The Feel of Steel (25 page)

Arrayed for the Bridal

A
lthough I have been married three times, I have never been ‘a bride'. What –
me
, in a big white dress? In a
veil
? The closest I ever got to the fantasy was back in the eighties, when I used to admire the white gypsophila crowns that a certain society woman wore to parties: I drew a curious satisfaction from their ethereal, circular, brow-pressing beauty. Twenty years later all that's left is the frisson I get from the coronet shape that salad leaves briefly take when I tip them out of the whizzer on to a tea towel.

But I never tire of hearing my friend Vanessa Lucas, the dress-maker, talk about a famous bridal salon where she works part-time, as a fitter of made-to-measure wedding gowns. She is the most composed person I know, yet in her kitchen, as she pours cups of delicate lemongrass tea, she tells me stories of frenzied female
melodrama that make my hair stand on end: domineering mothers, frantic daughters, sobs and swoonings, attacks of cold-blooded hauteur, savage quarrels, and sudden flourishes of glory.

‘The deadline,' says Vanessa. ‘The deadline is the worst. Then the whiteness, that you have to keep clean. And the bigness.'

For the bridal gowns are
big
. They are stored, between fittings, in large, loose bags of washed cotton. To carry one of these creations on its hanger, a woman has to walk with both arms extended vertical above her head and the bagged gown sweeping down along her torso and legs. Once, says Vanessa, a young fitter in the early stages of pregnancy carried a gown from the workroom to the fitting room: such was the weight of it that she began to bleed.

Lately Vanessa has been replacing another fitter who is on leave with a damaged shoulder. ‘They send me helpers from sales,' she says, ‘but the young girls can't do the fitting. Physically, they can't. You have to get the seam on an angle – you have to drive glass-headed pins through twenty layers of fabric. Young, thin girls find that really hard to do. Then they stab their finger and have to run off to get a bandaid – because you can't
bleed
on the dress.'

Blood! On all that whiteness? How appalling – how fabulous! The only thing, apart from chemicals, that will get blood out of the fabric is the saliva of the person whose blood has been spilt. These fragments of bridal lore Vanessa lets drop in passing, with
a casual little laugh. They send a fairy thrill right through me.

She leads me into the salon the back way, off a bluestone lane, up a step and straight into the workroom. It's a hot day and, though a cooler is blasting, the air under the silver ceiling insulation is thick and dry. Half a dozen women bend over sewing machines.
Bzzz
,
bzzzzz
,
bzzz
, they go, in their stabbing rhythm. Bare padded models stand about without heads. A woman at an ironing board is carefully pressing a pink strapless dress.

‘See?' says Vanessa, picking up from the work bench a stiff under-bodice as delicate as a fish skeleton. ‘This is the secret of everything. The boning. That's what holds it all up.'

My God. There are
corsets
under those dresses. They practically wear
stays
.

Vanessa herself is wearing black close-cut pants and top, with soft-soled flat boots: comfortable clothes for an afternoon of standing, crouching and crawling. Her offsider Barbara, a woman with thick fair hair and vestigial German speech patterns, is also dressed completely in black. It's a rule of the house, but there is something archetypal about it: they are handmaidens, attendants, dignified women in their forties who will efface their own femininity to enhance that of the bride.

The brides-to-be turn up one by one, in street clothes, carrying their wedding shoes in white cardboard boxes.

The first is Sally, a nurse. She is on night duty at Footscray Hospital, and is so tired today that she is nauseated and dizzy. She is accompanied into the fitting room by her matron of honour. Outside the closed calico curtains, on a small sofa, sit Sally's mother and sister, waiting humbly in silence.

Sally takes her shoes out of their box. They are chisel-toed, patent leather sling-backs, a luscious deep crimson.

‘When I told the girl in the shop that I wanted to wear red shoes at my wedding,' says Sally, ‘she said, “You can't do that!” And I said, “Watch me.” '

Without embarrassment, she strips to her knickers, drops her marmoreal bosom into a brand-new strapless bra, and slips her feet into the gleaming shoes. She stands facing the mirrored wall, all but naked before strangers, unfazed by her own reflection, half smiling through a haze of fatigue, waiting for her gown. Here it comes, cream silk faille, swung off its hanger and borne across the forearms of a tiny black-frocked emissary from the workroom.

Vanessa and Barbara pour the dress over and around the bride, and zip it up behind. Folds drape in a diagonal cluster from bosom to hip, like something from classical Greece. The two fitters are down on their knees and elbows, bottoms in the air, foreheads cut skimming the floor. With pins they level the under-layer, then they demonstrate to Sally's friend how to swag up the mass of fabric behind her into a low bustle, so she can walk and
dance. Sally's head with its dark, loose French roll rises serene above all this ant-like activity. She is impassive, floating in the stillness of fatigue.

When asked, she produces briskly from her bag a short net veil. ‘It was my girlfriend's,' she says in her pleasant, reasonable voice. ‘It's been sitting screwed up in a plastic bag for three years.'

Barbara reaches up to dig the comb of the veil into Sally's hair, and fluffs out the bunched net into an explosion of white around her bare shoulders. (What is this lump in my throat?)

‘Open the curtain for my Mum,' says Sally. ‘If she wants to cry she should cry now.'

The curtains are swept back. The mother and the sister lean forward. Sally turns to them and quietly shows herself. They gaze up at her from the sofa, smiling, smiling. No one speaks, or cries, but they look emotional, somehow.

Upstairs in the hot workroom, an emergency: some yellow marks have been found on the back of the next bride's dress. If drycleaning won't get them out, they'll have to unpick and replace the whole panel. I am impressed by the deep seriousness of the discussion. Squint and stare as I might, I can't see a stain or discolouration of any kind.

One of the women says, ‘Do you have a little spare
piece of the satin? Just a piece? A scrap? Put a bit of oil on it from the can. Just a touch.'

‘Julie's the expert with marks,' Vanessa whispers in my ear. ‘She's very
brave
.'

A small group has gathered round the gown on the ironing board. Julie begins to scrub at the fabric with something smelly out of a tin. It's unbearable, the intensity of their focus on a stain I still can't see. I bolt down the stairs to the reception area.

Everything in sight is swathed in pale cloth. Rows of diaphanous samples – ‘Ava', ‘Bijou', ‘Marissa', ‘Greta' – hang on wheeled metal racks. The very air feels feminine. ‘We're having two layers,' a woman is murmuring on the phone at the reception desk. ‘Watermelon, and amethyst. 'Cause she's got a tiny waistline and beautiful skin.' Somebody behind a curtain utters a soft, high-pitched laugh.

I pass a bride and her mother bowed over a coffee table, heads together, locked in conference about beading. They are utterly absorbed in their aesthetic dilemma, but glance up at me with dreamy smiles, their eyes lost in fantasy. They have wee high-pitched voices that issue from the very fronts of their mouths. The beads strewn before them on the fabric are minute, like silver seeds.

I become aware that the whole time I've been in the building, discreet music has been playing: no male voices, only women singing, or orchestras, quiet bands, string quartets. This salon is a shrine, a temple devoted to weddings, but it's got nothing to do with marriage. Men have no existence here. They are completely irrelevant –
barely even referred to. I'm starting to choke, to drown in softness and draperies and infinitesimal detail. If I were a smoker, I'd stagger out on to the street right now and light up.