The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

“There are no refunds,” Eva would say. “That’s our policy.”

  As Shelley sees it, despite Eva’s clear lack of a soft spot, she was a trailblazer as a woman in the workplace. She not only kept the business afloat but expanded it at a time when women were almost exclusively in the home, especially in towns like Fowler.

  She was a presence on dusty Main Street—a short, stocky woman with thick arms and thicker legs, wearing a white apron and that feathered hat of hers, always clutching wedding dresses as she walked to and from the bridal shop. Men took her seriously and admired her toughness; some said she was “a little Napoleon.” Women respected her too. They figured Eva knew what was best for their daughters when it came to bridal gowns.

  Eva had two sons. Her first, Luke, was born in 1923 and her second, Clark, was a surprise baby, born in 1937. Clark is Shelley’s father and his unexpected arrival was not greeted with great enthusiasm by his parents. Eva—then thirty-seven years old—feared that looking after him would take time away from the store.

  Clark is pretty straightforward in his descriptions of his mother. “She never showed much emotion,” he says. “She ran the store six days a week. That was her focus. And my dad worked hard, doing the book work every night and on Sundays, too.”

  In the years that followed, Eva became determined not to let brides leave the store empty-handed. If a bride and her mother couldn’t find a dress they liked, Eva would piece one together. When a bride didn’t like any veils, Eva made her a new one. Eva traveled by herself to Chicago and New York to bring dresses back to Fowler.

  Having logged seven decades at the store, Eva’s niece, Eleanor, recalls her as a woman who worked herself hard, and was a taskmaster with employees. “If there was a wall to wash, we washed it,” says Eleanor. When brides weren’t in the store, Eva would give her saleswomen directions in German. It was a regimented operation.

  Over time, Eva became more aggressive as a businesswoman, ordering so many dresses that her husband, Frank, feared the business could be crushed by debt. But Eva’s ambition was overpowering, and boxes of wedding gowns kept arriving at the local train depot. Frank sometimes refused to sign for the packages. “We just can’t afford to stock all of these dresses,” he’d say apologetically.

  “Just put the boxes over in the corner,” the master at the depot would tell his underlings after Frank had left. “Eva will come down tomorrow, when Frank’s not around, and she’ll sign for ’em and take ’em with her.”

  Clark joined the business in 1959. He would have preferred working up the street, in the family furniture business. But that operation had gone to his older brother. So he was told he could work at Becker’s Bridal, selling menswear at the back of the store. That was a flawed business plan. Not many men felt like walking through a bridal shop thick with chattering brides and their mothers. The place felt too feminine. So men went elsewhere to buy their suits and ties, and Clark’s menswear business struggled.

  The upside for Clark: working in the store allowed him to meet girls—bridesmaids, sisters of brides, window-shopping single girls—and one day a pretty young woman named Sharon walked in with her friends, just to look around. Clark took a liking to her and asked her on a date. They were married in 1962 and had eight children. Michelle—nicknamed Shelley—was the third born and the eldest daughter.

  Sharon learned quickly that Eva was a tough woman, and would be a take-charge mother-in-law. “Everything was always done her way, and nobody argued with her,” Sharon says. “Her husband was scared of her.”

  When it was time to pick out Sharon’s bridal gown, Eva gave her three choices. The first was powder-blue. “It’s nice, but I don’t think I like it,” Sharon volunteered.

  “OK, try on this one,” Eva told her. The second dress was satin, with Chantilly lace and a jewel neckline. “This is pretty,” Sharon said.

  “Good, then that’s the one,” Eva said. Sharon never even got to try the third dress.

  Eva gave Sharon a cabbage-leaf headpiece. “This will work,” she said. And that was that. Eva even picked Sharon’s bridesmaids.

  Clark and Sharon at their wedding in 1962

  After the wedding, Eva took back the dress Sharon had worn, had it cleaned, cut the sleeves, hung it on a rack at the store, and sold it weeks later to another bride.

  Eva’s authoritarian ways were legendary in the family. When Shelley was three years old, she had long hair down to her waist. One day, while Sharon was out buying groceries, Grandma Eva took a close look at Shelley. “Your hair is too long,” she said.

  Shelley’s seventeen-year-old cousin Beth was there too. “You need to cut this little girl’s hair,” Eva told the cousin. Eva got a pair of scissors and gave it to the teen, who did as she was instructed. “Keep cutting,” Eva said.

  By the time Sharon returned from the market, Shelley’s hair was so short that she looked like a boy. Sharon was flabbergasted but said nothing to her mother-in-law. It was too late, and besides, there was no arguing with Eva. “Maybe that was the kind of mind-set it took to be a pioneering woman in the bridal industry,” Shelley now says.

  Clark, understandably, took a liking to Sharon’s parents and siblings. Unlike the Becker family dynamics, which were so often business-focused, Sharon’s family tried harder to embrace their home life. They measured happiness by the joy they found in one another, rather than the number of dresses sold in a given week down at the store.

  It goes without saying that Eva was not a warm grandmother in the ways we like to think of grandmothers today. And yet Shelley, who was ten years old when Eva died, now feels closer to her than ever. Yes, Eva could be a tough, distant, formidable figure, but Shelley has a few sweeter memories of the family matriarch, and she holds them tightly. One day, at age eight or nine, Shelley was walking on Main Street and came upon Eva carrying a bridal gown. Eva switched the dress from her right to her left arm so she could reach into her pocket. She pulled out a dime.

  “Here you go, girlie,” Eva said.

  It wasn’t the dime that excited Shelley. It was the way her grandmother addressed her. It was that term of endearment she’d heard down at the shop.

  These days, Shelley is often alone at the store, after hours, doing bookkeeping, and that’s when she most feels her grandmother’s presence. Shelley’s daughter, Alyssa, was born eleven years after Eva died, and now that Alyssa is working at Becker’s, Shelley feels that another generational bond has been forged.

  “I’m grateful that it seems as if Grandma Eva is still in the store, helping Alyssa and me,” Shelley says. “I feel she is showing her love now, through all her energy in the store. Sometimes when people are alive, they can’t fully show the love they’re feeling. Maybe for some people, like Grandma Eva, their love somehow comes afterward.”

  Chapter Six

  Erika

  Twenty-three-year-old Erika Hansen has come to Becker’s with her mother, her three sisters, and her grandmother, and it’s a very sentimental moment for all of them as she contemplates which dress to bring into the Magic Room. Erika’s sisters surround her, fussing over each gown she tries on down by the fitting rooms, taking videos and photos, and talking all at once, issuing compliments and funny asides. Erika feels both excited and overwhelmed. She’d been here before, when her older sisters were on their own dress-buying missions. Now it’s her turn.

  “How will I know if it’s the right dress?” she asks Mona, her saleswoman.

  “You’ll know,” Mona tells her. “Usually, when you get into the Magic Room, and the tears come, that’s the dress.”

  Her sisters know Erika is nervous about getting married, and about the whole pageantry of a wedding. They are here to remind her that it’s not just about the wedding dress. It’s also about the love she feels for her fiancé, Reuben, a former Marine who saw duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The sisters have a great deal of affection for one another. You can see it in the way they stand so close together and brush the hair out of Erika’
s eyes. They have much in common, including a commitment to the sanctity of love and marriage that is rooted not just in their upbringing and their faith, but in their sense of themselves.

  Erika, far right, with her sisters

  It’s almost as if these very pretty, fresh-faced young women come from a different time, with different values, from almost all of their peers. All four sisters made a decision to save themselves for what they call “something very special.” Each sister has embraced the beauty in an uncommon patience.

  That’s why it wasn’t until just recently that Erika experienced her first romantic kiss. It happened on the day Reuben proposed to her. By her own design, she had waited a lifetime for that kiss.

  Her sisters have similar stories.

  Her oldest sister, Leanne, now twenty-six, received her first kiss on her wedding day, standing at the altar.

  Her middle sister, Kayla, twenty-four, was first kissed on the day her fiancé and his platoon were deployed to Iraq.

  Her youngest sister, Aleece, is twenty-two and has never been kissed. She vows to wait patiently until her time comes.

  Here at Becker’s, the sisters speak freely to Shelley, Mona, and the other saleswomen about their vows of purity—vows that go well beyond the doctrine of their Baptist church. When they were teens, their youth pastor routinely offered his thoughts about the stages of love, and the religious call to refrain from intercourse until marriage. But kissing? Cuddling? Maybe more? The underlying message was: We know you have urges, so be very careful and respectful. Other than intercourse, the girls learned, these personal decisions “are between you and God and your partner.”

  Erika’s older sister, Leanne, was the first to consider the no-kissing vow, back when she was in fifth grade. She had read a young-adult book in which the heroine made a decision to save her first kiss for her wedding day. Leanne thought that sounded very romantic, and she made the same vow herself. She did this on her own. It wasn’t that her parents were encouraging her. And one by one, her younger sisters took similar vows.

  Here at Becker’s, their mother, Lynn, an attractive fifty-year-old woman, is hanging back, letting her daughters talk. Then one of the saleswomen asks what she thinks of their decisions. “I teased the girls when they were little,” Lynn answers. “I said, ‘Save all your kisses for Mom and Dad and the man you marry.’ I was kidding, and they knew I was kidding.”

  She may have been kidding, but she and her husband, Victor, could take things seriously, too. They tried to guide the girls in making good decisions, especially when it came to matters of sexuality. “We tried to train them. When they were wrestling with decisions, instead of getting close to the line, where you might cross over into a bad decision, it’s best to stay as far from that line as possible. Our oldest daughter took that literally, and decided there would be no kissing. It became her soapbox, and that influenced her sisters. Honestly, it was totally them. They each made the decision and owned it individually.”

  Looking back at her younger years, Lynn describes her dating life as typical for the 1970s. “I loved kissing, and was nowhere near as chaste as my girls have been,” she says. “When Leanne said she wouldn’t kiss until marriage, I thought, ‘Well, you’ll never be able to make it,’ but I didn’t tell her that. I just said, ‘It could be hard to do.’ And I did challenge the girls as they got older. I didn’t want them to think kissing was wrong. Every once in a while I’d say, ‘You do understand that it’s not bad to kiss, right?’”

  The sisters each came up with their own slightly different standard. Leanne wanted to wait for marriage. Kayla wanted to wait until she knew she was in love, and had picked the man she’d marry. Erika decided it would be the day she got engaged. Aleece is still considering the exact circumstances that will feel right to her.

  In one sense, it is hard to fathom that in 2010, young women such as the Hansen sisters exist. At Becker’s, they seem completely refreshing. Shelley and her saleswomen have seen too many young women buying wedding dresses while pregnant. Some brides-to-be overshare their life stories, telling sordid tales of past relationships as they hope for better results with the new guys they’re marrying. Just the other day, a woman was in the store shopping for a dress for her fourth wedding. She told Shelley with a half-smile, “I’m always the bride, never the bridesmaid.”

  And so Erika and her sisters seem so different from many of their contemporaries. There’s a kind of serenity about them. They acknowledge that their choices may not be right for every young woman. But these choices are right for them.

  And yet . . .

  There are things that their mother, Lynn, doesn’t talk about here at Becker’s: hard memories that weigh on her, things the girls know about and also keep to themselves. Lynn grew up in a troubled home, and that has informed so many of her decisions as a mother. She wonders sometimes if maybe she’s being too overprotective of her daughters. Maybe, in her love for them, in her visceral urge to maintain their safety, she’s kept them too sheltered. Perhaps she’s trying too desperately to keep them from enduring the heartaches that defined her young life. Could their vows about kissing be rooted, at least in part, to their understanding of their mother’s upbringing?

  The Hansens have been at Becker’s for hours, since before the store opened. The day had begun with them standing outside the shop, surveying the tiny town, as they waited for Shelley to unlock the door. “You look at the building, and you wonder how they can possibly fit a couple thousand dresses in there,” one of Erika’s sisters told her. “Then you’ll walk in, and they’ll all be there, lined up and waiting for you.”

  Once in the front door, because the store wasn’t busy yet, Erika’s sisters had commandeered two dressing rooms, and kept finding dresses for her to try on. Some they thought could be contenders. Others they found so over-the-top or frilly that they thought it would be fun to see Erika wearing them, just because. Erika was game for all of it. “You’re beaming in every dress you put on,” her mother said.

  Mona, their saleswoman, knew just how to keep the young women excited. “You know what?” she said at one point. “We just got some new dresses in. I’m dying to see what they look like on somebody. Would you try a couple on for me?”

  Unlike most brides at Becker’s, who never seem to consider their fiancés’ taste in dresses, Erika was trying to keep in mind what Reuben might want to see her in. “He wouldn’t want anything high-end or trendy,” she told her sisters. “That’s not Reuben.”

  As the morning wore on, Erika had gotten into and out of thirty or forty dresses. Some where lightweight: under four pounds. Others, like the thick satin number that weighed almost twenty pounds, were hard to walk around in. “I feel like I’m wearing a curtain,” Erika announced at one point.

  “We need to refuel,” her mother said. “We’re losing energy. Where can we get lunch?”

  Mona sent them over to Main Street Pizza and promised that when Erika returned she could narrow the dresses down to a small handful. Then she could start thinking about looking at herself in the Magic Room.

  Erika’s sisters had taken photos of her in all of the dresses on their cell phones and a digital camera. They scrolled through them as they ate pizza, everyone weighing in. Some had lace. Some didn’t. One had an elegant snowflake design. One, from Spain, was gorgeous but beyond their budget. All were completely modest.

  Even though hordes of brides today want to look as sexy as possible in their wedding dresses, bridal-shop owners say there also has been a growing call for more modest bridal attire. Shelley has had customers who are Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, or Muslim. They need sleeves and higher necklines, with very little skin showing, but they still want to look glamorous.

  When the Hansens got back to Becker’s, they had narrowed their choices down to six. Mona pulled out some veils and mock bouquets and announced it was time. “OK,” she said. “Let’s try the Magic Room.”

  And so now here they are.

  The first
dress Erika tries on in the Magic Room is the one with all the snowflakes. Her sisters ooh and ahh, but that may be just a way to keep the energy level up. Someone asks, “What’s next?”

  Erika leaves and returns wearing the $2,300 gown from Spain. It’s beautiful, she looks stunning, but the price makes everyone uncomfortable. And so Erika tries on the third dress, which offers a modern twist on a vintage lace dress. It’s ivory, with ornate crystal beading on a satin band at the waist. The price tag: just under $1,000.

  In the soft lighting, looking in those mirrors that go on forever, Erika suddenly has an image in her head: She’s in this dress, standing at the altar.

  “I think I’m going to cry,” she says.

  “Well, that’s the sign,” someone says. And then Erika is crying and her sisters are crying and her mother and grandmother, too. Then they’re laughing. Just like that.

  “I guess this is the one,” Erika tells Mona. The fourth, fifth, and sixth dresses never make an appearance in the Magic Room.

  Erika stands there on the pedestal for another half hour, turning left, then right, and then around and around. “I love it,” she says. “I think Reuben will love it too.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Mother Daughter Business

  Back in the 1940s, it usually took a Becker’s bride an hour to find and buy a dress. Grandma Eva would have only about fifty dresses in the store, and by the time sixty minutes had passed, the bride’s parents were at the counter, paying cash for the dress.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, Becker’s offered a hundred or so dresses, and the process tended to take a couple of hours. For most brides, Becker’s was the only shop they planned to visit, and they bought the dress on their first day.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, there were a couple thousand different dresses at Becker’s, and brides and their mothers often would show up with pictures torn out of bridal magazines, asking questions: “Do you have something like this, only with a lower neckline and short sleeves?” The process of trying on dresses could stretch to four hours, but again, saleswomen knew a sale was likely. More than 90 percent of the women who came to Becker’s ended up buying.