The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (40 page)

The lime green prom dress looks like an artifact from a Charleston side-street used-clothing store that makes most of its money during the month of October when everyone is looking for trick-or-treat costumes.

The mere sight of the lime dress now sparks a momentary time-travel experience for Emma that makes her entire world stand still.

Emma had been looking for a prom dress for three weeks and in those three weeks Marty took her not just to every prom dress store in Charleston and Higgins, but possibly every store in the entire state of South Carolina. Emma kept insisting she wanted a dress that would not be like a dress every other girl at the senior prom would be wearing.

“Honey, that is what every girl who is going to prom is saying,” Marty patiently explained.

“So what?” Emma fired back.

“I’m not saying you should settle, dear. I am saying that you may have to compromise. We have seen thirty dresses that make you look even more beautiful than you are.”

“That’s not good enough,” Emma pouted. “I want to look good
and
feel good when I am wearing the dress. It’s about how
I
feel, not just what everyone else thinks.”

Marty Gilford turned slowly at that moment and decided that she had perhaps underestimated her daughter. Thinking like an eighteen-year-old was not easy but for a moment Marty had tried to imagine it—again. She tried to imagine the social pressure and the need to be and feel different even as you wanted, at the same moment, to be just like everyone else. She tried to imagine how this major senior class dance was the last chance to say something about not only who you were, but also who you were going to be.
She tried to imagine how exciting it must be to be standing with one foot exactly where it had been for eighteen years and the other foot in midair, waiting with feverish expectations for where it might land next. She tried to imagine then what her life would be like in exactly one year when Emma would be gone, when she would be driving through these streets alone, when the house would be a silent reminder of years and years of noise and shouting and teenage angst and windows opening and closing at two in the morning and that absolutely joyous moment when Emma was home, safe, and she could finally sleep.

And Marty had smiled at her daughter in a way that Emma would know when she got older was a summary of everything that she had just thought.

“Sweetcakes, we can drive for a week if we have to, but we will find you the dress of your dreams.”

They almost did drive all week and finally found the lime green formal in the most unlikely store either one of them could ever have imagined. There was a tiny bridal shop in a town a good seventy-five miles inland from Charleston that Marty had heard about from an old friend. The hip owner would not let Emma look at any of her dresses until she looked at Emma. She touched her face, held up several pieces of material, had Emma stand so that she could gauge her height, the way she carried her shoulders, where her throat met her collarbones.

Then she brought out the lime green dress as if she was carrying sixteen pounds of gold and held it in front of Emma whose knees almost buckled the moment she saw it.

Marty exchanged a smile with the shop owner, carried it into the dressing room, and waited.

When Emma finally emerged, Marty felt her heart lurch. It was the first moment,
the moment
, when she saw her daughter as
not just that—a daughter—but as a woman, as a potential friend, as a girl who had grown into a beautiful creature who was about to fly, and Marty, who rarely cried, wept.

“Mom,” Emma asked, rushing over, “are you okay?”

“Yes, sweetie, you just look beautiful, that’s all. Absolutely beautiful.”

And Emma will never forget
her moment
when she turned to look at herself. The dress, even in all of its limeness, looked as if it had been handmade to fit her. It showed the curve of her breasts and the tiny wedge of cleavage that she had been praying for since sixth grade. When she turned sideways, the slit opened and exposed her right thigh as if to say, “Wait until you see what’s above this.” The sides were tapered in close to her waist and when she turned again she loved how the high back made certain that the focus of the dress was on its front.

Wearing the dress, Emma felt beautiful for the first time in her life. And looking at the dress now brings that moment and all the moments that led up to its purchase into focus as if the entire room was under a huge magnifying glass.

“What?” Stephie asks, seeing the expression on her aunt’s face.

“I’m just remembering when I bought this dress.”

What Emma does not say out loud is that she is also wondering why she ever let go of the feeling she had when she wore the dress, when she actually believed that love and life were so much more than distant possibilities.

And Emma touches the dress in her niece’s hands, softly and quickly, hoping to gain back the power she believed it once held for her and the power she needs to take one more terribly important life step.

“It is so awesome, Auntie Em. But I just want one more slit up the other side and for you to help me cut the back off, and then I have these very cool long pieces of leather …”

“No—I’m going to make it better. This is like the hottest color ever in the whole world—and it will always be your prom dress.”

“No,” Emma says firmly, grabbing the dress, and opening the drawer so she can get out her scissors. “This is no longer my prom dress. It is now your pageant gown. Change is a good thing.”

And the surgery begins.

Three hours and twenty minutes later Emma has a long piece of lime green thread attached to a needle dangling from her teeth and her niece is standing in front of her in a brand new and blazingly bright dress that looks absolutely nothing like the prom dress Emma wore when she was a senior in high school. The dress was hot all those years ago just being lime green, but now—with the slits and leather and beads and the absence of any material in the back of the dress from the waist up—the dress is beyond hot.

And Stephie, too, is hot.

And Stephie will still be hot even if she keeps with her plan to wear a pair of bright pink Converse tennis shoes, which, of course, she will.

And pink hair, which she assures Emma will match her pink shoes by tomorrow night.

And all those plastic bracelets.

And a pair of ceramic earrings that hang to her shoulders.

And who knows what else by showtime.

Stephie twirls just the same way Emma twirled when she bought the dress, and when Emma sees the way her young back slides into it, and how absolutely confident she looks as she circles in front of the dishwasher, she feels her newly expanded portal widen yet again.

“Oh, Stephie,” she cries, forgetting she has the pin in her
mouth and jabbing her finger as she puts both hands to her lips. “You look absolutely stunning.”

“I don’t look like a pear or a piece of some other kind of green fruit?”

“You are beautiful. Really beautiful.”

“You don’t have to say that,” Stephie admonishes, putting up both hands as if she has just joined the Supremes. “You know how I feel about this beauty thing and that’s why I did the dress this way. Plus, it’s just funky. I love funky.”

“Funky becomes you, Stephie. It does.”

She has to.

“We need to talk about your mom, Stephie,” Emma begins, choking back a wall of tears and grabbing the adult-like emotions she needs to sustain herself through a conversation that is necessary and yet awkward and very painful.

“Mom.” Stephie nods. “It’s so sad, Auntie Em. I’m terrified that she is going to embarrass me tomorrow night but yet—well, she’s my mom. I want her to be there.”

Emma sits and pushes herself as close as she can to Stephie. The dress falls between them and looks like a sea of bright moss cascading to the floor. Emma twines her fingers around her niece’s and wonders if there is anything in the entire world that she can say that will make Stephie feel better.

She tells her about the planned intervention and about how much everyone really does care about her mother. She says somehow Stephie, her brothers, and even Joy will get through this. And of course Stephie knows about alcoholism and how hard it is to
recover and how the struggle to recover can take a very, very long time.

“We talked about this in health class so much it almost made me want to start drinking to get them to stop,” Stephie recalls. “It’s been obvious for a long time that Mom has a problem and it’s also obvious to me how much easier it was, for a while anyway, to just ignore it.”

“It’s not your responsibility to make sure your mother is well,” Emma advises.

Stephie laughs and tells Emma that is exactly what Emma does with Marty so what’s the difference?

“I’m an adult, sweetie,” Emma tells her. “You can care about your mother and love her and be sad but you cannot save her, Stephie. It’s her job to save herself.”

“Sometimes I hate her …”

“We all hate our mothers sometimes. It’s not easy stuff, this family business. But one day—and I hate to sound like everyone else—one day it will all make sense. I believe your mom will get better. I believe that she loves you and your brothers enough to pull out of this. I do.”

What Emma doesn’t say is that Stephie may be forty-three before it makes sense, before she can forgive her mother and herself, before the pieces of that part of her life’s puzzle fall into place so that she can focus on another section of life. It may take Stephie another twenty-seven years to know that she can be a part of her family and yet be her own family and create a whole new one—if she can choose. If she can do that.

She also doesn’t tell her that even then it is not always going to be easy and that sometimes she will fail her mother and sometimes her mother will fail her. And one more thing, one very important thing that Stephie already seems to have grasped. Your life with your mother will intersect and often collide with your own life but
it should not override the direction you are traveling in, the path you are taking at that moment, the outlines you have penciled in to follow through the nights and days that make up your very own life. Touching lives is fine, but overtaking them, erasing the lines, messing up direction—that’s a no-no.

But these are things Emma will tell her niece later, or maybe not at all, because right now what they have said is enough for a young woman who is about to get up on a stage wearing a refurbished lime green dress, recite what will most likely be a controversial poem, and crawl upstream against a social current that is as strong and constant as the love Emma feels for her niece.

“Stephie, you know the fact that you are doing this pageant, that you are your own person, that you have such a free spirit—well, that didn’t just all come from your father and it was not all self-created,” Emma says quietly. “Your mom has her faults like we all do, but she has given you a lot of good stuff. She really has.”

This is when Stephie folds in half as if she has just been hacked with a machete at the waist. She falls into Emma’s arms, sobbing, like this is the first time in her life she has cried, as if she may never stop. Emma has been waiting for this moment for weeks and she is ready.

“It makes me so sad sometimes, Auntie Em,” Stephie sobs as Emma holds up the sleeve of her shirt for Stephie to wipe her nose on so she doesn’t have to do it on the prom dress. “I wish I could just stay here and never go back there.”

“Well, that would make me happy too, but not everything is going to always work out the way you and I want it to work out.”

“I feel like I’ve been the mother for a while because she couldn’t do it. A part of me is just tired too, you know?”

What do you say to a tender and wounded young woman who is about to make her social debut in a dress that actually does glow in the dark? How do you say that what you wanted has come true
and now that you have it you are not sure it is what you wanted? Now that your mother has flown into a new orbit and started out on a new leg of her own journey, everything may change, and how do you let your terrified niece know that there is a little bit of good and a little bit of bad in every change? How do you say that every hurdle and obstacle and pain in the rear end is part of the deal and that without it she would have been a life orphan? Stephie, without this emotional mess, and sad and sick mother, would be an orphan also.