Dated Dresses

Ashley Vadner

Most of the closets in my Grammy’s house are dusty and full of relics from somewhere around thirty to ninety years ago. The dress closet in my mom’s childhood bedroom is a clash of wedding gowns, 80s prom dresses, and stale-smelling fragments of old Halloween costumes. I had never even known it existed until the day my mom, aunt, cousin Lydia, and I were helping to clean out the house, preparing it to sell. My Grammy is moving in with my parents and me since it’s getting harder for her to live alone.

Lydia and I modeled the old dresses, with our mothers and grandmother exclaiming over their memories. We posed in our moms’ prom dresses– dark, metallic blue and obnoxious pink, with full skirts and fake bows. We carefully buttoned up wedding gowns– my aunt’s, my grandmother’s, a great aunt’s–that had belonged to generations of women who had lived in that house. We pinned veils in our hair and laughed over what didn’t fit and gushed over what did.

By the end, the bed was overflowing with plastic dress bags, crumbling foam hangers, and pooled skirts. We hadn’t done much of the promised cleaning. Our camera rolls were twenty pictures fuller. But we had given new life to once-treasured garments that had been shoved, bagged, and sequestered into one dusty little closet in a hardly-used bedroom.

Most of the cleaning process of that house has been slow. For one thing, pack-rat hood is a family business. We’re not hoarders, but we like our stuff. There are boxes of old Christmas cards from random families sixty years ago, and I doubt the receivers even knew them particularly well. For another thing, some of the junk has memories or stories attached, and what doesn’t is old enough to be interesting. Three old-fashioned steamer trunks, an early microscope, sepia photographs of ancestors, crumbling journals with family secrets hidden in loopy cursive.

And then there’s the fact that each bag or box carried out of the house is one step closer to the day when it will be empty. Strangers will move in and take a sledgehammer to the kitchen, knock out walls for an “open floor plan,” and exchange old furniture for soulless Ikea builds. I despise open floor plans. What’s next, a doorless bathroom?

I’ve never lived there, but I’ve eaten meals around the long dining room table, built a fort inside a bush by the backyard creek, and convinced myself I saw a ghost climbing the stairs. I’ve slept in four of five little bedrooms, baked in the kitchen, and spent hours doing yard work and playing tag outside. But I never understood it until we began to peel back its layers. I’d never considered the importance of dusty, forgotten photographs until I held them in my hands.

The day I tried on the dresses was the day I began to appreciate the house for what it is. A place where my relatives have grown up and died, leaving their belongings like a trail of crumbs. A legacy that is about to end. Soon it will belong to a new family. I imagine them with young children. They’ll put a pool or trampoline in the quaint backyard. I won’t know. Anything could happen to that house; it could be flattened for the sake of a new mini-mansion. After all, it’s just wood and paint and plaster, right?

I’m losing a sliver of my life, a tether to the past. Things change and time goes on and of course this will happen: this house will change hands, shift itself to new people and a new time. But I think I’ll keep the dresses. For as long as I can, anyway. Maybe one day, a great-granddaughter will try them on and wonder over each tired crease.

ACT N°1: Blue Tulle

Katelyn Wang

Marker, pen