THE RED CHECKERED DRESS

     The red checkered dress was overpriced for most people in 1947. It fit perfectly on the mannequin in the front window of Waterslav’s on 179^th and Broadway. The price tag was $77 and most every female eye that passed couldn’t help but look its way.

     Molly had just been hired at the First National as a teller one month before the dress had made an appearance. A co-worker had told her about it and, after Molly’s first glimpse, she would purposefully walk two blocks out of her way home to have a look at it. Every day she would take a stroll by Waterslav’s to make sure this one-of-a-kind article of clothing hadn’t been snatched up by some wealthy socialite. She found herself bringing her lunch to the bench across the street from the dress and eating there most every day.

     "It wasn’t just the dress," she thought. "That’s not the only reason to eat lunch here. There’s a park and all these people. Good people-watching spot."

     But she was lying to herself, of course. The dress was worth eating lunch with in her mind.

     She had been saving a few dollars every week as an emergency fund on the insistence of her husband, Jack, ever since she’d gotten the First National job. And within three months of working there, she treated herself to that red checkered dress.

     Jack berated her almost immediately for buying it. He used just about every excuse that he’d used before when he was trying to make a point about money. Slow economy, bills, their newest child. But none of these things stuck in here opinion. The dress was worth the sacrifice that they had to make in other areas.

     Whenever there was a formal function, it was on her. Out to dinner with Jack and friends? It was on her. Vacations in Florida? It was on her. Her red checkered second skin was when she felt the most attractive and alive. Even Jack later regretted ever telling her to take it back. She looked so stunning in it.

     The 50s came and went, as did many other dresses. The red checkered was dry cleaned, mothballed and stuck in a closet.

     Jack died suddenly of a heart attack in ’74 and, as Molly went through his things, picking out what to give to the Salvation Army, she came across the red checkered dress hanging in the very back of the closet. She couldn’t believe it had been so long since she’d worn it and was even more taken aback that she used to be able to fit into it.

     She threw it on the pile with all of Jack’s shirts and suits and ties right as her daughter Esther passes the doorway with an armload of Jack’s old Cad magazines. She recognized the dress from numerous photos from the photo album that always sat on her parent’s old driftwood coffee table in the living room. Her mother always looked so gorgeous in those pictures. So young she was back then. So very elegant.

     They argued for a few minutes about what to do with it until Esther convinced Molly that it needed to stay in the family. With that, it became Esther’s.

     She never wore it nearly as much as she had planned. She surely never loved it as much as Molly had. IT still made appearances from time to time. Bar-be-ques, retro costume parties, kitchy get-togethers with her in-laws. For the most part, it stayed in the closet and never truly got as much mileage as it had years before.

     Molly outlived Jack by another 20 years or so, eventually living out her final years in a nursing home. During the last eight months of her life, she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. Esther would show up every Sunday with grandkids, but Molly seemed to recognize them less and less each time. Her mind wandered constantly, every Sunday conversation being a series of "catch-ups." Esther soon stopped bringing her children along.

     Only two things were consistent topics of conversation when it came to Molly in the end; Jack and the red checkered dress. Both subject made her beam from cheek to cheek. And whenever she could actually recognize Esther as her daughter, she would ask if she could bring the red checkered dress for next time, just so Molly could look at it one last time. For a reason only known to Esther, she would divert the conversation and try to make her mother forget about it, since it wasn’t very hard to do.

     Two days before she passed away, Molly was shuttled to a hair appointment along with other tenants of the nursing home. This was a way for them to get out into the real world again and make them feel good about themselves at the same time, if only for a short time.

     As Molly began to step back into the shuttle, fresh from Buela’s Beauty Spot, she found herself breathlessly staring across the street at a teenage girl coming out of the Salvation Army Thrift Store. About 19, the girl had a spiky head of hair dyed every color of the rainbow. She wore purple cowboy boots, accented with a red checkered dress.

     Something about it looked familiar, but Molly couldn’t quite place it. Not now. Maybe it would come back to her later.




-SLL