I should have known better than to think I could outsmart Eleanor Vance.
My husband has been gone five years now, and since the house on Maple Street got too big for my bones, I have lived alone with a big yellow cat named Barnaby and a habit of overthinking every single thing I say. Maya is my only girl, and ever since she got engaged to that accountant she met at the state tax office, I have tried my level best to keep my mouth shut.
I did not pick the caterer. I did not comment on the tiny silver favor boxes she ordered off the internet. When she told me the wedding colors were slate blue and cream, I smiled and bought a dress in a slate blue silk that cost more than my first used sedan.
It was a good dress. It had three-quarter sleeves with little pearl buttons at the wrists, and when I tried it on in front of the three-way mirror at the boutique in town, I actually felt like I looked the mother of the bride instead of an old widow who spends her Tuesday mornings dusting picture frames.
Then came the phone call at 4:15 on a Tuesday afternoon.
The ring wasn’t a normal ring. Maya has this frantic double-beep she uses when she is about to cry, and the second I heard it, my hand started shaking against the receiver of the landline.
“Mom, I am literally losing my mind,” she said, her voice shaking so hard the words blurred together. “I just found out my fiancé’s mother bought the exact same dress as you to wear to the wedding and she’s refusing to wear anything else!”
I sat down hard on the green corduroy armchair in the living room. Eleanor Vance is a woman who treats church committee meetings like corporate takeovers. She has hair the color of tin foil and a voice that sounds like gravel sliding down a galvanized pipe.
“What do you mean, the exact same dress?” I asked.
“I mean the boutique down in Springfield,” Maya whispered, sounding like she was standing in the middle of a war zone. “Eleanor went in on Saturday because she heard you bought yours there. She asked the girl at the counter what color you got, and she ordered the exact same one in her size.
And now she says since she is the groom’s mother, she has seniority on the color scheme, and she will not be seen in beige. She is daring me to make her change it, Mom.”
The silence in my living room felt thick, like old dust settling after a storm. I thought about Eleanor and her tight little smile at the bridal shower. I thought about the four hundred dollars hanging in my cedar closet in a plastic garment bag.
“Don’t worry sweetheart,” I told Maya, rubbing my thumb against the frayed armrest of the chair. “I’ll just go buy another dress.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear the television murmuring in Maya’s apartment, some sitcom canned laughter that sounded completely absurd against the panic in her breathing.
“But mother,” Maya said, and her voice dropped an octave into that stubborn register she inherited from her father. “That dress cost a fortune! It’s such a waste not to use it.”
I looked across the room at the stack of unopened mail on the sideboard. My insurance premium had gone up again. Four hundred dollars was three weeks of groceries, or half a load of heating oil for the coming winter.
“Who said I won’t use it?” I replied, and right there, in the quiet of my little living room, I made the choice that would unravel the whole week. “I’ll just wear it to the rehearsal dinner.”
Maya gave a little half-choked laugh that sounded like a hiccup. “You can’t do that. Eleanor will lose her mind.”
“Let her,” I said. And that was the mistake.
Three days later, the air outside the country club banquet room was thick and smelled faintly of fresh-cut Bermuda grass and diesel exhaust from the lawnmowers. I had pinned my hair up myself, using six bobby pins that kept sliding out of my fine gray strands. When I stepped through the double glass doors in that slate blue silk, the humidity hit me like a wet blanket, but I didn’t care. I felt righteous. I felt like I had solved a math problem that nobody else had the stomach for.
The room was already half full of people drinking iced tea out of heavy glass tumblers. Eleanor Vance was standing near the buffet table talking to the groom’s uncle from Peoria. She was wearing a beige linen pantsuit that looked like it had been ironed with a heavy brick.
Then she turned around and saw me.
She stopped mid-sentence. Her hand, holding a small paper napkin with a cucumber sandwich on it, froze about three inches from her mouth. She didn’t say a word for five seconds, but her eyes went straight down to my cuffs, then up to the pearl buttons, then right to my face.
I gave her a little nod. Just a small, polite nod, the kind you give the mailman when he delivers a package to the wrong porch.
“Well,” Eleanor said, and her voice carried across the clatter of silverware. “Look who decided to match the tablecloths.”
My stomach gave a hard, sour lurch, but I kept my chin up. “It’s a lovely color, isn’t it? Very practical.”
Across the room, I saw Maya standing by the ice machine with a clipboard in her hand. Her face wasn’t pale; it was bright red, the color of a rusted shovel left out in the rain. She looked at Eleanor, then she looked at me, and then she dropped the clipboard right on the linoleum floor. The metal corner made a sharp, cracking sound that cut through the chatter of the whole room.
Nobody rushed to help her pick up her papers.
The rehearsal dinner went on, but it was like eating gravel. Every time I reached for the butter dish, I could feel Eleanor’s eyes burning a hole through the side of my head. She didn’t speak to me once the whole evening. When the groom’s father stood up to give a little toast about family harmony and pulling together, he looked right at me while he talked about respecting traditions.
Maya didn’t come over to my table until the very end of the night, after the last basket of dinner rolls had been cleared away and the cousins were outside slamming car doors in the parking lot.
She stood by my chair with her car keys dangling from her finger, her shoulders pulled up tight toward her ears.
“You couldn’t just let it go, could you?” she asked.
I looked up at her, smoothing my napkin across my lap. “I saved you four hundred dollars, Maya. And I wore the dress I bought.”
“You made her look like a fool,” Maya whispered, and her voice didn’t have any anger in it anymore, just this flat, heavy disappointment that felt much worse. “And you made me look like I can’t control my own family for forty-eight hours before I get married. She told Arthur she isn’t coming to the ceremony tomorrow unless I make you apologize.”
The air in the banquet hall smelled like bleach and old lemon cleaner.
“I am not apologizing for wearing a dress I paid for with my own money,” I said, and my voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to.
Maya looked down at me for a long time, shaking her head just a little bit, like she was trying to figure out who I was.
“The wedding is at two,” she said quietly. “If you show up in blue tomorrow, don’t bother walking down the aisle.”
She turned around before I could answer, her heels clicking against the floor tiles until the heavy glass doors swung shut behind her.
I sat there alone in the empty banquet room for ten minutes while the busboys cleared the water pitchers off the tables around me. The silk of the dress felt stiff and cold against my ribs now, like a piece of tin mail I had strapped on for a battle nobody else cared about winning.
I went home to the dark house and let Barnaby out onto the back porch. I took the slate blue dress off, put it on a plastic hanger, and pushed it all the way to the back of the closet behind my winter coats where I wouldn’t have to look at it.
The wedding happened the next afternoon. I wore an old beige skirt and a cotton blouse I bought three years ago at the department store clearance rack. I sat in the fifth row on the mother-of-the-bride side, right behind an uncle I hadn’t seen since the family reunion in Dubuque.
Maya looked beautiful when she walked down that aisle. Her veil was long and lace-trimmed, and she didn’t look toward my row once. Eleanor Vance sat across the aisle in the front row, wearing her beige pantsuit, looking straight ahead like a queen inspecting her troops.
I have the wedding photos in a cardboard box on the top shelf of the hallway closet now. Every time I open the hall door to grab my raincoat, I see the corner of that box sticking out. I saved four hundred dollars on the dress, and I proved my point about who bought it first. But every Sunday when the phone rings at four in the afternoon and it’s just a telemarketer or the pharmacy calling about my blood pressure pills, I find myself staring at the wall, wishing I had just kept my mouth shut and bought another outfit.
