The divorce had left Danielle and her mother as kindred souls. Kris was such a young mother, and yet, because of their circumstances, both she and Danielle felt mature beyond their years. Cynda would watch them together and marvel at the ease with which they connected. They’d sit together around a campfire and talk for hours—an eight-year-old kid and her twenty-seven-year-old mother.
Perhaps because Kris had picked a man who treated her so poorly, and had a marriage that failed, she began giving advice at an early age. “You have to love yourself first,” she’d say to Danielle. “You have to take care of yourself first. You can’t love someone else until you love yourself.” Above all, that was the love she wished for her daughter.
Kris had great affection for children, and after getting her degree in child development, she went on to operate her own preschool. The children called her “Miss Kris.” “I’ve got thirty kids,” she’d tell Danielle, “but of course, you’re my favorite.”
Danielle loved helping out at the preschool. The kids were four and five years old, and Danielle was just eight or nine, but she looked after them in the sweetest, most maternal ways; the kids followed her around like a line of ducks.
Her father had made attempts to stay in touch with Danielle, but his addictions left him unreliable much of the time. He’d promise to pick her up for a weekend visit, and she’d always pack her bags and be set to go fifteen minutes before his scheduled arrival time. She’d sit in the living room, bundled in her winter coat, her suitcase at her feet, always at the ready. Half the time, he wouldn’t show up. For Kris, it was hard to watch her pretty little girl waiting thirty or forty minutes, then unbuttoning her coat, tears in her eyes, and carrying her suitcase back into the bedroom.
When Danielle was seven years old, in 1992, she asked Kris if she could dress as a bride for Halloween. So Kris found her a long white dress, a veil and a large bouquet of fake flowers, and Danielle went door-to-door as a bride without a groom.
Seven-year-old Danielle wearing a wedding dress for Halloween
Cynda is thinking of this too as she watches Danielle, all grown up, studying herself in the Magic Room mirrors.
Outside of the doorway, a bride and her mother wait patiently for Danielle to step off the pedestal and surrender the room. Danielle knows her time is up, but it’s hard for her. “I don’t want to leave,” she says, “I don’t want to get out of the dress.”
“You’ll wear it again soon,” her grandmother reassures her.
As Danielle finally takes leave of the Magic Room, she and Cynda talk about the alterations needed, and whether her fiancé, Brian, ought to see the dress before the big day. They do the math, figuring out how many weeks until the wedding. It’s happy small talk. Neither of them mentions Kris, and how desperately they wish she was here with them. That’s not something they can talk about easily.
Shelley doesn’t ask why Danielle is with her grandmother and not her mother. She has learned over the years that every bride has a story, and that some stories are revealed slowly, or not at all.
“You looked gorgeous in that dress,” she says when Danielle reaches the front counter to put down her deposit. “It’s a great choice for you.”
Becker’s Bridal, home to more than 2,500 dresses
Chapter Three
Sweethearts and Girlies
When Shelley was a young girl in the early 1970s, she’d head over to Becker’s to watch her mother and grandmother at work, and she’d often hide behind a rack of dresses. She could be there forty minutes, sitting on the floor, pressed against bridal gowns or bridesmaids dresses, just listening. Her little face sometimes peeked out, but usually, none of the brides knew she was there.
Shelley would study all of those young women, many still in their teens. Most seemed pretty to her, but not the way brides are these days—sexy and self-assured, with tanning-salon tans in the dead of winter. Back then, most brides had the same flip in their hair, the same pale skin. They wore glasses, not contacts, and few came in wearing a lot of makeup. (Grandma Eve frowned on makeup because it came off on the dresses. Those wearing too much makeup were asked to put Saran Wrap–like shields over their faces when they got into their gowns.)
The brides tended to be farm girls or the daughters of auto workers. They hadn’t traveled much, didn’t expect much, and ended up taking whichever dresses their mothers or Grandma Eva thought they looked best in. The store had only a couple hundred gowns back then, and Eva didn’t have patience for those who wanted a lot of options. Today, a bride can try on thirty dresses. In her time, Eva liked to offer three choices, maybe four, after which, she’d say something like, “Well, I think the first one looks best. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I think you’re right,” a bride would answer, and a bride’s mother would say, “The first one was lovely, wasn’t it?” And the sale was set.
Some mothers wouldn’t even wait for Eva to venture a verdict. They did all the deciding and didn’t engage in much discussion with their daughters. “That’s the one. We’ll take it,” Shelley would hear a mother say, and unlike today, the brides didn’t often argue about it. They smiled, kissed their mothers, and said thank you.
Shelley began to see that brides had a sense of destiny when it came to their selection of a dress. Again and again, she heard brides say that a dress had “talked” to them. Talked to them? They meant that a dress had announced itself as “the one,” somehow calling out from its place on the rack in a voice only the bride could hear. Shelley did wonder about these “talking dresses,” which always seemed pretty silent to her. But in time she came to understand the power of a wedding dress.
She also learned the saleswomen’s secret language. If they liked a bride, they’d refer to her as “girlie.” They’d say, “Girlie, that looks beautiful on you. Oh, girlie, it’s perfect!”
If a bride was being difficult, they’d call her “sweetheart.” That was code to let coworkers know who they were dealing with. “Would you help this young sweetheart find a veil?” Grandma Eva would say to a saleswoman.
As Shelley sat in her hiding place, she often had the same questions in her head: “What does all of this mean? These girls are standing here in these dresses, they’re getting married, but what’s really going on? How did they fall in love? Are they in love?”
Her mother and grandmother didn’t offer her any explanations. They were there to sell dresses, not to talk about love.
Saturdays have always been the busiest day at Becker’s because brides and their parents don’t have to go to work or to church. On some Saturday mornings, when the store hosts trunk shows from major designers, the line of brides and their entourages can stretch around the block before the store even opens.
And so for decades, young men in Fowler have cruised Main Street in search of roaming bands of bridesmaids. The brides are already taken, of course, but the unmarried bridesmaids they bring with them are fair game. There’s usually more girl-watching than successful flirting, but in a tiny town without much entertainment, it’s a scenic view.
Ken Hafner, born here in 1942, has watched bridesmaids parade down Main Street since he was a boy. “You’ll see ten of them walking to the store,” he says. “It’s good for the town. They eat. They buy gas. They’re great to look at. Well, most of them.”
Shelley’s daughter, Alyssa, convinced her twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, Cory, to work at Becker’s part-time doing accounting tasks. His friends think he’s got the life, hanging out with beautiful young women all day. They don’t realize he’s stuck in the back office, adding up saleswomen’s commissions. His friends will see a couple of attractive women on Main Street and they’ll text Cory: “Sexy blonde just entered store with two friends. Is she a bride or bridesmaid?”
“Don’t know,” Cory will text back. “I’m in the office.”
“Need to know,” comes the reply. “Find out!”
Though lovely women of all sizes and shapes come in here every day, plenty of Becker�
��s brides look nothing like the models found in bridal magazines. “I try to tell my friends that,” says Cory, “but they seem to only notice the prettiest girls.” (It may be true that all brides, like all babies, are beautiful. “Maybe on their wedding days,” says Cory diplomatically. Not necessarily on their shopping days at Becker’s.)
Given the large bridal business on Main Street—and the fact that the extended Becker family runs a men’s store and a furniture store—locals have long referred to Fowler as “Beckerville.” Some say it with affection. Some don’t. And either way, there’s an uncertainty in town about just how to reconcile, or to celebrate, the presence of Becker’s Bridal. A suggestion, years ago, to make a wedding gown the town symbol never got much traction. It would have been nice if pennants featuring wedding dresses were hanging from the town’s lampposts; fewer brides and their mothers, driving by on Michigan State Road 21, would end up missing the place.
Shelley appreciates it when locals say they’re grateful for the business her brides bring to town. For instance, bridal parties account for a large chunk of the business at KJ’s Café, the restaurant next door. If brides weren’t walking around on Main Street, Fowler would look pretty empty, like any other dying rural town.
Locals also say that when they travel elsewhere in Michigan, and tell people they’re from Fowler, they’re often told, “Yeah, my ex-wife got her wedding dress there.” Or: “Both of my ex-wives got their dresses there.”
It’s hard to find anyone here who doesn’t have a connection to the store. Most every woman in Fowler—like her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother before her—bought her wedding dress at Becker’s. Visit any attic in town and you’re likely to find an old gown with a Becker’s tag in it. The dresses are mostly modest numbers—Becker’s current prices range from $680 to $2,600—though more extravagant dresses are sometimes ordered, usually for more-affluent customers visiting from larger cities. (The average bride in the United States now spends $1,056 on a wedding dress, up 34 percent from 1999. Shelley credits the bridal shows on TV, which focus on the upper-end gowns, convincing viewers of all income levels that every bride deserves a pricey dress.)
Fowler still holds tightly to its German Catholic roots, and pretty much all 1,100 residents know each other. As grinning residents like to tell outsiders, “Fowler is a town where, even if your wife divorces you, at least she’s still your cousin.”
It always has been a quintessentially Middle-American community; a good number of its sons and daughters now serve in the military. Many residents work at auto plants nearby, while others drive a half-hour south to Lansing or East Lansing, where they hold white-collar jobs at Michigan State University, or government jobs at the state capital. And then there are those who choose to commute two or three minutes to work by taking a job at Becker’s, which now has twenty-two employees.
Eleanor Klein is the current record-holder for most time served as a Becker’s employee. Grandma Eva’s niece, she got the job in 1935, when she was fifteen, and went on to work at Becker’s for seventy-two years. Now eighty-nine and retired, she’s understandably wistful about the old days. Shelley turns to her for insights and gut checks, because decade after decade, Eleanor has watched the changes in brides, parents, dresses, and marriages.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, most brides had no jobs and no money of their own. Parents paid for wedding gowns. By the time Eleanor left the store in 2007, brides were doing almost all of the deciding, and often paying for dresses themselves. “These days, the brides tell their parents what they want instead of vice versa,” Eleanor says.
Wedding gowns are now far more risqué, of course. “Mothers used to say, ‘That’s too naked!’” Eleanor explains. “I used to have to set lace in places where there was bare skin. Now almost all the brides want bare skin. Some want to show the whole body.”
Becker’s brides used to be smaller than they are today. The average bride now is a bridal size 14 (which translates to a street size 8 to 10) and many have size 10 feet. Years ago, brides were less muscular. They didn’t exercise and lift weights. They didn’t eat the way Americans eat today. That’s why most brides today can’t wear the dresses their grandmothers bought at Becker’s.
Eleanor considers her early years in the store to be more fulfilling. When she sold a dress, she explains, “I’d feel as if I accomplished something. You sent a bride off into marriage, and it was for life. In the later years, you knew so many of the marriages weren’t going to be forever.” She’d sell a dress and wonder: Were they getting married with the idea that they could just get married again someday? About a third of Becker’s brides today are divorced, buying a dress for a second or third wedding.
Shelley shares Eleanor’s concerns, and yet the machinery of Becker’s Bridal constantly rumbles along; there’s no time to hit the Pause button. Like her grandmother and mother before her, Shelley oversees a military operation, always strategizing ways to get through each day as waves of new brides show up, while those who’ve already bought their gowns return for second fittings. There isn’t time to ask, “Do you love him?” or “Is loving him enough?” And truly, Shelley knows, it’s not really her place.
Our culture today focuses on individualism, on satisfying personal needs and finding mates to make us happy. More than their mothers and grandmothers, many women today expect romance to be the main fuel for their marriages. But researchers are now discovering that intensely romantic couples are actually more likely to engage in conflict and get divorced. In 2010, the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project released data showing that people who define marriage mostly as a “romance” seem more apt to put their own needs over the needs of the partnership. The bonds in their marriages can be exciting and fulfilling, but they’re more fragile, and 1.5 times more likely to end in divorce. Couples tend to do better if they focus more on the shared responsibilities of child-rearing, fiscal prudence, and being there for each other. Bottom line: Couples are more successful in marriage if they see themselves as helpmates rather than soul mates.
Researchers are also finding that the most successful couples don’t necessarily solve their problems—they outlast them. They call this “the marital endurance ethic.” In fact, a University of Chicago study found that 80 percent of couples who were “very unhappy” and agreed not to divorce described themselves as “happy” five years later. Of those who divorced, only half were happy five years up the road.
At Becker’s these days, many brides seem enthralled by the romance of marriage, but they can be clueless about the mechanics and annoyances of marriage. The result, it seems, is more relationships ending short of the altar.
Becker’s brides are told that wedding-dress sales are final, given the alterations required. That explains why there’s a room, beyond the view of buoyant brides, dubbed the Dress Cemetery. It’s a sad, crowded place where dresses are piled up after engagements are broken or brides-to-be are abandoned by grooms with cold feet. Sometimes, women return years later to reclaim their dresses, usually before marrying different bridegrooms. The rest of the dresses remain here for years, waiting for customers who never come back for them.
Lately, more wedding gowns than ever are ending up in Becker’s Dress Cemetery. As Shelley puts it: “The world feels more unsettled, money is tighter, weddings are being canceled, and some brides are just unsure of things.” Day after day, Shelley sees parents who don’t understand their daughters, who don’t have a sense of their yearnings, who can’t fully communicate with them. She sees daughters who don’t have a great deal of self-knowledge: They think they know the kind of wedding dress they want, but they don’t have a clear sense of the kind of life they want, or the kind of man who might best accompany them.
Indeed, inside this bridal shop in this tiny town, Shelley is able to speak to a global sense of uncertainty. Without the aid of research studies, she knows things. She knows what commitment means to all different kinds of people. She knows about promiscuity and s
erial monogamy, and how that leads into marriage today. She knows the joys and terrors that brides are feeling. And she sees how women are drawn these days to all of those TV bridal shows; they’ve led to an epidemic of interest in brides, their behavior, and their dresses—though not necessarily an interest in thoughtful musings about the concept of marriage.
Every day, Shelley sees examples of our changed culture, and she notices inconsistencies. “I’d like a white dress, and my mom says the sleeves need to cover my arms,” a first-time bride tells her. “I want to dress modestly. My family is religious, and I guess I am too.” The young woman and her boyfriend already have a toddler, who is zipping around the store while she shops. Shelley dutifully looks for the requested modest dress with long sleeves, making no judgment about the bride’s decision to put maternity before marriage. If a mother says a bride’s fiancé (and live-in lover) shouldn’t see her bare arms until after they’re married, well, she’ll accommodate that.
Some of Shelley’s customers say they’ve found inspiration in the movie Bull Durham, which celebrated the notion that a wedding dress needn’t reflect a woman’s past. A character in the film had slept with a baseball team’s starting lineup. “Do you think I deserve to wear white?” she asks the woman altering her bridal gown. “Honey,” comes the answer, “everybody deserves to wear white.”
At Becker’s today, 25 percent of first-time brides already have children. Another 7 or 8 percent are pregnant, looking for a wedding dress with room to expand. “When I started here at age fourteen,” Shelley says, “maybe one out of three hundred brides would be pregnant. And very few had children before getting married for the first time.”
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 3