Say "What the hell?!" to the Dress

This is one of those stories where you might be tempted to feel sorry for me. For what I felt to be limited life choices. For my depth of poverty at the time of getting married. For saying “Yes” when I should have said “Hell no!” For staying married as long as I did. For walking away and losing every single thing I owned.

But, please, don’t. Don’t feel sorry for me. Save these precious emotions for animals who need rescuing from shelters or communities that don’t have clean water or worms that need rescuing after a heavy rain. After all, I am a survivor – just like my wedding dress.

The wedding was doomed from Day One when several family members said they couldn't (wouldn’t) attend because we had unwittingly scheduled it for Super Bowl Sunday. Dumb, I know. I wasn’t a sports fanatic and how could I have known that watching the Super Bowl and its commercials was a national sport unto itself?

After all, My Big Day was what anyone would call a nontraditional affair. We got married on an isolated lake, deep in the wilderness. The pastor who made the trek to do the officiating arrived on time, but he inadvertently thought that he was dispensing a “pre-marital talk,” not performing the ceremony. We had to really scramble to get the vows straightened out and who was to say what and when before the ceremony could begin.

Then there was the wedding party: a crew of eight or so family members who were tricked out in woolen hats and mittens and heavy parkas as we were getting married in the middle of January. Remember Super Bowl Sunday?

One of the elderly attendees, Mildred, had thought to make a cake. It was a flat, depressing-looking two-layer with dripping icing. Sliding across the top and off-center was a tiny plastic figurine of a woman in a pink and green dress, the sort that would top a young girl's birthday cake. Someone from the wedding party understandably asked, “But where’s the groom?”

Mildred told us that she could only find the tiny girl in her junk drawer that morning, so she had to make do. Little did Mildred know that she was psychic and could portend the future. Indeed, I would start and end the marriage standing on my own. I was a believer in omens at the time (and still am), and an alarm went off sounding a lot like Agatha the Precog shouting to Tom Cruise in The Minority Report: “RUN!!!” I should have listened and heeded.

And there were additional nontraditional details I can't forget: We cut the cake with a large steel, wooden-handled butcher knife. As for wedding photos, Mildred came through again and had brought one of those ancient Polaroids with the spit-out photos that are all the artistic rage now. But when I got married? Not so much.

Ultimately, there were only three pictures taken, as Mildred couldn’t find any fresh film before leaving the house. She had the cake to deal with, after all. One photo is of us standing all together – the pastor, the attendees, and me standing next to Elmer Fudd (my newly betrothed) – with the lake in the background. Photo #2 was of Elmer and me cutting Mildred’s flattened beret of a cake with a 12” long butcher knife. And photo #3 was an upshot of Uncle Charlie’s hairy nostrils, taken while Mildred tried to remember how to work the camera.

Oh, and my dress. I cannot forget my dress. My sister, who knew of my lack of funds, told me that she wanted to "loan" me one of her dresses. She assured me that it was “one size fits all” . . . and it was. She had also assured me that I would “just love it” and that it would be perfect for My Big Day.

When I received the package in the mail, I was excited to see it. After all, this was to be the dress for My Big Day. And then I saw it. And I wasn’t so excited anymore. It looked more to be from the racks of some costume department for a stage production of “Little House on the Prairie.” I am here to assure you that it certainly would never be featured on the cover of any bride magazine or displayed in the window of some bridal boutique.

I found out that it was handsewn from a pattern called “The Prairie Dress.” It was long and billowy, so she was telling the truth about “one size fits all.” It had a tiny round collar and full, long sleeves that caught a few dabs of icing when we were cutting the cake. Oh, and the color? I know you are waiting for this: It was brown.

Yes, I got married in a brown dress the color of poo. Yes, it was a dream day for any bride.

Then the dream turned into a real and true nightmare. I will not subject you to any of the grim details, but I managed to stay married for far too long. Elmer Fudd was not only a jerk, but a mean one. It took a while, but I eventually figured out an exit strategy and I took it. By implementing said “exit strategy,” I literally walked away with the clothes that I was wearing on my body and the clothes I could stuff into the pack on my back. I left our home, our car, my books and journals and writing, any and all memorabilia . . . every little thing.

I was a walking cliché: “She walked away with the clothes on her back.” Little did I know that these overused phrases actually have a point of origin based on someone’s unfortunate truth.

Walking away like this should have felt like a liberating and cleansing experience, but it felt to be more of a lingering and magnificent abject terror that clung to my Day of Leaving, much like that of a bad odor. Turns out it isn’t so easy to “just walk away.” But I forged ahead and filed for divorce and figured stuff out as I went.

My life felt like one of those paint-by-number projects where all you see are the little cracks and lines on the canvas, each one assigned a number. You start out by filling in the olive-green fractals, and you don’t even like the color olive green. You finish all the little patches that were labeled number “17” – chosen first because that is how many years you were married.

You take a step back and lay down your brush and all you see is a hideous canvas with olive green blotches patched all over it. You want to give up and give in. But you don’t. You pick up the brush and start painting all of the patches with the number “1” – chosen for its “starting over” virtue: today is the first day of my life.

The divorce was finally finalized. It had been a long and strange trip, but I got through it. Looking back, I was much stronger than I believed that I could be. Once I had taken that first baby step, I was golden. I just didn’t realize it at the time. That’s the thing with baby steps. You might have to keep the faith when you don’t think you can and measure progress in inches, but you will arrive. And I eventually arrived.

Elmer, in one of his characteristic temper tantrums, decided that he didn’t want any reminders of me lingering in the home I had left behind. After months of the lawyers debating over this and that, I received a phone message saying that all my stuff had been dumped in a parking lot.

I drove to the lot to see exactly what lunacy I was dealing with here. There, in the middle of the lot was a pile of boxes simply dumped, one on top of the other. There was no stacking, no organization, no respect. It looked like a thrift store’s hangover – one that ended with a pile of box-vomit on the bathroom floor.

I surveyed the pile and assessed my options. I had been getting by for months without any of this stuff. I could go rent a U-Haul and a storage unit and stick everything in it until I felt better able to sort through it. Or I could get on the phone and call a local thrift store to see if they picked stuff up.

I went with door #2. The thrift store was happy to come and get my stuff. They asked for my address and this is where I had to explain that it was all piled up in a public parking lot, awaiting their rescue.

I didn’t even wait around for the truck to arrive. It wasn’t that it would have been too painful to watch my “treasure” being hauled away to some anonymous sorting and tagging. I just didn’t want to deal with any of it anymore. I was done.

A few months passed beyond The Parking Lot Vomit Incident and, in the process of resurrecting my material world, I went to the thrift store to buy a few items. I needed a lamp and a few rugs and a pair of Levi’s. While flicking through the racks for a pair of jeans, I spotted a familiar print on one of the nearby clothing racks. It was on one of those taller racks that holds “long items” such as prom dresses.

I walked over to verify that what I was seeing wasn’t some sort of cosmic illusion. But there it was: my wedding dress. It didn’t look any worse for wear, what with it only being homeless in the parking lot for a matter of hours before being rescued by the good folks at the thrift store.

Then I looked up and there, on the top of the rack, was a hand-lettered sign reading:

Sleepwear

I laughed out loud, and a woman looked over at me, giving me a look that confirmed my insanity for having stayed married as long as I had. I fingered the cloth of the puffy sleeve, and I actually considered buying the sorry thing so I could put it in a padded envelope and send it back to my sister with a note: “By the way, thanks for loaning me the brown dress for my wedding day.”

Sleepwear. Yes, I must have been sleepwalking for those 17 years to have stayed married to Elmer. But now? I am awake. I got up this morning and put on an age-appropriate-length red skirt – an item that the store employee described to me as “kicky.”

Well, say my name. Out loud. I can’t hear you. Yes, it’s Kicky. If Walter White could come to own “Heisenberg” so fully, I think I can pull off Kicky. No more sleepwalking for Kicky. Kicky is out there, kicking butt and taking names, and no one will ever put Kicky in the corner again. I am not just liberated. I am me.

That day of thrift shopping brought me full circle. I needed it. It was the proverbial icing on Mildred’s sad cake. I was the flying-solo plastic girl again, thank God. I was whole. And laughing out loud at seeing my wedding dress in Sleepwear was like being on the receiving end of Cher’s “Snap out of it!” slap. I didn't find any material treasures that day in the thrift store, but I did buy back my soul.

I might have been wearing sleepwear on my wedding day, but I am awake now. Say my name.