My Little Blue Dress (20 page)

“Oh. Do they?”

Betty's eyes, which I had taken initially for merely glassy, I noticed now to be glittering with evil, and suddenly I wanted my hand back worse than I had ever wanted anything.

“But we have
such
a good time . . .”

Finally she left, and rather than let the issue fester I addressed it head on. “Chester,” I said, “was that woman being deliberately
sinister
?”

“Mm?” My husband was gnawing the cellophane off an electric foot massager. “Oh no. That's just how people are round here. Friendly.”

On an impulse I sprang to the window and swept aside the plastic curtain. At the far end of the road an ambulance had backed up to a house, and floating faintly on the air you could hear a woman sobbing hysterically . . .

“ ‘Friendly'?” I muttered to myself. “Or sinister.”

“Hey, hey, now. What's that you say?” Having dropped his appliance Chester came up from behind to hug me.

“Mm? Oh nothing.”

[28 AUG--1:52
A
.
M
.
this whole fifties section is hackneyed and ridiculous and
pathetically unbelievable]

 

Reaching behind me, I pinched Chester's buttock affectionately. “Really. It's nothing.”

June 28th—Monday

And, reader, it really
was
nothing. After continuing to creep about the place for a few days as if I were the heroine of some particularly terrible modern novel about a middle-aged female detective probing the shocking underbelly of a superficially pleasant little town, my jet lag wore off and I was able to see the place with clearer eyes.

Fordham, Wisconsin, actually wasn't that “sinister” when you got to know it. Betty Olsen, I heard from people, just happened to speak in a repetitive, rather drugged-out manner. As for the psychotically waving man with the lawnmower, fifteen seconds, when you think about it, isn't actually
that
long to be waving at a person who has come to a standstill in the roadway and is staring at you like a lunatic. As for the ambulance and the person sobbing . . . well, welcome to human existence, reader. Occasionally people have accidents, and when they do, then it's other people's duty to call an ambulance.

No. I decided upon reflection that I had been discomfited those first few groggy days by something far, far subtler:

Fordham, Wisconsin,
wasn't actually modern
. All those gadgets and conveniences, the bells and whistles that had reminded me initially of me grand-da's modern paradise, were on closer examination entirely ornamental. Our car, for instance, a sporty lime-green number provided by Chester's work, had an impressive set of seemingly aerodynamic fins running along the rear of the fuselage, and yet the thing could hardly top fifty miles an hour—let alone actually
fly
. Same situation with our hi-fi system in the recreation room. Despite nine speakers and a whole battery of complicated-looking knobs and switches protruding from its sleek, black housing—including one toggle switch labeled
CLASSICAL
/
POPULAR
—the quality of the sound was terrible and there was nothing you could do about it. And then there were those lawnmowers. They all looked fantastic from a distance, the most ostensibly hi-tech pieces of equipment I'd ever seen and yet, to a machine, those lawnmowers were about as efficient at cutting grass as me mam used to be with a rusted and buckled old hand scythe, as evidenced by the fact that the good men of Fordham had to spend all weekend, every weekend, mowing their blessed lawns.

I was rather pleased with this observation, that suburban nineteen fifties America was something of a sham, though obviously a little disappointed that me grand-da's vision of an ultramodern utopia where me and my little blue dress could finally feel at home had still not come to pass. One evening, in fact, to test my grim hypothesis, I put on my little blue dress just to see how Chester would react to it—and sure enough he completely freaked out.

“Jeepers criminy” Chester said from the foot of the
stairs as I hove into view on the landing. “What are you wearing?”

“Dab of perfume,” I curtsied playfully, “little blue dress, hoop earrings.
¿Qué es el problema?
”

He jingled his car keys in agitation. “You can't wear that. I . . . I will not be seen with you looking like that.”

“¿Porque no?”

“Because it's a goddam . . . freak show . . . costume . . . and the Olsens are decent people.” We were supposed to be having dinner with Betty and Dale at a local fondue restaurant.

I pouted. “You don't like it?”

Chester went white and his veins stood out. “No,” he mouthed.

“Jesus. What's your problem?” I put my hands on my hips and frowned at him. “You're acting like it's got holes cut out for my nipples or something. Can you please relax?”

But, Chester didn't want to relax. Quickly he was on his knees on the swirly carpet, covering his face and peeking at me through his fingers as if I were the Virgin Mary and he were some Portuguese goatherd who'd encountered me in the hills. “Modern?” he quavered hysterically. “Are you
nuts
? That's like something out of the eighteenth century . . . or the twenties . . . or . . . oh yeah, you know what?” He jumped up and jabbed his finger. “It's like something from the twenties
and
the eighteenth century. There's like five different styles in that goddam dress and that's why I suddenly gotta puke so bad!”

“Okay fine. Don't pop your cork. I'll go and change.”

Which I did. I went and changed, and in fact I was privately rather glad Chester had hated my little blue dress and that we weren't living in the Future me grand-da had
predicted after all. I had forgotten how much it made my head hurt to think about all of that, forgotten how little sense it all made. The simple fact was, as I had perhaps known in the back of my mind all the time, that grand-da's whole theory about how there was some sort of cosmic difference between the Past and the Future such that a person could be “allergic” to one and perfectly comfortable in the other was a steaming pile of nonsense. How could there be a difference between the Past and the Future? Surely it just depends on where one stands. Now it is always the Present. Everything that's already happened is the Past. Everything that hasn't happened yet is the Future. End of story.

Pretending to sulk and clad in a tight pink dress that made my hips look big, I accompanied Chester to Heidi's Fondue World where we all got fairly squiffy on gin and ended up having a pretty nice time.

The next morning, while Chester slumbered, I crept out of bed and down to the garage where, with a pair of “electronic” garden shears, I snipped my little blue dress into three pieces and stuffed them in the incinerator. As the flames took hold I shed a tear. But only one, reader. Because for all its sentimental value, and despite everything we had been through together, there was just no getting round the fact that my little blue dress was possibly the most headache-inducing and downright irritating piece of clothing that any young girl had ever had the misfortune to be . . .

Actually, hold on a minute.

Stop the text.

I think I may have just had a major revelation, possibly of Nobel Prize–winning caliber.

Chester's criticism of my dress that evening back in the
fifties, that it seemed to be haphazardly paying homage to multiple different fashion traditions simultaneously: That's how people dress
now
. In fact, that's the
only
way they dress now. Turn on the television right at this moment, reader—seriously, go and do it—and I swear to god you'll see a young man wearing a gas-station-attendant's shirt from the nineteen fifties above a pair of nineteen thirties German golfing trousers, or something. That's the
style
now. That's the fashion. The only clothes anyone ever wears these days are clothes from the Past, and if you tune into the Fashion Channel you'll find that all they ever talk about is how such and such a style is “making a comeback” or some supposedly ground-breaking avant-garde designer is cheekily trying to
repopularize
flared trousers or the ten-foot-diameter hoop skirt, or chain mail, or loincloths, or the figleaf. No one invents anything
new,
do you see what I'm saying? It's all from the Past.

And my revelation is this:

What if that's because
the Past is over
?

What if the reason everyone's running around in wildly mismatched historical clothing is because we're no longer embedded in any particular era, because history itself has stopped happening? Back in twenties Paris, even if you thought you were the most free-thinking, rule-breaking rebel in the world, it would still never even
occur
to you to combine a military jacket from WWI with a pair of turn-of-the-century riding boots, because you knew that rather than making you look glamorous or creative it would just make you look like you didn't have any money. So like everyone else you wore the most up-to-date clothing available, which at the time was long skirts and floppy, bell-shaped hats.

But now . . . well, it's like people getting dressed in the
morning have the entire history of human clothing stretched out before them for the plundering. They can choose clothes from whenever they like: a shirt from one era, a pair of trousers from another . . . because they're
not in an era themselves
. Eras are
finished
. And so is the idea that everyone has to dress appropriately for their “role.” Take Bruno's Housing Department T-shirt. I don't know if I mentioned this but the boy doesn't actually work for the Housing Department. And his basketball shoes. He
doesn't play basketball
. He doesn't even know what a basketball looks like, as far as I know. But do Bruno's clothes cause confusion? Does anyone ever stop him in the street and demand that he come provide shelter for them and their kids, or ask if they can get tickets to his next game?
No.
Because the people in the street, who are all wearing exuberantly mismatched clothing themselves, understand that nobody's limited to being any particular type of person anymore, to any particular role. Back in the past, a village blacksmith was a village blacksmith. Whenever you saw him he was wearing a leather apron, and if you asked him what he did with himself he would look at you like you were crazy and then say something like, “Um . . . I'm the village blacksmith. I work with metal.” And if you ever went to a new village? One you'd never visited before? And you saw a man wearing a leather apron and banging on an anvil . . . ? Well, then you knew that this man
too
was a village blacksmith.

But not now, reader. Not anymore. See a man in a leather apron on the streets of Twenty-first-Century Manhattan, reader—even one holding a steaming red-hot horseshoe in a pair of tongs—and good luck guessing who he actually is. Oh sure, he
could
be a blacksmith, I suppose, but he's a good deal more likely to be a screenwriter doing research for a movie
about blacksmiths or bass player for The Blacksmiths or an extra from a fashion show or a millionaire en route to a fancy dress party. And if he actually is a blacksmith? A fully trained one with metal-working experience who isn't planning to ever do anything else? Then you can bet your bottom dollar he spends most of his time driving out to fancy suburbs to make wrought-iron garden gates and accept huge checks in his sooty hands from bored rich women who will immediately get on the 'phone and tell their friends about how they just had a blacksmith—an actual blacksmith! in a leather apron!—come to their house, do you see? He's the exception that proves the rule. History has ended and we don't
need
people to have fixed identities anymore because the world is now
finished
, there's nothing more that needs doing. We don't need anyone to make any more horseshoes. We don't need any more soldiers to fight any more wars. Finally, this is the end state, and we're going to celebrate that fact by going to parties in leather aprons and military helmets. In fact we're going to throw parties where everyone dresses up in clothes from a particular decade, and gigglingly dances to popular music from that same era to express our relief that we no longer have to live like that, embedded in one particular time. Oh, and you know what? We're going to design bars and nightclubs that look like toasters or golf courses just to acknowledge the fact that this is no longer the past and nobody, and nothing, is under any obligation to actually be how they seem, but rather . . .

Look, I'm rambling. Let me just state my revelation once again, very clearly and quietly, and then never fuss with it again. All I'm trying to say, reader, is that I now think that maybe in a sense me grand-da was actually telling the
truth
on that bizarre afternoon back in 1905. Maybe a person can
be “allergic to the Past” and only comfortable in the Future, because it seems to be that there is an actual concrete difference between the two time periods. The Past was the process of the world coming-of-age, very slowly, by trial and error, during which everyone had to dress ridiculously and only have one job. The Future
is
that finished state, in which you can dress and act and be however you want, and in which everything new is recycled from the Past.