The Department of Exiled Dresses: A Story of Secondhand Frocks and Underhanded Trauma
Flowers. I pressed my face into the wool of the sweaters in her closet, smelling the perfume of the lotion she anointed herself with daily.
I used to play in this closet as a kid, hiding my toy horses after galloping them over the jumps created by her shoe collection. As a teenager, I’d sit in here trying on the black patent leather pumps, throwing the silk scarves over my shoulder, writing little notes to leave in her purse for her to find later.
When my mother died, the task of cleaning out her closet fell to me.
After my brother’s wife and I figured out what we could wear and use from my mother’s closet, we donated the remainder to our local charities, picturing her sweaters and coats keeping someone else protected, envisioning someone else getting a boost of confidence from those extra high heeled shoes. That was weeks ago.
All that remained were the dresses.
In the back of the closet hung all of the fancier things, the dresses for parties, for weddings, for proms. As I got older, our collection started to merge a little, the shiny and sparkly fabrics only brought out for special occasions. After my mom’s death, the number of dresses with tags still on threw me into a deep well of weeping.
Along with the dresses awaiting wear were the dresses already worn: the gold dress she wore to my brother’s wedding, the purple velvet, the sequins, the lace.
In the back of the celebration dresses worn to the parties, the weddings, the funerals, the proms, the benefit dinners, rested a zippered bag with the Department of Exiled Dresses.
The Exiled Dresses were never to be worn again. Some made it into Exile based on their nature: one isn’t going to wear one’s prom dress again. Some made it into Exile based on superstition: one should not wear a dress again if one had a terrible time or got food poisoning the last time one wore it.
The heart of the Exiled Dress collection was a wedding dress from my ill-fated first wedding. My mom zipped that sucker into an airtight bag with her Mother of the Ill-fated Bride dress and shoved them out of sight, deep in the back of the Department of Exiled Dresses, never to be seen again.
When I emerged from my deep well of weeping over the smell of my mother’s perfume and the Mrs. Dalloway-styled tags still on dresses, this sarcophagus of my first marriage made me first cringe and then collapse laughing. Bless her heart, she had even zipped the shoes we wore into airtight Ziploc bags and shoved them back there. No bad energy was getting out of that bag; it was, not kidding, vacuum-packed. I think she packed some sage in there with them.
I had left this Bag of Exiles for last.
It had to go.
Harried, I stopped on my way back from my childhood home to my own house, with my car packed with my mother’s books and dishes and candles and vases, to rid my family forever of the curse of the Exiled Dresses by donating them to the clothing truck in the lot of the Park and Ride down the road.
Surely the curse was only for us; someone else could find joy in the Exiles.
It was August in Maryland. It was hot. I was sweaty and tired. I was not, alas, in the mood for conversation with the gregarious man accepting donations.
I admit that I was not being my best self. To be fair, I had not been my best self for the past two months.
I hauled the Bag of Exiled Dresses to the back of the donation truck, staggering under the weight of the body-shaped bag. The man leaned over, tipping his hat back to say hello, squinting into the late afternoon sun, to take the bag of my hands. I breathed a sigh of relief to hand the Department over and started to walk away.
“Wait a moment,” he called after me, removing the well-chewed toothpick from his mouth, “don’t you want a donation receipt?”
I assured him that I did not, laughing politely in the manner of all women wanting to be left alone.
He insisted.
I was trapped.
He zipped open the bag of Exiled Dresses.
“But, this is a wedding dress!”
I assented, my laugh growing slightly more hysterical. Yes, yes, it is a wedding dress. An Ill-Fated Wedding Dress.
“Is it your mother’s?”
Ouch. Was my taste in that retro? Or, maybe, I flattered myself, he thought I was way too young, at my mature 36 to be married.
I told him that it was, in fact, mine.
He whistled out from between his teeth, rolling the toothpick from side to side, and exclaimed that I could not be a day over 20.
Hating myself, I blushed and reassured him that I was quite old and that it was mine, but that it was quite ready for a new owner.
“But, you need to hang onto those memories!”
I told him that I absolutely did not nor did I need to hang onto the dress.
“But your mom would want you to keep it! Ladies like that kind of thing!”
I took a deep breath, filled with humid air and the scent of moth balls and the weight of the Department of Exiled Dresses.
Cringing, I told him that my mother was quite recently deceased.
Doffing his hat and beaming with the sincerity of someone who knows best, he said, “But you need to save it for your daughter!”
Ah, yes, my daughter.
My daughter, that non-existent being who also had a box of jewelry waiting for her entrance into the world, a box of my old toys that I was forbidden to throw away in case she might want them, and a box of charming little pink clothes discovered in the far corner of the basement, next to the cradle made for her by my grandfather before I was even born.
She was her own Department of Exiles.
And that’s how I ended up in a parking lot version of hell, trying to get rid of a wedding dress from my failed first marriage, explaining that my mom had actually just died, and bordering on telling a complete stranger that, no, I don’t have kids and likely won’t without medical intervention.
“I am almost certain my daughter will not want it,” I said tightly, rolling my sweating eyeballs for effect, the polite laughter packed away.
He laughed, jovial as ever, hat still in his hands. “Kids these days,” he said, “they don’t know how good they have it.”
