“I need to be earning more,” Shelley would say to her mother.
“We can’t afford it,” Sharon answered. “I’m already paying you a dollar an hour more than everyone else.”
“How about health insurance?” Shelley asked.
“I’m sorry,” Sharon said. “We can’t do it. Things are tight right now. The budget won’t allow it.”
Shelley would always return to the sales floor with a smile—brides never knew that she was upset—but she was increasingly unhappy with her situation. And it wasn’t just the money. Shelley had ideas for modernizing the store, for bringing in more-upscale dresses, for streamlining operations and creating a commission system for employees. Her parents’ response was usually the same: “That’s not how we do it.”
And so, having already changed her world by separating from her husband, Shelley decided that maybe it was time to reevaluate her work life, too. “You’re so stinkin’ cute,” the woman who ran the snack shop a few doors down from Becker’s would say to her. “You don’t belong in a small town. You belong in a city!”
A city? That was too formidable a step. But Shelley felt she had to do something.
She confided in her friends Jeff and Julie (Jeff’s fatal heart attack was still a decade away) and they helped her get her bearings. It’s common wisdom among family-business consultants that younger family members should first spend time working elsewhere. It can give them confidence, experience, and a sense of how other businesses work. Shelley never did that when she was younger. “It might be best if you leave the store and find your own path,” Julie advised her. “Someday you can return, but for now, why not see what life is like in the outside world?”
At the time, Julie, a nurse, was working for a cardiovascular surgeon who was looking to hire a receptionist and billing clerk. Shelley interviewed with the doctor, impressed him, and soon had a job offer. The pay was ten dollars an hour and included benefits. She decided to take it.
She never told her parents about the interview. She just came to work on a Thursday, and after the store emptied out, she asked her mother if she had a minute to talk. “I’ve accepted a job,” Shelley said. “I’ll be working for a doctor. I start Monday.”
Her mother was stunned. “You’re going to do what?”
Shelley explained the job again. “A doctor’s office?” Sharon said. “What does that have to do with wedding dresses? What does that have to do with what you know how to do?”
“I want to try something different,” Shelley told her. “I’m sorry, Mom. But it’s time for me to go.” Shelley knew she hadn’t given enough notice. She knew her mother saw this as abandonment. But she’d always done what others had expected of her. If this was an overdue rebellion, so be it.
Her mother was upset and angry. She was also a bit panicked at the idea that Shelley was leaving her. She had to ask: “What can I do to change your mind?”
“It’s too late, Mom,” Shelley said. “I’ve accepted the job.”
Shelley worked two more days at the store—Friday and Saturday—and she and her mother hardly exchanged words unless it pertained to a bride. Saturday was especially busy, and when Shelley left the building that evening, exhausted, there were no warm hugs from her mom or her coworkers. Just a few quick good-byes. No one knew what to make of her leaving.
A good part of Shelley was sad that night. She thought, “Why has it come to this?” But in her heart, she knew she’d likely return someday. And even if she didn’t, this was a move she had to make. She loved her parents, but the time had come.
After all those years in the bridal business, Shelley liked her new job, and the challenge of learning medical technology. She liked her boss. But she also felt out of sorts. Calling insurance companies to ask questions about claims, talking to faceless voices, well, it just wasn’t as rewarding as talking face-to-face to an excited bride. Her new job was responsibility without emotion, service without personal connections. Much of her time was spent alone in the office while the doctor was off doing surgery.
The doctor was pleased with her work, which proved to Shelley that she could be good at something besides selling bridal gowns. But as the weeks went on, she felt pangs. She thought about the brides she’d helped before she quit, and about how she wouldn’t be there to see their reactions when their dresses arrived. Who would do their fittings?
A bridal-gown wholesaler tracked her down at the doctor’s office. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked. “Don’t you know that you belong at Becker’s? The store could fall apart without you.” Shelley assured him that Becker’s would survive, but his admonition remained in her head.
Meanwhile, the near-estrangement with her mother lasted a couple of months, and then her mother started calling her at the doctor’s office. “I’m having chest pains,” she’d say. “Can you ask the doctor if he has any advice?”
Shelley saw the call as her mother’s way of breaking the ice. But her mother was serious, too. “The business is going to kill me,” she said at one point. Since Shelley’s departure, the stresses at the store were eroding her health.
Finally, one afternoon in November 1999, five months after Shelley had left Becker’s, her parents came to her house. They weren’t there to talk about Shelley’s need to spread her wings, or about her new job. They came with a question. “What will it take to get you back?” Sharon asked. “The store isn’t working without you.”
It was a huge admission, a genuine plea, but also, a parental compliment of sorts.
Shelley felt stunned. “What do you mean? What exactly are you asking?”
“We need you,” her mother said.
Shelley, who had spent her life being compliant, now felt emboldened. She was a thirty-four-year-old woman on the verge of a divorce, and she felt that the time for tiptoeing in any area of her life was over. That included her relationship with her parents. Now she was going to say it as she saw it.
She took a long breath, and then spoke. “The store is in my blood, there’s no denying that,” she said. “But I can’t raise three kids on eight dollars an hour. And I need health benefits.”
“We understand,” her dad said. “We’ll do whatever it’ll take. You set your price.”
“And it’s not just about money,” Shelley told him. “I know this business can’t go forward and thrive if we don’t change the dynamics of how it’s run. And I don’t think you both can be part of the changes that need to be made. If I’m going to leave this new job, if you’re serious about entrusting me with everything, for the long haul, then I want a fresh start.” She paused. “Mom, I can’t run this business if you’re there.”
Her mother’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?” Sharon asked. She was only fifty-seven years old. It felt too early to retire. Was this how Grandma Eva felt at the end of her reign . . . pushed out?
“Look, I have a vision for the store,” Shelley said, “but if you’re in the building, Mom, I’ll be walking on eggshells, wondering what you’re thinking. Or I’ll know, from the expression on your face, when you don’t approve. I’ve got to be on my own here.”
Shelley’s dad understood. “Whatever it takes, we trust you,” he said. And to her great credit, Sharon would come to agree too. If this is what would save Becker’s, she’d step aside. “It’s hard for a daughter to show tough love to her mother,” Shelley now says. “But I had to do it.”
Shelley’s parents agreed to pay her thirteen dollars an hour, to give her health benefits through the business, to increase bonuses to as much as $10,000 a year—and to let her run the operation without their interference.
Naturally, Shelley felt guilty leaving her medical job after just five months, and the doctor was not pleased. Shelley had gone through training, she was getting up to speed, and now she was leaving? “I’m disappointed in you,” the doctor snapped. A few days later, though, he calmed down. He took Shelley into his office and gave her fatherly advice. “Family businesses can be tough,” he said. �
�You can end up being a scapegoat for a lot of things. You can get sucked up in a lot of old issues.” Shelley told him how little she had been earning. He was taken aback.
“If you’re going to return to Becker’s,” he said, “then you need to do it right. You need to buy the store outright. That’s my advice.”
Shelley kept his words in her head, and seven years later, in 2006, she made her parents an offer for the store. By then, she was forty-one years old and had logged more than a quarter-century on the sales floor at Becker’s. It was time. And her parents agreed.
Helped by a lawyer and an accountant, they came up with a purchase price in the low six figures. Shelley would take responsibility for the payroll, and Sharon and Clark would extend her credit at a low interest rate.
The day of the closing was understandably bittersweet for Shelley and her parents. For Sharon and Clark, it was a relief and a loss at the same time. They were grateful that Becker’s was staying in the family, and they had great faith in Shelley. Indeed, Sharon had come to admire many of the things Shelley instituted after she returned to the store—renovating the sales floor, bringing in more upscale lines of dresses, putting saleswomen on commission. But Sharon also realized she would be forever on the sidelines now.
The customers coming through the door knew nothing of the Becker family drama, or that a torch had been formally passed. The day after the paperwork was signed, Shelley came to work just as she always had since she was in her teens. She complimented brides and commiserated with their mothers, just as she had the day before. Only now the stakes were raised. The dresses, the veils, the racks, the walls—everything belonged to her. And all the challenges of running the place were in her lap too.
As for Sharon: She agreed to continue doing seamstress work for Becker’s, at her home and at her leisure, which would keep her connected to the business. Shelley was grateful for her help and appreciated that Sharon still could be there to offer advice.
In a way, the mother-daughter relationship had come full circle. Shelley would now be paying her mother an hourly wage.
Shelley ended up slowly taking $250,000 out of the store’s sales to remodel Becker’s. It was an ambitious, risky undertaking, but it felt necessary. The place needed to be updated. The most crucial renovation, of course, was the Magic Room.
The project was a joint creation with Seth Kruger, a Minnesota-based sales rep for the wholesaler Allure Bridals. In the years after Shelley got divorced, she had dated Seth, who’d come through Fowler for trunk shows. Seth was a tall, self-assured, nattily dressed bridal business veteran, and as he developed feelings for Shelley, he threw himself into helping her brainstorm ways to give the old bank vault a measure of magic.
In his early fifties then, Seth carried himself as a straight-shooter and a proud romantic. He’d tell people: “I believe in love, and I think marriage should last forever. And I say that even though I’ve been married three times.” He explained that he conducted his life by focusing on three words: “love,” “kindness,” and “forgiveness.”
Shelley was drawn to Seth’s charisma and cockiness, but she also found herself rolling her eyes, too, when she was around him. His patter was a bit much sometimes. Still, she saw how brides and mothers were drawn to him.
Seth would be purposely tactile with brides. At trunk shows, he’d ask them, “Would you mind if I touch you?” It was a question that sounded both respectful and intrusive all at once, and few brides said no. He’d then touch them very lightly, jiggering the dress on their frames or smoothing out the beading.
Because he traveled to bridal shops nationwide for Allure, Seth developed a clear sense of regional differences. He said Southern brides are often more respectful. They’re always saying “Yes, ma’am.” Their mothers are easier too. They help hang up the bridal gowns their daughters have rejected, rather than just piling them in the arms of saleswomen. Midwest brides are sometimes less agreeable; maybe the cold weather makes them moodier.
No matter what, though, Seth always loved brides. And he grew to love Becker’s, too. He found it remarkable how the family kept the place going for seven decades.
When Shelley asked his advice about the Magic Room, he said mirrors would be crucial. “You want mirrors everywhere, taking every bride into infinity,” he said. “You want them to think about how many different people they are, how many personalities they have, as they see themselves everywhere they look.”
Shelley and Seth agreed that the history of the room as a bank vault gave it a kind of power. If a bride loves a dress she wears into the Magic Room, that’s where she decides to buy it. “Remember,” Seth said, “it’s still very much ‘the money room.’”
A lot of time was spent picking the carpet color, which ended up being a cross between emerald and teal. They decided the paneling on the walls would be the Sherwin-Williams color “mannered gold.” Everything else in Becker’s is a variation of white—the dresses, the veils, the banisters—so they thought it would be striking if brides entered the Magic Room and come upon all those mirrors framed by rich gold paneling.
For years, there had been racks of dresses in the vault. But Seth and Shelley emptied it out of everything except a pedestal adorned with two large letters, BB, for Becker’s Bridal. The pedestal is circular, “like a wedding ring, like life,” Shelley decided. “The beginning is the end is the beginning.”
At first, when soft track lighting was installed in the room, it felt too dark. And so Shelley made plans to add more lighting. But then bride after bride stepped into the room and onto that pedestal, and they just swooned. “You look flawless,” more than one mother said to her daughter. That soft lighting turned out to be exactly right. It didn’t overwhelm the dresses, yet somehow picked up the sparkle in each gown’s beading. It was flattering to the bride’s facial features without showcasing blemishes. And it created an absolute mood of serenity. Families who’d been arguing out on the main floor spoke softly and lovingly to each other in here. It was magic.
Shelley called the electrician and told him not to come.
As the Magic Room came together, and the bonds between Shelley and Seth got stronger, he thought of making Fowler his base of operations. He discussed marrying Shelley. But as a traveling man, he struggled with commitment. (“Because we were so connected, I overlooked things,” Shelley now says. “I’m a nurturer, and I nurtured him and accepted him as he was, when I should have demanded more from him.”)
In the end, Seth realized he couldn’t live in a tiny town, and he couldn’t be the man Shelley needed him to be. They remained friends, but any chance at a lasting romance passed. Shelley is grateful, though: Their partnership yielded the Magic Room.
Lately, when Shelley is alone in the store, she will sometimes stand in the Magic Room by herself, proud of what she created. Just as each bride had a journey that led her to stand on that pedestal, Shelley has journeyed here too. The road she took is chronicled in all those slash-marked calendars in the basement, in the agreement she signed when she bought the business from her parents, and in the now-middle-aged image she sees of herself, carried into infinity, here in the Magic Room’s mirrors.
She can’t help but smile. Maybe it’s the soft lighting. Or maybe it’s the magic. But she’s mostly satisfied with how she looks and who she is. She’s still standing, and so is Becker’s Bridal.
Chapter Seventeen
A Family’s Love Story
It’s a Sunday morning in September, and Becker’s is jammed with women for the store’s annual “Blowout Sample Sale.” Sample dresses have been drastically reduced—$1,100 gowns are as low as $300—but Becker’s won’t be doing any alterations.
“It’s grab and go,” Shelley explains to customers. “Everything is ‘as-is.’”
For Shelley, the sale will free up floor space for new arrivals, and make some cash to pay bills. For a segment of brides, “as-is” is a chance to stay within their wedding budgets. They’re willing to take a chance on missing b
uttons or lost beading.
When the store opened, sixteen brides and their entourages were lined up outside. A few hours later, forty more brides have shown up. Each dressing room is being shared by three brides, and the Magic Room line is six brides deep. Alyssa and their all-hands-on-deck sales team are trying to prevent confrontations, but it’s a free-for-all.
One bride’s mother approaches a saleswoman, steaming. “That mother over there just came into our dressing room and took a dress my daughter was about to try on,” the mother says. “She grabbed it out of my hands and walked off with it.”
“Where’s the dress?” the saleswoman asks.
“Over there!” says the mother. The other mother’s daughter actually has the dress on and is admiring herself in the old mirror near the counter.
“Well, we can’t rip it off the girl’s body,” the saleswomen says, correctly.
As Alyssa walks toward the mother who grabbed the dress, hoping to negotiate a solution, she hears the daughter say, “Actually, I don’t like the back of this.”
“Let’s hold on to it, just in case,” her mother says. When asked whether she took the dress from another customer, the mother feigns surprise. “I didn’t steal anything,” she says. “Those other people were about to put the dress back on the rack.”
Eventually, the thieves relinquish the dress—they decide it’s not “the one”—and the first bride tries it on. She doesn’t like it either. That’s how it goes sometimes, especially lately.
Alyssa is convinced that too many customers in recent years are trying to re-create that episode of Friends in which Monica goes to a “Running of the Brides” sale in Brooklyn and fights other shoppers for her dream dress. At one point on the sitcom, her friend Rachel says, “These bargain shoppers are crazy!”
They’re not really crazy. It’s just that some wedding-gown shoppers today figure fighting for a dress is part of the bridal hunt.
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 20
