said.
The organist pumped the wedding march. I tugged Dad’s arm. “Yes,” I said. “We should go.”
Here comes the bride.
The people of Condon, our families, my few friends from Eugene, the minister, my sisters and sister-in-law in matching bridesmaid dresses, the groomsmen, and Sam looked toward us, me on Dad’s arm.
Sam watched me come to him. His smile was full of his love.
Behind him, behind the altar, a stained-glass Jesus filled the whole wall, bigger than life. Vivid reds and blues, a staff in one arm and a lamb in the other. That Jesus had been here through childhood Sundays spent in this church with my mother and brothers and sisters, before each of us, in turn, had gotten old enough to refuse.
At the altar, I let go of Dad and stood next to Sam. With a last look at Jesus, I felt the old ache of longing I used to have when I wished it were me holding that lamb. The tiny circles of wool. The weight of it in the curve of my arm.
Our reception at the Elks Lodge was like going to another place of worship: my father’s place. Low ceilings and dark corners, a room full of people with drinks and cigarettes in hand. It seemed as if all of Condon had come to celebrate my marriage. On one side of the room gifts were piled on a long table next to the wedding cake Mom had decorated with peach-colored roses and silver-foil leaves.
Next to me, Leanne smiled for a picture. When I look at the picture now, I can hardly tell she was only a few weeks away from giving birth. Some small women carry their first child so close and easy you can see why they gladly go on to a second. She was lean with a small mound of belly in the empire-waist dress. She looks happy. Even that far pregnant, she looks happier than me, the bride.
She talked between snaps of the camera. “You know Mom will treat you differently now that you’re married.”
I held my smile for another flash of bulb and talked out the corner of my mouth. “Really? How?”
“I don’t know. Like you’re a grown-up, I guess.”
That’s what I hoped for. To start my grown-up life.