The Beckers worked hard, six days a week, but there was one workday a year, Good Friday, when they took a three-hour break. Each Friday before Easter, as noon approached, Shelley’s mom would ask all the brides to get back into their street clothes because the store would be closed from noon to three p.m. Catholics consider those three hours to be holy; that was the time Jesus was on the cross before he died. Sharon made a grand embrace of Good Friday. She’d invite her whole extended family over to her house for salmon patties, and the youngest kids would get to decorate Easter eggs. It was a nice Becker’s tradition, a respite from the unrelenting bridal trade. But by 3:05, all the saleswomen needed to be back at work. And there was often a line of brides waiting to get into the store as Sharon unlocked the front door.
Shelley often found herself looking around the store at the cluttered boxes, the less-than-elegant, warehouse-like ambiance, and she thought that if she ever ran the place, she’d make changes. Shelley always had a visual eye, and though she never offered suggestions to her parents, her urges to renovate someday were catalogued in her head.
She worked at Becker’s every day after school from three thirty until it closed at eight p.m., and then all day Saturday, which meant in both junior high and high school, she had little time for her friends. While they were at the school dances on Friday nights, she was working at the store, waiting patiently for brides to step out of fitting rooms.
Again and again, Shelley saw how crucial it was to make sure every bride had the dress she selected, perfectly altered, in time for her ceremony. If Shelley screwed up somehow, brides might respond as if she had ruined their lives. Shelley figured out early that this was a serious business.
On September 30, 1981, when Shelley was a high school freshman, eight inches of rain fell in Fowler in a matter of hours, leaving Main Street completely flooded. The man who owned the gas station two blocks to the west drowned. At Becker’s, water gushed uncontrollably through the front door.
Clark and Sharon had rushed out to get sandbags, but they couldn’t hold back the water. “Grab all the sold dresses on the ground floor!” Sharon shouted to Shelley. “Get ’em upstairs. Go, go, go!”
The Beckers knew that the dresses already altered, or slated for weddings in the weeks ahead, had to be saved first. If they were ruined, the store would be dealing with mass bridal hysteria. It was the wedding-dress equivalent of “women and children first.”
Shelley sprang into action, checking tags and carrying sold dresses, two at a time, over her head to higher ground. As the dresses were piled in heaps on the second floor, Shelley helped sort them, then ran down for more. Meanwhile, because there were news reports that Fowler was flooding, the phone at the store kept ringing with frantic brides asking if their gowns were submerged. “We’re doing our best,” Shelley heard her mom say again and again. Shelley knew that nothing less than their best would be acceptable.
The weeks leading up to the flood had been extremely busy at Becker’s. More than 750 million people worldwide had watched Princess Diana’s wedding two months earlier, and it seemed as if every Becker’s bride was swooning over the princess’s hugely poufy, hand-embroidered gown of 10,000 pearls. The brides loved seeing that twenty-five-foot, ivory-taffeta train stuffed into that not-big-enough carriage, and as a result, they also wanted endless trains and extra-poufed sleeves for their dream dresses. It was exhausting pulling all those poufy, long-trained gowns up the stairs and out of harm’s way.
The store lost some inventory to the rising waters, but no bride waiting for her dress was disappointed. All the sold dresses were rescued. The Beckers brought in fans to dry the floors, and if any brides walked down the aisle smelling like flood water, their water-stained trains trailing behind them, no one came back and mentioned it.
Shelley’s young life carried her from sale to sale, bride to bride, and crisis to crisis. She did her homework on the run, when there was a lull at the store, or not at all. She never thought about going to college, never really considered getting out of Fowler, never dated much. During her senior year, she enrolled in a work-study co-op program at Fowler High so she could leave at noon each day and head down to Becker’s.
When she thought about her life, she saw her purpose as helping out at the store and helping her younger siblings. But then it seemed her time had come.
One night, when Shelley was seventeen, she got out of Becker’s early enough to attend a friend’s party. Her friend had plotted to also invite an older guy named Gary Mueller so they could fix him up with her. And so Shelley found herself talking with this tall, handsome twenty-year-old who’d gone to school with her brother. Shelley and Gary had never spoken before, and she found him courteous but shy. She had to draw him out, but he was kind of funny in a low-key way if you listened closely.
In the weeks that followed, Gary fell for her fast, and Shelley remained taken by his quiet charm and good looks. He was a bit of a party boy—he often had a drink in his hand—but that described many of the young men in the area. And for Shelley, there was something exciting about that, too. When she was with him, she felt like she was escaping the confines and responsibilities of the bridal store.
For his part, Gary, then working in construction maintenance, didn’t have the biggest of dreams. He was the youngest of six children, and the son of a General Motors line worker. His parents were older and had a Depression-era view of life, which left them very careful about spending and saving. Like many families in Fowler, they weren’t very tactile or effusive in expressing their love.
Taking their cues from their families, Gary and Shelley weren’t effusive about their feelings either. But once they started seriously dating, it seemed like an inevitable progression toward marriage. “I’ve found a guy,” Shelley thought. “This must be it.”
Gary had never been inside of Becker’s Bridal when he was a boy, but after he started dating Shelley, he saw how the store dominated the Beckers’ lives. He was impressed by the family’s commitment to the place, and by Shelley’s dedication to brides, her parents and her siblings. He sensed she’d make a good wife and mother.
One day in July 1984, Gary and Shelley were driving around Fowler and he pulled up onto the driveway of his parents’ house. He seemed nervous, more bashful than usual. He pulled out a box of candy, and a box with a ring in it. He didn’t really propose. “I want you to be my wife,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Yeah,” she said, “Sure.” They kissed, they hugged, and Shelley was excited. She had friends who were engaged. Now she was too. Gary was twenty-one. Shelley was eighteen.
She tried on dresses after hours at Becker’s, but didn’t search in earnest until she joined her mom that fall on a buying trip to Chicago. Sharon remembered how Grandma Eva had picked her bridesmaids and steered her into a dress for her wedding. And so she gave Shelley time and space to look around and make her own decision. “Let’s find something you’ll love,” she told Shelley.
At one point, a wholesaler showed Shelley a white satin dress that retailed for $3,000—quite a price at the time, and more expensive than any dress at Becker’s. (Today such a dress would cost $10,000.) It had a wedding-ring collar, Renaissance sleeves, and a Cathedral train, and it was loaded with more sparkling beads and hand-sewn sequins than Shelley had ever seen in the store back in Fowler. “I love it,” she said.
Shelley and Gary, just married, in 1985
“Then it’s yours,” Sharon told her.
They paid the wholesale price—$1,400—and took it with them.
During Shelley’s engagement, when she waited on brides at Becker’s, she had a new affinity for them. She couldn’t really describe it, except as “a secret feeling.” Excitement mixed with trepidation and uncertainty.
The wedding day, September 7, 1985, turned out to be one of the hottest, most humid September days ever in the Midwest. The University of Nebraska football team hosted Florida State that day, and the temperature on the field reached 133 degrees. In Chi
cago, thousands of people left their stifling homes for relief along Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, Shelley and Gary sweated through their ceremony at the Catholic church in Fowler, then held a reception for 450 guests seven miles east in St. John’s, in a parks-and-recreation building without air-conditioning. The temperature in the hall topped 100 degrees.
Shelley’s hair sat flat on her head, and the wedding cake actually melted. The frosting kept slipping off the cake, coming to rest in blobs on the table. Every ten minutes, one of Shelley’s aunts would pick up whatever clumps she could and plop them back on the cake, but she eventually saw it was useless and stopped. Meanwhile, two of Shelley’s bridesmaids went MIA, having left the reception—twice—to go home and take showers. Several guests warned that they felt ready to pass out.
Shelley had walked down the aisle with mixed emotions. The thoughts in her head were: “I don’t think I want to get married. I don’t want to leave my brothers and sisters. They still need me.” Her caregiver identity was hard to shake. She was especially focused on her kid sister, Jenny, then eleven years old. Shelley, who helped raise her from birth, felt guilty about moving out of the family home and leaving Jenny behind.
As for her feelings for Gary, well, she was young and he was young and there they were. He looked handsome and he was sweet to her, and he seemed to have fewer fears. Did she love him? In a way, of course. But she thinks back to the nineteen-year-old girl she was and knows she didn’t fully understand love. How could she?
The reception was fine. A lot of dancing and drinking, some speeches no one really remembers. At midnight, Shelley and Gary started saying their good-byes before heading north to Michigan’s Mackinac Island. The parks-and-rec building had hardly cooled down. Someone said the temperature outside was still ninety-nine degrees. The remaining guests were weary and wet from perspiration as Shelley kissed them and thanked them for coming. They seemed just miserable. All of them needed a shower.
When she approached her mother to say good-bye, Shelley heard something she couldn’t recall ever hearing before. “I love you,” her mother said, and hugged her.
Surely Sharon had said it to Shelley when she was a baby. Maybe she’d said it at other times when Shelley was growing up. But Shelley felt, in that moment, as if these were new words from her mother. Had Shelley been yearning to hear them? Hard to say. She would later analyze the moment and decide: “When you’ve never had something, you don’t necessarily long for it. Maybe you don’t know you need it.” Her parents weren’t expressive people. That didn’t mean they didn’t feel love.
Still, those words from her mom meant more to her than any other words exchanged that evening, including every “I love you” uttered by Gary.
“I love you,” her mother had said, and the words lifted Shelley up.
“I love you, too, Mom,” she responded, and hugged her mother tightly.
She left the hall with Gary, wearing her sweat-soaked wedding dress, and began her life as a married woman.
Chapter Eleven
Julie
Standing on the pedestal in the Magic Room, Julie Wieber has a clear realization: This may be the most bittersweet moment of her life.
When she first came to Becker’s in 1986, her mother and her future mother-in-law accompanied her. She was a twenty-one-year-old bride-to-be—bubbly, giggly, in love but naïve—chattering about her wedding plans and her hunky fiancé. She selected the very first dress she tried on. A few months later, she walked happily down the aisle with Jeff, an athletic and handsome young man she had known since childhood. They went on to have five children between 1987 and 1995—four daughters and a son.
Now, twenty-four years later and back at Becker’s, her walk into the Magic Room is far more sobering because her life has taken an unexpected and unwanted turn.
A nurse at a hospital in Lansing, Julie spent her adult life assuming that she’d one day return to Becker’s as a mother of the bride. Probably the mother of four brides. She never thought she’d be the bride standing on that pedestal again.
In certain ways, this 2010 Becker’s appointment is a replay of her visit in 1986. She again has chosen the first wedding dress that she tried on, although this time it’s ivory-colored and understated instead of white and full of flourishes. Her mother has again accompanied her, but this time, two of her daughters are here too.
As she stands here in her new dress, still beautiful at age forty-five, all the women in the Magic Room are crying—her mom, her daughters, the saleswomen. Shelley, leans against the east wall, also tearing up. (She and Julie are friends, as are their daughters.)
“I’d like to think that no one is crying unhappy tears,” Julie says, “that you’re all crying out of happiness because my life is coming back together.”
“Of course,” someone says, while everyone wipes their eyes.
At every step in this dress-buying process, Julie can’t help but think back to the day in 1986 when she first came to Becker’s. She closes her eyes for a second, remembering what it felt like to look at herself in the mirror as a twenty-one-year-old in a white wedding dress. She opens her eyes and here she is, middle-aged. That’s part of the magic in these Magic Room mirrors. “When I came to Becker’s the first time, I hadn’t yet had all these life experiences,” she later tells Shelley. “At age twenty-one, it was all about the dress. That’s what we focused on. The dress. The wedding.”
Back in 1986, she had decided to spend much of her savings—$900—to buy a fairly extravagant dress. She put $150 down, and planned to make payments of $100 a month. However, when she went to Becker’s to make the first payment, she was told she didn’t owe any more money. Her fiancé Jeff had already stopped by and paid off the dress. It was an early act of kindness by Jeff that would be followed by many more.
Julie was born in Fowler, and grew up hanging around Jeff, her brother’s friend. Jeff, whose family owned the local lumber company, was a practical joker, the life of every party. People would say he was the most charismatic, friendliest guy they’d ever met, and he was known for his cheerful willingness to fix things for neighbors and friends. Dozens of people have stories about how Jeff stopped by and helped them fix their garage doors, or taught them how to fish, or checked the salt in their water softeners. Starting when he was a teen, he had this urge to offer people hands-on help. Many in Fowler described him the same way: He was a boy, and then a man, with a big heart.
Jeff was built like a linebacker, tall and handsome with baby-blue eyes, and as he aged, he began to look like Christopher Reeve, or a more rugged version of David Hasselhoff. From their first real date, when Julie was eighteen and Jeff was twenty-one, she felt this huge attraction. There’s a photo from their wedding day, and Julie is gazing up at Jeff with a look that seems genuinely starry-eyed. For his part, Jeff liked to tell people that he loved Julie long before they ever dated—maybe all his life. At their wedding, a Bible verse was read: “Love never fails . . . love bears all things . . .”
Julie and Jeff on their wedding day
Julie was devoted to Jeff in an old-fashioned way, committed to reaching for their dreams as a team. Her romantic role models were always her paternal grandparents—who died at ages ninety-nine and ninety-three, and were married for sixty-eight years—and her parents, married for fifty-eight years. Her mother, especially, is Julie’s closest confidante. Since she was a girl, Julie says, her mother has been the wisest presence in her life.
Jeff worked as a tool-and-die maker for General Motors in Lansing. He and Julie worked opposite shifts—her nursing shift at the hospital usually ran from seven a.m. to five thirty p.m., and he’d work two p.m. to ten thirty p.m. at GM’s Cadillac plant—and so their moments together were precious. They focused their free time on their kids’ sports and activities. They played in a coed volleyball league together and escaped to their cottage on Houghton Lake, a couple hours north of Fowler.
Jeff liked wearing Hawaiian shirts, drinking beer, fishing, hunting, and entertaining th
ose who came his way with a full arsenal of comic moves. He did a dead-on imitation of Mike Brady, the dad from The Brady Bunch and was equally famous for his impersonation of a rabid dog. He liked taking Julie to a certain nightclub where the dance-floor lighting made white clothing glow in the dark. He’d nonchalantly pull his pants down a bit to show off his glowing white underwear while he danced. Across the dance floor, people couldn’t stop laughing, as a DJ kept instructing him over the loudspeaker: “You, with the pants down, pull ’em up!”
Jeff was proud of his ability to parcel out goofy nicknames to people, and he enjoyed watching little kids scratch their heads when he’d purposely mispronounce their names. At first, children would wonder why an adult would make such a mistake, and then they’d realize that Jeff’s mispronunciations were terms of endearment.
Most everything about Jeff appealed to Julie, and that was part of the reason their marriage succeeded. Researchers now say that happy marriages are often fueled by “irrational optimism” and “self-delusion”—in which at least one spouse idealizes his or her partner. If a wife finds a husband to be smarter, funnier, and more handsome than he actually is, her positive perceptions are good for the marriage, according to an ongoing study by University of Buffalo researchers.
Realists’ marriages can be more problematic, especially as years go by, and a partner’s charms can seem monotonous or overrated, while his faults feel magnified and unfixable. People who continue to idealize their spouses, even irrationally, have what the researchers describe as “a level of immunity to the corrosive effects of time.” Long marriages are more satisfying when at least one half of a couple resists removing the rose-colored glasses.
In Julie’s case, whenever she talked glowingly about Jeff, she’d insist that she wasn’t inflating his positive traits. And his daughters—Stefanie, Lauren, Camie, and Macy—agreed. They idolized him too. When Camie was in fourth grade, she won a local Father’s Day essay-writing contest, beating out four hundred other children. “Any girl would love to have my dad in her life,” Camie wrote. Among her reasons: “He worked two jobs so my mom could go to nursing school and get her degree.” And: “You just have to see the oak benches and cabinets he makes, all from his heart and just for us!” Thanks to Camie’s essay, Jeff was named “Father of the Year” and won a new suit and tickets for the family to attend a Lansing Lugnuts minor-league baseball game.
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 11