The Aquamarine Dream

“This is the dress I want you wearing tonight,” he tells me holding up the aquamarine halter dress. “I want everyone jealous of me.”

I blush and roll my eyes to hide my pleasure at the compliment. “But I don’t even know what to pack!” I exclaim to him. He laughs at my mock frenzy.

“Don’t worry about nothing. It’s two days. I took care of everything for you,” and with that he embraces me, pulling me against the chest. The slow roll of warmth finally crashes and I admit I am giddy that this wonderful, wonderful man has bothered to go through the trouble of taking someone as dull and average as me away for the weekend. I’ve heard other women gush over these types of things their men did for them on occasion and quite frankly always assumed they were lying. I mean, I had never had a boyfriend who could even muster the THOUGHT of taking me away for the weekend, let along actually doing it for me.

I shift through the rack of dresses at the Goodwill in an attempt to find the culprit of this bogus and clichéd story. The rambling gets louder, something about us holding hands in the car and singing along, badly, to one hit wonders from the early 90’s, when I snatch the offender from the rack.

“Hello!” coos the aquamarine halter top dress.

“Actually, you are more of a turquoise,” I flatly tell the dress.

“But you still loved me at first sight!” the dress exclaims and as I hold it up for inspection.
The dress is right, of course, I do love it at first sight even if it looks like it may be a bit complicated to figure out how to put on. Also it looks like I would need to grow several inches and develop some curves to not be completely engulfed in the flowy material. I cock my head to consider it.

“He will never be able to resist you in this,” the dress whispers to me coyly. “He’ll barely be able to contain himself as you sip wine from across the table, look at him shyly from between your thick and luscious lashes. Did I mention the restaurant is expensive? As in, reservation required.”

“We both know this is a lie,” I haughtily whisper to the dress. “He’s a fucking junkie and I’m pretty sure he’s banging his roommate. Even if he had the extra money he sure as shit isn’t spending it on a weekend getaway and a reservation.”

“Well not with that attitude!” the dress pouts. “With me, he’ll change.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I mumble.

“But what if it does?”

The dress and I are at a standstill, glaring at each other under the hard, fluorescent lights and day time geriatric shoppers, meandering around us with carts filled with chipped vases and faded throw pillows.

“I’m only $6.00,” the dress urges. “What’s the harm in trying me on?”

I am sold and so, in baggy sweatpants and an oversized hoodie, most likely my brothers, the TURQUOISE dress and I make our way through the sprawling aisles of used garments, cast off wedding dresses (how bad must the marriage have been to donate a wedding dress to Goodwill?) and dirty children’s boots to the dressing rooms; dark 3 by 3 foot spaces partitioned off with a curtain the colour of mold.

I hang the dress and ignore it as it hums a little ditty, removing my clothing and avoiding my reflection in the foggy mirror.

“Don’t forget the bra!” the dress sings from the hook. “You’ll lose the full effect if you don’t lose the bra!”

“Bossy bitch,” I mutter as I remove my dingy bra, wire poking out the bottom. I gently remove the dress from the hanger and pull it over my head.

I am in the Waldorf Astoria as soon as I pull this dress over my head and smooth it over my body. There is a base layer that is form-fitting and a solid blue, softened by the translucent material that overlays it. It elongates my neck and my eye follows the soft curve from the base of my neck to the gentle slope of my shoulders. Did my…did my acne clear up wearing this dress? I swear my skin looks clearer and ; the opposite of scarred, red from my rosacea, with a greenish tint due to the olive skin tone my Italian porcelain heritage has offered me.

“You’ve made my tits bigger,” I tell the dress in awe, looking at the soft cleft of cleavage I didn’t even think was possible.

“And your ass too!” the frock asserts as I do a slow spin, stopping to gaze upon my profile in admiration. The dress is correct, of course, my ass does look bigger or at the least seems to sit higher and perkier on my otherwise petite and stick figure frame. I was small and had always been; the one in the front row of all school pictures and the last girl to need a bra in high school. I referred to my body as a non-body. Larger women often remarked that I could wear anything I wanted and get away with it and while that was true it didn’t matter what I wore; I was never noticed for it. Of course, I had never worn this dress until now. The dress was right, my life could probably change because of it.

I parted with my six dollars at the register and the dress and I went home together. As I opened the closet in the downstairs bedroom of my mom’s house I could catch the other bits of conversation from all the other garments of clothing who had tricked me with promises and scenarios of a better life if only I would try them on and bring them home with me.

“I’m still waiting for that underground sex club in Brooklyn,” the leather studded black pants snarled at me as I look for an appropriate hanger for the tourqious…i’m sorry, Aquamarine dress to live on.

“Well, we are going on a girls only trip to wine country this spring!” the pastel pink flared dress purrs from the corner.

“She hasn’t even bought shoes that match you yet!” the navy blue, A-Line Dress snaps from somewhere inside the depths of my closet. “She is going to wear me to that corporate office party where she ends up meeting her future husband who is on the fast track to climbing the corporate ladder! Can’t you see how beautiful their children are going to look? Oh, and the Christmas cards!” the A-Line dress sighs.

“Girls,” I scold, closing the closet door on them and silencing them with the dark and musk of the closet. I can hear them tittering still in there as I kick off my shoes, reminding me of all the possibilities, the life I COULD have, the potential I COULD showcase if only I would finally wear them outside the confines of my bedroom. But I never would wear these items outside the confines of these bedrooms. All the COULD haves they promised me where things I knew, deep down in the corridors of my mind I dare not really wander, sticking a toe into the swirling fog of those hallways before running back out again; were things that NEVER WOULD BE.

Three years later I will move from my mom’s house and into my own apartment with an alcoholic boyfriend with a fondness for cocaine that would regularly hit me lest I express my displeasure over the drugs, lack of job and constant run-ins with the law and these daydream garments would be transferred from one closet to another, one whose door regularly came off the track and that I would finally just lean up against the opposite bedroom wall, ignoring that this attic apartment was decaying around me.

One evening the boyfriend is not home and most likely will not be for hours when I hear my name being whispered from the bedroom. I peak around the corner from the doorway and I immediately see IT, that two toned aquamarine dress who had, years earlier, promised me a surprise weekend get away and a fancy dinner from a guy who never even existed within my orbit.

“What?” I ask the dress crossly.

“I’m lonely,” the dress whines. “Please just put me on once. Do a twirl in the mirror. I want to play pretend again! I miss you. You aren’t even doing anything right now anyway.”

“Fine,” I groan and pull her from the closet. I hear a chorus of protests from the closet though the Navy Blue dress is suspiciously quiet. I suspect she knows that corporate office party where I meet my ambitious and handsome husband will never come to fruition and thus she has nothing to say to me. That’s fine because I have nothing to say to her either.

“Do you think today I can finally go outside?” the dress hesitantly asks.
The dress and I are both quiet and, i think, a little sad as I remove my clothing and slide the dress over my body. We study each other in the mirror. I am still just as beautiful in it as I was years earlier when I first found her at the Goodwill but now it just feels like we are going through the motions, an adult playing dress up like a child for a life she never was going to have and who was afraid to even continue wishing for it.

“You know,” the dress says tentatively as I sway a bit in the mirror, hypnotized by the gauzy material floating around my ankles, “you can always leave him. We still can have that weekend.”

The dress is wrong though. I can’t leave him. People emotionally kill themselves trying to obtain better and this was a secret about the world I was fortunate to have discovered; not everyone would get to that level of “better” and so it wasted the effort to even try. The boyfriend before him had spent most of the relationship cheating on me behind my back with his much prettier ex girlfriend. And then there was the black out drunk night that had occurred with the boyfriend prior to him. No, this was not ideal but it still somehow felt better. Here, at the very least, I was maintaining.

The dress lashes out at me as I went about taking it off. “You are WEAK!” she berates me as I pull her over my head. “We had plans with each other! No wonder you are in this position, you keep letting it happen!”

“Nobody asked for your fucking opinion,” I roared back at the dress. “You aren’t even in the position to say shit. You weren’t even wanted. You were given away too!” and with that I hurled her back into the closet, behind the rows of high heels and jeweled sandals that had also promised me vacations, nights out at dive bars in Astoria, concerts in Philadelphia. All different shapes, sizes, styles of items for a life I yearned for and in the still of night lying in my bed daydreamed of. Memories, laughing, clear crisp evenings, camp fires, trips to the shore, hikes through the mountains in West Virgina, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Alaska where I would get to see the Northern Lights, Fire Island, pub crawls in Georgia; a million places, a million things I would get to see once and then never see again except for the moments I could close my eyes and recount my stories to co-workers or gas station attendants.

Then, if you had opened my closet you would think it was the closet of four or five different girls. I didn’t buy things because I necessarily wanted them. I bought things because it promised me a future. For a moment I was somebody else and at any given moment I could be ANYONE else just by slipping on a pair of pants or a wrap-around dress. I wasn’t a rape victim in my closet. I was a prom queen. I wasn’t drowning in student loan debt from a for-profit school that shut down shortly after I graduated. I was a high-powered something-or-other whose job title impressed people and who gave me a pension and full benefits. I wasn’t married to a man who fractured my face. I was married to a man whose eyes lit up when I came home from the day, who bragged about my cooking to coworkers on the construction site and who would come up behind me, squeeze my butt, kiss my neck and tell me he loved me. Changing my life had always felt too daunting and I was tired of Huffington Post articles and Oprah episodes featuring women who had move mountains to change their lives from drug addicts and domestic violence survivors to stay-at-home CEO’s of their self-made, multi million dollar business that had bagged adoring husbands and exactly 2.5 kids. Clothing and accessories took less energy and offered me a chance to calm my constantly mounting fears, anxieties, and disappoints and so I preferred to just spend an hour of the day secretly playing the part of a woman I desperately wanted to be.

I wish I could say I have long since abandoned this practice because I finally got that surprise weekend trip, girls outing to wine country and dungeon sex club in Brooklyn but in truth I only stopped doing it about a year and a half ago when I realized half the closet was being taken up by date night dresses for dates I was not being taken on. I removed much of these items and donated them back to the very place that had once begged me to take them home with me.

Recently I find myself in a Goodwill just to kill a rainy afternoon when I am beckoned to a discount rack by a sweater dress.

“I’m gray, your favourite color!” the sweater dress exclaims, elbowing a day-glo mumu and a sequined cocktail dress so I could get a better view.

“I have enough gray,” I say passing the dress. “Besides I’m just here to browse.”

“He won’t be able to keep his hands off you,” she presses on, desperately. “He…he…he’s going to propose to you in me! Please come back!”

I turn to her and laugh, aware there is a teen worker eyeing me suspiciously from the aisle over. “He moved out a week ago,” I chortle. “Trust me, that guy isn’t thinking about buying me a ring in this life time.” I walk away, giggling to myself over the sweater dresses silly predictions. I don’t believe in these things anymore. I rarely find myself thinking about them. I’m a single mom now, a welfare mom, working two jobs and struggling to provide as normal and as happy a life as I can for my two children. Daydreaming has become a luxury and now I wake up at 5:45 and hit the ground running, strict, regimented, resilient, quiet. My life isn’t easier now than it had been and I certainly never managed to make it to Alaska or New Orleans but it’s less scary now as well.

I leave the store without buying anything and get into my car. I sit there a moment and listen to the rain hit the windshield, hands in my lap and rubbing the jeans along my thighs, a nervous habit.

“Well,” my jeans sigh, “got all your coupons? Ready to hit the grocery store? I think grapes are on sale today.”

“Yep,” i respond back. I start the car and pull out, heading off to my mundane and normal, well deserved life.