Dream Dress Dreaming

Dream dresses look like this…I think this is a Vera Wang dress in her shop window on Manhattan’s upper East Side, but I can’t remember…all I know is that this dream dress is a web, a weaving, of dreams. To wear it, you would have to be tall, beautiful (but in a jolie-laid sort of way), accomplished (violin? poetry? venture capital? architecture, law? ballet?), well travelled, at least bi-lingual, financially secure, and probably vegetarian.

In short, perfect.

Most likely, this dress is a wedding dress to be worn once in an emerald garden or a sumptuous hotel or a glittering rooftop or the porch of the old family shingled house with the ocean beyond. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hang forever in state in an upstairs guest room closet (all clean and sacheted, of course).

I look at the dream dress and I sense that it wishes otherwise…wants a different kind of future. Maybe something like this: to be worn on fresh Monday mornings while hanging out the sheets; or dancing in front of the fireplace on a mid-January night as the snow blankets the world; or apron-layered and rolling out a real pie crust; or driving in a perfectly ordinary car with the windows all down, headed west on a black October night; or making out in the front seat of that perfectly ordinary car by a dark green lake, the night fragrant with earth and iron and cornfields.

Maybe this dream dress makes its way to Port Clyde, Maine or Roslindale, Massachusetts or Honeoye Falls, New York or Quebec City or even Dublin or Venice or Paris or Tokyo. Or maybe it just stays put in its own back yard, happy there with the ordinary–the maples and cedars, the petunias, clover, and dandelions, the robins, the stray cats, the humming mowers and rusty swing-sets, the crooked snowmen and the barking dogs, the ordinary people, dreaming behind the square white windows of dresses such as this, of dreams all webbed and tangled in the ordinary living rooms of the heart.

Nothing B-flat about it.

At the consignment shop where I used to do the windows, we would say, “Oh, that’s a B-flat blouse, a B-flat jacket, a B-flat sweater,” meaning that garment was dated, nondescript, boring, maybe a little faded, a bit worn. B-flat. B-splat.

I look in my closet…what’s B-flat in here? Probably most of it…or none of it…since to me, something is B-flat only if it’s worn in a B-flat way. If I wear a plain black crew-neck sweater with ordinary black wool pants, well, that’s B-flat. But if the ordinary black wool sweater is worn with a red, square-dance petticoat over black, voluminous Charlie Chaplin silk pants…or that same sweater over a Hospital Thrift Shop short, knife-pleated black skirt over the ordinary pants…then maybe topped off with red Doc Martens and silver socks, it’s B-flat begone!

I wish everyday I could un-B-flat things: notice how colorful the cereal boxes are in the Stop & Shop aisles; notice the red flags on mailboxes; notice the abandoned sculptures of bedsprings and storm windows in the metal heap at the transfer station. Open my eyes to the way the rainbows fall into the blue coffee cup; the way the daffodils nod in the cold breeze; hear the click of the computer keys as the words sprinkle down the page; hear the sound of the ghost plane headed for Paris when the twilight is thick with clouds.

Today, this B-flat short skirt I’m wearing has an A+ verve  over a slender Lilith long tube skirt with black socks that say “Joy” in big white letters. I’m about to bite into an organic Pink Lady apple, cold and crisp and fresh. Later, I’ll take a bike ride and see how the ocean looks this afternoon. I’ll think about England and Ireland and wonder what the people there are making for dinner. Today is an ordinary Tuesday…nothing B-flat about it.

Clothesline in March

One of the most glorious sights to behold on brisk, chilly March mornings when you could drink the air is a clothesline in full use. I have loved clotheslines since I was a girl when my mother taught me how to hang the big white sheets (doubled, of course) and my father’s workshirts (upside down) and the pillowcases (open so the wind could billow through). We hung our little white cotton undies in the middle lines so no one could see.

It was a splendid clothesline at 80 West Main Street with at least six or seven lines stretched far between two large metal T’s. Way out in the back yard, it was flanked by the neighbor’s barn on one side and a gnarled apple tree and flowering quince on the other.

With her infinite practicality, my mother used to put the top sheet on the bottom of each bed and wash the bottom sheet and the pillowcases every week, rain or shine. Even in winter when the sheets froze on the line like great pieces of white cardboard, the clothesline was in use. It’s such a part of my memory–one of those things I rarely think about–unless I am clothesline-less.

When I finally got a clothesline here on Cape Cod after a hiatus of several years, I wondered how I had ever managed without it…without the crisp fragrance of sun and wind caught in sheets, the scratchy towels, the crinkly lace curtains, the jeans that can stand up by themselves. It’s wonderful to thumb my nose at the dryer and its rapacious hunger for electricity. Wonderful to know that all’s right with the world when I look out the back window and see the sheets snapping in the March wind.

I am with clothesline again.

Coatrack. Party Dress.

Coatracks are good and necessary things; especially when you live in an old house with one (only one!) closet on the first floor, and that single closet doubles as 1)the shipping department for my business where all the bubble wrap is stashed, 2) the wine closet and liquor cabinet, and 3) the place where the vacuum cleaner resides almost all of the time.

I’ve always lived with a coatrack in the corner by the door and find that it’s one of those things in my house that is both essential and invisible like curtain rods and bookshelves and electrical outlets. Without thinking, season by season, I toss hats up top, hang coats and slickers and dusters on old heavy wooden hangers that come from church rummage, and occasionally display a party dress that I’m not wearing, perhaps will never wear, but want to look at just the same.

The one pictured here on the coatrack came from a barn/antique shop in Friendship, Maine. I thought it would change my life and imagined wearing it with a billowing underskirt around my workshop or on a late afternoon walk down by the ocean with my sister or perhaps to the supermarket. (Strangely, a party never entered my mind.) So I took the dress to a tailor who lifted the hem and tucked in the shoulders for a goodly sum and had every intention of allowing the dress to work its magic.

I wore it once. Nothing worked: it was tight at the waist, big at the shoulders, and too bare around the neck. I tried a tight little shirt under it and shook my head–all wrong. I decided I liked two things about this dress: the sound it made when I walked and the way it looked on the coatrack.

So here it hangs. It has not changed my life but every time I go upstairs, I see it and have a glimpse of the dream behind it: I am gloriously sweeping down the Produce Aisle, skirts rustling, eyes clear, intention in my step…headed for Venice that very afternoon.