5

My yellow dress was my favorite. It had frills and lace and a full skirt

that when I twirled would flair. Puffy sleeves, lined with satin, it nearly matched my hair.

It made me beautiful like the other girls, even though I didn’t have their ponytails and curls.

Nothing special, my yellow dress, it was a most happy, lucky thrift find.

I was five years old and it hung alone in my closet, the finest thing I had ever owned.

It disappeared in the spring with flames that engulfed our home.

We bounced around town for a month or two before we finally moved

into the toolshed, which Daddy said we “renovated.”

I argue now that was an overstatement.

My brother, sister, and I had to share a bedroom, but my sister was never there.

My brother, two years my senior, began taking my clothes off

and kissing me “like they do on the soap operas,” and I said ok.

I wanted him to be my friend and invite me to play with him and the boys up the street.

It felt strange and shame came from some place I couldn’t find,

the boy up the street put his private in mine.

Boys will be boys, Mama said.

I forgot how to say no when I was eight years old.

​

10

I asked for a white dress, reminiscent of the yellow one, and Mama said she would look.

She returned from rummaging with a dull, sagging gown, eggshell in color with lazy lace

and no flair. I crinkled my nose and watched the pride in her eyes melt away.

“I thought it was pretty,” she said, disguising her sadness as if it were feigned.

Grandma said wasn’t I ashamed.

I was.

 

17

My senior prom dress was lavender with spaghetti straps and slightly too tight.

Mama picked it out. It wasn’t the type of dress I would have picked, but I liked it.

She had a classic fashion sense.

Perhaps I would have loved the lazy eggshell gown.

I would tell her if I could that I should have tried it on,

but the time for recompense was twenty years ago.

My prom dress cost three hundred fifty dollars and had a full ballroom skirt with mesh overlay

At seventeen, I felt its splendor. Sequins and beads squeezed my waist, a treat for my date.

He gave me my first orgasm that winter.

 

19

The dress in which Mama was buried had a background of cream

with florals of purple and pink. The skirt was a matching pink, I think.

She wore it when my sister married, along with lipstick, eyeshadow and rouge,

something she didn’t often do.

We learned the day before her funeral that dead people don’t wear shoes,

and a mortician will give you side eye if you bring them.

Her nail polish was the autumn chestnut she wore most days

chipped at the ends, on fingertips covered in ink.

She looked peculiar without her glasses, but she didn’t need them.

They were broken and old. When she was alive, they balanced

between her nose and one ear, held together with clear tape until it wouldn’t hold.

I did not recognize her sacrifice. Otherwise, I would have been more kind.

 

20

Dress blues for female Marines are not actually blue.

They are black, a-line skirts extending below the knee, to me, inoperative.

Trousers are more practical and more tactical, but women bleed so there’s no need

for walking mattresses in the fleet.

Days before my mother died, I was in a hurry to speak to the Girl Scouts.

I carried my uniform in my left hand - the right hand is for saluting -

and she said she couldn’t wait to see me in it.

While away at training a few months before, I called her and asked,

would I go to hell and what if I was pregnant?

On the golf course, I lost my real virginity to a redhead who winked at me.

She said keep my pants on. I told her I had a dream she was on death row -

for what, I did not know -and no one believed me that she was innocent.

She laughed and said she would see me when I got home.

I wore my dress blues to her funeral. An American flag billowed behind the trees.

Marine Corps convention says to salute in uniform, but I didn’t. The day wasn’t about me.

 

21

The first wedding dress I bought cost one thousand, five hundred dollars.

It was Victorian style, off the shoulder with bell sleeves,

ivory lace and gold beads. But my groom-to-be was already married.

He kissed me on a park bench in Gladstone and told me he didn’t want his wife.

I was new and exciting, and he had been hiding his crush on me for the sake of fidelity.

I should have run, but a plain girl with funny teeth and thick thighs

might need to compromise her morals to avoid ending up alone.

His wife met someone new, so I helped him move.

Homewrecker.

“No” was a word I could not say, even when I knew it was wrong.

I could not find the spine to leave, so I found another way.

I began to eye the fat guy who lived in the barracks down the hall. He was single,

a drummer from Jersey. When I fucked him, the married guy called me a whore.

Relieved he never gave me a ring, I sold the gown, unworn, for thirty dollars plus shipping.

 

24

I got married the first time in a strapless dress.

Hot pink silk, cleavage spilling like milk

through the low V cut between my breasts.

V for Vegas, the Little White Wedding Chapel. Our witness ditched us for an escort,

but the bar tender gave us wine glasses so we could toast, at most, a three-week courtship.

We met in California at the beginning of my second tour in the Corps.

He was outgoing, nothing like me. He put his hands down my bathing suit at a pool party.

I don’t remember what happened next, but he brought me my bra the next morning.

On January 6, we marched the Tournament of Roses Parade in freezing rain

and snuck away to sin city.

I drank my disgust away that night with cheap bar wine

half dressed in pink silk, lying half naked on a musty hotel room bed.

 

25

We brought our daughter home in a tiny pink dress, much like the yellow dress of my childhood.

It had frills and lace, a satin sash, tiny pink socks and a headband to match.

That was the last time I dressed a newborn that way. What sense did it make?

She was floppy and limp, her head slumped to the right.

She whaled and then whimpered, so I whispered our sunshine lullaby.

The dog shat on the floor before we got home, which made my husband sick.

Could I take care of it?

On my hands and knees,

episiotomy splitting, hemorrhoids flaring, I scrubbed it clean.

 

30

My next wedding dress was a halter style with a sheer collar for four hundred fifty dollars.

It was white, though with two children I was clearly not a virgin.

Wedding dresses have not always been white,

and the color of a wedding dress has not always signified the purity of the bride.

My groom was chubby and stoic with remnants of handsomeness that had long escaped him.

He had the stale confidence of a soldier, once lean and strong,

And a gap between his two front teeth, stained with nicotine.

His gaze darted back and forth with a fervor seen in the fog of war.

He looked his age, a shell of his fleeted glory days. We met at Alcoholics Anonymous.

Soon, we were monogamous, and he said he wouldn’t drink

but he did. Even when I thought he was sober,

empty bottles hid in the cabinet, situated behind the wood that separated the left from the right.

His words were harsh. He threw things and hit my son.

I got brave a few times and said I would leave, but each time

he said he would steal the kids or take his own life. I didn’t want to be his wife

but the choice wasn’t mine.

We got married in front of a cabin downtown; the big ceremony would be later.

I wore a white fit-and-flare dress with orange flowers and a matching cardigan.

His mother brought a cake and a bouquet.

Things got hard again the night I walked toward the door with our daughter in my arms,

and drunk, he tried to rip her away.

Unable to break loose, I stayed unwillingly, but there was one more thing I hadn’t tried.

On the eve of the ceremony, I spent the night with a photographer.

No dignity left to save, on top of a man with a girl’s name, I came like a freight train.

It shouldn’t be the fond memory that it is, but sex had been an obligation,

a chore, a penance for imaginary sins for which I could not atone.

For once, I was in control. In making a choice, I found

an erotic sense of power where I was otherwise powerless.

I drove home and delivered the news. Again, I was a whore.

The divorce took six months. I gave the gown away.

 

34

Her dress was gold, sleeveless, and sparkled under the porch light,

where we smoked and drank on New Year’s Eve,

and she came with the man I thought I was seeing.

He liked me, he said. We slept together and flirted after I blurted out my feelings. Wine is a

conversation starter for people who are shy. He and I both were.

He hosted me and ghosted me but his breadcrumbs were plentiful.

He said he was a mess, busy with school and this and that.

When they arrived she skipped up the steps and he followed,

a full two feet behind her.

I went there in hopes of a romantic reunion, and he spoke to me

as if we had never caressed each other’s bodies.

I left there with rage for him and his girl, who was half his age.

On the drive home, I vomited in the car.

He haunted my dreams for nearly a year. I went back to the guy who hit my son.

Loneliness was too much, and I was weak from a heart nonsensically broken.

I believed what I wanted to be true, that he was sorry.

I left one last time. When he shoved me against the bar, he said I was in his way.

The girl in the gold dress left and my ghost became my guest.

A single message and I got my reunion,

though romance was lost on the broken. Two lonely hearts in bed again.

 

37

My fourth wedding dress was also a halter style for five hundred twenty-five dollars.

It was cut low in front. At six weeks pregnant, my breasts were fuller than when I bought it,

so they stretched the fabric and I had to tuck them back in periodically.

My groom looked happy and handsome. During the reception,

he sang some old songs and danced around with his father.

It was the happiest day of my life; I dressed the part of the happy wife

I loved him and he loved me, and that was all that mattered.

Still I cannot forget how shattered I was when I saw him that New Year’s Eve.

He didn’t pick me. I got him by default, but I am helpless,

caught in a circle that never ends. I don’t see how he could ever love me

if he chose to love her instead.

But truth be told, he does not have to.

I love him with a love more desperate than any I have ever known,

the kind that’s blind to the logic of sense, that breached defenses of my own.

He said I just had to knock down the barriers he built around his heart

while mine were crumbling. Though I don’t think I should have had to work that hard,

I won’t feel regret and I won’t feel shame, because most people never love like this.

If I never know peace in my lifetime,

I will die one day knowing I wholly loved a good man.

If this is true, I never have to say no, and that’s good,

because I don’t think I can.

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