by Jessi Klein
For instance: How did events align such that when I needed to get away from Mike, my two girlfriends happened to be on Martha’s Vineyard in Rose Styron’s guesthouse with an extra room available for me? How did these two awesome women happen to be on vacation at the very moment I needed them to get drunk with me till the wee hours and let me cry about how I was now, at thirty-seven, going to be single and starting over again? How was it that when I needed to write the most important letter of my life, telling him how profoundly disappointed I was and that I needed to move on, I was sitting in the same house where William Styron wrote Sophie’s Choice?5 What I’m really asking is, Why did it take all these things for me to be sitting here now, typing these words with a diamond ring on my left hand?
Because, as Mike later wrote to me, he was terrified. Because he was scared of repeating his parents’ decimating divorce. Because he was sublimating lifelong fears of failing the way his father had.
But who knows the real answer? I don’t.
I just know that what I learned is that this is often the way men and women decide to get engaged.
1 They’re in the middle of a five-day stay in the guesthouse of Rose Styron, William Styron’s widow, the result of Jenny winning a charity auction for the Paris Review.
2 His apartment was awesome.
3 Flashback to me finding lube bottle in ex’s apartment.
4 In case you’re not familiar, Spa Belles is a chain of manicure places in New York City. They are usually pretty clean-ish. The dirtiest I ever saw one was after someone did a number two in the restroom and the toilet clogged, and I guess that someone was embarrassed and just ran off. (I was the someone.)
5 To be clear: I am not comparing the letter I wrote to the novel Sophie’s Choice. I’m just saying I was able to channel some Streep energy being in that room.
The Wedding Dress
A few days ago, Mike and I were eating key lime pie and watching Say Yes to the Dress. A bride-to-be was standing on a pedestal in an overly sequined dress, griping about a lack of “bling” and demanding to see another gown. We both chuckled about how silly she looked and how dumb it is to freak out over this trivial bullshit. But suddenly I remembered, mid-pie-bite, as some twenty-one-year-old from Atlanta was agreeing to be “jacked up” (this is SYTTD speak for allowing yourself to be accessorized—veil, jewelry, etc.—in order to prove to your skeptical mom that your dress makes you look like a classy bride and not a cheap common slutty slut), that just a few months ago I was one of these ladies.
Actually, that’s not even true. I was, in fact, much worse.
The sad truth is: Over the spring and summer of 2013, I tried on over a hundred wedding dresses.
Immediately after we got engaged, friends and family started asking me what I was thinking about vis-à-vis a wedding dress. I gave everyone the same answer: “Oh, I’m not going to wear a wedding dress.” And then, as I watched their eyes widen and their minds explode, I would feel this incredibly warm wave of self-satisfaction wash over me. It’s very similar to the feeling I get when I tell people that while I understand that he may appeal to others, I do not personally find Brad Pitt attractive. No thanks, not for me!
We all enjoy the little moments when we can quietly announce to the world how special and unique we are; but the thing is, I genuinely didn’t want to wear a wedding dress. I’ve simply never related to them. The poofiness, the taffeta-ness, the overall Cinderella-ness—none of it ever interested me. I’ve attended many weddings where I’ve watched a friend, someone I thought I knew well, walk down the aisle in an ensemble that rendered her essence somehow unrecognizable, like seeing your beloved pet Chihuahua in a neon Speedo. It’s as if these dresses are designed to erase your individuality, leveling you into a universal symbol of femaleness, like that faceless woman wearing a triangle dress on the door of every ladies’ restroom in America.
I didn’t want to do that. My plan (as I elaborated to anyone who asked) was simply to spend “a little more than I normally would” on a festive but gorgeous but non-bridal dress. Maybe a Catherine Malandrino. A Zac Posen. I’d identified a few designers I liked, but the common factor in all of my dress fantasies was how incredibly easy it would be for me, a humble feminist with almost no material needs, to accomplish this simple task.
What I wasn’t expecting was the number of people who came out of the woodwork and actually volunteered to take me wedding dress shopping. A casual acquaintance, a woman I occasionally work with, lit up when I told her I was engaged. “Oooh,” she said. “Are you going to go to Kleinfeld? If you are, could I go with you? I’ve always wanted to go.” She lives in Chicago, but was willing to fly to New York to fulfill this lifelong dream.
Closer friends wanted to take me shopping as well. One friend, whom I had accompanied to a boutique to buy her wedding dress two years earlier, was quite eager to return the favor. “I’ll make the appointment!” she offered. I didn’t know you had to make an appointment to go dress shopping. I thought you could just waltz in and jack yourself up.
But since she was willing to deal with it, I agreed. No biggie, I thought to myself. I’d have this shopping-for-a-wedding-dress experience and then file it away along with other things I’d tried just so I could say I had done them, like the time I had sex with someone who owned a motorcycle (he told me only afterward that he had borrowed it from a friend aghhhhhh…). Then I’d go spend a few hundred bucks on something at Bloomingdale’s.
In the spirit of going full-tilt on the girliness of this excursion, I rounded up an extra friend and the three of us met at Cafe Cluny for a pre-shop champagne toast. I chugged it, got slightly more buzzed than I’d planned, and we crossed the street and entered Lovely.
Lovely is a quaint bridal boutique in the West Village, located on two floors of an old brownstone. Everyone on the sales staff is adorable and has impeccable yet approachable style. They all look like your big sister’s best friend from Marin County. It is a place that has a reputation for attracting a more “low-key” (mid-thirties yuppie lady) bride and offering a more “curated” (less stuff) selection of dresses than big bridal warehouses like Kleinfeld. It’s chockablock with the kinds of twee touches that make it catnip for girls: gilded antique mirrors, shabby chic chandeliers, and glass doorknobs. Little silver trays are filled with sparkling accessories: bracelets, rhinestone hairpins, and even—sadly—a tiara. A TIARA. But I’m not immune to catnip. I walked in and wanted a taste. I wanted to belong.
However, moments after we arrived, things started to go south. While we waited for the saleswoman who’d be helping us, I thought I’d get started and check out what was on the racks. No sooner had I taken a step away from the waiting area than one of the impeccable yet approachable women reprimanded me that I should not look at any dresses until I was accompanied by my attendant. “You can, like, look at the jewelry and hairpins that are where you’re sitting,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she was friendly, but not fucking around. This would be the deal at pretty much every bridal shop I visited. For some reason that I never figured out, they do not like you to look at the stuff you will be looking at. Dresses are brought out from back rooms with somber reverence, like the Torah being revealed from the ark. Also, every appointment is exactly an hour, and then Cinderella time is over and it’s time to get back to your stupid pumpkin life.
My saleswoman was “Maya,” a pretty redhead with Amy Winehouse eyeliner. She was nice enough, but it was already four in the afternoon and she also seemed vaguely over it. Which made me insecure. Which was probably why she was over it. Who wants to deal with a bunch of insecure and needy girls all day? Maya followed me around the forbidden racks as I touched dress after dress, each of them covered in plastic, and tried to imagine myself as a bride. But for someone who normally wears jeans and an old sweater I’m trying to pretend I didn’t buy at J.Crew in 2005, it was a tough road.
And it only got worse from there. I have a tremendous amount of inherent body shame but Maya made i
t clear, as she stepped behind the dressing room curtain with me, that she would not be granting me any privacy. As I fumbled around in front of this stranger in my raggy old Gap underwear and ill-fitting high heels, I waved good-bye to my dignity.
And I hadn’t been familiar with the system for trying on the dresses, with the samples being either three sizes too big or (horror of horrors) four sizes too small. The ones that were too small I’d try to shimmy past my hips, then realize I had to give up. Under Maya’s dead-eyed gaze I’d feel the pressure to make a self-deprecating joke, which would somehow make her eyes even deader.
The dresses that were too large, Maya would fasten to me with four or five construction-grade metal clips, so that I kind of looked like the old Victorian paper dolls I used to fasten paper dresses on top of until I got bored and waited for video games to be invented.
When we were able to get a dress vaguely on me, or even adjacent to me, I would shuffle out toward my friends and present myself on a little pedestal. From there we would engage in a verbal tennis match, wherein they would tell me I looked like the most beautiful angel ever to alight upon this earth, and I would tell them that I looked like a fat piece of shit, and they would tell me I was being insane, and then I would tell them they had to admit that my boobs were falling out of this dress that was clearly meant for a waifish mouse, and they would begrudgingly tell me that maybe perhaps the dress wasn’t as gorgeous and special as I am, and then we’d settle there and I’d shuffle back into my dress cave.
Toward the end of my hour with Maya, who I could tell was really starting to fantasize about getting drunk at home by herself, I picked up one last dress that, once on, felt different. It was a strapless art deco column with sequins all over, and a blouson top.1 I shuffled toward my friends and looked in the mirror. It was a beautiful dress—a wedding dress, yes, but with a boho-rock-star edge, a dress I could picture Kate Moss doing coke in before passing out on a huge messy bed at the Ritz. I took a moment to consider whether I wanted to look like a coked-up Kate Moss at my wedding, and realized the answer was yes. My friends told me I looked like the prettiest bride in the history of female creation. I thought my ass looked like a beanbag chair.
But now I’d seen myself in a wedding dress, and for the first time, saw a sliver of my potential to look like something besides myself for a day. Not even a day, I reasoned. Really, just a few hours. Maybe I could wear a wedding dress. Shouldn’t I try to be feminine for just a few hours out of my entire fucking life?
And so the search began. I started looking online at wedding blogs, making lists. It was March. My wedding was in November. This seemed like a ton of time, although as Maya had warned me, before she went home to get stoned in the bathtub, for a November wedding I’d really want to order a dress by May. June at the latest. This seemed like an excessive amount of time for what I wanted, especially considering that I was going to get a very modest dress, nothing fancy, nothing expensive, most likely off the rack, basically rags.
In April, I had to go to LA for work, so I took the opportunity to meet with my friend Jenny (another person who was excited to take me wedding dress shopping) and go to Barneys. I tried on every iteration of white, champagne, and ivory party dress and I managed to look like a plump flamingo in all of them. I started to see a pattern, which is that my large boobs and hips, in combination with my stick arms and legs, made a lot of things that fit in one place not fit in another. Dresses that I thought looked good on me in the mirror would reveal themselves to be horribly unflattering when seen in the cold hard light of the photos Jenny was taking on her iPhone.
When Jenny had to leave for work, I Ubered my way over to the LA outpost of Lovely to see if they had “curated” any stock that wasn’t in the New York store. This time the saleschick was a little bit sweeter, and, body shame a distant memory, we had a relatively pleasant time clipping me into a series of dresses that, like last time, all made me look like a large raccoon that had tipped over a garbage can searching for food, found a wedding dress instead, and then decided to take a nap in it.
Before leaving, I decided to take one final spin around to see if there was anything I’d missed, and in the corner rack I noticed a strapless dress with a multi-tiered bottom. It looked odd on the rack, falling in a weird shape from the hanger. It was the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of dresses. But once it was on, I felt something, a lightness. It had a bohemian whimsy. It looked like a cross between the costume of a bawdy nineteenth-century saloon owner and something Frida Kahlo would have worn to paint herself bleeding to death. I looked like a bride who didn’t take being a bride too seriously, not like one of those women on the cover of Brides magazine who looks like her facial expression is being held in place with toothpicks.
The saleschick jacked me up with a sparkly sash, and looking in the mirror, I felt good. I looked like me, but more female-er. I immediately sent photos to four or five friends to get their blessings so I could end this ridiculous process.
One friend texted “pretty,” but then there was a pause, and then those three little iPhone dots that mean someone is writing you back appeared again, and this continued for a while before the message was finally SENT and she said, “I’ve never really liked ruffles?…”
All the texts I got back were decidedly tepid. No one else LOVED it.
A seed of doubt was planted, but I still felt pretty confident I’d found my dress. Maybe I’d just go to a few places to see if I could find something better. But in a week or two, if I couldn’t, I’d just buy it. After all, who gives a shit? I made an appointment at Saks in New York.
Saks New York’s bridal salon had glass doors separating the bridal parlor from the rest of the upscale shopper riffraff. My saleswoman, Barbara, was an older lady from New Jersey who told me she’d been at this for twenty-five years. She was a familiar type to me, maternal ambiguous Jew-Italian, and she seemed kind. I trusted her. Ten minutes into the appointment she came back into my dressing room dragging behind her several large plastic garment bags, which looked as heavy as if they contained corpses, but were filled instead with glittering sheaths.
They were all beautiful, but there was one small problem. Just a month earlier, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby had premiered and every fashion magazine was filled with Gatsby-inspired dresses, all of which looked like these, and I felt like some Zelda Fitzgerald–wannabe asshole.
The one nice thing was how encouraging Barbara was about my body. “You don’t have anything to worry about, you’re like a model, you’ll look good in anything,” she said. But midway through my hour, I started telling her about the tiered dress from Lovely and how I was looking for something with that same whimsical vibe. “Show me,” she said. I showed her the photo on my phone and she scowled. “No,” she said, her voice dripping with disgust. “It’s like a maternity dress. You look pregnant.”
My heart sank. Even Barbara had turned on me.
This was the first moment I started to realize that some larger problem was boiling to the surface, that this wasn’t just about the dress, but rather a deep cauldron of self-doubt in my own taste—and not just my own taste, but my entire self. It was one thing to be a sartorial mess in my everyday life, but it felt like quite another to show up at my own wedding in something that everyone would silently think was an embarrassment. I’d spent my whole life walking around with a certain relief that when I entered a room I wasn’t one of those girls everyone stared at. But in this case, as the bride, by definition I was the one everyone was supposed to gawk at. This was terrifying. To fail at finding a wedding dress felt like failing at femininity. What if I COULDN’T pull it together for a few measly hours? What would that say about me as a woman? And how disappointing would it be for Mike, who looks impeccable every day?
A quick word on Mike—about two months into my dress search, he decided it was time to find a suit. I went with him on a Saturday afternoon to Prada. I was prepared to comfort him, to tell him not to be discouraged when nothing fit. Within t
wenty minutes, he found a suit that looked perfect on him the moment he tried it on. He bought it, and we went home.
Total wedding suit search time: an hour and forty-five minutes. I wanted to murder him. I wanted to murder everyone.
I was becoming unglued. Finding a dress became a job, with whole days spent running from one place to another, heels and a strapless bra always in my bag, like I was a hybrid of superhero and stripper. I made an appointment at Nicole Miller, where I found a dress that I loved except for the fact that my boobs were spilling out of the cups. Me and the salesgirl, who was busy planning her own wedding, had an increasingly contentious conversation about whether the dress could be altered for my body. She insisted it could work, and stuck about thirty pins into the top to create a simulation of how the dress, once tailored, could offer more coverage, but the effect was like trying to cover a wombat with a cocktail napkin.
I also struck out at a newly opened “bohemian” studio where the owner sat in front of her MacBook Air twisting flowers into headwreaths while I tried on vintage hippie dresses inside a tinsel-strewn yurt. I’d held out big hopes for this place, but everything I tried on made me look like someone half-assing a Stevie Nicks Halloween costume, and at the end of my appointment my friend Kate and I fled to go get drunk.