The Feel of Steel

by Helen Garner

  Now it was the veterans’ turn, a handful of us, mostly well over fifty. Tactical Joan, sturdy Ivor, wiry Maria, whippy Sandy – I knew them from the class above me, where in practice bouts they all routinely beat me. The wild card was an unknown forty-five-year-old man from the Dandenongs, tall, heavy-limbed and determined.

  I was called. Already dripping in layer after layer of cotton, synthetic, plastic, metal and leather, I stepped up and plugged the scoring lead into my foil. I pulled on the mask. It was heavier than the practice one, its wire darker, its holes smaller, its bib more spongily padded. Oh God. How would I breathe in here? Sweat began to trickle through my hair. I wasn’t scare of getting hurt, but I was expecting to be soundly thrashed.

  In the first bout I was. My ears muffled by the mask, I couldn’t understand what the curly-haired young referee was saying, why he kept gesturing at me. I thought he was ticking me off for something I was doing wrong.

  I tore off my mask. ‘I don’t understand what you’re telling me.’

  He looked at me with a crooked smile.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ he said, in the clear, slow voice one uses to a simpleton, ‘who won each point, and why.’

  I uttered a crazed laugh and yanked the mask back on. ‘En garde. Prêts? Allez!’

  I was beaten. I won a bout. I was beaten again. I faced the big guy from the Dandenongs. He was like a Sherman tank. He came at me with his blade down low and his left hand dangling loosely near his shoulder. I couldn’t deal with the bulk of him, his steady, relentless advance. I forgot about ‘Retreat! Retire!’ and brandished my feeble blade in his face. He swatted me off like a mosquito. He wiped me out. I shook his hand in bliss.

  The longer we fenced in the awful heat, the cooler my head became. I felt daring. I didn’t care if I lost but I went all out to win. My mind, normally so scattered and fleeting, tuned itself to my body. I grasped for the first time in my life what tactical thinking might be, how I could vary my attacks, feint and wait and spring a surprise. I saw in a series of bright flashes what was required, what I might one day be capable of, if I stuck at this.

  I was panting, laughing, gasping, sweating. I felt like a million dollars. I could have kept going all day and all night. Between bouts I guzzled water but I was too excited to sit down. I paced around with the mask under my arm. I leaned against the fire escape door to get a breath of air. I was streaming with joy.

  And I won a medal. A bronze medal on a long blue ribbon. Typing this, I’ve still got it on. The maître d’armes (it thrills me that we have the same first name) gave us each a bottle of champagne and some yellow roses. The coach made me eat a muesli bar. We all, even the victorious hulk from the mountains, kissed each other and shook hands. It was a radiant companionship.

  I’m different, since that day. My body feels taller, stronger, freer. At this late age I suddenly understand why people on winter Saturdays scramble and strain in mud. The devotion and patience of coaches, their severe heartening – all this is clear to me now. At last, at last, I get it. I yelled and sang with gratitude all the way home.

  Arrayed for the Bridal

  Although I have been married three times, I have never been ‘a bride’. What – me, in a big white dress? In a veil? The closest I ever got to the fantasy was back in the eighties, when I used to admire the white gypsophila crowns that a certain society woman wore to parties: I drew a curious satisfaction from their ethereal, circular, brow-pressing beauty. Twenty years later all that’s left is the frisson I get from the coronet shape that salad leaves briefly take when I tip them out of the whizzer on to a tea towel.

  But I never tire of hearing my friend Vanessa Lucas, the dress-maker, talk about a famous bridal salon where she works part-time, as a fitter of made-to-measure wedding gowns. She is the most composed person I know, yet in her kitchen, as she pours cups of delicate lemongrass tea, she tells me stories of frenzied female melodrama that make my hair stand on end: domineering mothers, frantic daughters, sobs and swoonings, attacks of cold-blooded hauteur, savage quarrels, and sudden flourishes of glory.

  ‘The deadline,’ says Vanessa. ‘The deadline is the worst. Then the whiteness, that you have to keep clean. And the bigness.’

  For the bridal gowns are big. They are stored, between fittings, in large, loose bags of washed cotton. To carry one of these creations on its hanger, a woman has to walk with both arms extended vertical above her head and the bagged gown sweeping down along her torso and legs. Once, says Vanessa, a young fitter in the early stages of pregnancy carried a gown from the workroom to the fitting room: such was the weight of it that she began to bleed.

  Lately Vanessa has been replacing another fitter who is on leave with a damaged shoulder. ‘They send me helpers from sales,’ she says, ‘but the young girls can’t do the fitting. Physically, they can’t. You have to get the seam on an angle – you have to drive glass-headed pins through twenty layers of fabric. Young, thin girls find that really hard to do. Then they stab their finger and have to run off to get a bandaid – because you can’t bleed on the dress.’

  Blood! On all that whiteness? How appalling – how fabulous! The only thing, apart from chemicals, that will get blood out of the fabric is the saliva of the person whose blood has been spilt. These fragments of bridal lore Vanessa lets drop in passing, with a casual little laugh. They send a fairy thrill right through me.

  She leads me into the salon the back way, off a bluestone lane, up a step and straight into the workroom. It’s a hot day and, though a cooler is blasting, the air under the silver ceiling insulation is thick and dry. Half a dozen women bend over sewing machines. Bzzz, bzzzzz, bzzz, they go, in their stabbing rhythm. Bare padded models stand about without heads. A woman at an ironing board is carefully pressing a pink strapless dress.

  ‘See?’ says Vanessa, picking up from the work bench a stiff under-bodice as delicate as a fish skeleton. ‘This is the secret of everything. The boning. That’s what holds it all up.’

  My God. There are corsets under those dresses. They practically wear stays.

  Vanessa herself is wearing black close-cut pants and top, with soft-soled flat boots: comfortable clothes for an afternoon of standing, crouching and crawling. Her offsider Barbara, a woman with thick fair hair and vestigial German speech patterns, is also dressed completely in black. It’s a rule of the house, but there is something archetypal about it: they are handmaidens, attendants, dignified women in their forties who will efface their own femininity to enhance that of the bride.

  The brides-to-be turn up one by one, in street clothes, carrying their wedding shoes in white cardboard boxes.

  The first is Sally, a nurse. She is on night duty at Footscray Hospital, and is so tired today that she is nauseated and dizzy. She is accompanied into the fitting room by her matron of honour. Outside the closed calico curtains, on a small sofa, sit Sally’s mother and sister, waiting humbly in silence.

  Sally takes her shoes out of their box. They are chisel-toed, patent leather sling-backs, a luscious deep crimson.

  ‘When I told the girl in the shop that I wanted to wear red shoes at my wedding,’ says Sally, ‘she said, “You can’t do that!” And I said, “Watch me.” ’

  Without embarrassment, she strips to her knickers, drops her marmoreal bosom into a brand-new strapless bra, and slips her feet into the gleaming shoes. She stands facing the mirrored wall, all but naked before strangers, unfazed by her own reflection, half smiling through a haze of fatigue, waiting for her gown. Here it comes, cream silk faille, swung off its hanger and borne across the forearms of a tiny black-frocked emissary from the workroom.

  Vanessa and Barbara pour the dress over and around the bride, and zip it up behind. Folds drape in a diagonal cluster from bosom to hip, like something from classical Greece. The two fitters are down on their knees and elbows, bottoms in the air, foreheads cut skimming the floor. With pins they level the under-layer, then they demonstrate to Sally’s friend how to swag up the mass of fabric behin
d her into a low bustle, so she can walk and dance. Sally’s head with its dark, loose French roll rises serene above all this ant-like activity. She is impassive, floating in the stillness of fatigue.

  When asked, she produces briskly from her bag a short net veil. ‘It was my girlfriend’s,’ she says in her pleasant, reasonable voice. ‘It’s been sitting screwed up in a plastic bag for three years.’

  Barbara reaches up to dig the comb of the veil into Sally’s hair, and fluffs out the bunched net into an explosion of white around her bare shoulders. (What is this lump in my throat?)

  ‘Open the curtain for my Mum,’ says Sally. ‘If she wants to cry she should cry now.’

  The curtains are swept back. The mother and the sister lean forward. Sally turns to them and quietly shows herself. They gaze up at her from the sofa, smiling, smiling. No one speaks, or cries, but they look emotional, somehow.

  Upstairs in the hot workroom, an emergency: some yellow marks have been found on the back of the next bride’s dress. If drycleaning won’t get them out, they’ll have to unpick and replace the whole panel. I am impressed by the deep seriousness of the discussion. Squint and stare as I might, I can’t see a stain or discolouration of any kind.

  One of the women says, ‘Do you have a little spare piece of the satin? Just a piece? A scrap? Put a bit of oil on it from the can. Just a touch.’

  ‘Julie’s the expert with marks,’ Vanessa whispers in my ear. ‘She’s very brave.’

  A small group has gathered round the gown on the ironing board. Julie begins to scrub at the fabric with something smelly out of a tin. It’s unbearable, the intensity of their focus on a stain I still can’t see. I bolt down the stairs to the reception area.

  Everything in sight is swathed in pale cloth. Rows of diaphanous samples – ‘Ava’, ‘Bijou’, ‘Marissa’, ‘Greta’ – hang on wheeled metal racks. The very air feels feminine. ‘We’re having two layers,’ a woman is murmuring on the phone at the reception desk. ‘Watermelon, and amethyst. ’Cause she’s got a tiny waistline and beautiful skin.’ Somebody behind a curtain utters a soft, high-pitched laugh.

  I pass a bride and her mother bowed over a coffee table, heads together, locked in conference about beading. They are utterly absorbed in their aesthetic dilemma, but glance up at me with dreamy smiles, their eyes lost in fantasy. They have wee high-pitched voices that issue from the very fronts of their mouths. The beads strewn before them on the fabric are minute, like silver seeds.

  I become aware that the whole time I’ve been in the building, discreet music has been playing: no male voices, only women singing, or orchestras, quiet bands, string quartets. This salon is a shrine, a temple devoted to weddings, but it’s got nothing to do with marriage. Men have no existence here. They are completely irrelevant – barely even referred to. I’m starting to choke, to drown in softness and draperies and infinitesimal detail. If I were a smoker, I’d stagger out on to the street right now and light up.

  ‘Sometimes they faint,’ says Vanessa. ‘And one time a girl actually vomited. I grabbed her shoebox and got it under her mouth just in time. The tension can be terrible.’

  No wonder – they are all on fierce diets. Every bride whose fitting I watch speaks about losing weight as if it were her duty.

  ‘I’ve been good all week,’ says one of them, as she strips off in front of the mirror.

  ‘Will I be able to eat, on the night?’ asks another.

  ‘Yes,’ says Vanessa. ‘It’ll stretch’ – body warmth causes a gown to relax and give as much as a centimetre – ‘but if it feels too tight today, let us know.’

  It’s like being in an emergency ward, here among the curtains, hearing someone in the next cubicle saying, ‘Just breathe normally.’

  Vanessa teases one of the girlfriends, whose wedding dress she also made: ‘Don’t you remember you lost weight and I told you you had to eat cake?’

  The girlfriend sighs, and bewails her fate: ‘I lost weight, then I put it all back on! See what happens, Sally, when you’ve been married four years?’

  ‘Oh,’ cries the bride, ‘don’t tell me that now!’

  Indeed there is a striking difference between the brides-to-be and their married attendants. The single women have a sharp, bright edge to them (enhanced, no doubt, by adrenalin and anxiety), while the married ones look slightly blurred, even, in some cases, dull-eyed, specially the ones with small kids at home. They are suffering a different exhaustion, the bone-deep fatigue of motherhood, a permanent insufficiency of sleep.

  Marina has ordered a pale blue gown. This is her first fitting. While they shape her skirt with pins, she clasps her hands in the air above her head, to give the black-clad fitters free access to her torso. She’s in her twenties but she has a teenager’s body: flat belly, long firm thighs, small breasts still set high. Her skin is lovely. Her thick fair hair, greasy today, grows back off her brow in a sweep. While the fitters work, she unconsciously adopts graceful postures and holds them without strain, her face blank with thought.

  Her mother, in tinted spectacles, trousers and flat shoes, chews gum in the corner chair, a big brown handbag leaning against her leg. She is watching like a hawk. At one point she reaches forward and picks up the corner of a layer of lace. She says nothing, but examines it critically, then lets it fall.

  ‘Now,’ says Marina, ‘are you going to put padding in? Because I definitely need –’

  ‘Yes,’ says Vanessa calmly.

  They bring in the bodice and fit it to her. It has shoestring straps and is cut low in front but oddly high at the back, well above her shoulder blades. I have never seen such a dress shape before. The fitters slide the padding into the bodice.

  ‘Why is the back so high?’ asks Barbara.

  ‘It needs to be high,’ says Vanessa in her mild voice, ‘to cover this.’

  ‘It’s my star sign,’ says Marina. ‘Aries.’

  All I can see of the tattoo, on her left shoulder blade, is two delicate horn tips peeping over the high bodice back.

  There’s a pause.

  The mother looks at me and says, ‘I think too up.’

  Freed by her glance, I put in my two bob’s worth. ‘Why do you want to cover it? Does your fiancé . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ says Marina, ‘my fiancé’s OK about it. But other people might be shocked. Like the priest.’

  Everyone laughs.

  ‘I would try it with makeup,’ says Barbara. ‘Or a patch.’

  A patch? Yuk. Recklessly I barge in. ‘You should go with that tatt.’

  Mother and daughter confer in rapid Greek. The mother gets up and stands behind Marina with her feet apart and her arms folded. Occasionally she glances at me and grimaces, woman to middle-aged woman. She is tough and friendly. The two fitters begin to hint, with the greatest delicacy, that they might cut the back of the bodice down to its proper position and reveal the tattoo.

  ‘You have a nice back,’ says Barbara cautiously.

  The mother agrees: ‘I like more better other way.’

  ‘I’m being here very honest,’ says Barbara.

  ‘Yes,’ says Marina bravely. ‘I want the truth.’

  She will have to decide right now, today. The tension level in the fitting room soars. Her face darkens and stiffens, but she goes on being patiently courteous. You could not call her beautiful or even pretty, yet there is something intensely appealing about her. When she catches my eye she grins: suddenly she is only a girl. A girl with guts.

  ‘Is it possible,’ she says, gaining time, ‘to get a bit more padding in here?’

  They hand her more. She squeezes it in. Up pop her little breasts in two pretty curves above the bodice edge. They swell and subside with her breathing. I control an urge to say, ‘The priest will be more interested in those, my dear, than in the tatt on your back.’

  ‘Are you going to have a flower or two?’ asks Barbara, a traditionalist.

  ‘Here?’ says Marina, vague, anxious, touching her bosom. ‘I don’t k
now. I haven’t thought about it.’ She lays her fingers across her lips, to think. Her smallest gesture is inspired by an elegance of which she seems perfectly unaware.

  I can’t resist. ‘Are you a dancer?’

  ‘No,’ she says, astounded. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re so graceful.’

  ‘You’re just saying that!’

  ‘No I’m not! Every move you make is full of grace. You’re a natural.’

  ‘I’m an accountant,’ she says, starting to scramble out of the dress.

  But her face has softened. She decides to risk lowering the bodice at the back. Everyone utters discreet sounds of applause. The mother makes a fast joke in Greek. Marina laughs: ‘My Mum says I should have the dress made so my navel ring shows.’ The mother cracks up and so do we. The fitting room is flooded with relief.

  Marina, back in her street clothes, turns to face Vanessa. Smiling at each other, they exchange nods so slow and formal that they seem to be bowing.

  ‘You’ve done an excellent job,’ says Marina.

  I have just witnessed a tiny act of heroism.

  The last client for the afternoon is Graziella. She’s not a bride but a matron of honour. There’s a back-story here: at Graziella’s own wedding, her cousin was a bridesmaid. On the day, the cousin’s dress burst at the seams. The cousin in question is now about to marry, and the salon, to atone for the catastrophe, is making Graziella her matron of honour dress free. Graziella, in high good humour, is here to collect her pound of flesh.

  (Vanessa tells me on the side that the salon considers this a fair cop, whereas the complaint of another woman, who had come in raging with the bottom half of her gown torn right away from its bodice, was not.

  ‘We asked her, “How did it happen?” She said, “Somebody stood on the hem!” We said, “Our gowns aren’t made to withstand being stood on.” She said, “But it had only one row of stitching!” And we said, “One row of stitching should be enough.” ’)