My daughter shows up at my work recently. She gets out of her RN training early, a good
thing because it's her last day working the psych ward rotation. Of course, she leaves there and arrives to
find me with a bunch of pre-teens, trying to run what is loosely called Flex
but really means "glorified study hall." In other words, a teacher's version of a
psych ward rotation.
She was wondering if we might go check out the bridesmaid
dresses for her wedding. One teeny tiny
little itsy bitsy hole-in-the-wall place in nearby Lynnfield has them. I am ecstatic to help her check one more item
off of her Bridal Prep List. After the
final school bell, we pack up, which takes about thirty minutes, and head out
to the dress shop.
We find the place with little problem, except that I didn't
go the back roads and let my GPS take us on to route 128, normally not a big
deal, but we have the infamous route 1 to contend with, so we were truly hoping
for a quiet drive until we hit the main drag.
Anyone who has ever driven route 1 between Saugus and
Danvers knows that route 1 is nothing short of a Shit Show. If you are heading north and see the place
you need to be on the south side of the road, it takes a hundred miles to find
a connecting street, overpass, or underpass.
If you miss your chance to turn, you may find yourself hopelessly doing
enormous circles like a giant cruise ship being piloted by the Flying
Dutchman. We here on the North Shore
know exactly what happened to Charlie from the MTA (The Man Who Never Returned):
He made his way to route 1 and has been making continuous u-turns between
Lynnfield and Peabody ever since.
We find the shop easily because we have done a lot of
research. ("It's right off the ramp
as soon as you exit 128 and enter route 1… a small brick strip mall… on the
right … Don't miss the shop or it will take you three miles to turn south, then
another six miles until you can turn north again and not be too far ahead of
your target exit.") When we walk
in, we find the sales associate is working alone that day and has a small
"bridal party" (one older woman trying on a dress in front of her
friend) in there already.
There are hundreds of dresses hanging on the racks, all
colors, sizes, shapes, and lengths, and the task of locating this one dress is
daunting. My daughter found the style on
line, and then she started calling the bridal shops that popped up in the area
according to an Internet search of the dress.
After seven tries, the dress is finally located in Lynnfield, so here we
are. We wait until the shop phone stops
ringing (endless) and the clerk is momentarily available while her appointment
is in the dressing room.
We give her the designer, dress style, and tag number,
hoping upon all odds that the store still carries the style, the dress, and
that a sample gown is in these racks somewhere.
Anywhere. The clerk smiles and
nods toward a teeny hallway where the dressing rooms are.
There in the corner, tucked away from the taffeta-and-satin
saturated room, is a single mannequin, the only mannequin in the place, and it
is wearing The Dress. We both react simultaneously: "That's it!" It's the same reaction we have to finding her
wedding gown after she had tried on about eighty others. We check the color
swatches. Almost a match to her chosen
palette; so close, in fact, that we dub it to be perfect. Wondering if it's too heavy, we ask if we
might be able to just hold the dress off the mannequin to get an idea of the
comfort level for her attendants.
The woman takes the dress off the mannequin and tosses it
high to the ceiling. As it floats
through the air to us, I grab it, expecting it to be too heavy, too
complicated.
It is neither.
The dress is simple as can be (no massive directions needed
just to get into and out of it) -- A
form-fitting top with a sexy, flowy bottom to it. And it is as light as a cotton sundress. In fact, it is one of the lightest dresses of
any length that I have ever held in my two hands.
So far, so good. The
last hurdle will be the price. When the
sales woman is done with her calculations, she spits out a price that isn't
unreasonable. We exchange all kinds of
informal paperwork and tell her we will be making an appointment to come back
very soon with the members of the wedding party.
Perfect. Everything
is perfect until we decide to go to dinner.
The restaurant is less than a half mile away … on the other
side of the highway. We enter route 1
and promptly turn at the first available chance. Problem is, we hadn't gone far enough
yet. So, back we go past the shop
again. We wave to the shop now that
we're all old friends and all. We
continue up route 1 even further, past the new construction that will house a
Christmas Tree Shop, past Spinellis, and find another turn-around point.
Finally, after several loops to Nowhere, we pull into the
parking lot for a Mexican restaurant called The Fat Cactus. Daughter orders a burrito; I opt for the
Black Angus burger. We have a nice meal,
a quiet meal as we've asked to be seated away from anywhere there might be
children.
As we exit the restaurant an hour later, we see that it has
started to rain -- not pour, but definitely rain in earnest. It rains like this the whole way back to my
work, where we have left her car, sitting by itself all lonely at the edge of
the parking lot. There are a few cars
still there, probably from some late meetings.
The darkening evening sky and the persistent rain may dampen the
ambience, but the feeling of victory prevails, an ember of relief signifying
another check off the pre-wedding to-do list.
Though my daughter may have completed her psych ward
rotation, she still needs to remind herself that wedding planning is a bit
crazy in and of itself. If you let it
get the best of you, you're bound to end up circling around and around a few
times, nipping at your own heels… pretty, white, wedding-shoed heels, but
heels, just the same.
