A New Dress

A New Dress
Karina Grifka

All I wanted this past summer was for two hot boys to find me fabulously irresistible.  But oh well. It’s alright I guess ‘cause that would have been so time consuming and our German Shepards would have been lonely and the weeds would have taken over Grandma’s rose bushes out front.  I still need an occasion to wear my new dress. 

My mom said the dress looks like one she once saw Princess Diana wearing in a photo with skinny little black kids, but I don’t know about that ‘cause I modeled it after the one that Audrey Hepburn wears to the party in Sabrina, except I sewed mine from our old red table cloth after Dad got a brand new one from Amish country.   

Anyway, it would have been absolutely perfect for that evening, the final evening with my two suitors when I would make my decision.  I can just picture it: a crackling fire, me in my dress, the gifts, their snide comments toward each other, Kentucky Fried Chicken.  My parents would be away which wouldn’t be a problem ‘cause they often go on vacations without me. 

The boys would be aching for me, which would make it all the more rewarding when I would finally tell them I was dumping both of them and traveling off to Paris to “find myself.”  This would of course be followed by a kinky ménage à trois on the living room rug. 

My sister, it seems always had an excuse to get out of the house, “Joe’s taking me to dinner…the movies…the fair…Please Dad? He could propose any day! Hey, thanks Mom. Blah blah blah.” Since there weren’t any hot men in the picture, I had no excuse.  No reason why I couldn’t spend all vacation collecting eggs, so my summer was filled with chickens and cows and pigs and Bobby Fairbanks.  Well at least Bobby offered to help me milk the cows but I think he just didn’t have anything better to do.  Standing in the middle of our barn actually made that stupid purple tie he always wears look even more out of place than usual.  No wonder everyone at school calls him a fag. 

This girl in my class told me that in England cigarettes are called fags.  I’ve never smoked a cigarette though ‘cause I don’t want to die of lung cancer like Grandma.  But I guess I did “smoke a fag” this summer if you know what I mean.  

I told Bobby not to tell anybody.

I don’t know if he had planned it or what.  That afternoon I was listening to some old Louis Armstrong records my grandpa gave me when Bobby came banging on my screen door, telling me to come with him because he had found a dead body out in the woods where we couldn’t drive.  I told him he was full of shit, that he had totally ripped that off from the movie Stand by Me but I went with him anyway ‘cause I had already finished my chores and I was bored and I had no one else to hang out with.  

I grabbed my purse and walked out through the living room.  My sister was lounging on the sofa, working a new hole into the threadbare upholstery with her fingertips.  I waved but she just stared at the big screen TV, some fuzzy special on celebrities and the houses and cars that they love. 

Bobby was looking at this photo I love of my grandfather in uniform with grandma on his arm. They looked like a movie star couple from the fifties.  Grandpa had the strongest chin, so refined, not like boys today.  When I was little I would sit by his feet and we’d listen to some jazz record or another and he would tell me all these stories about the war, but only the nice war stories and also ones about him and grandma when they were dating.   It was all very romantic, even though he would always call all the black people niggers. 

Bobby asked about the photo, but I just grabbed his arm and dragged him outside.  We crossed the field near my house and entered the woods.  I noticed a new breeze sweeping through the tall pines and across my face.  It was the first day in weeks I didn’t have sweat coating my forehead and the backs of my knees.

I hadn’t been into the woods in at least a couple years.  It was quieter than I remembered.

I stopped when we came to a familiar spot, a small clearing between four trees.  When I was eight I had run away from home to this very spot for two days with nothing but a sleeping bag, a supply of goldfish crackers and a box of apple juice.  I had forgotten a flashlight.  At least it was quiet.  Jazz records are crap for drowning out screaming.

I thought of Ella Fitgerald’s creamy voice pouring from the record player in my bedroom interrupted by the agonizing cries of my grandfather.  He’d had had a stroke a few years prior, just after grandma died and all he could say was lo.  Lo lo lo lo lo lo lo.  Now every so often, he would suddenly be struck by this horrible pain through his whole body.  Doctors didn’t know.  We couldn’t afford tests.  So Ella’s trying to get a word in “It's autumn in New York that brings the promise of new love …lo lo lo… Autumn in New York is often mingled with pain …lo lo lo lo lo.” And dad, feeling a little feisty from pouring back a few too many, screams something over the blasting television about living in a goddamn crazy house.  I only went into grandpa’s room once since the stroke.  He just wasn’t right.  An emptiness in his eyes.  I couldn’t stand to see him there.  I knew he would die in that bed.  

Suddenly I felt warm moist breath on the back of my neck followed by a hand going down my top, groping my right breast, squeezing rhythmically like it was milking a cow.  I stood there for for a few seconds, staring at clusters of brown pine needles and fallen branches on the ground and then  I turned around and saw Bobby biting his lower lip, his blue eyes looking everywhere but my face, his brown tweed pants down around his ankles. 

Well, what the hell.

I dropped to my knees. 

A few minutes later, the twigs were digging into my back through the thin cotton layer of my dress and Bobby was on top of me.  His eyes were squeezed shut and his freckled forehead was clenched tight like he was trying to do a complicated physics problem in his head.  The front of my teal cotton circle skirt was bunched around my stomach.  I stared at the tall pine tree behind him where, on that second day eight years ago I had been hunched over on the ground in tears because nobody had come to look for me.     

Afterward I noticed some sticky spots and crimson droplets on the back of my skirt.  I didn’t know I would bleed.  I’m glad I wasn’t wearing my Sabrina dress. 

I leaned back down. Bobby was lying next to me on his back.  We looked up at the clouds, those wispy ones with grey around the edges.  It would rain soon. 

“Sorry about your dress,” he said.

“No big, it’s kinda ugly anyway.”

Bobby promised to buy me a new dress.  He told me all about his plan to quit school and run away to New York City in November when he turns sixteen.  He wants to become a writer.  He said he would buy it from one of the fancy boutiques there and send it to me.  I told him not to. 

“Train ride’s an hour and a half,” he said, “You should visit.”

“Tickets are expensive.”

He pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it.  He put it to his lips then handed it to me.  Everyone here smokes ‘cause there’s nothing better to do.  Probably even the old folks.  We suspect the retirement home is just one big hot box. 

I held my breath and looked up at the clouds.  This big round cloud with two trunk looking things coming out each end kind of looked like the torso of this morbidly obese 600 pound woman I once saw in a group photo of all the freaks in the Barnum and Bailey Circus from the ‘30’s.  I thought about all those poor freaks and how I couldn’t feel too bad about them ‘cause they probably were only sneered and gawked at for a few hours a day but then got to go out and live it up in New York or Chicago or wherever in some swanky bar.  Maybe the eight foot tall woman and the three and a half foot tall man from the photo got all dolled up and went out dancing together.  I pictured her gracefully carrying him across the floor then something fell out of the dream…uh, the sky and hit with a thud several yards away.

I sat up and looked at Bobby, “What the hell was that?”

Bobby looked at me wide- eyed. “Maybe it’s a piece of the Russian space station.”

We stood up and walked over to where we heard the sound.  I put the joint to my lips and crouched down to get a better look.

A tiny, perfect white sparrow was lying on one wing, motionless in the dirt.  I let out my breath, “Dead bird.”

Bobby sat down next to me.  He stared at the bird.  “See?” he said, “I told you…a dead body.”  He let out a coy, high pitched laugh like a little school- girl; the laugh that makes me cringe when we are around other people. 

He got quiet and sat gazing at it for a minute before turning to me, “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death,” he said.

I glanced at his mouth.  It always had something to say.  “What are you babbling about?”

“Walt Whitman.  He has the most amazing words.  It’s like he’s inside my brain.  Like he defines me somehow.”  Bobby paused and looked back at the bird.  “There’s this line that goes ‘Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.’” He looked back at me, his green eyes lit up. “Isn’t that wonderful? It’s a beautiful idea, don’t you think?”

The bird was starting to creep me out.  I swear I saw it move.  “Wasn’t Walt Whitman just a big closet case?”

Bobby got up off the ground and looked down at me.  “Let’s go get milkshakes at Dennys.” 

He ordered strawberry and I ordered Vanilla.  I’ve barely talked to him since that day.     

Bobby is leaving in a few weeks and I promised not to tell his dad about his plan, like he promised not to say anything about us.  But I noticed the boys at school have been looking at me differently this year.  I was coughed at a few times with the word slut.  I guess that’s better than loser.  And Bobby never gets bruises anymore. 

Yesterday I was sitting in Starbucks reading an article in the culture section of the New York Times.  It was about a new jazz club in an old fancy building in Manhattan that reminded me of the party scene in Sabrina.  Bobby’s dad walked in alone in his janitor’s uniform and ordered a large cup of coffee, black. 

I found out this morning that a train ticket to New York costs sixty- five dollars for students.  Round Trip.  I guess that’s not so expensive.