The sun filtered through my childhood home's basement windows. The clock read 3:30 p.m. Having survived another day on the long bus ride home from my middle school in Richmond, UT I believed it was time for another forbidden foray into my older sister's closet. Not a soul was home in the house. I cracked open a cold one...Coke that is. I preferred the bubbly over ice in a goblet so that I could pretend I was some fancy lady at some fancy party and not just an ordinary seventh-grader in a small town where half the residents could be traced back to a handful of settlers. Believe me, Clarkston, UT is a tangled web of cousins and cousins by marriage. You almost need to sit down and do some genealogy before talking bad about someone to someone else. Chances are they are related.
But back to the closet raid at hand. My sister never let me wear her clothes. How I envied the maroon tinged Doc Martins, and rows and rows of big baggy pants that my sister could probably burrow into like a sleeping bag. But hey, it was the nineties and grunge was in. My cousin Rory and I had a weekly date so we could specifically watch the angst of
My So-Called Life together and ruminate in hushed voices what it would be like to reach out and touch Jared Leto's silky blond hair. I wore white wife-beaters that came in a Hanes three pack in the men's section covered by flannels of all sorts of different colors. But my sister's wardrobe was the ultimate grunge fantasy. Striped XXL t-shirts abounded. She was always borrowing friend's clothes, which only made the fruit that more forbidden for me.
The red and pink shag carpet smelled of damp, as it always did. I marveled at my sister's underground lair. If she was home this is where she spent 95% of her time. Locked away from the rest of us being much cooler than me, or that's the way I saw it at the time. I ran my fingers over the dark wooden slats of the folding closet doors, sealed tightly and shut off like my sister seemed to me. I gently pried them open beholding the splendor of the second hand clothing that my sister got for killer deals at our local thrift store.
I flipped from one article of clothing to the next, daydreaming of myself with blond hair, like my sister's. Maybe we'd go up the canyon together, or whatever it was that she did and we would talk and laugh. Make fun of our parents. If only I could wear clothes like her, maybe she'd think I was cool enough to be with her.
You're so grown up, Denise! You used to be so annoying but now you're my favorite sibling. Here, take my other pair of Doc. Martins. Now we can stomp around in them together. I imagined all this as I spied a new article of clothing that hadn't been there previously. It was a sleeveless matte black cotton dress that fell to the knee. The cut was simple, with a fuller skirt and white stitching around the seams. The perfect thing to wear with army boots and your Kirk Cobain look-alike boyfriend's denim jacket that wreaked of stale cigarette smoke.
I took another sip of bubbly and pondered whether I should try it on. It clearly wasn't hers. She'd never worn it that I knew of. That meant it was a friend's. Most of my trips to her closet consisted of day dreaming and simple looking at the clothing. I rarely tried on things. My sister always knew when I had. She later told me it's because I messed up the hangers when I put the clothes back on them haphazardly.
What the heck, I thought. Heck, because I was a good Mormon girl who hadn't uttered a single swear word at the time. I bet my sister could cuss a blue streak though. She was a rebel. She didn't care what anyone thought of her. And so I removed the mysterious friend's dress and slipped it over my head. There was no zipper. This should have been my first warning that something could go awry. I struggled to fit the dress over my shoulders and full bust, but once I had shimmied and stretched that cotton weave to it's limits the dress fell easily over my waist and hips. It was a bit snug I observed in the full length mirror in the upstairs bathroom. My bust felt a distinct kinship to all those news reports on getting your yearly mammogram. Pretty soon I got a tingling under my arms because the arm holes were so tight. Oh dear.
Starting to sweat I decided it was time to get the dress off, it had started to feel like a steel corset. The Grande Dames...(my boobs) were having the life squished out of them. I pulled the dress up to take it off. I could only get it to the bottom of my bust. I grunted and growled. I pulled and I stretched but I could not get out of the dress. Sweating in earnest now I ran to the microwave to check on the time. There was no telling what time Darcie would come home. For a good twenty minutes I fought with every fiber of my being to peel that tortuous dress off of me. Crying I finally made a fatal decision.
The cold metal of the scissors against my hot skin was a welcome relief.
Snip. Snip. Snip. With every cut I saw my sister in my mind's eye screaming at me for what I had done. She'd banish me from ever setting foot in her bedroom. All hopes I had of a friendship with her would be lost. With about a five inch cut in the upper seam under the right armpit I was finally able to pull the dress free. And my boobs sang.
I quickly changed back into my clothes and took the ruined dress to my bedroom and shut the door. What was I going to do? I could ask my mom to sew it but then I'd have to deal with those consequences and she'd probably make me tell my sister as part of my penance anyway. No. The only choice I had was to sew it myself. The only problem was I didn't know how. I took my mother's sewing kit from the hall closet. The sewing machine was like some unknowable technology to me, as alien as disliking the taste of chocolate. I threaded the needle with white thread. Black would have looked better but I couldn't find any. I heard the side door open and close. I shakily tied a knot in the end of the long thread. Then I set to work. My stitches were big and clumsy. I passed the needle through the rent fabric closing the gap as best I could.
As I finished I nearly gasped at how incredibly obvious the wound on the dress was. Oh well. Time to face my fate. I left the dress in my room and went in search of whom ever was home. It was my brother. I was saved. He called me tub-o-lard as I passed and I called him dummy. Our deep bond shimmered in the air like dust motes.
I gathered the dress in my bedroom into a ball and tucked it under my shirt, just in case. As I quickly placed it on the hanger I looked once more at the maroon Doc. Martins. She was so lucky. I crossed my fingers and left her room as it had been.
I gave myself ulcers worrying about it for weeks. Eventually the dress disappeared from the closet, gone back to the unfortunate owner a little more dilapidated than before. My sister never said a word about it. And I never tried on another dress without a zipper.
