A Dangerous Dress

by Julia Holden

  If you didn’t grow up in a small town, or in the Midwest, or you just don’t know, a housecoat is like a robe, only made of a much thinner fabric. Which makes no sense, because in a place like Kirland, which is not a mile off Lake Michigan and that wind, what good it does to wear a robe made of such thin fabric, I don’t know. But there they were. Housecoats. Size twenty-two.

  I could speculate about how Grandma got to be so big, but I don’t have to, because she told me. Before I tell you, first you need to know about people in Kirland. There are mostly two kinds: Steel people and Oil people. Historically, those were the only industries in town: the U.S. Steel steel mill, and the Standard Oil oil refinery. Since most folks worked for one or the other, you came from either a Steel family or an Oil family, I guess because they were different unions, but partly it seemed to be a personality thing, too. At least, that’s how it struck me, based on my own family.

  When I was born I had all four grandparents alive. My dad’s family was a Steel family, and my dad’s parents were Steel people. They were tall and skinny and kind of cold, and they didn’t give you a lot of hugs, even when you were at that really cute age. So my grandmother on my father’s side was always just a grandmother.

  My mother’s family was an Oil family. They were short and round and loud, and I always wanted to go to Grandma’s house, where there were always great old songs playing on the cabinet phonograph. Even if I went there every day, I got more hugs than you can imagine, even when I reached an age we can all agree is not terribly adorable. At Grandma’s, everybody was always in the kitchen, and somebody was always frying up pierogies, or baking nut roll, or kneading the dough for amazing homemade bread.

  Incidentally, Kirland is a very high-cholesterol environment.

  I have seen Grandma’s wedding pictures, and she was a slender young thing. So I just assumed she got to be so big eating all the pierogies and nut roll and amazing bread. But one day, I guess when she figured I was old enough to handle it, she told me the truth. She said all that weight came from the Boilermakers.

  A Boilermaker is a drink. It comes from a time before fruity drinks, when mixed drinks meant things like Manhattans and Stingers, which are now fashionable again. Boilermakers are not fashionable again. They were probably never fashionable. A Boilermaker is:

  One shot of whiskey. And one mug of beer. That’s it.

  Some people shoot the whiskey straight and drink the beer as a chaser. Other people pour the whiskey into the beer and drink them together. Still other people drop the shot glass of whiskey into the beer mug, then drink it like that. The first method is certainly the most efficient. The second is kind of putrid. The third is putrid and also inefficient, because if your beer mug starts out full, dropping the shot glass in makes you lose some of the beer. Personally I went for shooting the whiskey and then chugging the beer.

  I have a little experience of my own with Boilermakers. You know how at Notre Dame the football team is the Fighting Irish, and if you play football at USC you’re the Trojans? At Purdue, you’re a Boilermaker. So, at least at Purdue, Boilermakers never really went out of style. Which on occasion led to certain events that are none of your business.

  Anyway, according to Grandma, that was where all her weight came from—Boilermakers. She told me that one day she just got tired of being a size twenty-two, so she gave up the Boilermakers, cold. I was about ten at the time. Let me tell you, she must have been drinking an awful lot of boilermakers. Because when she gave them up, she started to drop those pounds. Until she weighed eighty-five pounds, and then she died.

  She made my Grandpa give them up, too. Maybe he shouldn’t have quit the Boilermakers, because about six weeks after he did, he had a stroke and died. It probably had nothing to do with the Boilermakers, but you never know. I haven’t said much about Grandpa, which really isn’t fair. He was short and round and loud and huggy. He always gave me the spare change from his pockets. I loved him a whole lot. I hope wherever he is—and yes, I believe in that kind of stuff—wherever he is I hope Grandpa won’t be mad, but he’s just not all that important. Not to this story.

  Because, as far as I could learn in my research, Grandma got the dangerous dress when she was nineteen years old, but she only started dating Grandpa when they were twenty-one and married him when they were twenty-two. So you see, the dress came from somebody else. Which made it even more dangerous. And far more mysterious.

  Just like her house was perfectly clean even when she couldn’t see, Grandma was perfectly organized when she was dying. She didn’t have a will. I suspect most people in Kirland don’t have a will. That may cause problems for people who are not as organized as Grandma was. It did not create any problems for Grandma. Two weeks before she died, she went around her house Scotch-taping little tags to everything, saying who got what. She didn’t have a lot of things. But she made sure everybody she cared about got something.

  After the funeral, I didn’t want to go look right away. Grandma had just died, and I was very upset. Because she was extremely special to me. I was very sad, and I didn’t think looking through her empty house would be much fun. But my mom said that if Grandma could be so organized for everybody, at least we could all go see what she gave us. So I went.

  Mom got Grandma’s framed picture of the Pope. Cousin Mary got a lamp I always thought looked like an old-fashioned hair dryer. Mary’s daughter Paris got Grandma’s collection of WordFinder puzzle books. Like I said, I got her clothes. Which, I must admit, initially I wasn’t too excited about. Because there were all those housecoats. Size twenty-two. Size sixteen. Size ten. Down and down, the housecoats documented Grandma’s slow disappearing act.

  There were other things, too. Skirts, blouses, and a few dresses. Church clothes. Shoes. None of which fit me and—sorry, Grandma—none of which I would even consider wearing.

  Then there was Grandma’s wedding dress. Which was a pretty dress in Grandma’s wedding picture. Unfortunately the silk had turned all yellow and brittle with age. So even if I ever have the occasion to wear a wedding dress, and even if I want to wear a traditional one, and even if for sentimental reasons I want to wear my Grandma’s dress—I can’t. It’s all stained and mildewed and cracked, so it smells . . . well, not good enough to wear to your wedding.

  I finished going through the closets, and that was pretty much it. Because after all, where else would you keep clothes? Just for the heck of it, I wandered down to the basement. For most people, a basement is like a grease trap. Things accumulate there, and unless it gets so clogged that you absolutely have to clean it, you don’t. Not Grandma, though. Her basement was this big empty room. Besides the furnace and some plumbing, there was mostly a lot of nothing there. Except a table with a lamp, a couple of pieces of Depression glass, and a bunch of rosaries with the beads worn down to almost nothing. All the Scotch-taped tags on those things had other people’s names on them. Next to the table was an old suitcase.

  A suitcase? Grandma never went anywhere that I knew of. Or that anyone else in the family knew of. I mean anywhere. Ever.

  It was a very old suitcase. The frame was made of wood, and the side and top and end panels were rattan. The handle was crumbly old leather. If it had been new, the suitcase would have looked at home in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. Which made me wonder a couple of things.

  First, what was Grandma doing with it?

  And second, where had she been hiding it all these years? Because let me tell you, I spent a lot of time in Grandma’s house. It’s not very big. And I’ve been through all of it, including the basement. At least, I thought I’d been through all of it. Only here was this suitcase that I’d never seen.

  The suitcase had a name tag on it—not an old luggage tag, but one of Grandma’s Scotch-taped bequests. She had been really careful with this one, though. She had doubled up the tape, sticky side to sticky side, and made a loop, so the adhesive wouldn’t touch the bag. Which made it seem extremely important. I was very excited when I looke
d at the tag.

  Only it said, Suitcase for Uncle Joe. Not for me. In just a few seconds I’d decided this was something special, and it must’ve been for me. Now it wasn’t. I was so disappointed.

  I don’t know what made me turn the tag over. None of the other tags had writing on both sides. But I did. And the other side said, Contents for Jane.

  Which was how I found the dress.

  3

  I need to be very careful about how I describe the dress. Because it is completely relevant. More than just relevant. Essential.

  The bodice of the dress was made of two layers of this amazing sheer pearl-blue silk satin. If the dressmaker had used only one layer, the dress would have been indecent in 1928, and maybe even today. Because you could see right through a single layer of the silk. But with another layer added, the dress became translucent rather than transparent. You could almost see through it, but not quite. Which made it incredibly provocative.

  The fabric was cut on a diagonal, what fashion design people call “on the bias,” which makes the fabric cling to the body much more intimately than if the weave was simply vertical and horizontal. The bodice was sleeveless, and the neckline plunged modestly in the front and so immodestly in the back that it would be daring even now. I can only imagine what a fuss it would have caused when first worn. The front of the bodice was sewn with an elaborate Art Deco pattern of dark blue glass beads so iridescent you’d think Tiffany made every single bead. I am talking about Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany, not the store with the turquoise gift boxes.

  The pearl-blue tulle skirt flirted with transparency, and it was also sewn with the amazing blue beads, but fewer of them, so they did not weigh down the skirt. The hemline looked as if it would fall just below the knee in front and to about midcalf in back.

  I could not have written that description when I first saw the dress. I needed to get quite an education first. At the time, all I could think was Wow.

  Once I got past wow, I realized it was the kind of dress you’d picture the women in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels wearing. The young, pretty ones. The ones who make the men and boys gasp for breath. The careless, reckless, gorgeous, sexual ones. The dangerous ones.

  There was something else in the suitcase, too. An old menu. From a restaurant called La Tour d’Argent. Which is French for The Tower of Silver. I know because I looked it up on the Internet. The name is in French because the restaurant is in France. In Paris, to be precise. In fact, it has been there for four hundred years. The fact that one restaurant has been in business in the same place for four hundred years is pretty amazing, but not nearly as amazing as the fact that, as far as I could tell, my Grandma had been there. Not to mention that she had apparently been there wearing this reckless, gorgeous, sexual, dangerous dress.

  I asked my mom why she never told me Grandma went to Paris.

  “As far as I know, she didn’t,” my mom said.

  “Then where did she get the menu?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “What about the suitcase? Where was that?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “But you grew up in this house,” I said. “How could you not know anything about it?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “What about the dress? Did Grandpa give it to her?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Did Grandma ever go anywhere?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. Then she stopped and thought for a while. “I wonder.” She sat down and frowned, which is what she does when she is trying to remember something. Finally she said, “I was only eighteen. Almost nineteen. I was helping Grandma and Ginny Anderson cook chickens over at Sacred Heart. I asked Grandma where she thought I should go for my birthday. I just meant, What restaurant? Only she gave me this stare and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere. Not for the next six months.’ Then Ginny asked Grandma, ‘What’s wrong, you think it runs in the family?’ And then the two of them laughed until they cried. I asked Grandma what was so funny, but she never told me.”

  “You think she went to Paris?”

  My mom and I both looked at the dress, and the menu, and the suitcase. She didn’t have to say anything. I had the answer.

  From what my mom said, Ginny Anderson seemed to know something about it. Maybe she even went with Grandma. Ginny was Susie Anderson’s grandma, and if I had heard this story years ago, I could have asked her. Only Ginny died two years before Grandma, and Susie and her family moved away after that, so all I had was the suitcase, the dress, and the menu. In other words, a mystery. Which I vowed I would solve.

  As it turns out, vows are easy to make. But mysteries are not necessarily easy to solve.

  In fact, for a long time, the only thing I had besides the suitcase, the dress, and the menu was the vow. For four whole years, in fact. I wish I could tell you that I immediately knew what to make of it. But I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t have a clue what to do. So I did something practical: I took the dress to Chicago. Which I should mention is only about a half-hour drive from Kirland. Twenty minutes if there’s no traffic, although there’s always traffic. So half an hour.

  Here’s another thing you need to know about Kirland: A lot of people who live there have never been to Chicago. Like I said—Bumfuck.

  I folded the dress very carefully, wrapped it in white tissue paper, and gently placed it in a big shopping bag, which I seat-belted into the front seat of my Tercel. I drove into downtown Chicago to find a dry cleaner. And no, it did not occur to me to take the dress to a dry cleaner in Kirland. If I have to explain why, you have not been paying attention.

  I parked at the Chicago Place Mall on North Michigan Avenue and found the public phones. The mall is modern, but the phones still had phone books hanging from them. I looked in the Yellow Pages under Dry Cleaners, and wrote down a couple in the most expensive neighborhoods. Then I drove until I found one I liked the look of.

  I guess I picked the right dry cleaner. When the ladies behind the counter saw Grandma’s dress, their eyes got big. They oohed and aahed, and they handled it very carefully, like they knew immediately it was something special. They did a very nice job cleaning it, too. When I picked it up, it was packed like it would survive a nuclear war.

  They charged me fifty-two dollars. I almost fainted. But I didn’t. I paid, took the dress home, and put it—and the mystery—away in my closet. Where they both stayed.

  For four years. Until my junior year at Purdue. Second semester. History of Fashion.

  We were looking at slides. Which we saw a lot of. Which was when Grandma’s dress came up on the screen.

  The picture wasn’t like Grandma’s dress. It was Grandma’s dress. Actually, the very first thing that occurred to me was that somebody must’ve stolen the dress from my closet back home in Kirland and taken a picture of it, although why anybody would do such a thing I couldn’t imagine. Then right away I decided that was silly. Which didn’t stop me from going back to my dorm room and calling Mom and having her check, and of course the dress was still hanging where it was supposed to be.

  Before I called my mom, I went up to the professor at the end of class. Her name was Professor Singer. She was tall and thin and looked like she had almost been a model when she was younger. I say almost, because her eyes were a little too close together. But she was very nice when I told her I had a question about a dress. The one with the very sheer skirt. With the blue-black glass beads. Did she know anything about it?

  She checked her notes. “It just says ‘Collection of Flapper Dresses, 1920s, Paris.’ ”

  “Nothing else?” I asked.

  “Nothing else.” I guess she could see that I was unusually interested. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” For a moment I wasn’t sure if I should tell her. Like it was my big secret. The thing that made me feel special, different from everybody else in that big lecture hall, even if I hadn’t earned the right to feel special, since the dress
was really my Grandma’s, after all, and I only got it because she died. But even if I hadn’t earned it, just having the dress in my closet back at home made me feel like I had some little spark of magic that was all mine. And I was afraid the magic might go away if I told.

  Then I thought, If you can’t tell your History of Fashion professor about this dress, who can you tell? So I told her Grandma had a dress exactly like that, which she left to me.

  “It’s a very unusual dress,” she said. “For there to be two identical dresses would be . . . unusual.”

  “It is unusual,” I said.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Kirland,” I said. I almost said Bumfuck, but I didn’t think I should call it that to a professor, so I didn’t.

  “That would be . . . very unusual,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You’re sure it’s exactly the same?”

  “Absolutely.” I was.

  “Hmmm,” she said. Then she thought a little. I was afraid her eyes would cross. But they didn’t. “What do you know about its provenance?” she asked. Provenance is a fancy art word that means where something came from and where it’s been.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Well,” she said. “Well.” And I thought that was that. But then she said, “We can’t lose an opportunity like this, can we?”

  I didn’t know what opportunity, but I shook my head no anyway.

  “You’re required to write a paper for my class,” she said. “The dress can be your paper!”

  “But I don’t know anything about it. And”—I tried to say this part very diplomatically, and I even pointed at her notes to back me up—“neither do you.”

  “But you can research,” she said. “I’ll help you. Oh, this is going to be fun!”

  Up to that moment it never occurred to me that you could research a dress. I knew you could research the building of the Sears Tower, or the history of space exploration, or even—yuck—the savings and loan industry in northern Indiana. I knew you could, because at one sorry time or another in my so-called education, I’d actually had to research those things. But I didn’t know you could research a dress. Much less an old dress. Much less an old dress you knew nothing about.