White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “Some ­people,” my mother always said, “were just born with the kindness gene—­and David was one of them.”

  But while David tried to tell Anthony everything was going to be all right, it was far from it. Our mother was gone, and the mess of her house remained.

  We spent Christmas Day on my father’s boyhood farm, trying to provide for the boys something resembling a normal holiday, replete with a tree and presents. But by the end of the week, we were back in Beaver Dam, and I was faced with the new challenge of setting foot—­at last—­into the home my mother had kept me away from for a decade.

  Pulling into the driveway on the morning of December 29, I sat in the passenger seat while Dean drove, concentrating on my hands in my lap. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the house. The kids were back at the hotel with a babysitter. There was no way I could let them see how their Oma had spent her final years.

  “Are you ready for this?” Dean asked, leading me up the icy driveway and up onto the front step where Kim and I had spent countless hours in summers gone by, wondering whom we’d marry, what life outside of Beaver Dam might have in store.

  I shook my head.

  It was all familiar—­the yellow door, the black knocker, the shrubs that lined the front of the house. At the same time, it was all so strange. I held my breath as I turned the front doorknob and stepped over the threshold.

  “Welcome,” said my brother from his post on the futon he’d placed in the middle of the living room, directly in front of the Best Buy TV Dean and I had bought my mother three years before. He was watching ESPN but stood now to greet us. “Whaddya think of the place?”

  I couldn’t speak. All I could do was smell. Or try to keep myself from smelling. The noxious combination of odors swimming around me made me want to hurl. It wasn’t just the underlying scent of yucky—­that smell that reminded me a bit of a stuffy, rancid barn. It was also the competing smells of Lysol and a knockoff version of Pine-Sol that my brother had used in the days following the funeral to try to mask the odor. The conflicting smells were too much. I felt the vomit burn in the back of my mouth and began to gag. How could she have lived like this? How could I not have found a way to get her out of this?

  “You okay?” asked Dean.

  I nodded but I felt anything but. I reached for a Kleenex in my coat pocket to cover my mouth, then worked to do what I did in particularly nasty gas station bathrooms: stop smelling. I breathed in through my mouth, exhaled through my mouth—­willing myself to not allow my nose to enter the equation.

  The house was much the way I remembered it from my last time home. Yes, my uncle had made significant inroads in clearing the debris from the main floor. Now I could see at least patches of the floor. But there were still piles upon piles of stuff everywhere: stacks of unopened mail, at least a dozen disposable cameras that had been used or half used but had yet to be taken to a photo processor, old key chains with no keys, boxes upon boxes filled with filthy coins that had likely been rescued from the bottoms of my mother’s purses and coat pockets and never made their way to the bank. There were Christmas ornaments still sealed in plastic boxes, children’s clothing that had clearly been intended for my children or my brother’s kids at some point but had never been mailed, an old tape recorder, an ancient slipper that had lost its mate, and a collection of toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals still in their plastic wrappers.

  But I didn’t care about the main floor. I wanted to see my bedroom. I wanted to go back to where I’d spent all those hours studying, and practicing my clarinet, and playing with my dolls, and dreaming of a life beyond Beaver Dam.

  Steeling myself, I made my way to the staircase. As I reached for the banister, I gasped. This was the section of the house my uncle had yet to touch. And it showed. There was clothing everywhere. It looked as if a dozen washing machines had thrown up all over the steps, hurling their contents down the stairs: blouses, slacks, sweaters, towels, undergarments, and rugs. I don’t know how my mother had managed to get through all the riffraff during her last months in the house, or if she had even tried. Mixed in with the clothing were dozens of random items: unopened boxes of baking soda covered in dust and an old collar we’d used for Blackie.

  Using the banister for leverage, I pulled myself slowly but surely to the top of the steps. I was in the process of swimming toward my childhood bedroom when I heard Dean’s voice. It was urgent.

  “It’s your brother,” he whispered from halfway up the stairs. “I think you should come down here.”

  I made my way down the stairs, stepping on an unopened box of Band-­Aids and a pack of new but dust-­covered panty hose as I went.

  The living room door stood propped open, and the bitter cold of winter flew into the house. It felt oddly good—­the cold air a strong antidote to the yucky smells of the house.

  Out on the front walk, I found my brother struggling with the coffee table that had stood watch over the living room window for nearly four decades. He tossed the table into the snow-­covered front yard angrily before returning to the house to take dining room chairs. The throws grew increasingly angry and deliberate. I screamed as he hurled the largest of the chairs, the one with arms that had always been situated at the head of the table, into the flower bed where we’d grown the tulips I’d posed in front of on the morning of my First Communion all those years ago.

  “What are you doing?!” I yelled, running outside.

  My brother didn’t answer. He fixed his gaze back on the house, in search of new furniture to throw.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” I repeated, louder this time.

  My brother ignored me. He turned and brushed past me, returning to the interior of the house.

  I had never understood my brother very well. But I knew enough to know that this must be his way of mourning.

  I looked to Dean for guidance. But he shrugged his shoulders, his hands jammed into his pockets.

  A moment later, my brother was back, this time with the ancient green-­and-­white Castle typewriter that had sat in my mother’s dining room for as long as I could remember. She’d used it to help me type my college applications since we’d been unable to afford a computer.

  Anthony pivoted his body atop the front stoop, the way he used to when he threw discus on the high school track team, then hurled the typewriter into the snow.

  “You can’t do this,” I told Anthony, crying. “This was Mom’s. This was ours.”

  “This,” Anthony said angrily, “was a mess. It was always a mess. And I’m sick of it.”

  And there it was: the realization that miles may have separated us for years, that he may have seemed to have tuned out the problems for two and a half decades, but that our struggle with this mess—­this hoarding—­was something that would always unite us.

  “Still—­it was hers,” I cried. “This was—­”

  My voice cracked as I saw them then—­the old plastic-­covered photo albums that I’d loved to pore over as a child. They were my parents’ ancient wedding albums. Two of them. They used to be housed behind the heavy doors of the coffee table. But they’d taken flight when my brother tossed the table from the house. Now they lay in the snow. One of them had opened up to a page showing photos of my unsmiling mother in her wedding gown.

  “You can’t do this,” I said, beginning to cry. “These were her wedding photos.”

  I ran to the albums then, bending to touch them gingerly, as if they were an injured patient that shouldn’t be moved until the paramedics arrived.

  “Her marriage is over. And so is she. It all sucks.” My brother’s voice was wooden. As hollow as the now-­empty coffee table.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, crying. “I want these.”

  I scooped up the photo albums, trying to wipe them dry with my black wool coat in the process. Then I reached for the typewriter. It had been thrown hard
. But I didn’t care. She might have tried to write some of her last poems—­the ones that had been destroyed—­on the thing. I had to try to save it.

  Dean bent to help me lift it.

  “I’ll put these in the car,” he whispered. “You should get back inside. Take anything else you absolutely have to have. Get it now.”

  He looked from me to my brother. “With the way he’s acting, I wouldn’t count on anything you want remaining here for long.”

  I bit my lip and nodded. We’d rented an already-­packed SUV for the week. I knew there wasn’t much room in the car. But there was just enough.

  Wading back up the stairs, my heart beating, I reached it at last: my room. It was my childhood oasis, where I’d done all of my studying and playing and crying and dreaming. Now it was covered—­smothered—­beneath a layer of thick, sooty dust. I wanted to take it all in. To linger on the trophies and the diplomas and the awards and the dolls. Oh, how I had loved those dolls! Mandy and Ballerina and Strawberry Shortcake. But I couldn’t linger. There wasn’t time. All I really needed was them. The white dresses. Our white dresses.

  Looking past the Gone with the Wind artifacts still on display on my walls, my beloved bulletin board still hanging there, stepping around an old rocking chair and over the filthy carpeting, littered with mouse droppings, I reached the closet.

  I held my breath and moved the right-­hand closet door to the left so that I could see the clothes within.

  “Please,” I said softly to myself. Then, more loudly, “Please, God, let them be here.”

  Moments later, in the back of the closet, on the far right end of the closet rod, pushed up against the wall, I found it: my First Communion dress. It had hung there in a place of honor every day for nearly three decades and remained remarkably—­miraculously—­white within the room coated in that layer of impenetrable dust. The closet had served as a sort of protective armor for it. The semitransparent sleeves remained pretty, the lace on the bodice delicate and unspoiled.

  But that was just one white dress. There should be more. There had to be more!

  I went through the closet again—­past the spider-­covered yellow shawl I’d worn when I was four, the ivory cardigan full of holes thanks to all the moths.

  I didn’t see any more white. I felt my heart pound in my chest anew, the beads of sweaty panic begin to form on my forehead. But wait!

  There on the floor, peeking out of a dust-­covered dry-­cleaning bag, I saw a flash of something white.

  Could it be? It was! It was my high school graduation dress. The dress had remained in a once-­translucent plastic dry-­cleaning bag all these years. Through the now cloudy plastic wrap, I could see that the dress was intact. No bats or mice or moths had eaten away at the starchy white material. The lace still looked like something Daisy Buchanan would have loved.

  Hugging both dresses to me, I ran to retrieve the rest. From my bedroom, I swam through the clutter of the upstairs hallway to what had once been my mother’s room. I could barely make my way through the doorway. There were clothes, lamps, old rotary telephones with their endless spiral cords, laundry baskets piled five feet high. This was the room that had remained untouched for the better part of three decades. My mother had started her hoarding here when my father left, allowing this room to rage out of control when he’d moved out, as some sort of silent protest or cry for help. This was where the cancer of hoarding had started before spreading to every crevice of the house.

  The room’s two closets—­a his and a hers—­had remained largely untouched since he’d packed up. In hers, there still hung a little girl’s dress, orange and white with a dash of lace. It was purchased for a shower, intended for some friend’s child, thirty-­plus years ago. It had long since faded. The dress would never be gifted—­just as the room would never be cleaned.

  But never mind the dress—­I had interest in only one part of the room: the old green trunk that had long stood against the front wall. It was a beloved relic of my mother’s graduate school days at Ball State. I had always loved examining the trunk’s contents as a child, as it was the place she’d taken to storing our baby clothes. I struggled to push the clothes and old bathroom rugs that covered the trunk to the side so that I could open its lid wide. And there inside I found it—­just where I’d found it decades before, when I was a princess-­obsessed five-­year-­old—­my mother’s wedding dress. It was still in the blue cardboard LS Ayres box in which it had been shipped to her, folded up in a rectangular heap. I pulled the box to me, crying. The satin remained rich, the train long.

  I had them: the three things that I couldn’t live without; three white dresses that helped to define me and my mother.

  I turned to see Dean watching me, concerned, from the doorway. He’d followed me, swum his way up that fabric-­covered stairway, and studied me now with those big brown eyes.

  “You ready?” he asked, looking at the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  “Now I am,” I said, holding the dresses up to show him. I handed them over to him as I struggled to exit the room, tripping over an old broken black-­and-­white television set in the process.

  The dresses made it home to New York intact—­but my heart did not. It would take weeks of long cries and endless talks with Dean over tall glasses of wine before I started to process all that had happened when my mother “expired.”

  Work helped, as did the boys, whose sloppy kisses and constant demands took my mind off the gaping sore that was my grief.

  And then—­that spring—­came the news that was the best medicine in the world: I was pregnant.

  I didn’t know for certain that I was pregnant with the boys until I peed on sticks that ultimately turned blue. But when I became pregnant with Piper, I didn’t need any sticks. That quickening in my tummy—­that soreness in my breasts—­was unmistakable from day one. It was May in New York. The weather was warm. The air smelled sweet, at least sweeter than New York air usually smelled. And on our wedding anniversary—­the anniversary of the day I’d worn that white nightgown of a Vera Wang gown—­I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was expecting. The discovery was a gift from my mother, I’d like to think.

  Nine months later—­after struggles to clean up my mother’s house—­she arrived: a perfect little reminder of the joy that life serves up to balance the sadness. When the doctor pulled her from me at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital after just a ­couple of minutes of pushing, I looked at her in total wonder.

  “I don’t understand,” I told the doctor, eyeing Piper in confusion. “What’s wrong with that little boy?”

  Accustomed to seeing only naked baby boys, I looked the baby up and down in search of a tiny penis.

  “It’s not a boy.” Dr. Kurtz, the father of five boys, laughed. He raised Piper up higher in the air so that I could get a better look. “You have a daughter.”

  I screamed and reached for her.

  “It’s Piper!” I shouted as I held her in my arms for the first time. “It’s Piper Anne!”

  Coming up with the name was easy. We’d loved the name Piper—­a nod to my Irish roots—­from the time we’d been dating. Aurelia Arvin Diener would have been proud. And Anne? Well, what else would we call her? Piper was my mother’s gift to me. Of course she would bear her name.

  During my pregnancy with Piper, I had been worried I would be filled with renewed searing grief when the baby was born—­that the hormonal shift that comes with postpartum would kick me into a deep state of depression and I would be consumed once again by all that I had lost. But Piper’s arrival did just the opposite: she filled me with a sense of calm, peace, contentment where there had been none before.

  I missed my mother dearly. That would not change. But in Piper I felt as if I had her back. Dressing Piper up in girly dresses, reading to her my mother’s favorite poems, I felt Mom’s presence. I knew she was there, s
omewhere.

  And then that day—­putting Piper into that girliest and most ceremonial of dresses—­her christening gown from my journey to County Cork—­my heart filled anew with love and with grief. How my mother would have loved to have seen her on that day, to have caressed that linen on the skirt, to have helped me tie the ribbon on her bonnet.

  My father tried to dry my tears.

  Piper continued to watch me from her post on the changing table as my father wrapped an arm around me.

  “Your mother would be so proud of you,” he said reassuringly, bending to kiss my cheek.

  In the wake of my mother’s death, he was working hard to be a good grandfather and a source of support to me. To my boys, he was a hero. With me, there were still rough patches. I’d hung up the phone more than once when he’d said something inappropriate about my mother’s housekeeping. But in coming to see me for Piper’s baptism—­in standing here with me now—­I knew he was waving the white flag and asking for the sort of forgiveness Anne would so readily have offered, as she did all those years ago when he came out.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said, watching me with the baby. “You know that, don’t you?”

  He was crying now, his salty tears mixing with mine as they dropped onto the white lining of the changing table. This past year had not been easy for him. He mourned my mother in a way different from me. Even after he’d left the marriage, my mother remained his confidante. Often he called her at night just to talk. Now that she was gone, she wasn’t there for those evening calls and he was a bit lost. And, I think, haunted.

  Piper looked up at the two of us, her little smile now taking on a look of confusion as she watched me whimper.