The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  And what about her wedding day? It was a stunning dress. Certainly, the bride’s guests would have said to her, “You look so beautiful. Where’d you get the dress?”

  Would the bride dodge the question or would she give an answer? “Becker’s Bridal. They have quite a selection.”

  Somewhere, deeply imbedded in the old mirror by the front desk, is an image of that kleptomaniac bride. She surely passed the mirror on her way out of the fitting room in her bulky winter coat as she headed off into the night.

  Perhaps the most challenging threat to bridal shops today is the competition from Internet bridal sites. “Some brides are taking three hours of our time, trying on dresses, and then they go online to save fifty dollars,” says Shelley. On an average Saturday, fifty-five brides visit the store. “Usually ten or fifteen of them are using us, and then going on the Internet,” says Shelley. “They lead us to believe they’re true shoppers. But we see warning signs.” Becker’s saleswomen notice the glances brides will give their mothers, or the shared whispers when they think a saleswoman is out of earshot.

  Some stores cut the names of designers out of the dresses so brides can’t look them up online. Becker’s has so many gowns that it would be too much work to remove every tag. They used to tell brides they couldn’t take photos of a dress until they put down a deposit, but they gave up on that rule several years ago.

  “Every bride has a camera on her body now,” Shelley says. When brides are in fitting rooms, she often hears the clicking of cell-phone cameras. Brides photograph the tags, the inside of the dress—everything—so they can go home and figure out how to buy it less expensively.

  Shelley has instructed her saleswomen not to confront these nonbuy-ers. “Smile through it,” she advises them. “If we don’t, they’ll go online and say we’re rude.” These days, brides unhappy with the service they receive will often go on Facebook or Wedding Wire.com to post one- and zero-star reviews. “We can’t risk it,” Shelley says.

  After brides buy their dresses online and find they don’t fit right, they’ll sometimes bring them to Becker’s, begging for help with alterations. “We have to say no,” Shelley says. “It’s hard enough keeping up with the alterations for customers who’ve bought from us.” They try to send them away with a smile, so they’re not attacked on Wedding Wire for being unhelpful. The wedding industry in America has supposedly grown into a $40-billion-a-year business, but it gets harder and harder for Becker’s to hold on to its slice of the sales.

  Despite these challenges on the floor of the store, a part of Shelley enjoys watching the spectacle of the dress hunt. She’s still touched when brides swoon over a dress, and she’ll still choke up when a mother and daughter get teary and hug. “We’re in the emotion business,” she reminds her saleswomen at monthly staff meetings.

  They’re in the mother-daughter business, too, of course.

  Shelley has spent her life watching how moms and daughters interact and express affection. She has heard the advice, good and bad, that mothers share with daughters, admonitions such as: “Never date a man who is prettier than you are, and never date a man who smells better than you do.” (The lesson in that? Never listen to everything said by a mother who speaks in absolutes.) “Marry a man who loves you just a little bit more than you love him.” (The problem with that: Love isn’t a liquid that can be quantified in a measuring cup.) “The best gift you can give your children is to love your spouse.” (Shelley saw truth in this, yes, but in her own life, knew this was a gift not easily delivered.)

  In the back office one day, sitting with Alyssa, she speaks frankly: “I see mothers and daughters hugging and kissing and it makes me think I don’t do that enough. I know I’m not expressive enough. I’m not cuddly.”

  “I don’t need it,” Alyssa tells her. “Really I don’t.”

  “Well, I know you’re seeing this all the time out on the floor, and I don’t want you to think . . .” Shelley’s voice trails off.

  “It’s OK. We’re just not a huggy family,” Alyssa says.

  “That’s the way it’s always been, I guess,” says Shelley.

  In their years running the store, Shelley’s parents, Clark and Sharon, were too busy just trying to make a living. They didn’t have the time to make sure they were doling out public displays of affection to their kids. It didn’t occur to them that Shelley was observing parents and daughters being affectionate in the store, and that maybe she’d be contemplating her own life.

  And society was different then, too. Unlike today, parents didn’t have a heightened sense of the need to say “I love you,” or to share hugs. The media wasn’t pounding out reminders that parents need to behave in loving, supportive ways.

  And so Shelley and Alyssa are throwbacks in a way. Each day, they watch gushy mother-daughter bonding adventures unfold at the store. But by nature and upbringing, they’re more reserved.

  And Shelley understands and appreciates the family focus on business, instilled by Grandma Eva. She salutes her grandparents and parents for their efforts to keep this store going. She knows their story. Nothing was easy. And if there were trade-offs on the home front, well, that’s what it took to keep Becker’s Bridal in business.

  Shelley recognizes how the history of Becker’s hasn’t just shaped the business she runs today: It also has shaped her as a daughter and as a mother.

  After Grandma Eva installed Shelley’s father, Clark, in the menswear business at the back of the store in 1959, he tried hard to make a go of it. But between 1963 and 1975, he and Sharon had eight kids, who kept arriving at eighteen-month intervals. Even though Sharon was working for Eva, it was tough to support all those children on the meager paychecks they were collecting at Becker’s.

  Eva had been promising Clark, starting in the early 1960s, that she’d hand the business over to him and Sharon “within a couple years.” The wait turned out to be sixteen years. Eva just couldn’t let go.

  In 1975, when Eva was seventy-five years old and her husband, Frank, was eighty-two, Clark finally went to them with an ultimatum. “If I can’t buy the place,” he told his parents, “I’m going to have to move on and find a different job, something that pays more. I’ve waited and waited. I think I’ve waited long enough.”

  Clark’s father was ready to sell. He’d had enough. But for Eva, the bridal shop was everything. Her reluctance to hand it over turned to bitterness. She complained that she was being pushed out of the business she had spent her life building. “They’re kicking me out of the store,” she told people.

  But Frank knew it was time—past time—and urged Eva to accept it. He and Clark came up with what seemed like an appropriate price for the business—the figure was less than $100,000—and agreed that Clark could pay it off in installments. They shook hands and Eva, though unhappy, went along with the plan.

  Within days, however, the agreement faced a new hurdle. When Clark’s older brother learned of the deal, he thought the store had been undervalued. The less Eva and Frank received, the less they’d be able to leave as their inheritance. As often happens with family businesses, the friction that followed forever damaged relationships.

  Eva and Frank reneged on their agreement with Clark and Sharon, telling them they’d have to pay more money. Clark felt betrayed, but accepted the new terms.

  Within months, both Frank and Eva would be dead. In April 1975, Eva had a stroke and never recovered. In August, Frank choked to death on a piece of lettuce. And so it was left to Clark and Sharon to run Becker’s without Eva’s input—or interference. Some say Eva’s spirit began inhabiting Becker’s on the very day she died. But Clark and Sharon weren’t spooked by that possibility. They accepted it. As Sharon explained to her kids, “Everyone is around us after they’re gone. Grandma Eva is too.” And Clark made sure to tell his children that despite the bad blood over the sale, he had great respect for his mother. “I’m proud of her,” he’d say. “Her dedication and hard work made this business, and it’s up to us
to carry on from here.”

  Eva’s passing was liberating for Clark and Sharon, but sad and frightening, too. They finally felt the freedom to re-create the store on their own terms, and for a new era, but they were on their own. They moved fast, increasing the inventory from about two hundred wedding dresses in 1975 to three thousand by 1982, the year the store also began accepting credit cards. And they worked incredibly hard—days, nights, weekends. They had to put in those hours, they said, to support all those kids. They kept the store open five nights a week until eight p.m., and their children pitched in too.

  “You have a lot of kids, you ask them to help,” says Sharon. “It’s like the farmers, putting their kids on the tractor at an early age.”

  Sharon looks back today and has her own regrets about lost time with her children, and about school activities she missed. “Why didn’t I take a day off?” she asks. “Why did I have to be down at the store six days a week?” Her life felt constantly hectic. Her responsibilities to get the brides’ dresses altered in time for their weddings could feel overwhelming.

  The children noticed, of course. “Do you have to come home every night and talk about the store?” they’d ask. But that’s just the way it was. It was a family business, and the emphasis was on the business.

  In the 1950s, department stores had about 85 percent of the wedding-gown business nationwide, but Becker’s had stayed afloat through word of mouth in small Michigan towns. In the 1960s, thousands of mom-and-pop bridal shops began opening up as strip malls were built in every suburb in America. These boutiques flourished, but because Becker’s had established itself so long ago, its customers remained loyal. The next big challenge would come in the 1990s, when the David’s Bridal chain began growing, selling synthetic gowns starting at $99. As a result of this and other pressures, the number of bridal shops in the United States fell from a peak of 8,000 in 1990 to less than 5,000. Becker’s held on.

  Starting when Eva ran the store, some people in town assumed the Beckers were Fowler’s version of the Rockefellers. There was a certain amount of jealousy and resentment. People didn’t fully understand the pressures of a family business. They just saw all the brides roaming around town, buying expensive dresses, and they made assumptions that the Beckers had it made.

  A lot of people in Fowler worked the assembly line at General Motors. Their lunch pail was pretty much their only investment in their jobs. They put in their eight hours, and when they got home, they were free. “I envied them,” says Sharon. “We got home and we were still eating, drinking, and sleeping the business. We were putting ninety percent of what we earned back into the store. We were worried if there was enough money to pay the help and the bills.”

  For his part, Clark never liked the bridal business, never felt any great affection for brides, never felt much of a thrill selling dresses. “I should have left right out of high school and looked for other work,” he says bluntly. “The store was a livelihood. That’s all I got out of it.” His passion became the miniature model train set he meticulously built, day by day, and which eventually took up most of the basement of his house. Using tweezers and razor blades, he built ninety-eight different structures, all at 1/87th scale. He used bridal netting for the windows, and the roofs were made from the cardboard divider sheets that came with each wedding dress. That model train set was his escape.

  He placed a damsel in distress—a bride waving a veil—on one of the train tracks. “Maybe someone tied her here,” he’d tell visitors. “Or maybe she’s committing suicide.” Somehow, he got a kick out of that possibility. And when a ceiling tile in the basement fell and destroyed his 1/87th model of the Becker’s Bridal building, that somehow seemed apropos. He chose to never rebuild it. “If I had it to do again,” he says, “I’d have built the biggest hobby shop in the country, not a huge bridal shop.”

  In his working years, Clark usually came home from Becker’s at about eight thirty at night. Sharon often arrived later, since she’d stick around until the last bride was helped.

  Shelley saw the strains the business put on her parents’ marriage. They didn’t have enough free time with each other. They were sometimes at odds about decisions that needed to be made at the store. And they handled the pressures of their jobs in different ways. Sharon always tried to keep her composure when dealing with customers. Clark could get to the point where he’d had enough.

  Once Shelley watched as a bride and her mother screamed at Clark because the dress didn’t fit right. The bride had obviously gained weight since the dress was altered, but she was blaming the Becker’s seamstresses. Clark took the abuse for a while, then snapped back: “If God can’t please everybody, I sure can’t!” The bride glared at him and Clark walked off.

  Even though the family didn’t spend enough time together, and even though she longed for her parents’ affection, Shelley knew she was loved by her parents. She knew this in the way she knew that Grandma Eva must have loved Clark. Through the generations, this was not a demonstrative family, especially by today’s standards, but love was assumed. Clark sometimes came home from work bearing candy bars or popsicles for the kids. He didn’t say “I love you”—he hadn’t heard those words much in his own childhood, either—but at times he found his own ways to show it.

  Because her parents were consumed with their responsibilities at the store, Shelley, as the eldest daughter, was called upon to be the at-home babysitter to her siblings. That became the role by which she defined herself. She doesn’t remember thinking much about her own needs. The sharpest thought in her mind was this: “As long as my siblings are happy, as long as my parents are selling a lot of dresses at the store and making a living, then everything is OK.”

  When Shelley looks back and tries to understand the girl she was and the teenager she became, she wonders why she never allowed herself to dream. Hiding behind those bridal gowns, watching life at Becker’s, it never occurred to her to ask her mom if she might be allowed to try on a wedding dress some evening after the store closed.

  “I didn’t think happiness was for me,” she says. “Maybe it was because I felt I didn’t deserve it. But more than that, I just didn’t allow myself to go there.”

  Shelley spent a great deal of time babysitting her five younger siblings. Her mother recognizes it now. “Shelley missed her childhood,” Sharon says.

  Or more precisely, she didn’t have time—nor did she make time—to consider her own future. She gave no thought to whether she’d one day be the star of her own wedding, walking down the aisle as a Becker’s bride. It occurred to her that she’d someday be a mother; her motherly instincts, and her babysitting experience, made that a more obvious thought. But a bride? She didn’t consider that. “I think when you’re so busy as a kid, and your mind is developing, you lose that dream time,” she says. As a girl, she didn’t have a lot of carefree hours to sit around playing with dolls, fantasizing about their lives and hers. She was a serious kid with serious responsibilities. Her parents were at work ten or twelve hours a day, and they needed her to help look after life at home.

  People tell Shelley they’re saddened to hear that she had something of a lost childhood, but she doesn’t have many regrets. “It’s OK, I understand,” she says. “I accept that I was the caretaker, that my siblings needed me. That’s how my head was geared. And I loved them, of course. So I wanted to look after them.”

  When Shelley was ten, her youngest sister, Jenny, was born. Later, Jenny’s crib was sometimes kept in Shelley’s bedroom so Shelley could keep an eye on her.

  Shelley took this charge very seriously. “Come on, Jenny,” she’d say. “Come sleep with me.”

  She did this not just because she had an urge to bond with her baby sister. The truth was, Shelley wanted to make sure Jenny was breathing all night long. She didn’t want anything to happen to this precious little girl, especially on her watch. As long as she could feel her sister breathing beside her, things were OK. It was a mix of love, duty, uncertainty,
and terror that led her to take Jenny out of her crib.

  There’s a photographic record of Shelley as a caregiver. In Becker family photo albums, she’s always holding on to Jenny. In countless photos, she’s a ten-year-old holding a baby or a twelve-year-old holding a two-year-old or a thirteen-year-old holding a three-year-old. “Shelley, you were just obsessed with me!” says Jenny, who is now thirty-five.

  “In a way I was,” Shelley tells her.

  Shelley thinks her caregiver personality is a benefit now that she runs Becker’s. She has a maternal urge to look after her employees and, just as important, to look after the needs of brides. It’s almost as if she wants to protect them all from what may lie ahead.

  Not long ago, she was treated for thyroid issues that are likely related to the stress in her life. “You are the oak tree, I can see that in you,” her doctor told her.

  “What do you mean by that?” Shelley asked.

  “Well, an oak tree can be rotting from the inside and still be strong on the outside,” the doctor said. “You’d never know by looking at the tree the damage that is inside it. You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

  Shelley took to heart the doctor’s words, but there were sixteen weddings that weekend, and much to do. She had no time to contemplate the oak tree she had become.

  Megan, age two, in 1990

  Chapter Eight

  Megan

  Megan Pardo has the bearings of a kindergarten teacher. She speaks with a smile and a pleasant lilt in her voice, but there’s an authority there, too. You can tell she has a gift for explaining things patiently and carefully, that she pays close attention to how younger ears need to absorb what older people say.