White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  When I emerged from the fitting room for the first time wearing the dress and took my place atop a raised platform in the middle of the showroom at the Vera Wang flagship store on Madison Avenue, a group of four fifty-­something sisters who had flown in from Minnesota to help their niece shop for her wedding dress spontaneously burst into applause. One of them even cried. I watched, half stunned, half flattered, as they momentarily left their poor niece—­standing atop her own platform on the other side of the floor—­to fend for herself and gathered around me to ooh and aah, as if I were some sort of celebrity.

  “Could we take your picture?” they asked, beginning to snap my photo before I’d even said yes.

  “Did you always know you wanted to wear something this sexy?” they queried.

  “Isn’t this just like the dress Carolyn Bessette wore when she got married to John Kennedy Junior?” they asked. “Girl, you’re lucky you’ve got the figure to pull it off!”

  Their niece, wearing a lacy ball gown that wasn’t particularly flattering on her pear-­shaped figure, smiled at me from the other side of the store. The saleswoman nodded approvingly as I turned around to inspect my backside in the three-­way mirror. And my mother—­who had flown in the night before, and for whom I had specifically scheduled the dress appointment, weeks in advance—­shook her head.

  Her crossed arms spoke volumes, as did her sighs. But even I was unprepared for what she would say of the dress:

  “You look like you’re wearing a nightgown.”

  The women from Minnesota gasped. The saleswoman dropped her pen.

  “A what?” asked the saleswoman.

  “A nightgown,” my mother repeated, taking me in carefully. “She looks like she’s wearing a nightgown I used to have.”

  The women from Minnesota protested. “She’s beautiful!” they cried. “She looks fantastic!” A third gently mouthed to me, “Don’t listen to her!” before scurrying off to rejoin her niece.

  How could I not listen to her? She was my mother. And I was the bride. The bride! Wasn’t she supposed to be as happy as I was about shopping for my wedding gown? Wasn’t she supposed to be as crazy about weddings as I’d always been? For as long as I could remember, I’d longed for this moment. I had been that little girl who grew up cutting images of bridal gowns out of magazines so that I could hang them over my bed. I’d sketched my own dream gown dozens of times in notebooks, carefully constructing the waist that would be just so, the veil that would hang to right about there.

  Becoming a bride was not just a moment for me—­it was The Moment. So hearing from my beloved mother during said Moment that a four-­thousand-­dollar gown from a top designer reminded her of something she’d likely bought on clearance at some department store and would only wear to bed in the dark of night stung mightily.

  And, strangely, that seemed to be her intent. It must have been, since it wasn’t an isolated incident.

  At the Carolina Herrera boutique, she would spend the entire time telling me what was wrong with each dress. Too low in the front. Too low in the back. Too bumpy. Too poofy. Not simple enough.

  At the Monique Lhuillier trunk show the following day, it was more of the same. The gowns were too busy or too lacy, too modern, too confusing, or, my favorite, “too look-­at-­me.”

  “What does ‘too look-­at-­me’ mean?” asked the saleswoman overseeing the trunk show.

  “If Mary wears that, it’s obvious she just wants everyone to look at her.” My mother sighed, eyeing the figure-­forming sheath from Monique Lhuillier that was so tight I could scarcely breathe.

  “But she’s the bride,” the exasperated saleswoman said. “Everyone is supposed to be looking at her.”

  A large part of the problem, of course, was that the gowns I loved were light years away from the simple gown my mother had worn for her own wedding. She wanted my wedding dress to have sleeves. And a high neckline. And with nothing that hinted at the figure that lay beneath layers of satin and silk.

  In the end, two months after my quest began, I purchased my wedding gown—­the Vera Wang “nightgown”—­all by myself, trudging back to the boutique with no mother in tow. For the sake of maintaining a good relationship with the sales reps at Vera Wang, my solo mission was for the best. But it was more than a little bit disappointing. I wanted my mother with me.

  It’s not that my mother didn’t like my future husband. No—­Dean Peterson was a subject on which the two of us could wholeheartedly agree. Within moments of meeting him, my mother declared, “Mary, he’s wonderful!”

  And he was. For both of us. Dean had it all: brains, a sense of humor, kindness, and manners galore. Plus, he was a Catholic who’d grown up in the Midwest. A Catholic! The first Catholic man I’d ever seriously dated. Add to that Dean’s tremendous patience and his strong physical resemblance to her father—­like Al Diener, Dean has soulful brown eyes and a head full of dark curls—­and my mother was over the moon.

  “He’s wonderful,” my mother said again and again.

  I met Dean on my birthday, October 25, 2003, at a party given in my honor at a bar on Manhattan’s East Side. I’ve always said Dean is the best birthday present I’ve ever received. And it’s true. When I met Dean, I felt as if I’d found the piece of the puzzle that at last made me whole.

  The years leading up to that birthday had been particularly tumultuous. I had been faced with my first serious health crisis. I had lost a job at CNN that I dearly loved and that had come to define me. I had fumbled financially. And, perhaps most significantly, I had broken a heart and had my heart broken.

  There was only one man I loved before Dean Peterson. His name was Mesut. He was Turkish. He was Muslim. And he was everything my mother feared when I moved to Istanbul.

  On so many levels, Mesut and I were opposites. I was a Westerner who adored short skirts, bright red lipstick, and silly soap operas. He was a proud Turk who counted among his friends Turkish nationalists who despised the U.S. and its foreign policy and questioned its seemingly loose morals. But from the moment we met in July 1999—­within a week of my moving to Istanbul to work full-­time for the fledgling CNN Türk network—­we were drawn to each other.

  We were introduced one sunny afternoon in a hallway of the Hürriyet newspaper building, me with a notebook in my hand, he with a camera in his. I was twenty-­six. I was immediately struck by his prematurely graying hair, his piercing brown eyes, and his muscular physique, honed by years of lugging heavy equipment up mountains, in and out of war zones. Most of all, I was struck by Mesut’s wisdom, which was palpable.

  I was new to Turkey and its East-­meets-­West ways. Istanbul was divided between two continents: Europe and Asia. Fittingly, I lived on the western, European side of the city, while Mesut and his identical twin brother shared an apartment on the Asian side.

  In those early weeks, I was still adjusting to my new environment. There was new food—­one part Middle Eastern, one part Mediterranean. There were different customs: important decisions weren’t made by asking direct questions and taking part in frank discussions, but instead by drinking round upon round of Turkish tea. And there were decidedly conflicting views of Western women. To some Turks, Western women represented a brave new world to be embraced, and to others, we were the embodiment of evil and little better than prostitutes. I found that out the hard way. On more than one occasion in those early months as an American journalist living abroad, authorities pulled me over to question me for having the audacity to take a taxi home from the office by myself after nine P.M.

  “What are you?” they queried, shining a flashlight first on my blond hair, then on my reporter’s notebooks. “A hooker?”

  And so as I worked to navigate my new country of residence, and my place in the fledgling CNN Türk organization, Mesut and I struck up a friendship. We put aside all the glaring differences, focusing instead on what we had in common: We
were both children of divorce who adored our mothers. We both had conflicted relationships with our fathers. We both had majored in history in college.

  When a 7.8 earthquake struck Istanbul in August—­killing nearly twenty thousand ­people and causing the buildings we lived and worked in to rumble and crack—­we stopped the delicate dance of flirtation that we had been engaging in and launched full-­throttle into a passionate affair. Lovemaking came easily and frequently after long days of work. It struck us both as funny that some of our most intense limb-­locking sessions took place during afternoon prayer calls, when conservative chants were blasted from the spindle-­like minarets of nearby mosques.

  But while a torrid affair—­and an affair with a Muslim, no less—­was decidedly un-­Catholic, my life in Turkey actually strengthened my Catholicism, thanks in large part to the support of Mesut.

  On Sundays, Mesut protectively accompanied me to Mass at the Catholic church in central Istanbul and watched as I hung my head in prayer in the aftermath of the quake. There in a Muslim country, I was forced for the first time to think deeply about the meaning of the words to prayers I’d recited since childhood:

  “We believe in one God.”

  “One baptism for the forgiveness of sins.”

  “He was born of the Virgin Mary.”

  “We believe . . . in the life of the world to come.”

  My deepening faith was further bolstered by the historic environs in which I lived. On long weekends, Mesut and his friends delighted in taking me to Chris­tian sites throughout Turkey: To Haran, where it’s believed the Virgin Mary was born. To the Pool of Abraham on the Syrian border. To the ancient home of one of the Three Kings. To the caves and tunnels of Cappadocia, where ancient Chris­tians gathered and painted beautiful frescoes devoted to Christ in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

  My mother marveled at my stories, which I would share with her during late-­night or early-­morning phone calls, owing to the eight-­hour time difference that separated Istanbul from Beaver Dam.

  “How do you know that’s where the Virgin Mary lived?” she would ask, half excitedly, half skeptically.

  “Mom, it’s not just me saying these things. Historians and biblical scholars say it, too. Just because Muslim ­people live here now doesn’t mean Chris­tians didn’t live here before. And Chris­tian ­people live here, too, you know.”

  Then I would pause and offer the invitation I know she dreaded.

  “You should come here to visit me. You would like it.”

  I knew she would never come. If she hadn’t liked Germany—­a Western country with the comforts of America—­she would never tolerate Turkey.

  “Why don’t you take the money you’d spend on a ticket for me to go there and use it to come home and see me instead?” she’d counter.

  She wanted to remain at home. And she wanted me home, too. She remained concerned about my safety.

  When I got a high fever in the wake of the earthquake—­likely as a result of spending so much time in the hardest-­hit areas, where the mountains of debris and the dead bodies beneath baked in 90-­plus-­degree temperatures—­she sent me and my colleagues a box filled with latex gloves and masks she’d secured from the local Fleet Farm in Beaver Dam.

  “Wear these!” her handwritten note implored. “Please!”

  And when I wrote to her of my travels with Mesut, my delight in learning more Turkish, she countered with questions about my future.

  “When are you coming home?” she would half ask, half demand. “I have your room all ready for you.”

  My answers were vague. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe in a few months?”

  It was the truth. I didn’t know where my relationship with Mesut was headed, but I knew I wanted to follow its lead.

  Every day was a new adventure.

  In addition to the ancient Chris­tian sites, Mesut took me to Aphrodisias, an amazing collection of ancient temples devoted to the goddess of love, located on the western side of Turkey. I’ll never forget the sight of pomegranate blossoms billowing in the breeze in the midst of the sun-­soaked ruins.

  On another vacation, we journeyed to Cesme, a beautiful little town on the Aegean. By day, we swam in water bluer and clearer than any I’d ever seen and fell asleep on white sandy beaches, the taste of the salt water still on our lips. And at night, we feasted on local cuisine. One evening Mesut asked me what my heart desired for dinner. I told him I didn’t care so long as we could eat it outdoors and look out onto the water. I watched as Mesut passed my wish along to a balding restaurant owner, who wore a suit and tie. Smiling at me, the owner nodded graciously, then clapped his hands and instructed a team of waiters to lift a white-­cloth-­covered table from inside the restaurant high into the air and to follow me to any outdoor location of my choosing.

  “Anywhere?” I asked, delighted by the display of over-­the-­top chivalry.

  “Anywhere,” the restaurant owner told me, bowing.

  I laughed as the waiters dutifully followed me for nearly a block before, at the nod of my head, they dramatically set the table down on a patch of land that overlooked a series of little boats that danced in the moonlit water.

  Mesut clapped his hands and laughed as he took his seat opposite me. “Tatlim, do you know why I love you?”

  “Why?” I asked, placing my napkin in my lap.

  “I love you because you are three.”

  “Three?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes, you are three. All of us—­we have an internal age, the age we are on the inside. You are three.”

  The words might have insulted most women, but Mesut’s body language and tone were warm.

  “The way you smile and laugh, the way you ask all those questions, the way you love with your whole heart—­you are three,” he said, nodding once more.

  Our love was simple and sweet and pure and like none I had ever experienced. Everything, it seemed, was possible with him at my side. Even overcoming those pesky cultural differences. I met Mesut’s family—­his two brothers and two sisters and mother. His mother spoke no English and wore a veil at all times. I worried what she might think of me, an American girl who wore sleeveless dresses that fell only to my knees. But at the end of our first visit, she embraced me and called me “daughter.”

  My mother was less certain of our match. From the moment I showed her pictures of Mesut, a year before I brought him home to the U.S. for the first time, she was uneasy.

  “Why are you wearing this shirt?” she asked, looking uneasily at a photo of Mesut and me happily fishing on the Bosphorus at sunset. She looked not at the stunning site, the sunbeams dancing on the water’s surface, but instead at the man’s-­style green polo shirt I wore in the photograph. I squirmed uneasily. Did I tell her it was because the sex had been so good the night before that I hadn’t bothered to go home to change in the morning and had instead borrowed Mesut’s shirt?

  “Why are you wearing his hat in this one?” she asked, looking at another photo, this time with the two of us happily posing in front of an old lighthouse in Istanbul that had been converted into a restaurant. Mesut had taken me there one chilly evening and offered me his wool stocking cap when the wind ripped through us as we waited for a boat to take us back to the mainland. It was an odd match for the elegant long black wool Calvin Klein dress coat I wore. But I didn’t care. As the photographer snapped the photo, Mesut and I exchanged glances—­the ones that said, at that very moment, he and I were the only two ­people in the world.

  I was happy. And my mother knew it. This, I think, made her the most uncomfortable of all—­not that I was sharing articles of clothing with a man, but that I was so happy with that man—­a Muslim from the other side of the world whom she knew so little about.

  Our once-­tight mother-­daughter bond was still tight, but it was shifting. Phone calls that had former
ly occurred once a day now took place just a ­couple of times a week, owing to the time difference and the expense. And while I had once felt free to tell her everything about my life, now I hesitated.

  When my mother eventually met Mesut in the flesh, more than a year after our courtship began, she eyed him skeptically, treating him as if he were some sort of science fair experiment she’d reluctantly agreed to let me bring home to tinker with on the condition that I would ultimately take it back to the laboratory from which it came. The meeting took place not in Wisconsin, where I’d wanted to bring Mesut, but instead in downtown Indianapolis.

  “The school year’s been so busy,” my mother had said, sighing into the phone, when I’d initially called her from Turkey, announcing that Mesut was coming with me to the U.S. for a visit and wanted to see Beaver Dam.

  “But, Mom—­he wants to see where I grew up,” I protested. “Maybe I can make some calls and find a cleaning crew to come in while you’re at work. You wouldn’t even know they were there.”

  “Where would he sleep?” she asked.

  “Maybe he could stay in the guest room?”

  “The guest room isn’t in good shape,” she said. “And do you know anything about chipmunks?”

  “Chipmunks?” I asked.

  “Chipmunks,” she repeated, as if this were a most natural question to bring up in the middle of a conversation about introducing her to my new boyfriend. “I think they’re trying to get into the house from somewhere around where the front garden meets the foundation.”

  My mother paused, then sighed.

  “Mary, you won’t be happy. It’s not a good time. For me. Or the house.”

  “Oh,” I said, nodding sadly. Of course the house was a problem. Again. When would I learn? “Okay.”

  My mother had last promised me she would work to clean up the house the previous December, when I’d flown home for what would be my last Christmas in Beaver Dam.