Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (44 page)

You would think that when you’re shopping for your “dress of a lifetime,” bridal stores would bend over backwards to alleviate such agonies. Yet amazingly, many exclusive wedding boutiques will not even let you try on dresses in anything but their “stock size.” This means they hand you a sample dress in size 8, and you’re supposed to decide if you want it judging from the “idea” you get of yourself in it.

Any woman who is not built like a surfboard knows it’s impossible to gauge what a dress will look like without trying it on properly first. Big breasts or hips change the drape and distribution of material: you can’t select a style based on hypotheticals. The idea of paying thousands of dollars for a dress that I couldn’t even try on enraged me. I would have none of it.

My friends, I assumed, would understand this only too well. Most of my girlfriends had tales about shopping for bras and bathing suits that rivaled only “gym class stories” for their agony and pathos. Yet when I told them of my intention to walk down the aisle in red or black, they were apoplectic.

“Oh no,” Desa cried. “But you’ll never get to wear a wedding dress again in your life!”

“Try to think about how you’ll feel twenty years from now,” said Stefie. “Trust me. You don’t want to be like those people in the 60s who got married in hot pants and clogs and now feel like idiots whenever they open their wedding album.”

“Just try one on first before you reject it,” Lucy pleaded.

Grudgingly, I dragged myself to David’s Bridal, a chain store in a strip mall that subscribes to the revolutionary idea of actually stocking wedding dresses in different sizes so that women in different sizes can actually try them on. My plan was to simply confirm that ‘ I’d look ridiculous before heading up to a vintage clothing store in New York called Trash and Vaudeville to pick up something campy or punk.

I did everything all the wedding books instructed me not to. I arrived at David’s Bridal alone, without an appointment, and with absolutely no idea of what would look good on me, other than, perhaps, an enormous paper bag.

A saleslady, Annette, led me back to the dressing room and set me up in a cubby with the few, plain dresses I’d reluctantly selected. “Let me get you some foundation garments,” she called out. “What size bra do you wear?”

When I told her, the entire dressing room came to a standstill. Okay: so I have large breasts. That does happen to women, occasionally. But one of the mothers-of-the-brides trying on a suit stopped in mid-twirl before the mirror.

“OhmyGod.
That’s
your size?” she exclaimed, staring at me over the rim of her glasses. “If I were you, I would have surgery.”

I wish I could say this was the first time anyone ever said something so awful to me. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, women feel compelled to remark about my breasts all the time in dressing rooms. It’s another reason I hate shopping.

My first impulse, of course, was to reply, “I wish you would have surgery. Have someone sew your mouth shut.”

But instead, I said, “Really? You’d cut up your body just to fit into a dress? What’s wrong with you?” Then I whirled around, yanked the curtain shut across my cubicle in defiance—and burst into tears.

Annette, the saleslady, had seen the whole thing. When she came back into my area laden with plus-sized bustiers, I was weeping quietly and telling her that I was sick of feeling like a mutant and this is exactly why I didn’t want to shop for a wedding dress in the first place and what was wrong with a bride in a red plastic rain poncho anyway?

“There now,” Annette said, giving me a conspiratorial squeeze. “Don’t listen to that lady. Some people have no sense. We’re going to make you look beautiful.”

This seemed hard to believe, given that my face was now what might charitably be described as a mucus farm. But I leaned over the bustier (performing the old “drop ‘n’ prop” as I called it) while Annette hooked it across my back. Then I tried on the first dress.

Since the only white wedding gown I’d ever liked had been the one worn by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, I wriggled into a series of plain, spaghetti-strapped white columns. Unfortunately, as I quickly discovered, in order to look good in a dress like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s, you essentially had to be built like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Studying myself in variations of her dress, the only word that came to mind was “bratwurst.”

I tried on a beaded, silvery-satin sheath that made me look like a female impersonator, and another with a flouncy lace bolero jacket that made me look like a French prostitute on the Place Pigalle.

“Okay, that’s it,” I told Annette. “Hideousness confirmed. Visit over.”

“Hm,” said Annette, studying my figure and pretending not to have heard. “Let’s try something different. Just for variety’s sake.”

Then she hoisted me into a big, pouffy, ivory-satin dress by Oleg Cassini—a dress with a Battenberg lace train long enough to carpet a legion hall, a voluminous, sweeping skirt, beaded, sequined lace-capped sleeves, and a lace sweetheart neckline that revealed a dÉcolletage underneath. It was confectionary, princessy, glittering. It was exactly the type of dress that I had sworn on a stack of
Ms.
magazines that I would never, ever wear.

It looked spectacular on me.

My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions. It curved where I curved; it went in where I went in. It accentuated my height, it emphasized the smallness of my waist, it lengthened my neck, it lifted my breasts slightly and balanced them with my hips. Granted, it made breathing nearly impossible, but this was not because of the cut, but rather because I simply could not believe what I looked like.

When Annette sidled over to me and whispered coyly, “Would you like to try on a tiara with that?” a gurgle escaped from the back of my throat that sounded distinctly like “goo.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Come here,” she smiled, motioning to the three-way mirror in the center of the room. “Let’s get you on the pedestal, too.”

Flabbergasted, I climbed up on the pedestal, the dress fanning out around me. “Here we go,” said Annette, pinning the tiara to my head, then turning me toward my reflection.

I couldn’t help it. I almost started to weep. I looked beautiful. More beautiful than I had ever seen myself look in my entire life. I looked queenly, glorious, uncompromised. The dress swept around me as if I were a great work of art carved from marble, as if I had emerged from the ocean on a half-shell, heralded by angels.

For the next four hours, I stood in front of the mirror, zombielike, refusing to take off the dress. Occasionally, Annette would come over and check up on me, “How you doing up there? Still liking that dress, huh? Well, you just let me know if you need a glass of water or something.”

All around me, women came in, tried on dresses, twirled before the mirror, then left, while I stood there, catatonic in their midst.

“That girl by the mirror, is she all right?” I overheard one of the other customers whisper to Annette. “I don’t think she’s moved in over an hour.”

“Oh, she’s doing just fine,” Annette assured her with a chuckle. “Just a little bride shock, is all.”

What can I say? I was having a total ideological meltdown right there in the middle of David’s Bridal salon. Because this was not what I was supposed to look like. This was not who I was supposed to be. This dress was symbolic of everything I’d railed against, everything I feared and fought again. Putting it on hurtled me closer and closer to becoming Superbride, Susie Homemaker, Giant Mammary Mom.

I was supposed to be the Anti-Bride, goddamn it! I was not some insipid girlie-girl dolled up like a parade float. But in that dress, with the tiara, I was intoxicated with myself. I felt gorgeous, indomitable. And I loved it. And I hated myself for loving it. Yet I couldn’t stand to take it off.

And as I stood there, something else occurred to me: why did it take so long to have this experience? Every woman should have this experience—and not only
if or when
she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture.

When men shop at ordinary department stores, they are treated like brides all the time. I’ve watched a salesman literally get down on his knees in a dressing room to pin the cuffs on a pair of off-the-rack slacks Bob was trying on. I’ve seen salesmen fawn over my brother, adjusting the sleeves on a sports jacket. I’ve heard them tell my father, “Let me get you the single-breasted version. That will look better on you.”

Men’s stores seem determined to make every schmucky guy who walks through their doors feel catered to, powerful, supremely attractive. At the time that I was planning my wedding, in fact, a commercial for a popular menswear chain featured the owner assuring his customers, “You’re going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.”

When was the last time women heard that from a salesperson? Most clothing stores only inflame our insecurities and our sense of limitation. “If you have wide hips, don’t wear stripes,” we’re instructed. “Designers don’t make that in your size.” “At your age, you can no longer get away with a hemline like that.” Even the bridal boutiques, while telling women that this is “our special time,” implicitly punish anyone who can’t fit their sample size.

David’s Bridal, I thought. What a bizarrely feminist place: a froufrou heaven staffed by women dedicated to making sure that other women look astonishing. In the dressing room, I saw three-hundred-pound blondes, wiry black women, Asian brides with asymmetrical haircuts, voluptuous Hispanic girls, acne-splattered bridesmaids, birdlike middle-aged women saying, “So what if this will be husband Number Three? This time, I’m doing it right.” And every woman was treated like royalty. Yes, they have sizes 2 to 32. Yes, they have all price ranges. Yes, they will alter if for you. Yes, they will make you look beautiful. For you—
you,
my dear—are a goddess.

Shortly after 6:30 that evening, Annette came over to me. “Listen, I hate to do this to you, but we’re closing the store for the night.”

Panicked, I only then realized what I should have done hours before. Whipping out my cell phone, I started frantically calling my girlfriends and leaving incoherent messages on their answering machines, sounding, finally, like the hysterical five-year-old the bridal industry had been encouraging me to act like all along:

“Quick! It’s an emergency,” I cried. “I’m at David’s Bridal! And they put me in this dress! And then they put me on a pedestal! And then they put a tiara on my head! And now I want to stay this way for the rest of my life!”

Lucy called back almost immediately. “Put the saleslady on,” she commanded like a platoon leader. “I’m logging on to the David’s Bridal Web site.”

I handed Annette the phone. I heard her say, “Oleg Cassini. A-line. Keep scrolling down. Now click. That’s it, with the lacy train … oh, yes. It does look gorgeous on her. I should know. I’ve been watching her wear it for the past four hours.”

Eventually, with Lucy talking to me on the cell phone and Annette holding my hand in the dressing room, the two of them managed to coax me down off what I’d come to think of as “my” pedestal. Slowly, I changed back into my street clothes, but not before I’d put the dress on hold, called my mother, and arranged for the two of us to return the next day. You weren’t supposed to buy the first wedding dress you fell in love with, but the truth was, I doubted my mental health—or anyone else’s—could withstand another shopping trip.

That evening, I returned to Bob’s apartment as if a tragedy had occurred.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” he said with alarm.

“I found a wedding dress!” I sobbed, flinging myself down on his futon.

Bob looked at my heaving form on the bed before him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?”

“But it’s BIG. And WHITE. And LACY. AND I LOOK LIKE A BRIDE!” I cried.

“Okay. I think I’m missing something here,” he said. “I thought you were a bride.”

“Well, technically, yes, but I’m not supposed to LOOK like one! I’m supposed to be the Anti-Bride! I’m supposed to be a renegade. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE SUBVERSIVE,” I wailed.

Bob sat down beside me. “Honey,” he said after a moment. “Don’t take this the wrong way but: You? Dressed in a big, white, traditional wedding dress? If you ask me, that’s about as subversive as you can get.”

“Really?” I sniffled.

“If you want to shock people and defy all expectations,” he said, “frankly, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

I rolled over and gazed at him, tears streaking down my cheeks and pooling in my ears. My fiancÉ had an intense, brooding face, a landscape of complicated thought. That is, until he smiled. Then, his face became a circus marquee lighting up, boyish and gleeful, and you couldn’t help grinning back at it. Looking at him, I saw his profound goodness, his poignant strength, his refusal to be cowed by either convention or rebelliousness.

Decades earlier, on the afternoon that my mother and my father had announced they were engaged, both their families had inexplicably declared war on each other. Battles were pitched over who paid for liquor at the wedding, who paid for the flowers, who could invite an extra cousin. By the time my parents finally got married, an invisible line seemed to have been drawn down the center of the chapel. My mother’s family sat on one side in frigid silence, my father’s on the other. It was like a wedding with the Berlin Wall plunked down the middle of it. In the photographs, my poor parents look miserable. They were only kids at the time. Trying to build a life together on such a fractured foundation, in the face of such volcanic animosity, why, they’d hardly stood a chance.

The decision to pledge your life to someone is such an enormous leap of faith. You grab each other’s hand and jump, hoping you’ll manage to navigate together whatever life hurls at you. It’s crucial to be good to each other, to feel supported and endorsed.