Buy the Dress

On the importance of an unimportant thing

Since December of 2018, I have been either pregnant, nursing, pregnant again, and, at this writing, nursing again. My body has been a gestational heap with milk udders lumbering around town in a series of forgiving, black tent dresses. When my phone is possessed by Satan and presents me with an unsolicited slideshow of “Memories!” from a decade ago, I look at my childless body gyrating around in SPANX-less oblivion and I can hardly recognize it. “Ah yes,” I say as if looking at a quaint European village later demolished in the great war, “It was a different time.”

There was a brief period between pregnancies when I returned to The Size of all the clothing from my previous life, and tragically, that was during the first year of a global pandemic, and it was wasted on my immediate family. And now, with the world opened up again, my body has been stretched and pulled and pulverized beyond recognition by the miracle of life.

I need to stop here and say: This is fine. I “signed up” for this. And as I frequently exclaim getting dressed in the morning to my husband’s horror, “Well, I couldn’t keep my legs together and now my tits are on the floor!” The lacey, underwire bras of my twenties are now cotton shelving units with names like “Skin to Skin” and “Dream Feed” and “Mooo, Horrible Beast!” The problem is, despite having used my body to create several babies from nothing but thin air and a couple gin and tonics, I am still expected to occasionally go out in public in nice clothes.

Yesterday was one of those days. We had to go to a formal event and I had nothing to wear. Throughout my life, I have said — with conviction — “I have nothing to wear.” All of those times I was lying. Yesterday I tried on every nice dress I own and aside from a few silk caftans from when I pretended to belong in Los Angeles (strike that era from the record), nothing fit around my ribcage. So I did what anyone who had a 2pm OBGYN appointment in Manhattan would do: I left two hours early to find a dress.

Let me first say this about shopping. I do not enjoy shopping for myself. Shopping for my kids: True heaven (and 90 percent of the reason to have them in the first place, the other 10 percent is eldercare). Shopping for a gift for a loved one: Sky’s the limit. Shopping for myself: Torture. It is not a “leisure” activity for me, it is a stressful endeavor that flips every major anxiety switch built into my psychological hardware. I generally have a “get in, get out” mentality about it and cycle between regret and shame and money guilt and dysmorphia and exhaustion. In recent years, I’ve done it with earbuds which act as a buffer against anyone asking if I need help, and give me a soundtrack of a sad lady with a guitar to meet me at the bottom of my emotional well.

If you have read my book (what a breathtakingly pretentious way to begin a sentence), you will know that I was raised by a grandmother who loved shopping and a mother who hated it. As a young child, I loved shopping with my grandmother with a religious fervor. On days my grandma Bobby was coming to whisk me out of our walk-up apartment on West 84th Street and take me to her temple, Bloomingdales, I would wait at the door in my nicest Laura Ashley dress listening for her heels clacking up the stairs. She’d take me by taxi (!) to the department store and I would purposely walk through the spritzed clouds of perfume to “smell fancy” the rest of the day, which would usually include lunch with something unbelievably decadent, like a melon filled with cottage cheese (!) or a salad (!) covered in bacon (!!).

As I got older, shopping with my grandma was a tandem sport, like ice luge or couple’s figure skating. We were, in her words, a well-oiled machine. We’d hit the sale section, find everything in our sizes, scrutinize as if it’s the clothing’s problem — never our bodies — and rejoice like Vikings when something was “perfect.” Then we’d go find something special for a specific event, visualize the entire thing with shoes and jewelry we already had, and on our way out, get a new lipstick. She grew up impoverished to the point of starving and by the time she was my grandmother, she had enough money to shower me in shift dresses and cardigans. And the occasional blazer I’d never wear.

When my grandma died in 2017, mercifully before I gained the baby weight, shopping lost all joy for me.

Until yesterday. When I found the Dress.

I walked into the store in my Birkenstocks (I thought they were chic! But in this gleaming chiffon atelier they felt very gross!), and nine minutes later I was staring into a dressing room mirror looking at…Kate Fucking Middleton? Following my grandma’s orders from beyond the grave, I marched out of the dressing room and went into the less flattering light of the store to take another look. Tragically, I still looked good. This dress was ludicrously expensive. It cost as much as three of my usual dresses. But! Since having children, I had not considered myself even remotely attractive woman until this very moment. A warm maternal figure politely obscured by dark fabrics, sure. But a woman? I could look serviceable and presentable when required, but…pretty? That booze cruise had sailed.

So I started to rationalize it. Hard. I calculated what it would cost per time worn (PTW). In addition to the event that night, I’d have a summer family wedding and a fall friend wedding, which is great because there will be no dress overlap (NDO). I could “dress it down” for a baby shower later this month. I could wear it with a leather jacket to my picture book event this winter. I could be buried in it! In a moment of delusion, I wondered if maybe they would they give it to me because it looked so good — “Please, miss, you must have it - we give all models a dress, it’s only fair!”

Normally, in this situation, I text my best friend. Our text messages are mostly pictures of our kids, long diatribes about grievances, and dressing room pictures followed by “HELP THIS IS TOO EXPENSIVE.” But she, cruelly, is visiting her family in Paris right now. So I did what any sane person would do: I called my mother to talk me out of it.

There is good news and bad news about this plan. The good news is that my mother picked up the call. The bad news is she was on light painkillers after recovering from a (she’s fine!!) medical procedure a week ago. Here is the conversation with my high mom.

ME: Mom?

MOM: Sweetie.

ME: How are you doing?

MOM: I’m great.

ME: Good. I’m in a store and I’m trying on a dress and it looks good I think. But it’s expensive.

MOM: Send me a picture.

[I DO]

MOM: Preeeetty!

ME: Yes it’s very nice.

MOM: Get it!

ME: Who is this?

MOM: Ha ha. You crack yourself up.

ME: Mom it’s [REDACTED AMOUNT OF MONEY] on sale.

MOM: You spend that on the kids!

ME: On several days of childcare!

MOM: Whatever. It’s so nice. You earn money and you can spend it. And it’s on sale!

ME: It’s unethical. It’s for a preschool fundraiser. But also other things.

MOM: It’s been so long since I’ve seen you in a dress I forgot what it looked like.

ME: Jesus.

MOM: Hee hee.

ME: I’m putting it on hold and trying on cheaper things somewhere else.

MOM: You’ll never find something else. Oh I forgot I have to call [INAUDIBLE].

[SHE HANGS UP]

I went to — I shit you not — six other stores. I clacked my filthy Birkenstocks all over the Goyard bag hellscape of the Upper East Side as I searched for even a serviceable dress. I tried. I swathed my lopsided tits in satin-blend all over Madison Avenue and nothing came close to the Dress.

Then, with thirty minutes to go before my doctor’s appointment, hungry and bereft, I sat down in some bullshit patisserie for rich wives of hedge fund guys and got furious. As I rage-ate a lukewarm slice of quiche, I heard my grandma loud and clear. “Bessie?” I kept eating and tried to dismiss her in my head. “Buy the dress.” I stabbed the plastic fork into the crust so hard a tong snapped off. “How much does Charlie spend on a guitar?” That’s different! Those are instruments to pass down to the kids! Those take craftsmanship! “You think you can put a price on feeling the way you felt?” Yes I can! It’s exactly [REDACTED] before tax! “What is money for?” Education. Childcare. Food. Shelter. Important things!

Important things.

Since my formative years, I’ve felt vaguely self-conscious about giving a damn about clothes. We are meant to laugh at Cher Horowitz when she gets upset about ruining her Alaïa dress during a mugging. We’re meant to applaud Elizabeth Bennet for trudging across the moors, hem six inches deep in the mud, not caring for the ribbons and silks and fripperies of her silly younger sisters.

Paramount

The cultural ethics are pretty straightforward. Liking clothes: Decadent. Consumerista. Bad. Not caring about clothes: Virtuous. Smart. Cool.

But also: A little bit fuck that? Since becoming a mother, the guilt and shame I have felt about indulgences has been a constant shadow over pleasurable or self-centered experiences. “I’m getting a haircut, but shouldn’t I be spending time with my kids?” “I’m writing in an office a few days a week, but shouldn’t I be spending time with my kids?” “I’m getting an ultrasound of my ovaries, but shouldn’t I be spending time with the kids that CAME FROM THOSE OVARIES?” The answer is sometimes! A lot of the time, even!

But there are times, and clothes, that are not about the kids.

When I first read Joan Didion’s packing list in one of the essays in The White Album, I felt like I wanted to nod my head directly into the book. “Two skirts. Two leotards. One pullover sweater.” She was going on a reporting trip and curating a series of chic looks. She loved her clothes. She was in a Celine ad for Christ’s sake! And she was smart. And virtuous. And universally acknowledged as cool.

From The Guardian

There are moments in every serious person’s life, when she needs the right skirt. My stoned mother and my dead grandmother were right. I had to do it. I had the chance, for the first time in half a decade, to feel like a human woman and not just a vessel for another person’s life. And I had an advance for a children’s book in my bank account.

After my OBGYN appointment, I walked back into the store. The saleswoman was visibly surprised to see me.

“Sorry!” she coughed, rushing out from behind the register. “I didn’t think you - I put it back out.” She was so certain I wouldn’t come back that she didn’t even keep the dress on hold. It was out on the floor.

“That’s okay.” I assured her, handing over my card, trembling a bit.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d be back either.”

Kate Middleton