She spent most of her twenties in bed, sleeping up to twenty hours a day. She’d get up to eat and use the bathroom, and then she’d go back to sleep. It was hard for her parents to watch as the disease damaged her heart valves and her immune system.
To pay Courtney’s insurance premiums of $660 a month, her mother got a job in the men’s department at JCPenney. She started off earning $6.75 an hour. Given her mother’s selflessness, Courtney found herself fighting off constant feelings of guilt. She’d be incredibly tired and sick, curled up on her parents’ couch, and in her grogginess, she’d see her mother heading off to work on winter mornings. Ask Courtney to define the word “love,” and she talks about her mother, helping men find ties and pants at JCPenney so she can make insurance payments.
When Courtney’s health improved, and she roused herself from the couch to take on a few part-time jobs, she felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle. She returned to Owosso High School to coach the baton, dance, and pom-pom squads, and quickly saw troubling changes in the way many young women carried themselves—and in the secrets they kept from their parents.
She became a big-sister figure to a lot of the girls, and was taken aback by the ways in which sexuality is more blatant than when she was in school. “When I left high school twelve years ago, we were wearing baggy clothes and flannel shirts,” she says. “Now girls are wearing stilettos to band camp. I feel for them. They want to be desirable and pretty, but they’re confusing that with dressing like little trollops. It’s alarming.”
The school was filled with girls in short skirts and low-cut tops. A male teacher confided to Courtney that he’s uncomfortable teaching his provocatively dressed female students. Some literally open their legs and expose their underwear to him while he’s teaching. “He’s afraid to look at them,” Courtney says.
Courtney saw how girls, inundated with confusing messages all their lives, felt pressured to look “hot” at younger and younger ages. When those inappropriately dressed students were preteens, for instance, they were targets of advertising come-ons such as the one for Nair Pretty, a hair-removal product aimed at girls ages ten to fifteen. The mixed-message tagline: “I am a citizen of the world. I am a dreamer. I am fresh. I am so not going to have stubs sticking out of my legs.”
Such messages can seem innocuous, but Courtney saw how it speeds up adolescence, and adds a toxic degree of pressure to girls’ lives. Girls who fear that their worth depends on their ability to look sexy are often the ones who develop eating disorders or turn to cutting themselves—or do dangerous things sexually.
One girl Courtney coached allegedly got drunk at a party and had sex with five boys, one after the other. Courtney tried to convince her to go to Planned Parenthood for an exam, but the girl refused. “That’s gross,” she said. “I’m too young for that.” Her mother learned of the rumors, but chose to accept the girl’s denials. The promiscuity continued.
Courtney would encourage girls to confide in their parents. Some would. Others saw no upside in that; they said their mothers and fathers would be too judgmental, especially about sexual issues. Such comments mirror a 2009 study by researchers at Ohio State University. They found that while teenage girls share more with their parents about their dating lives than teenage boys do, when it comes to talking to Mom and Dad about sex, girls and boys are equally close-mouthed.
Spending time with girls who were confused and uncertain about themselves, Courtney naturally thought of her own teen years. She considered herself lucky that, most of the time, she felt comfortable turning to her mother to discuss sensitive issues—sexuality, drugs, whatever—even if she and her mom began by approaching topics indirectly. “We’d do it sideways,” recalls her mother, Susan. “We’d talk about someone else who had made a bad choice or gotten into a tough situation. That made it easier for us to speak frankly about how we thought about our own decisions.”
Courtney’s mother also would talk to her preemptively. For instance, women in their family, going back a couple generations, struggled with serious premenstrual syndrome and the depression and crankiness that accompanies it. In her own life, Courtney has mostly avoided the worst side effects. “But I wanted her to realize there’s a pattern to it,” Susan says, “in case she found herself dealing with it too.”
Over the years, Susan had watched as Courtney’s health problems affected her romantic relationships. There wasn’t much she could do to help, except to be supportive and a good listener. She tried to boost Courtney’s self-esteem when she could, but she also thought it important to be realistic.
In her early twenties, Courtney had a serious boyfriend and thought she’d marry him. When her grandfather was on his deathbed, she brought this boyfriend to meet him, thinking it was important for the old man and the young man to make a connection. Her grandfather died a few hours later.
But rather than cementing their bonds, that deathbed encounter made the relationship too serious for Courtney’s boyfriend. He broke up with her the next day. “He grew up on a farm, where his mother did everything for the family,” Courtney says. “And there I was, sleeping a lot and having my good days and bad days. I wasn’t the physical martyr his mother had been.”
Looking back, Courtney says, she should have seen the breakup coming. Her mom certainly sensed the young man was backing away, and she offered Courtney a few light warnings. But Courtney ignored the signals. “When he left me, I was taken off guard,” she says.
Her mom recalls how devastated Courtney was by the breakup, how she curled up on the couch, dead-tired as always and as sad as she’d ever been. “It looks like I’m going to be on this couch until I’m ninety years old!” Courtney said.
“I was heartbroken,” Susan says. “I wanted to make it all go away.” But she gave Courtney her honest take—that a lot of men can’t cope with dating or marrying someone who is ill. “Honey, you’re smart, you’re dynamic, you’re intuitive, you’re pretty. You’re the kindest, coolest person I know. But you’re also sick, and your health may hold you back. It may take you longer to find the right person.”
“I wasn’t sure it would all work out for her,” Susan now says, “and I was sad and worried about that. But I also knew her challenges were making her stronger. I had hope.”
Courtney ended up being very grateful that her illness scared some men away. That allowed her to eventually find John Schlaud, a Marine drill instructor who fell in love with all that was wonderful about her, and vowed to stand by her no matter how precarious her health might be.
John has a son and daughter from a previous marriage, and as Courtney’s relationship with him blossomed, she talked to her mom about her feelings every step of the way. Was she up to the task of being a stepmother? Would it be fair to John if they married, given her health issues? What if her illness precluded her from having children of her own?
Mothers don’t have all the answers, but sometimes they have maternal powers of observation, and they can sum things up in ways that comfort their daughters. “I see how much you love him, and how much he loves you,” Courtney’s mom told her. “You’ll get through whatever lies ahead, and you’ll get through it together.”
During Courtney’s visit to Becker’s, Shelley and the saleswomen saw how lovingly and easily she interacted with her mother. But Courtney didn’t tell them that she had a secret: Yes, she was planning a formal wedding. Yes, she wanted a beautiful dress. But she and John had already gotten married months before in South Carolina, where John was stationed.
The reason? She felt too guilty that her mom was working every day to pay for her insurance. “It’s like a sin on my heart,” she once told John, who then explained to her that if she became a military spouse, she could immediately be covered by his health plan. Getting married quickly became a no-brainer. Her parents agreed.
Still, that piece of paper wouldn’t take away from the emotions Courtney knew she would feel when she eventually walked down the aisle with her mom and dad. “I spent a lot of years fee
ling so ill, sleeping on their couch day after day, while my mom showed her love by heading off to work,” Courtney says. “After all that, my parents deserve to see me as a bride—and they definitely deserve an empty nest.” Her parents had been there for her “in sickness and in health.” Now she felt blessed to have fallen in love with a man who was willing to do the same.
Doctors told Courtney and John that they shouldn’t consider having a baby together anytime soon—perhaps ever—because her body might not be able to withstand a pregnancy. Courtney is sad about that, but accepting. And she feels lucky that she is building meaningful bonds with John’s two kids, especially six-year-old Samantha. Courtney has vowed to be a sounding board and a resource for her stepdaughter, helping her find her way to womanhood. (Already, Samantha has talked of wanting large breasts when she grows up, which left Courtney a bit speechless.)
When she is with Samantha in Owosso, Courtney likes to help her maintain her innocence, taking her to the parks where she herself played as a girl. Samantha rides her bike through the neighborhood where Courtney grew up, and Courtney has been shooting photos of her. “It’s a subconscious passing along of the little things that marked my happiest childhood moments, of the things I did with my own mother,” she says.
She thinks of what life might be like for Samantha when she enters high school. Will the culture be even more sexually charged and confusing for young girls then? Will she avoid the teen hazards—eating disorders, binge drinking, inappropriate celebrity role models, toxic friendships—and come out the other end with her self-esteem intact?
At Becker’s, Courtney explained that after the wedding, she and John would be taking a “familymoon” to Orlando, Florida, with his two kids. They couldn’t afford to go to Disney World, but they planned to visit Sea World, which is free to active military and their families. Growing up in Michigan, the kids had never seen the ocean, so they vowed to also drive east until they hit the Atlantic. It all sounded so wholesome.
When Courtney eventually found the right dress and took it into the Magic Room, she thought, “Wow, this is such a soft room.” It wasn’t just the lighting. It was the way the room made everyone want to whisper. It was the way she and her mother looked at each other in those mirrors.
Her mother, so used to seeing Courtney lying prone on the couch, was understandably emotional as Courtney stood upright on the Magic Room pedestal.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see this day,” her mother said.
Outside the store, for a great many daughters and their mothers, the world was spinning with uncertainty—about their identities, their sexuality, and how they should interact with each other. But in here, for a secretly married woman and her proud mother, the mood was nothing short of joyous.
Courtney with her husband, John, and stepchildren Jacob and Samantha
Chapter Ten
A Becker’s Bride
Shelley first began working at Becker’s in 1979, when she was fourteen years old. Her sister Bev, who was three years younger, took over the role as at-home babysitter, so Shelley could help out at the store.
Shelley didn’t exactly ask herself, “Is this where I’ll spend my life?” It was more a case of her assuming, “There isn’t anything else. This will be my life.” She’d had no real exposure to much beyond Fowler and the store. She can’t remember if her parents ever said to her, “Someday, Shelley, you’ll run the store.” Maybe they said it. Or maybe they didn’t need to. They knew and she knew.
Her parents didn’t pay her a salary right away. For the first six months, they had her taking new gowns out of boxes and bagging dresses for pickups. But soon enough, they began paying her five dollars an hour, and she was on the floor, selling dresses.
She was understandably tentative at first, trying to act knowledgeable. But even though she was barely a teenager, she found the words inside herself, and began asking grown women, “So what kind of dress have you dreamed about all your life?”
Shelley, trying on a wedding veil at age fourteen, when she began working at Becker’s
The brides and their mothers would look at Shelley and smile. Who was this kid? But they’d tell her about their dream dresses, and they’d let her make suggestions.
“How do you think this looks?” a bride would ask.
“It’s not exactly right for you,” Shelley would say. “Come on over to this rack.” And they figured this kid must know something, so they followed her.
The business was both frightening and exciting for Shelley. She saw the pressures her mother was under. She saw how brides could be terribly difficult. But she also observed a lot of lovely interactions between mothers and daughters. She came to appreciate the blind, familial love described best in the Moroccan proverb: “In the eyes of its mother, every beetle is a gazelle.”
Shelley came to appreciate the camaraderie of the older saleswomen, including Eleanor, hired by Grandma Eva in 1935. Over the decades, these women had learned to calibrate the degree of patience each bride required. They’d found techniques to humor brides who believed they knew best, but didn’t.
Many brides came in clutching a photo from a bridal magazine, insisting that this was the dress they were destined to wear. More often than not, a dress that looked so perfect on a thin model in a magazine wasn’t close to the dress that looked best on them.
When Shelley was sixteen years old, in 1981, the soap opera General Hospital staged the TV wedding of the millennium, sending characters Luke and Laura down the aisle before thirty million viewers. Because Laura wore a champagne-pink gown, a hint of pink became the go-to color for countless Becker’s brides. That was fine. But a lot of the brides also wanted to wear gargantuan, forehead-covering, doodad-dripping headpieces that echoed Laura’s. Not all women look good in monstrous headpieces. Those with small faces and features get lost with them. Those with fat faces look fatter. At sixteen, Shelley learned how to tell brides, “No, that’s not really you.”
“But it’s so perfect . . .”
“No, I’m sorry. It isn’t. Not for you.”
Shelley also learned to accept the futility inherent in waiting on certain customers. Because Becker’s had such a large selection, brides would often drive from distant towns, fall in love with a dress, then leave without buying it.
“What happened?” Shelley would ask after such customers left.
“They’re probably going to have their hometown store just order it,” an older saleswoman would explain, “so they don’t have to drive a hundred miles back here for second fittings.” For Becker’s saleswomen, the process could be demoralizing.
Shelley’s mom, Sharon, was always worried about cash flow and making payroll. She sometimes took it hard when a bride departed empty-handed. “It was as if we failed,” a saleswoman recalls.
Still, the store dealt in volume and racked up sales. Saturdays were usually crazy free-for-alls. Two or three brides would share each dressing room. Given how crowded it was, less-inhibited brides would disrobe right on the sales floor, out in the open.
It wasn’t uncommon for a bride to come in without underwear on, so no lines would show. “Will you zip me up?” she’d ask. And that meant a saleswoman had to reach down her bare buttocks and start zipping. Some brides wore too much perfume. Others smelled of body odor. Saleswomen always made sure to wash their hands before lunch.
There were all sorts of techniques Shelley learned from the veterans on the sales floor. It was important to read the relationship between a bride and her mother. If there’s tension, what’s the root of it? Often, a bride would give her saleswoman a “help me” look, and it was easy to tell that she needed the freedom to think for herself, without her mom’s sledgehammer bossiness. A saleswoman could help by directing questions almost exclusively to the bride. If a mother wasn’t totally dense, she’d get the message.
On the other hand, a bride being disrespectful to her mother was harder to control. Even if a saleswoman could jolly the bride into being more courte
ous, there was no way to correct a lifetime of poor motherdaughter dynamics. In those cases, the goal was to make the sale and get the unappreciative bride and her beleaguered mother on their way.
Shelley saw that the older saleswomen had a sense of humor but remained as dignified as possible. As Sharon hired in local teens and twenty-somethings—including three girls who would go on to marry Shelley’s brothers—the vibe in the store changed. The store might have been a hallowed institution, but the younger saleswomen were determined to entertain themselves there, and they found goofy ways to do so.
The place had mirrors everywhere, of course, and so the young saleswomen couldn’t avoid looking at themselves all day long. Unless they had high self-esteem, they were always noticing their flaws, their acne, their less than movie-star-like profiles. The tools of their trade—tape measures and mirrors—led the young salesgirls to self-consciously assess one another. On a slow day, when no bride was nearby, they’d measure the length of one another’s noses, fingers, or ears and compare stats.
When Shelley’s mom was gone from the store for more than a few hours, the young salesgirls would sometimes try on dresses for one another and parade around. The jingle of the front door, signaling an arriving bride, would lead them scurrying to hide in a dressing room. Then they’d return, composed: “Can I help you?”
Once, a bride’s mother did a double-take, asking the saleswoman: “Is there a reason you’re wearing a veil?”
The saleswoman hadn’t realized it was still on, but recovered well. “Hey, I’m single and I work in a bridal shop. I can’t resist.”
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 10