Pretty in White

“It’s horrid. Hideous. You can’t get married in it. I won’t let you,” he insisted, tail whipping behind him furiously, left to right like a metronome. His stare was yellow and unblinking, his pupils thin and sharp. He sat perched in the rafters, watching me from above. I laughed.

“You’re supposed to tell me I look pretty, Porkchop.” The bottom of the dress was bunched in my arms and I released it to the barn floor, the weight of fabric stirring the air with dust and strands of hay. Keeping it from dirt was pointless; decades of hanging in an attic had left the lace speckled with pale stains, “yellowed with age”, as Mama said.

“Oh, Bailey,” she’d huffed earlier that morning, her cheeks round and sunkissed. “You don’t wanna wear that raggedy old thing, it smells like mothballs." She paused. "And mold.” She spread a generous layer of jam over the buttered roll, handing it to me with a pinched frown.

Pa snored from the living room and I ignored her for a moment, biting into the bread, the thick blackberry preserve coating my tongue with a sour tang.

“But--”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

I swallowed.

“I’ll pay to get it altered and Daddy said he’d bring it to the cleaners,” I whined. I immediately blushed. I sounded childish; like I was listing off reasons I deserved a later curfew.

She shook her head.

“We’ll find you a perfectly fine dress in town.”

I sighed. “I don't get it. You always talked about one of us wearing it someday." Pa stirred from the next room and I lowered my voice. "Nancy's already married. Why can't I wear it?”

“It's out of fashion," she snapped.

I shook my head and pushed my chair back, brushing crumbs from my chest to the checkered tablecloth.

“I don’t want a dress from town,” I said with a forced cheeriness, pulling the chair to the hallway. I positioned it under the attic’s door. “At least let me try it on.”

“Bailey, you know you can't--okay, fine. Sit down and hush up, 'fore you wake your daddy. But this ain't mean I'm saying yes."

“Once it's hemmed and cleaned," I said now, spinning slowly so the layers danced and spun with my movements. "It'll be good as new. Mama worries too much." Porkchop squinted, licking his paw before drawing it across the points of each ear.

“You look like a doily.”

I stopped, dizzied. “Porkchop,” I said.

“That I’ve peed on,” he added. "The yellow is unsightly."

“Someone’s a grumpy kitty.” I bit my tongue, bracing myself for a hiss and swat. He despised such talk, and I couldn't blame him; he was nearly sixty in cat years. An old man. Instead, his skinny orange back arched into a lazy stretch, his claws extending into the barn’s boards as he scratched. There were hundreds of similar marks in the various boards and beams.

“Is this really what you want?” he asked finally. I exhaled, my annoyance returning.

“For the hundreth time, yes. The dress isn’t even that bad. You’re so dramatic.”

“Does the man approve of it?”

“The man--” I caught myself. “Carl, said he’d marry me in a potato sack, for all he cares.” I smiled, imagining a matching newspaper veil and tissue box shoes.

“Even that would be an improvement,” he said, cooly. He yawned, and despite my annoyance I gawked as I always did, his spearlike teeth reminidng me of the impressive nibbles I’d endured in his days as a kitten. He jumped to a lower platform and I sat next to him, holding my breath as the wood groaned beneath me. He pawed at a loose piece of lace from the dress, his claws insantly caught in the fabric. I smiled and carefully unstuck him as I would an emboidery needle from a cloth hoop.

“Ma said I could bring you, you know,” I said gently, scratching between his ears. He rumbled with a deep purr and I ran my nails under his chin.

“I couldn't.”

I slowed my scratching.

“Why not?”

“The city’s no place for wildlife.”

“You're hardly wild. But either way,” I said, stroking his back, “plenty of familes keep cats in the city.”

“A hundred stories up, in those four-walled cells?”

"It's more than four,” I mumbled. Carl's apartment was a tight squeeze, but it was quaint; I enjoyed my evenings there, planning where I would eventually home my things. The shelves I'd fill with photographs; the tables I'd adorn with cloths and vases for flowers. I'd come to love the relentless noise of the city roads, the honks and shouts from below. I found myself mourning it during my daily returns to the silence of the farm.

“Bailey-Girl.” He gracefully lept to the floor, sitting below my dangling feet; his face was serious. "Are you sure this is what you want? Are you sure this is right?”

My chest flushed beneath the high neck of the dress and I was thankful he couldn’t see the splotches I knew were there.

“What wouldn't be right?" I felt myself growing defensive of the life I'd envisioned for myself. "You think I should be marrying some hick in town like Mama says? Live on a farm like this? Send my babies to school with a teacher who thinks dancing is a sin?” It was raining lightly now, a mist sprinkling us from holes in the roof. The wind wafted a minty air.

“No.”

“Then what's so wrong about this Porkchop? What?”

He said nothing, his tail splashing the floor.

“Why can’t you just be happy for me?” I asked.

“Your misery doesn’t make me happy.” His voice was flat; matter-of-fact.

“I’m not--” my voice cracked. “Oh. You stupid thing.” I was surprised by the volume of my voice. The tears slid down my cheeks in two neat lines, dripping to the floor as I leaned to stand. He stepped back cautiously, the floorboards moaning beneath us.

“Bailey-Girl.”

“I’m not a girl!” I cried, my body swaying, feet shifting above the uneven wood. I leaned against a nearby beam. "I'm a woman. A woman. Why is everyone treating me like a useless child?”

I caught my balance, one hand curved below my abdomen. I stepped forward quickly and immedately stopped, gasping. Something had torn; I'd heard the rip of fabric, loud and quick like the crack of a whip. I looked down to see the dress tangled beneath me, an enormous hole revealing my bare feet. I stood motionless, staring at the hole. He watched me and I met his eyes. They were soft; concerned. Pitying.

They were the same eyes Mama gave me this morning when she'd shooed me from the attic ladder. The same eyes she'd given me when I'd fought to squeeze her dress over my stomach.

Nancy had tried the dress on when she was ten. Mama hadn't let me, said I was too young. It was still mostly white back then, still pristine and clean. How Mama's eyes had lit up when Nancy twirled. I must have soured that memory today; spoiled it like milk on a hot porch. Of course Mama didn't want to see her white wedding lace stretched across a pregnant belly. What was I thinking?

“Idiot. You goddamn idiot.” I pulled the dress over my head and clutched it by the sleeve. The wind kissed the skin where I'd been sweating, sending shivers down my back. I stood still for several minutes until I moved in a trance toward the barn's exit, in only my underwear.

The dress dragged behind me, Porkchop closely following, my bare feet gliding across the open lawn. I braced myself for frantic screams, for my mother running toward me and hastefully covering me with something from the clothesline despite no one living near us for miles. But the further I walked, the silence deepened.

I fanned the dress across the grass and bent in an awkward squat, scratching the ground for clumps of grass and dirt. I threw it onto the gown before ravishing the nearby blackberry brambles, the bush's tangle of leaves tearing tiny, bloodless cuts in my hands and arms, my motions rhythmic until my thighs and arms began to shake. I released a final handful of berries into the nest of fabric, the juices staining the tips of my fingers and palms.

Sat at the head of the gown, Porkchop watched me in silence, curiously. I ignored him and stepped onto the dress, the berries squishing beneath me. And suddenly I was stomping, rubbing my heels into the fibres, disfiguring it; bruising it. Slowly but surely, the white disappeared beneath the earthy ink. I laughed, hands and feet sticky and stained, a mosaic of blues and browns and greens.

“It’s somehow uglier than before,” Porkchop said, my march ceased.

I laughed harder. I beheld the masterpiece, noticed the areas of yellows and creams where I’d missed; the splotches of faded pink where the dyes had rejected. The laughter caught in my throat, and suddenly I was crying violently, my shoulders shuddering with each sob. I sat in the grass and cradled my stomach, closing my eyes from the evening sun.

I felt his paw on my arm.

"He's a good man," I said, once my cries faded.

"If you're sure."

"I am."

"So go," Porkchop said. His voice was kind now; softer. I nodded, wipping my eyes with the back of my hand.

"Your Pa keeps his keys in the glove box. Spare overalls in the backseat," he said. A deep, aching homesickness filled me all at once. I nodded again.

"Will you visit?" he asked. His tail was tucked and lifeless; his ears pinned back against his head. I held the side of his face.

"If they let me," I said. It was all I could say.

*

My knuckles were white at the steering wheel. He watched me, loyally following the truck as it barreled down the dirt road. I looked in the mirror, curiosity overcoming the adrenaline; Mama and Pa were nowhere in sight. Instead, I watched the soft orange speck grow smaller and smaller, a flame slowly extinguishing.