“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Not what we’re looking for? What kinds of things do we like?”
If you must know, we like things that are loose, boxy, and don’t make two of us chafe together. Is there a section for that?
The saleswoman grins like she wants to eat me. She’s wearing a cream skirt and matching pumps, and has a measuring tape hanging around her neck. Ms. K-B’s measuring tape was worn and soft, the lines and numbers faded from years wrapping around waists and up and down legs, stretching over big bolts of fabric, checking the work for errors. The tape around this woman’s neck looks bright and stiff and new. This measuring tape has never met a body like mine, and there is no way she is touching me with it.
“I’m just looking around for now.”
“Do we like something a little simpler? Maybe more of an A-line?”
“I just came with friends. I don’t need help.”
“What size are we looking for?”
“I, ah, what?”
“It’s all right. If you’re used to small, medium, and large, dress sizes can be confusing. It’s not the same as throwing on a sweatshirt!” She nods to my sweatshirt, like I’m too stupid to have ever heard of sizes that are numbers. “Let’s head back and get some measurements so we know what we’re looking for.” She walks away, expecting me to follow.
I do what any rational person would do: I drop to the floor, crawl under a rack of dresses, and slink away, my head ducked low.
There’s a sitting area outside the fitting rooms. I slump in a flowered chair to watch the parade of girls twist in front of a panel of mirrors.
Jessa and the others are having so much fun, it’s almost contagious. Not prissy fun. Just fun. It reminds me of the day we got our uniforms, with people suiting up and transforming right in front of me, and I feel a little pang of envy.
Mena, whose mother calls her skinny as an uncooked noodle, is trying on a blue dress with one bare shoulder. It bags all over the place. Jessa, pressed tight into a long black casing, stands behind her and pinches the extra fabric. “This is perfect! We can keep our phones in here. And our keys. And our jackets.” Mena swats her.
“I’m sorry. Zero is the smallest that comes in,” says a saleslady, “but we can alter it.”
“How much does that cost?” asks Jessa.
“It depends on a lot of factors.”
“That means it’s expensive,” Jess tells Mena. “Maybe you can just pin it.”
“I don’t recommend that,” says the lady, but Mena is already closing herself back in the fitting room.
“I’m feeling pretty good about this one,” says Jessa. She’s dancing in front of the mirrors, grinding her hips even though Suzanne’s is piping in a string quartet. She’s not trying to pull the fabric away from her sides or suck in her breath. She’s not scrutinizing every angle of herself. She’s just moving. She’s moving like bulges and curves are supposed to be part of a human body. It’s like she’s found a new skin. Or a new uniform. Jessa wears that dress the way she wears everything: comfortably.
“Jess? You going to get black kneepads to go with that dress?” asks Mena through the door.
“THERE we are!” It’s Tape Measure, clicking toward my chair with an armload of dresses. “I thought we lost each other.”
So did I.
“Here’s just a couple of different styles to start with, and once we have an idea of what we like, we can go from there.” She starts hanging them along the bar in an open fitting room.
“We’re going to look at accessories,” says Kate, who peeks in the back with Khloe. Why can’t I be in their “we” instead of this messed-up “we” with pushy pumps lady?
Jessa is stripping off the black dress in front of the mirrors. “Do you want to try on this one? It’s actually really stretchy, like yoga pants or something. You want to try it? We could both get it.”
See? Uniform.
She holds the tangled dress out to me, but I shake my head.
I try to feel optimistic, though, since Jessa and Mena are trying stuff on and they don’t have ideal proportions, either. I have to find something, and here is where they have absolutely everything. I click the door behind me and slide out of my jeans. In the mirror, my legs look long and strong; not the chiseled legs of a gymnast or a dancer—just the kind of legs that no one could think of anything bad to say about except for all the new and old bruises from crashing into things on the court. My legs don’t need any Special Sizes.
But then I peel off my shirt. Me from the waist up looks like it couldn’t belong to the same person as me from the waist down. If my bottom half was built out of regular Legos, my top would be made of Duplos. These Sizes don’t just need to be Special. They need to be Magic Sizes or I don’t see how a dress is going to work.
I think I’m going to regret this, but I start in with what Tapey brought me.
The first thing is a sheath dress, like the one Mena had on. It gets to my armpits and doesn’t move. I tug at the edge, but it isn’t going anywhere. I pull it off and try the other way: I step into it and pull from the bottom. This time it slides up over my hips, but it gets stuck on the way up. Like if you tried to stuff a sea lion in a boot sock, only worse, because a sock would stretch a little. I take it off and hold it in front of me. It’s the same skinniness from top to bottom. My optimism is starting to fade, but it’s only one dress. I carefully hang it back on the hanger because Kathryn Walsh has trained me well.
I try a pale teal dress with a full skirt next. This time I start from the bottom, pulling it on like a pair of pants. It feels right around the middle, and the fabric is this really nice kind of silk that’s got imperfections in it—dupioni, it’s called. It’s a good length for me, a little above the knee, and I let myself pop up on my tiptoes a few times to imagine how it might look with heels.
But then I slide into the armholes and try to pull up the bodice. It’s not working because my breasts are in the way. I pull the bottom up higher to give me more room and manage to get my arms all the way in. Now the top is up, stretched very tightly across my chest. The skirt is hanging wrong, higher in front than in back, I can’t move my shoulders, and the whole thing looks like I’ve dropped a couple of ten-pound sacks of rice down around my belly. I haven’t even tried to close the zipper on the side, which is gaping open about eight inches. You’d need a whole other Mena-size dress to fill in that gap.
I can’t get that dress off fast enough.
“Are we finding anything?” Tape Measure says from behind the door.
Stop saying we. “Not really,” I say. I slide it onto its hanger a little less carefully than the first one.