“Sorry!” she calls down again. “Technical difficulty!' She turns the spotlight back on, and we see Theo turning around, shaking is head at us in mock-disappointment.
I rest my forehead on her shoulder and try not to laugh loudly enough for them to hear it down on the floor.
13
That weekend, my mother and I pack up bright and early for a bridal store sample sale, because we cannot afford for her to look like a princess unless we're going off the rack. We arrive two hours before the store opens, thinking that will be plenty, only to discover there are women who have been camping out all night. Most of them look closer to my age than to my mother's. Some of them have bridal makeup on and big heels to wear when they try on dresses. All of them have magazine cut outs.
My mother and I have nothing, because we have so many magazine cut outs that they're fairly useless, since all we've figured out is that we seem to like dresses, and we have no shoes because my mother, small and skinny though she may be, is to blame genetically for my enormous feet, so finding heels for her is a process we haven't started yet.
So yes, we're not even inside yet and I am terrified.
“All the websites said just bring one person,” my mom says, while we're trekking backwards away from the store, trying to find the end of this line. “Why do all of them look like they have a brigade?”
“I have no idea.”
“Maybe we should have brought more people.”
“Who else are you gonna bring?” I'm the only bridesmaid, and also essentially the only girl my mother knows now that we've left Miami.
“We should have made Aanya come up,” she says.
“Aanya would hate this. She'd fall asleep on the floor and people would step all over her.”
“Maybe your friend Elisha, then.”
Elisha would actually love this, I realize. I didn't know that apparently I know her well enough to know if she likes violent shopping. Maybe I'm a better friend than I thought I was. That would be a nice surprise.
We finally find the end of the line. My mother bounces on her toes a little, peering ahead of us like she has to see how far from the front door we are, as if we didn't just trek the quarter mile between us and the store.
“Are they even going to let us in?” I say.
“Maybe by the time it's our turn they'll be so tired of people that they'll just throw dresses at us for free to stop us from coming in.”
“Sure, that sounds likely.”
She thwacks me on the back of the head.
It turns out, we absolutely get in because everybody gets in, including the hundred or so women who appear behind us over the next few hours who are apparently even more stupid than we are. They let us in in batches of fifty, which sounds reasonable until we get inside and realize that if a fire marshall showed up right now to judge the safety of having this many frantic women in a store that is not as large as it deceptively appeared to be from the street, we'd all be pretty screwed.
I cannot figure out how these dresses are organized. It's either by brand or by style or by price. Probably.
And I keep losing my mother.
“Mom!” I call, but there are at least ten other women yelling mom at any given time, and most of them are the brides yelling at their mothers who move way too slowly for fifty-some-year-olds, and if my mother is this slow and in the way when she's fifty-some-years-old I am putting her in a home.
The fourth time I call her, she does appear, her arms so full of dresses that I don't know she walks. “I found a few,” she says, her voice muffled by satin and tulle.
“I can see that,” I say. “I have these two...do you want big poofy or kind of a sleek thing?” I hold up the two options.
“I don't know,” she says.
“Mom, we had three hours standing outside to think about this, seriously? You said you were thinking about it.”
“Don't stress, mija, we'll just try on a couple and then see.”
A couple. Maybe I'll put her in a home right now just for spite.
Our one upside is that I get not only my large feet from my mother, but also our moderate lack of modesty, Catholicism literally be damned. As soon as there's a dressing room that looks like it'll fit both us and another mother-daughter pair at the same time, we squeeze ourselves in. Judging by the other bride's choices in dresses, she's not known for her modesty either, and sure enough we get a brief glare for making her share the space but nothing after that. If one of the consultants shows up, we might be in trouble, but there are about ten harried consultants here compared to a a fifty person barreling stampede of us. I like our odds.
Our odds of not being bothered, anyway. I don't love our odds of finding a dress.
I'm trying to hang these gowns anywhere so that my mother's body will be free to dress and my hands will be freed to do the dressing. “Mom, none of these have anything in common,” I say.
“Well, that's the point,” she says. “I try them all on and then I see what style we like, and then we go and find more in that style until we find the right one.”
“You realize they give us an hour before they send the next set of girls in, right?”
She takes off her jeans. “Then you better stop complaining and get to zipping.”
“Does this one have a high-low hem? Mother, what the hell.”
She laughs.
