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

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Alyssa finds Shelley in the back office. “It’s anarchy out there,” she says. In the morning, they had used ribbons to separate the sale dresses from the full-priced dresses, because on a wild day like today, there’s no time to help brides peruse the regular stock.

  “They’re breaking down the ribbons!” Alyssa says.

  “Try to keep them back,” Shelley tells her. “Ask nicely.”

  “Yeah, sure, Barbie, that’ll work,” says Alyssa.

  It’s her “white blindness” nightmare come to life.

  Carol and Paul Otto, 1979

  Later in the afternoon, when things settle down, fifty-two-year-old Carol Otto arrives. She has four daughters, ages twenty to twenty-nine, three of whom are with her today. Carol was a Becker’s bride in 1978. Her two older daughters bought their gowns here in 2003 and 2005. Now her third daughter, Missy, twenty-four, is engaged and ready for the Becker’s experience.

  The Ottos know they’re supposed to look only at the sale merchandise. But, like other bridal scofflaws, they can’t resist peeking beyond the ribbons. They’re especially taken with a $1,600, trumpet-fit dress that is off-limits on a mannequin. Carol asks Alyssa, “Can my daughter try that on?”

  Alyssa gets Shelley’s permission to undress the mannequin, but they both know the “bridal mannequin principle”: A bride who loves a dress on a mannequin will rarely love it on herself. Dresses just look better on mannequins than on hangers. That’s why most mannequins aren’t naked for long. (The mannequins may seem eternally stone-faced, but saleswomen detect a slight smile when they get their gowns back.)

  Missy Otto turns out to be the exception to the mannequin principle. Wearing the mannequin’s dress, she’s thrilled. She loves the way the bow sits, and how soft the lace feels on her body. And so she heads up to the Magic Room for a formal look.

  Seeing her on the pedestal, Missy’s twenty-year-old sister, Rochelle, starts to cry; it’s common for a kid sister to be the first to get teary in the Magic Room. Soon, middle sister Heather is wiping away tears. Then their mother, Carol, feels overwhelmed too, and steps away, ducking into a nearby dressing room to have a moment by herself.

  Turns out, it is the same dressing room Carol used when she came to Becker’s as a bride-to-be in 1978. And as she stands in here, a memory comes clearly into her head, an unexpected reminder of her mother, who passed away fourteen years ago.

  The memory is this: On that summer day in 1978, she and her mom had finally found a dress that fit well, looked good and, at $165, was affordable for her dad, a supervisor in a prison kitchen. Both Carol and her mother felt their emotions rise as they looked in the dressing-room mirror. “This is it,” Carol said. “This is my dress.”

  And that’s when Carol’s mother reached up and slowly moved Carol’s veil away from her cheek, and with a catch in her voice, said, “You’re just a beautiful bride.”

  Standing in this same dressing room in 2010, it’s almost as if Carol can again feel her mother touching her face, gently and lovingly. She can almost see her mom standing against the mirror, facing her, smiling proudly. The vividness of her recollection surprises Carol. “Wow, that memory was locked inside of me for thirty-two years,” she thinks.

  Now she needs a moment to compose herself before she rejoins her daughters. She’s wishing, of course, that her mother was alive to be with all of them today. And she also wishes her mother had been around these last fourteen years to give her guidance. How might she have counseled Carol as her girls made their way to adulthood? How would her mother have consoled all of them now, as the family faces new struggles?

  Carol stands inside that dressing room, thinking of everything, as her daughters call to her from the Magic Room, asking her to come back for another look at Missy.

  Carol’s mother, Lois, had been a very giving and attentive parent, even though she never knew what it felt like to be loved by a mother.

  Carol’s grandparents—Lois’s parents—married at age seventeen, and after Lois was born in 1929, they quickly divorced. Lois’s mother, Peggy, looked after her for a few months, but then one day decided she’d had enough of motherhood. She left Lois alone in her crib, walked out of her apartment in Michigan, and headed for Chigago, never to return. Given this abandonment, a court declared Peggy an unfit mother, and an aunt and uncle were left to raise baby Lois. Lois’s father disappeared too. When he wasn’t in jail, he was allegedly a truck-driver for Al Capone.

  For a long time, Lois never knew what became of her mother. But in those silent years, Peggy’s story would take some surprising twists.

  In the 1930s, Peggy blossomed into a glamorous young woman. She spent time as a fashion model, then got a sales job in an elite Chicago dress shop, where she’d work for five decades. She never had any more children. Beyond a few Christmas cards signed “Peggy,” she had almost no contact with her daughter Lois, who always struggled to understand why she had been rejected and abandoned.

  But then, in 1989, when Peggy was seventy-eight, she called Lois one night at three a.m. She apologized for leaving her, and for evading all the duties of motherhood.

  Lois listened and then spoke. “I forgive you,” she said. The words came so easily that she surprised herself. They reconciled, and Lois agreed to visit her mother in Chicago. It was a remarkable reunion: an old woman trying to make amends to the sixty-year-old daughter she’d turned her back on.

  In 1993, Peggy began showing signs of dementia, and Lois, the daughter she never cared for, and Carol, the granddaughter she never knew, brought her back to Michigan to look after her. At first, they set her up in her own apartment. Then they got her a room at an assisted-living facility. And then, in 1997, after Lois died of heart failure at age sixty-eight, Carol fulfilled her mother’s wish by continuing to care for Peggy.

  For Carol’s daughters, having this long-absentee great-grandmother dropped into their lives was curious and instructive. They learned a good deal about forgiveness, and about the regrets and secrets that can accompany adults through their lifetimes.

  Great-Grandma Peggy had arrived in Michigan with a batch of letters from a man who at one point was the love of her life. She was eager to talk about him. She said she had first met him in Sarasota, Florida, in 1954, where he had come for business. His business was baseball. His name was Ted Williams.

  Williams, the Boston Red Sox slugger, had separated from his wife weeks earlier, and went on his first date with Peggy on March 5, 1954, during spring training. He would continue writing to her, and visiting her in Chicago when his team came to town. The relationship lasted into the fall of 1958. Three years later, Williams married another woman, his second of three wives.

  The Otto girls were fascinated to learn that their unconventional and flawed great-grandmother had an ongoing affair with the legendary ballplayer. Peggy wasn’t just a groupie who had a fling with him. She wanted the girls to know this. As an old woman, her most prized possession was a hundred-page, overstuffed scrapbook that she created in the 1950s to track Williams’s exploits. She chronicled his injuries, his on-the-field triumphs and his off-the-field dates with her. She kept his letters to her, written on the stationery of various hotels. One night, just before a road trip to play the Chicago White Sox, Williams wrote to Peggy promising that when he arrived in town “I’ll grab you close and not let you get away.” Williams signed another note “T.03773.” Did it refer to his batting average—he remains the last player in major league history to bat over .400 in a season—or did it represent an intimate code between them? Peggy never said.

  Carol’s second daughter, Heather, ended up writing her grad-school thesis about her great-grandmother’s relationship with Williams. She described meeting Peggy when she was seven years old and explained how she wanted to spend time with this old woman “to learn who she was and what she had done with her life if it was not mothering children. . . . I came to appreciate the value Ted Williams’s letters held for this lonely, heartbroken woman my great-grandmother
eventually became.” As for Peggy’s place in her family, Heather decided: “Her motivations for her actions are beyond my imagination. But I recognize the courage it took to apologize decades later.”

  Peggy died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2000.

  Given this backstory, it’s understandable that Carol would be so moved by the memory of her mother’s touch in that dressing room at Becker’s. Lois had never had the experience of shopping for a wedding dress with her own mother. She never felt her mother’s loving hand against her cheek. And yet she instinctively knew to offer her hand to her own daughter. It made that gesture incredibly meaningful for Carol—both in 1978 and in her memory of the moment, in 2010.

  Looking back, Carol is glad she was there for her grandmother in her final years. Peggy had not acted properly in her life. She made selfish decisions that reverberated through other people’s lives for decades. “And yet she was family, and she needed to be taken care of, and so we forgave her,” Carol says. “People make mistakes, but their families take them back. It was a good lesson for my daughters.”

  The Otto Girls when they were young, posing as Charlie’s Angels

  Over the years, raising four daughters, Carol Otto developed a set of philosophies. She’d tell them: “I’m going to stick with you girls, no matter what. I’ll be on your side, but I’ll be in your face, too.” And she was.

  When her daughters bickered, Carol wouldn’t send them to separate corners. She’d make them stand, face-to-face, their noses touching. In a minute or two, they’d be laughing, almost like teammates, and everything was better.

  Long before the girls got their wedding gowns, they’d been taught to see the magic in receiving a new dress. Carol and her husband, Paul, an insurance executive, liked to make special presentations for special occasions. For Christmas and Easter, the four girls would line up, close their eyes, and when they opened their eyes, their parents would be holding their new dresses, and the girls would ooh and ahh. Each also received a new dress on her sixteenth birthday.

  Jennifer, the eldest daughter, born in 1981, was idolized by her sisters. “She could do no wrong in my eyes,” says Heather, who is two years younger. “I wanted to be like her. She thought Jordan from New Kids on the Block was the cutest, so I said I did too, even though I secretly liked Donnie best. She took art classes and drew amazing cartoons, so I used my birthday money to purchase a sketchpad.”

  When Jennifer misbehaved, she was grounded from going to her friends’ houses. She wasn’t allowed to venture farther than the Ottos’ front porch. Heather loved when Jennifer was grounded and couldn’t see her friends because that meant she had her older sister all to herself. They could sit on that porch—a simple cement platform that was hot during the day but cool against the skin at night—talking and playing for hours.

  Heather’s hero worship got a jolt, however, when she was fourteen and Jennifer was almost sixteen. Heather came home from cheerleading practice one day and was met by her mother who was obviously distraught; she said she needed to talk to Jennifer. Heather was told to go to a neighbor’s house until her mother came for her. It all seemed very strange to Heather. She’d never been asked to leave her own home before.

  Later that night, she learned what happened. Their parents had discovered that Jennifer was having sex with her boyfriend. Heather, who hadn’t yet even been kissed, was overwhelmed by the news.

  “Was it just once?” she asked her sister when they were alone in their shared bedroom. Jennifer shook her head.

  “More than ten times?” Heather asked, her eyes widening.

  “We’ve been having sex for a while,” Jennifer said. “Yes, more than ten times.”

  Later, while studying for a master’s in English, Heather wrote about that night as a defining moment of her childhood. What made her ask if Jennifer had sex ten times?

  “It was as if ten was a magic number that would save my sister from humiliation and judgment,” Heather wrote. “My parents had made it clear to us that sex was an expression of love between husband and wife. I was not prepared to hear that my sister had disobeyed my parents by having premarital sex before she had turned sixteen.”

  Heather couldn’t contain how furious she was with Jennifer. “I didn’t feel like I knew her anymore. Even though she knew all of my secrets, I apparently knew none of hers. I couldn’t stand the thought of looking at her every day in our shared bedroom.”

  The next morning, she asked her parents to switch the room arrangements. She wanted to move in with Missy. Her mother, Carol, didn’t take immediate action, so Heather began the transfer on her own. Soon enough, all her belongings—her clothing, her porcelain dolls—were in the other room.

  Heather would later write: “The change in my relationship with Jennifer was drastic. My love for her had been so natural before. I didn’t have to try to love her; I just did. Now, I didn’t know how to love her. All I saw were her faults. Wasn’t an older sister supposed to set an example? How was I to love Jen?”

  Jennifer would enter adulthood uneasily. She moved away to college, did her share of partying, and one night when she was nineteen she accepted a dinner invitation from a man who later date-raped her. “I told him no,” Jennifer said, tearfully, again and again, after she returned home and called a family meeting to talk about it.

  It was a terrible shock for her three younger sisters, and it was cathartic for Heather to later write about that night:

  “There was nothing we could say or do to prevent Jen’s hurt. It had already happened. I felt helpless. My mom had known of her experience and was sitting in a chair by my father, sobbing . . . Jennifer did not reveal her own vulnerability that often, but that night, she was exposed. I started to hate boys for larger reasons than simply acting immature in class and not asking me to high school dances.”

  Two years later, in the spring of 2002, Jennifer told Heather she was having unprotected sex with an older man she had begun dating.

  “Are you on birth control?” Heather asked her.

  “No.”

  “Are you using condoms?”

  “Not usually. Sometimes.”

  “You’re going to get pregnant, Jen. Is that what you want?” Obviously, twenty-one-year-old Jennifer wasn’t thinking clearly. She had known this man for just a month. There was passion between them, yes, but she ignored warning signs.

  “Don’t go on the pill,” the man had told her. “It’ll make you fat.”

  He didn’t want to use protection himself, so they tried the rhythm method.

  Soon enough, Jennifer was pregnant. That’s when she learned that this man already had three children out of wedlock. It all felt so overwhelming and anguishing. Jennifer had been a typical, hard-working college student who liked to have fun and didn’t always make smart decisions. Some young women survive their bad decisions without incident. Jennifer assumed, wrongly, that she would too.

  It took her a couple weeks to find the courage to approach Carol with the news. And before she even got the words out, Carol looked in her eyes and knew; it was a mother’s intuition. Jennifer crumbled into tears.

  Later, Jennifer told her father, who soberly discussed her options. She had been studying graphic design, and was three semesters from graduation. It was decided that she’d get a job to support the baby and continue in school. Her parents would help her by moving into a home with more bedrooms, so there would be room for the baby. And her parents and sisters assured her: the love in their family was unconditional and would carry her through.

  Jennifer’s boyfriend tried to convince her to stay away from her family and to have an abortion, but from the beginning she knew she couldn’t do that. And she had no interest in giving the baby up for adoption. “I knew how hurt my grandmother was when her mother abandoned her,” Jen says. “Great-Grandma Peggy was in my head. I didn’t want to repeat what she had done.”

  Jennifer and this man spoke briefly about marriage, but in her heart she knew better. When she told her patern
al grandfather that she was considering marriage, he put it perfectly: “You’ve already made one mistake. Don’t make a second one.”

  Jennifer’s pregnancy was hard on the whole family. Heather, who had already distanced herself from her older sister, remained distraught. Missy developed bulimia, which her mother thought was related to the stress and depression in the household.

  Meanwhile, Jennifer’s relationship with this man deteriorated. He’d call at all hours: “I hate you!” Then: “I love you.” He eventually got so abusive, verbally and physically, that she got a restraining order. When Jennifer was five months pregnant, he was jailed for seven days. The last time she ever saw him was in a courtroom.

  Jennifer finished college while pregnant, spending long days studying while also working as a saleswoman for a flatware company in a local mall. Then, one day in December, a man walked into the store where she worked. He wanted to buy kitchen utensils as a Christmas present for a childhood friend. “My friend needs stuff for his apartment,” he said.

  Jennifer, then seven months pregnant, was affable and helpful, and the customer started telling her about his friend. “Matthew is such a great guy,” the man said. “He’s a doctor in his first year of residency, and he works really hard. He’s twenty-six. He’s single. Believe me, he deserves all good things. A knife set isn’t enough!”

  “Sounds like he needs a good woman,” Jennifer replied, just conversationally.

  “Of course he does!” the man said, and then looked at Jennifer more closely. “You know, you seem great. You’re beautiful. Are you single?”

  Self-conscious about being pregnant and unmarried, Jennifer had bought a twenty-dollar gold band at Target to wear on her ring finger. But she took a breath and answered the man directly. “Look, I’m seven months pregnant,” she said as she followed the man’s eyes to her belly, partially hidden behind the counter. “But yes, I’m single.”