If white is the color of, if not virginity, at least tradition, what does scarlet stand for? Nell Freudenberger said yes to the dress that felt not like the costume for some age-old role—but like being hersel
Courtship is
famously bad preparation for marriage. But shopping for a wedding dress is good
preparation for a wedding, in that the fantasy in your head is very unlikely to
occur just as you imagine it. When I got engaged, I had in the back of my mind
an afternoon spent in elegant Manhattan bridal salons, trying on breathtaking
gowns while my mother and sister gasped, exclaimed, and perhaps dabbed their
eyes with tissues. Afterward we would enjoy lunch at an uptown sidewalk café. I
hate shopping, and the relationship between my mother and sister is delicate at
best, but still the idea persisted—part of a general wedding fantasy that had
probably been percolating since I was five years old.
At about
that age, I can remember playing dress-up in my mother’s wedding gown: a purple
taffeta mini dress with a chiffon overlay and a stiff Elizabethan collar, made
for her by the costume designer at the repertory theater where my father was
directing at the time. On me, the dress fell to the floor, and with its purple
satin sash and appliquéd floral design, it was perfect for playing princess or
fairy, if not exactly right for “bride.”
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My mother described this dress to the young sales girls on
the day we started shopping for my dress, adding the joking caveat: “It was the
'70s.” The salesgirls nodded politely; if they knew the decade, it was from the
recent finale of That ’70s Show. My mother had
married before, in a long white dress at age 22; the marriage had lasted only a
year and a half. The purple dress was meant to be dramatic, fun, and, most of
all, different from what had come before, like the decade of its creation. By
the time I started searching for a dress for myself, though, it looked
temporary and a little outlandish. My mother and sister and I visited three
bridal salons that day—classic establishments where I climbed onto wooden boxes
in dress after dress, expecting to be transformed.
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“It’s a
pretty dress,” my mother would say. “But I’m not sure it does anything for
you.” Or: “I think you could do better.” Every time she offered one of these
assessments, my sister rolled her eyes and silently mouthed: “I love it.” But
my mother was right: White isn’t my color, and with my basically straight
figure (breastless, waistless, hipless), most of them were unflattering. We
didn’t find a dress that day, and if we went out to lunch, I have succeeded in
erasing it from my memory.
Like many
men and women of my generation, who are as likely to have divorced parents as
not,
I was terrified of marriage.
My husband
and I talked about our parents’ divorces on our first date: Both marriages had
been tumultuous, and the divorces that concluded them were drawn-out and messy.
Talking about them was easy, though, and oddly romantic. The upside to watching
the marriage you know best blow up is that the pitfalls seem tragically clear;
the downside is that you know exactly how hard it is to avoid them.
About a year
after we first met, I broke up with him without warning and then spent the next
24 hours crying about it. When my best friend asked why I’d done it, I said I
was afraid I was wasting time—that he wasn’t the person I was going to marry.
Looking back, I think it was probably the opposite: I was afraid because I knew
he was. The next morning I appeared at his door at 6:30 a.m., begging for
forgiveness with lilacs and bagels.
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