to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts. Once she had tried on her mother’s veil in the bathroom, a Juliet cap pocked with pearls, its long tail of net beige and tattered. She had locked the door, and placed the little dome on her head, then stood back to survey the effect. But she could not grasp the magic. Perhaps it required the entire outfit. She could not grasp it in the salon either, although she got glimpses of what she was searching for every now and then, in the racks of white dresses, misty as ghosts, hanging along one wall in plastic bags, or in the scratchy sound of one of them being carried across the floor in a saleswoman’s arms. Monica had already gotten her dress, and they were there for the bridesmaids—Maggie, two friends of Monica’s from Sacred Heart, and the groom’s sister, who was unfortunately, as Aunt Cass had confided after Mass on Sunday, “quite large.” Neither the fat sister nor Maggie wanted to take off their clothes in front of the others.
Monica sat slouched in a chair in a pale-blue blouse and skirt, her hair in a ponytail, acquiescing to her mother’s wishes. If the bridal salon was not quite what Maggie had expected, Monica was not acting a bit like her idea of a bride. She seemed bored and anxious to get on with it.
“What about pink?” Aunt Cass said, and Monica replied, “Fine” in a tone that suggested the answer to What about yellow? Or green? Or blue? would have been “fine” too. The saleswoman brought out pinks of all shades and styles, and finally it was decided that the dresses would be high-waisted, like Monica’s, and made from some fabric Maggie had never heard of before called silk shantung. There were little pillbox hats with veils, and the dresses were rather plain, so that the bridesmaids looked very sophisticated, except for the fat sister, who looked enormous.
“Now for the little one,” said the saleswoman, a tiny woman dressed all in black, perhaps to better point up the colors of her wares. She spoke with a faint accent and had a bodice dotted with safety pins and needles trailing white and pastel wisps of thread. Maggie realized that the saleswoman was referring to her, and she followed the woman into the dressing room. But she saw at once that the dress there was different, puffed sleeves instead of cap, a big bow at the high waist in the back, even a different hat, like the straw sailors she had always had for Easter, except that it was pink, with a pink ribbon and a gauzy brim.
“Off with the clothes,” the saleswoman said brightly, and Maggie turned her back, crimson. She was wearing her slip, the closest thing she had to a bra. She had stuffed the nylon skirt into her shorts, so that she had had lumpy legs all morning. The saleslady clicked her tongue. “You will need foundation garments with this,” she said, unzipping the dress. “For the hose. And to give the line to it.” But the dress, when it was on, had no line. It fell straight down Maggie’s angular body. A carpenter’s dream, she thought. Her hair hung in big hanks where her breasts should be.
“It needs something,” said Aunt Cass, who had slipped in between the dressing-room curtains.
The saleswoman shrugged. “She is a little girl,” she said, although Maggie was taller than she was. “It is not the same here”—she grabbed a handful of the bodice—“or here,” lifting the skirt and dropping it with another shrug.
“What if we put her hair up?”
“Not with the hat. The hair, besides, is very fashionable today, for the young girls. But it has no style. Perhaps a little lipstick, some rouge.” A picture flashed through Maggie’s mind of herself on Halloween, when her mother wedged her on the vanity bench in the bathroom and expertly, seriously, her tongue snagged between her lips in concentration, made Maggie’s face up. She was good at it, and Maggie always thought she looked wonderful, her lips fuller, deep red, her cheeks flushed with the powdered rouge, her lashes spiky with the mascara, coaxed from its red plastic case with a little brush and some drops of water. But she did not look the way the older girls did, their lips