From The Paris Review:
I’ve never been married, and I’ve bought my wedding dress.
It was a skin-melting summer day. K. and I were going to this perfect vintage store, we have to go, I really want to take you. But she couldn’t remember its name, or whether it was off Columbus or Amsterdam, so we kept stumbling into these half blocks, asphalt shimmering under our sweating shoes.
Suddenly, sure as a homing pigeon, she wheeled around a corner to a gated sliver of silver and pressed an anonymous black button. Then K. pressed her hand to the double-barred iron door, and it yielded.
The store was a riot of color. Every corner had multiple layers of stuff, so you couldn’t put your eye down on one thing without it landing on five more: golden silk handkerchiefs, tallboy cabinets draped with ropy silken tassels, iridescent velvet slippers, a bristly thick, glossy black, lancelet fur capelet, gumdrop earrings that might have been rhinestones or Tiffany. The accessories had their own accessories: there were opera glasses with an eyeglasses chain on which dangled an opera-glasses charm. My molars ached.
Oh! K.’s feathery exclamation snapped my vision into focus toward a dress form. The dress was white with the faintest tinge of seafoam green, beaded and stiff through the torso and then releasing into a tulle storm cloud that gathered barometric pressure above the ground at thigh height.
It was the worst dress.
This dress is amazing, said K. It’s so good. It would look so good on you.
I swallowed. So good, I parroted.
The shopkeeper’s ears flared up. I don’t know who made it, she said, but it’s in totally perfect condition. I think it could have been custom. She flicked her eyes along my body like a tape measure. You’d fit it perfectly.
No changing room, so I wriggled out of my tee and lost my shorts under the dress. K. and the shopkeeper whirled around me, zipping up the boning in one swoop like peeling a clementine in a single long perfect spiral. The dress cinched me and its skirt fell toward my knees, its marshmallow thunder hovering above the rug’s nap.
The saleswoman made all sorts of low squawks. K. cocked her head.
Yes, she cooed. Amazing on you. It’s perfect.
I felt the boning cut into me and felt nothing at all.
I’m serious, said K. This could be your wedding dress.
I floated above my body and watched it: a ballerina in a music box, two legs fused on one foot.
Oh my God, I can see it, said K. I could see it too. A blurry man in a tuxedo; K. behind me in garnet and gold. The dress whiter than white, backlit in seafoam, the way lights in a dentist’s office are white because they’re against a cold-hot fluorescent background.
$750, more than a month of my first rent.
That’s actually a really good price, K. said, sotto voce. You have to get it. Her pale eyes narrowed.
I–. I can’t. I shot my eyes down. I really, literally can’t, I muttered, I mean I only have a debit card and I don’t have that much money on there right now.
K. tossed her hair around her face. I’ll pay for it now, she said. You’ll pay me back.
It’s your wedding dress, she said. We found your wedding dress. It’s so perfect!
Link to the rest at The Paris Review