The Dress

The Dress

I grew up in a modest apartment in Astoria in Queens. Our block was made up of mostly 6 story apartment buildings, although there were three single family homes. One of them had a magnificent magnolia tree that bloomed each spring in brilliant pink and white flowers. I walked past that tree four times a day when I was in elementary school: going to PS 5 in the morning, returning home for lunch, and then going back to school for the afternoon session and returning home again after school. Today it seems foreign; my children and grandchildren had to take a bus to school or else be driven by their parents. I’m sure it is still true in cities that children walk to school, but I can’t imagine that they come home for lunch and then go back, with most women working these days. But this was another time, a time when most women were stay-at-home homemakers. Not all the children in the school went home for lunch; there was a cafeteria and you could purchase a hot meal but I can’t remember ever doing that.

I always thought of our family as solidly middle class; I never felt deprived of anything. I later learned in sociology that we were actually lower middle class. We were careful with money, however; when we  went food shopping it was not unusual for my mother to refuse to buy food that she considered too expensive. I’m not talking about candy or cookies alone; it was also true of fruits and vegetables, which were not quite in season yet. 

My father was a lawyer but worked for the City of New York as an accountant; he didn’t make as much as he would have in private practice of either law or accountancy, but he did have remarkable benefits.  When I was growing up, he had four weeks of vacation a year, which was extremely unusual at that time and probably still is today. Most importantly, he had an excellent pension plan, which served him well during the thirty years when he was retired.

My father was risk averse and the security of his job was critical to him. That was understandable; he had suffered during the Depression and sometimes didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. I should add that he worked his way through college and continued going to night school to earn his MBA long after he married my mother at the age of 32.

My mother had been considered an old maid until she married my father at the age of 27. She was a bookkeeper and stopped working when her pregnancy with my sister starting showing, and then she was a stay-at-home mother as well as a caretaker for my grandfather. My parents had moved into my mother’s parents’ apartment, because when they married in 1945 there was a housing shortage in New York City with all the soldiers returning from World War II.

My mother’s mother passed away within four months of my mother’s wedding. It makes me wonder whether my grandmother was so relieved that her daughter had finally gotten married that she felt she had completed her life’s mission and could rest in peace.

My mother was often caught between the wishes of her father and her husband, which made for a difficult situation. I don’t remember her telling me the details, but I clearly remember her advising me that when I got married I should live alone with my husband, and not with either set of parents.

Both of my parents were caring, responsible and reliable, and were well respected in our community. My father was happy to provide letters on legal stationery for friends who needed it, and was very active in charitable organizations and gave blood regularly. My mother was also active in charities and was always available to help others; when she was going food shopping, she regularly rang the bell of an elderly neighbor to see if she could pick up something for her at the store. She was the primary carer for her father, while my father was the primary carer for his parents.

Against that backdrop, you can see why I was shell-shocked by the experience I am about to describe. When I was twelve, I had a dress that I liked very much. It was short sleeved and it had a beautiful paisley pattern of purples and blues. Made of cotton with a little polyester, it was very comfortable to wear.  Most importantly for a preteen, I thought I looked good in it, which was not true of most of my clothes.  I wore it frequently, occasionally garnering a compliment about how nice I looked.

In those days, girls had to wear dresses or skirts and blouses to school every day, and I was interested in getting another dress or a skirt, so my mother took me shopping. While we were browsing in the dress section, my mother discovered that same dress that I liked so much, only this one had a matching scarf that my dress did not. She became aggrieved; she felt that we had been cheated out of a scarf. I wasn’t at all concerned because I was happy with the dress I had, but she was indignant at first and then resentful. Her mood had changed and neither of us felt like shopping any longer, so we went home without purchasing anything.

By the time we got home, her mood had subsided and we were both cheerful. I helped her make a dinner of roast chicken and salad and spaghetti, and when my father came home from work we sat down and ate as a family. There was no mention of the dress with the scarf that we’d seen.

After supper, my mother came into my room and showed me a scarf that matched my favorite dress. 

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“I took it,” she replied.

I was appalled. To me, that was shoplifting and it was wrong. It was against every principle I had been taught. It was against everything I believed. I could not believe that my mother had done that. I still can’t believe it. I became nauseous and felt sick, but I didn’t feel comfortable confronting my mother about it. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and felt guilty for a long time afterward.

I could never bring myself to wear that dress again. Even looking at it in my closet made me feel guilty. And even now, as I look back so many years later, the incident makes me feel embarrassed for my mother. What she had done was so out of character for her and I guess that’s why I have never judged her for that one inappropriate action that ended up backfiring.