PART ONE:
PICK YOUR PATTERN
“When designing a wedding dress, the first step is to decide on a pattern. Do not make this decision lightly. This is the most important step, as all other decisions you make will flow from this very first choice. This dress is the most important dress a bride will ever wear. Choose carefully.”
—Excerpted from Creating the Illusion by Madame Michel,
Paris, 1954
One
The bride
Brooklyn, 2020
She hated the dress. She did not really like the veil that went with it, either. Yes, she understood that it was made of rose point lace, the same type of lace that was used on Princess Grace’s wedding dress, the most iconic wedding dress of all time, but no, that did not sway her opinion.
She did not want to wear any wedding dress, for that matter. She thought that wedding dresses were stupid and overly expensive and a symbol of the patriarchy and a million other things her mother just would not understand. But she could never say any of those things to her mother. Especially since it was her dress that they were talking about. The dress Joan proudly wore down the aisle on her wedding day. The dress that was passed down to her by her mother, Rocky’s grandmother.
How could a girl tell her mother that she didn’t want to wear that dress?
Rocky wiped her hands on her black jeans as she puzzled over what to do, what to say. Perhaps she should just be honest with her mother, tell her the truth. This could end right here and now.
She could hear her father’s gentle laughter echo in her mind. She didn’t need to speak to him to know what his reaction would be: Is that the plan, Kitten? No, that wouldn’t work. That wouldn’t work at all.
Rocky took a deep breath as she arrived at the bridal boutique. This salon was the one her mother had picked out, of course, not the one Rocky had wanted. But she could never say no to her mother.
Rocky slowly opened the door, so slowly, as if she were afraid to walk in (wasn’t she, though?), and a gentle chime rang out. Her father was right: she would need a strategy to tell her mother the truth. She couldn’t just blurt it out. She’d have to visit her father this week. He’d help her come up with a plan.
“This is my daughter, Rachel,” Joan said, beaming with pride as Rocky entered. Rocky felt like Dorothy, walking into Oz and seeing things in color for the first time. It was as if the streets of Brooklyn, where she lived and worked, were sepia tones, and the bridal shop, a store she’d walked by hundreds of times without noticing, was in full Technicolor. Rainbows bounced off the tiaras in the display case onto the mannequins wearing wedding dresses in delicate shades of white, ivory, and blush. There were ribbons, and tulle, and taffeta, oh my!
“Rocky,” her daughter corrected her, arm extended for a handshake. The old woman standing next to her mother regarded her, arms carefully folded across her chest. She examined Rocky from the tips of her toes to the top of her head and then offered a small smile in return. “I’m Greta.”
“Oh, yes,” Joan said. “I was just getting to that. She likes to be called Rocky. Rocky, Greta. Greta, Rocky.” And then, sotto voce, she delivered her usual line: “It would make more sense if her name was Raquel, but who am I to judge?”
Truth was, they’d been calling her Rocky since the third grade, and it had nothing to do with the fact that her given name was Rachel. They named her “Rocky” one day at recess, after she punched Jimmy Timbers squarely in the nose for calling her sister, Amanda, a dyke.
Joan put her arm around Rocky’s shoulders as they walked towards the back of the salon. “Did you need to wear combat boots into a bridal boutique?” she whispered.
“They’re motorcycle boots,” Rocky said, and then looked down at her feet, as if to prove it were true. She glanced down at her mother’s shoes: pale pink ballerinas.
“Combat, motorcycle,” Joan said. “Same difference. Wouldn’t it be lovely to wear a nice pair of heels for a change?”
“These are my dressy motorcycle boots.”
“Shall we get the dress on?” Greta asked, and Rocky couldn’t help but think: What, no foreplay? We’re just doing this? But she simply allowed herself to be led to the slaughter. Which is to say: a fitting room where she would be forced to strip down, nearly naked, in front of her mother and Greta and try on a dress she had no intention of wearing.
“She’s going to dye her hair back to brown for the wedding,” Joan said to Greta, as she pulled the bodice onto her daughter’s lithe frame. She pressed her hands to Rocky’s waist, to show her what it would look like once it was tailored to fit her body. The dress had been made for someone with more of an hourglass figure, someone more like her sister, Amanda, and everyone knew it. But no one would say it. No one would dare say it.
Rocky wanted to say something about her hair color—she was not planning to dye it back to brown for her wedding day—but she couldn’t get the words out.
“Great,” Greta said, as she slowly helped Rocky step into the skirt of the dress. Greta’s hands showed her age, and Rocky didn’t want her bending over and straining herself on her behalf. She looked to be around the same age as Rocky’s grandmother. Rocky wanted to tell Greta that she could do it on her own, but then reconsidered. Would it offend her if Rocky offered to do it on her own? Greta was old, but she moved as if she were a young woman, as if nothing could kill her. “We’ll use these clips to get a sense of what it will look like once it’s been tailored.”
“Oh, Greta,” Joan said, as the woman stepped back to admire her handiwork.
With the aid of the clips, the dress actually fit. Rocky gave her short hair, cut into a messy shag and dyed dark green this week, a tousle, and looked at herself. She didn’t look terrible. That much she had to admit. But there was something bothering her, something she couldn’t put her finger on.
Her eyes traveled down her body. The rose point lace was beautiful, just as her mother had described. Rocky had never been the one to try on her mother’s wedding dress as a child—that was Amanda’s department—so she was pleased to see that it wasn’t quite as outdated as she thought it might be. Although the Princess Diana sleeves—an update added by her mother in the ’80s—would have to go. The dress had a fitted bodice, a cummerbund made of thick layers of silk on the waist, and a full skirt done in silk faille. Three skirts, actually, if you included the skirt support, silk skirt with ruffled petticoat, and train insert.
“Do you need a pair of shoes to put on?” Greta asked, holding out a pair of sling-backs.
And there it was. She might have looked all right—nice, even—but she didn’t look like herself. She never wore dresses, for one, and even if she did, she would never wear white. And the way her mother was holding down the voluminous sleeves of the dress made it clear that she was happy that, at just under elbow length, they would cover up her tattoos. But Rocky was proud of her tattoos. They told her story, one by one. She tugged up the sleeve to reveal one of her favorite tattoos just below the crook of her right elbow. The name of her fiancé, written in script. Drew had a matching one on his arm, in the same spot. It was the seventh tattoo she ever got, inked on the day they moved in together. Lucky number seven.