At the end of the night, Ron asked one of Meredith’s friends for her number. Though he waited two weeks to call her, once he did they were locked into each other.
Ron told her about his own journey into her life. “I once had a good woman at the wrong time,” he explained, “then I had the wrong woman at the right time, and now I think I’ve found the perfect woman for all time.”
Meredith ran a police check on Ron, and thank goodness, found only parking tickets. A year after they met, he asked her to marry him and she accepted.
“It’s better to be an older bride,” Meredith now says. “I know who I am, I know what I want in a man, and I know enough to set that aside and accept that what I need in a man is the better thing to have.”
For Meredith’s mom, it’s a great relief, and a great joy, to be here at Becker’s. They’ve come, along with Meredith’s sister-in-law, to look through the offerings at a Maggie Sottero trunk show. Shelley’s staffers try their best to figure out the right dress for her, but what they don’t know is this: Meredith has already found a gown, days earlier, at another store and is almost ready to buy it. She has come to Becker’s just to make sure. In her head, she justifies letting the saleswomen here spend a couple hours helping her. She isn’t 100 percent sure of that other dress. As she puts it: “My heart’s open. Maybe it’s like dating a few more guys before realizing you’re with the right one.”
There’s one dress she looks sensational in, and that’s the one she decides to wear into the Magic Room. It’s strapless and low-cut, with a sexy corset. “I look so fricking hot in this dress,” Meredith says to her sister-in-law. “It’s like movie-star glamorous. Look at my boobs hanging out!”
She studies herself in the mirrors that carry her off into infinity. “It’s like a whole bunch of me’s looking fabulous!” She smiles in the mirror for a few more beats, while her sister-in-law takes photos. A part of her would love to wear this dress. Then Meredith says, “You know, it’s awfully va-vava-voom. I don’t want Ron passing out right there in the church.” She makes a decision: “I just don’t feel like a bride in it. I feel like a movie star walking the red carpet in Hollywood.”
She heads to the lower level, by the fitting rooms, and tries on more dresses without success. Finally, she shrugs and says, “I guess that’s all for tonight.”
She walks past the old mirror, over to the front counter, and one of Shelley’s saleswomen writes down her measurements, contact info, and wedding date. Meredith thanks her for her time, takes one last glance at the sexy dress, and as she’s leaving, her mother tells her, “That may have been everything we didn’t want in a wedding dress—strapless, with all that lace and those horizontal stripes—but I’ve got to tell you, you sure looked gorgeous in it. Just gorgeous.”
Sometimes mothers know just the right thing to say.
Meredith in the Magic Room with her too-sexy dress
Chapter Five
Grandma Eva
Shelley likes that Becker’s Bridal is located in an old bank. The century-old structure is solid, like a good marriage should be. That’s meaningful to her. She likes that the word “BANK” is prominently carved in large block letters in the gray stone at the top of the building. That’s a reminder to Shelley that she comes here to make money to support her family, that this business is the family’s bank. There’s also the recognition, both mystical and meaningful, that the bank’s vault once held people’s most precious material possessions in safe deposit boxes. Now parents are bringing something even more precious into the Magic Room—their daughters.
As a child, Shelley saw the word “BANK” at the top of the building, but she never asked Grandma Eva for an explanation. And so Shelley doesn’t really know how Eva felt about her store occupying this space. Was it a reminder to Eva of the Depression-era losses the town suffered there? Did she like the powerful and stately shadow it cast as the most prominent structure on Main Street?
There are still a handful of Fowler residents, now in their nineties, who remember the day in 1932 when People’s Bank went under. Banks were failing everywhere, and adjusters came to Fowler to calculate how many pennies on the dollar depositors would receive. They went into the vault, on the second floor, and seized what little cash was left there. Some people got nothing. The man who for decades owned the restaurant next door to Becker’s Bridal was one of them. He lost his entire fortune at the bank. “I was twelve years old at the time it went under,” he likes to tell people. “I’d been a hardworking paperboy, and I had twelve dollars and fifty cents at that bank. Never saw a penny of it.”
Though he has played his loss for laughs over the years, he and other old-timers also speak of how the bank failure devastated Fowler. Many in town lost their savings, farms, and businesses. One Fowler farmer was so distraught at having lost $5,000 that he went into his barn, threw a rope over one of the beams, and hanged himself.
A dry cleaner occupied the former bank for a short run, and then Eva moved her shop from across the street into the empty building. At first, she used the bank vault for storage. It was an odd space—a heavily fortified room surrounded by concrete walls, supported by two-foot-thick concrete slabs in the basement. Wedding dresses didn’t seem to belong in a room designed to protect stacks of money. It wouldn’t be until after Eva died that Shelley dreamed of turning the vault into the Magic Room.
Now that the store is hers, Shelley is more curious about the history of this building, and about Eva’s role as family matriarch. She’d like to better understand exactly how this business remained in her family’s hands, in this location, for seventy-six years. She thinks about how every generation of Beckers made sacrifices on the home front—missing moments in their children’s lives—to keep this store running. Eva’s work ethic was passed down to her children and grandchildren, but there was a price they all paid. Sure, there were plenty of fulfilling moments over the years, and they made a comfortable living, but the Beckers didn’t get those 100,000 brides into their dresses without enduring their own scars and disappointments.
A lot of today’s Becker family dynamics can be traced back to Grandma Eva. In 1922, at age twenty-two, she married Frank Becker, the oldest of nine siblings, and joined a family with a long history in the retail business. Like most people in town, the Beckers were faithful German-Catholics, and their church was central to a serious, God-fearing life. There were expectations in Fowler: You prayed, worked hard, and had a lot of children—and you made sure that they worked hard and prayed too.
Frank and Eva on their wedding day in 1922
Eva’s in-laws had operated a general store on Main Street since 1899, selling feed and seed to farmers, and fabric and dry goods to others in town. As would be the rule for generations in the family, everyone was expected to pitch in, and so Eva and her husband Frank worked at the store, eventually taking it over.
It was in 1934 that Eva dipped her toe into the bridal-gown business. She had driven six hours to Chicago to pick up goods for the store, and decided to bring back a wedding dress from a wholesaler. Her first customer was a local girl named Helen Miller, and the dress was a high-necked, pure white satin number with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. Eva also sold Helen a pleated, halo-bonnet headpiece, with a floor-length veil.
The highlight of Helen’s wedding reception, held in a local barn, was an impromptu performance by best man Clem Sohn, a twenty-four-year-old neighbor who had become famous in the early 1930s as an air-show daredevil known as “The Batwing Jumper.” By studying bats, Clem had figured out a way to glide through the air in a wing-suit he fashioned himself using zephyr cloth attached to steel tubes. He traveled the world jumping out of airplanes and gliding like a bat until he was a thousand feet off the ground, at which point he’d open a parachute. He liked to tell the media: “I feel as safe as you would in your grandmother’s kitchen.”
At Helen’s wedding, Clem jumped off the top of the barn in his bat suit while wedding guests cheered him on from below. (About three ye
ars later, a horrified air-show crowd of 110,000 in Vincennes, France, watched him desperately pull the ripcord of his emergency parachute. It never opened. Film footage of his death spiral, which was his 175th jump, is now on the Internet.) The oldest people in Fowler remember that it was Clem’s Batman getup, not Helen’s wedding dress, that was fawned over at her wedding.
Likewise, Eva’s arrival in the bridal business was hardly noticed. The general store was better known for its pickles. But Eva continued to make out-of-town trips, bringing back dresses, and over time word spread to neighboring towns that she was the go-to woman for bridal gowns. Eventually, that became the focus of the family business.
Early on, Eva realized that gowns will always be changing, and so she’d better be aware of trends. When she started selling wedding dresses, they were still being fastened with a complicated line of hook-and-eye closures. But on shopping trips out of town, she began seeing more dresses with zippers, and she embraced the concept, bringing these modern dresses back to Fowler. Her brides were impressed by the glide of the zipper, and pleased with how easily they could get into and out of the dresses.
It was the heart of the Depression, and many in Fowler struggled financially. Their most indulgent form of recreation was to drive to Lansing and spend the night at a movie theater, where the characters on screen lived the high life. No men in Fowler casually walked around in tuxedos the way Cary Grant did in the 1937 film Topper. But weddings became the one opportunity that regular folks had to pretend that they, too, were dapper. And so they rented tuxedos, and the most daring bought wedding dresses from Eva that mirrored the slinky satin gowns worn by actresses such as Jean Harlow.
In the 1930s, wedding dresses were still expected to be multifunctional, rather than one-time-only fashion statements. A lot of women would wear their gowns at their weddings, and then months later, dye or hem them for other important occasions, or even as maternity wear. Eva would brainstorm with brides about how they could get another few uses out of a dress. That was part of the sales pitch.
Unlike today, when it’s bad form or even bad luck to ask a bride to borrow her wedding dress, back then sharing was common. Eva lost business when one dress got passed around among friends, but it was a part of the business model she had to accept.
During World War II, when patriotism led people to cut back on ostentation, Becker’s brides skipped long trains, sequins, and other embellishments. Then the war ended, and there was an unrelenting demand for ready-to-wear dresses to accommodate all the “rush weddings” between returning soldiers and their no-longer-patient sweethearts. Eva kept a steady parade of soldiers’ brides marching through the store.
In the years that followed, with rationing over, shoulder pads got larger and so did wedding budgets. By the early 1950s, after Elizabeth Taylor’s Father of the Bride arrived in Michigan theaters, brides started asking Eva for antebellum skirts and gowns that were as tight as possible in the waist.
Brides also came into Becker’s chattering about Grace Kelly’s 1956 wedding to Monaco’s Prince Rainier. Thirty-five seamstresses and designers at MGM’s wardrobe department in Hollywood had created her wedding gown, using one hundred yards of silk net and twenty-five yards of silk taffeta. The veil featured lace lovebirds and several thousand seed pearls. It was all good for Becker’s. If Grace’s father, Philadelphia millionaire Jack Kelly, could give his daughter away so gorgeously garbed, fathers in Fowler had to pay at least a few dollars more to make sure their daughters got a dress that was a step above ordinary.
It was in those years that the concept of daughters being entitled to fairy-tale ceremonies started to flourish. Dresses were less likely to be viewed as multipurpose garments, or something to be shared with anyone else. Weddings became less about two families gathered together and more about the bride. The bride became the star of her own fashion show, with her friends and loved ones as the audience.
Eva was happy that weddings were becoming commercialized pageants. She was selling more dresses and customers were spending more money. And she liked it when the weddings of the rich and famous captured people’s imaginations.
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson’s nineteen-year-old daughter Luci got married wearing a staid gown that covered her entire body. She took her vows before ten equally unexposed pink-gowned bridesmaids, fifty-five million television viewers and seven hundred guests, including her sister Lynda’s handsome young boyfriend, the actor George Hamilton.
The pomp-infused spectacle was good for business at Becker’s, but Eva was also noticing signs of change. A LIFE magazine cover story called Luci Johnson’s wedding a respite for the nation during “a summer of violence, frustration, and despair” over Vietnam and racial protests. Though central Michigan would hold on to its conservative values longer than other parts of the country, Eva suspected the shifting culture would reach her store. In 1967, forty-three people died during riots in Detroit. Hippies had begun advocating “free love,” and feminists were suggesting that brides walk themselves down the aisle, rather than letting their fathers give them away like pieces of property. It was inevitable that some of Eva’s potential customers would soon be forgoing her most ostentatious gowns, opting instead for simple peasant dresses bought elsewhere.
All she could do was remain tenacious with the customers who did come to her, reminding parents of the values their daughters would find in conventional weddings. She continued feeding her customers to the Catholic church a few blocks away, which kept uniting brides and grooms in traditional ceremonies centered on God.
Eva worked hard. And as always, Becker’s survived.
When Shelley compares her grandmother’s tenure to her own, she sees similarities, sure, but also societal sea changes. In Eva’s day, most professional men didn’t want professional women as wives, and in any case, few such women existed. Men married their secretaries, who then stayed home to care for the kids.
That was the American way, and women clung to the clichéd hope that a prince on a white horse would whisk them away from their ordinary lives. Shelley sees that a longing for this possibility still lingers today. Some of her middle-class brides were excited by the 2011 British royal wedding because they saw themselves in commoner Kate Middleton. Unlike in Europe, where young people rarely marry outside their class, marriage always has been one of the clearest paths to a higher status in the United States. “Marrying up” is made possible in part by our culture’s fixation on attractiveness: men don’t necessarily select trophy wives based on their pedigree or portfolios.
But as Shelley sees in her store, it is getting harder for someone from a lower economic class to find and marry someone from a higher class. “Assortative mating”—the human urge to pair up with someone who is similar to you—is on the rise in America, sociologists say. Those with college degrees are marrying people with college degrees at higher rates than ever. In Grandma Eva’s time, male doctors married their nurses and receptionists. Now they’re marrying their fellow doctors.
When Eva ran Becker’s, almost all the brides were younger than their fiancés, and shorter, too. But in recent decades, the percentage of US brides who are older (and taller) than their husbands has risen steadily.
For Becker’s brides today who are well educated with high-paying jobs, their self-sufficiency gives them power. They won’t have to stay in a dead marriage. (That’s one reason why 65 percent of US divorces today are initiated by wives.) But for brides at lower socioeconomic levels who marry their economic equals, things are more precarious and stressful. Unlike wealthy couples, it’s harder for them to afford good child care, to hire housekeepers, to take parental leave, or to find jobs that let them telecommute. This all makes for more to worry and fight about, and given their dual roles at home and at work, women are especially burdened.
In Eva’s day, most everyone headed to the altar; a lowly economic status rarely stopped couples. They’d find a way. But today, college grads are 16 percent more likely to get married than those
with no degrees. As the previously mentioned 2010 Pew study summarized: “A marriage gap and a socioeconomic gap have been growing side by side for the past half-century, and each may be feeding off the other.”
Some of these trends were first noticed by Grandma Eva as distant drumbeats. Now they affect how Shelley runs the business and interacts with brides, mothers, and grandmothers—all with different expectations based on where they fall on the timeline.
When brides buzz about Prince William marrying a commoner, on some level they’re also contemplating their own lives. Even in seemingly frivolous conversations about a royal wedding, Shelley can trace the arc of the female experience, from Grandma Eva’s time until today.
There aren’t many people left in town who were alive during Becker’s early days, and Shelley is drawn to those with firsthand recollections of Eva. When older women come into the store with their dress-buying granddaughters and mention buying their own wedding dresses from an aging Eva, Shelley lights up. People say her grandmother was a tough businesswoman. There was nothing touchy-feely about her. It reminds Shelley of how different the sales process is today. Unlike Shelley, selling wedding gowns in the modern age, Eva didn’t spend much time complimenting brides on how beautiful they looked or sweet-talking their mothers. Eva’s focus was on selling dresses, not catering to a bride’s emotional state.
She didn’t have much sympathy for broken engagements. “Our policy is very clear,” she’d tell a mother-of-the-bride. “No refunds.”
“But this was so unexpected. My daughter is so distraught. What can we do with a wedding dress when there isn’t going to be a wedding?”
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 5