"Two Dresses" by Jennifer Kates

Jennifer Wachtel Kates was born and raised in middle Tennessee. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Rhodes College, her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, and her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. She has taught both General Education and Creative Writing classes in MTSU’s English Department since 1997. Kates serves as the current Executive Director of the Southern Literary Festival, for which she also serves as faculty sponsor for MTSU’s best undergraduate writers each spring. Kates is a member of the Rutherford County Arts Alliance and a passionate advocate for literary arts in her community. She lives in a 102-year-old home in downtown Murfreesboro with her three sons and a naughty beagle named Molly.

Two Dresses

Ruby Mae Brandon, aged 14, stood in front of the long mirror on her mother’s chiffarobe, smoothing the celery green plaid dress she had ironed the night before. She had also spent more than an hour painstakingly setting her fine reddish brown hair in pincurls, which were now arranged into a sort of frizzy pompadour. Ruby examined her long, thin shape, turning from one side to the other. 

“Ruby Mae! Come on now!” yelled her brother James. Ruby slipped on a pair of white ankle socks and her older sister’s hand-me-down brown oxfords, longing for the day she could wear pumps. She snatched up her canvas schoolbag and ran down the porch steps to join her siblings.

September 1 of 1944 was still summer in Camden. Ruby willed herself not to sweat on the long walk to the new high school, but she could do nothing about the dust kicked up on her shoes. When they arrived at the tall front door, Arch and James ran on ahead to meet their buddies and Ruby walked in alone, trying to look like a smart, aloof movie star. She could feel the sweat edging along her temples, threatening the pincurls, just as she saw a sign directing freshmen to the assembly hall. As she made her way through the crowded corridors, she noticed what the other girls had on, their ribbon hairbands and little purses. The older girls wore lipstick. 

In the assembly hall Ruby found Gracie and Mary Jane, two girls she knew from junior high. She did not particularly like them, but their familiarity calmed her insides as she took her seat next to them. 

“Hi Ruby. I love your hair!” said Gracie, in her little baby voice.

“Oooh, yes. Did your mother do the pincurls?” asked Mary Jane. “My mother won’t do them for me.” Mary Jane still wore her brown hair in two long braids. Ruby just looked at them and smiled before lying.

“It’s a permanent wave,” she said slowly, watching their eyes grow larger in admiration. Ruby tried to smile like Marlene Dietrich on the cover of a magazine she had seen at the dime store, confident and glamorous. She allowed her gaze to roam the room in case someone else had noticed Gracie and Mary Jane’s reactions. 

By lunch, Ruby had sweat through the dress shields she had stolen from mother’s dresser and had lost one of the buttons from her skirt, which she had tucked into the front pocket. She had also noticed that nobody carried a book satchel in high school, and that the older girls walked a certain way, holding their books in front of them as though hugging them and allowing their skirts to sway behind them. On her way out of school at the end of the day, she deposited her own canvas schoolbag in the garbage.

“How was school?” Mother asked vacantly as they walked through the house. Ruby plopped her stack of books on the kitchen table and helped herself to a peach on the counter. “Grab that apron there and start on those potatoes, Ruby Mae,” her mother never looked up from her own hands, which were measuring out salt into a pot of mustard greens. Ruby studied her mother Annie, a small, meek woman in a faded floral housedress and slippers. She had once been beautiful. 

Ruby had seen a picture of her mother before she married. In the photo Annie stands in front of the lumber mill her father owned, wearing a white pintucked blouse with a high lace collar and a long A-line skirt, shiny boots peeking out from the hem. She looks directly into the camera, her pale blue eyes unblinking. Even in the grainy old photo, her pale skin is smooth and clear, her light hair curls at the temples, even her tiny hands are graceful. Annie had been raised in a wealthy family, never wanting for anything. 

Now, Annie stands in the steam of the stove, her graying hair falling loose from the braided bun she always wore. Annie’s first husband, Ruby’s father, died years ago. She married again to keep things afloat, and had six more children, five that lived. Ruby looks at how the skin sags around her eyes, behind the silver eyeglass frames she squints through. Ruby tries to remember the last time she saw Annie wearing proper shoes. 

That night, Ruby carefully sewed the button back onto her dress, then spot cleaned it and hung it up to air. Then she pulled out a navy dotted cap sleeve dress that her mother had made for Ruby’s older sister’s high school graduation. Annie had copied it from memory off a Cain Sloan photo ad she saw in the newspaper.nSister had left it behind when she got married, and Ruby had tried it on once. The belt at the waist was a little loose, but it fit in the shoulders. Ruby ironed it and pinned the belt at the side where it wouldn’t show. Then she began the pincurl ritual again. She practiced her smiles in the small dresser mirror. Then she practiced lowering her lashes like Hedy Lamarr. When she finished the last curl and tied the scarf around her head, she glanced at the pile of books, vaguely recalling Mrs. Stapleton’s assignment for English. 

She opened the fat, heavy textbook and saw the list of names inside the front cover, in Mrs. Stapleton’s neat, straight cursive hand. Seven names came before “Ruby Brandon.” Ruby wondered if all those people had read this whole big book. She fingered the opening pages absent-mindedly, The Junior Highway to English. She imagined herself and all the students listed in the front walking down a highway together. The Table of Contents made her dizzy–so many chapters and sections and topics. She turned to the assigned chapter and began to read:

Part One

Lesson One–Oral Composition 1

The good story-teller is always popular. Everybody likes stories. Besides, story-telling, when one knows how to do it, is great fun for the speaker, as well as for the listener. Perhaps you think that because you have never been a great traveler and explorer, or a detective, you have nothing interesting to tell. If this is your opinion, you are mistaken, for some of the very best stories are about the common little incidents that happen to us at home. Every one of you has in his memory the material for many good stories.

“Always popular.” Ruby liked that. But reading such a long passage made her head buzz. She tried to continue:

The things that happen to you are much more interesting than you think. All that is necessary is for you to learn how to tell about them.

But before she finished the first page, Ruby fell asleep. She dreamed of the Highway to English. She was walking right in the middle of the road, alongside her classmates. She saw Gracie and Mary Jane. She saw her brothers. She saw other young people she somehow knew belonged to the names in the textbook. She was walking in long, straight strides and she was wearing stockings and high heels, like the movie stars, with the dark seam up the back of her calves. In the dream her hair curled perfectly, naturally, and her eyelashes were long and curved. Ahead of her, where the highway met the horizon, she saw a glowing pink light like a sunrise. It grew brighter and brighter, shining directly on her face, illuminating her skin like the bright light of a movie camera. Her skin was the screen, her features projected onto a flat blank surface. Then her skin became the celluloid, shiny and smooth. Then the brightness became too much and everything was just light.

In the morning, Ruby barely remembered the dream, just little snippets of a road, a light. But she found herself mildly excited for school. She pinned the sides of her hair back more tightly and frizzed up the front a little higher. She slipped into the navy dress, feeling the seams against her waist and the skirt swishing around her calves. As she checked her reflection in the chiffarobe mirror, she knew the dress was much too nice for school, but she didn’t care. 

On the walk to school, her chin tilted up and her eyes narrowed as she envisioned herself, the kind of girl who gets her school dresses all the way up in Nashville at Cain Sloan. As she walked into English class, she felt all the eyes on her and walked all the way around the classroom like an Atlantic City beauty queen before slowly slipping into her seat near the back. She saw girls lean over and whisper behind their hands. She didn’t care if it was admiration or jealousy. She placed the stack of books she had carried on the wooden desk. The Junior Highway to English was on top. She remembered the lines about storytelling. Then she remembered that she had not finished the chapter. And she could not remember what else she was supposed to have done for homework. 

Mrs. Stapleton called the class to order and began the roll call. They said the pledge, repeated the prayer, and Ruby noticed more than one head turn her way for furtive glances. Mrs. Stapleton began writing something on the blackboard in that same straight and even cursive in the front of the textbook. Ruby tried to listen but could not hold her mind on the topic. Her thoughts wandered to her dream, the bright pink light. She studied the line of student feet in front of her, looking at the shoes and how each person held themselves: some feet splayed or hooked around the chair legs. Some feet neatly aligned or crossed. Ruby moved her legs to the side and crossed her ankles, pressing her knees together. When she looked up, she realized her name had been called.

“Ruby Mae?” Mrs. Stapleton was repeating. 

“Yes ma’am?” 

“You may come give your speech now Ruby.”

Speech? That was the thing. She was supposed to tell a story about herself. 

The things that happen to you are much more interesting than you think. 

Ruby made her way to the front, forcing her face to remain blank. She turned to face the class, then looked at the teacher, who nodded then looked at her watch. Ruby smiled with her lips closed, hoped she looked confident. 

“I would like to tell you a story,” she began, searching her mind for a hand hold. “A story about a journey I took.  On a highway.” She looked around and saw that her classmates were watching her. Listening to her. “Yes, this summer I took a very nice journey. You see,” she paused. All that is necessary is for you to learn how to tell about them. “You see, my mother sent me on a trip to Nashville.” A few people nodded. “Then all the way to St. Louis!” This brought a few murmurs. It was rare that anyone in Camden, Tennessee, travelled any farther than Nashville unless they were in the military. Ruby felt a little buzz of energy and this emboldened her. “I rode a bus to Nashville. While I was there I done some shopping. That’s where I got this dress.” She stopped to spin around slowly. “At Cain Sloan department store.” Ruby nodded knowingly. Now she was on a roll. “Then I rode a train from Nashville to St. Louis. It was very exciting. I seen the most beautiful pink sunrise!” Ruby glanced at Mrs. Stapleton, who was writing something in a notebook, lips pursed, then looked back at the class, who waited for …she did not know what. She had nothing else to offer them. She decided to wrap it up: “And that’s the story of my summer adventure.” 

At lunch, Ruby sat with Gracie and Mary Jane again. Lunch was white beans with very little fatback, a slice of white bread, and a small apple. Ruby hated white beans. They always reminded her of tiny baby mice, naked and blind. She nibbled her bread and tried to listen to her friends going on about some new teacher, when she caught the sound of her own name in a stranger’s mouth. She swiveled her head and tuned her ears to catch the disembodied snippets coming from a table some ways behind her. 

“She said she went to St. Louis!”

“No Brandon ever took a train to no St. Louis.”

“...and that dress.”

“Unless of course….”

“Unless what?”

“Well some girls go away you know”

“You don’t think.”

“Maybe she HAD to, you know”

“...more likely I reckon.”

“You see how she carries on…”

Ruby paled, froze. They thought she was ruint. Ruby had fought off her stepfather’s advances in the night, her siblings’ torture and humiliation, and the thick red dirt film of social class that came with her name. Only to become the school slut on her second day of ninth grade. 

After lunch, Ruby went to the office and faked stomachache so she could go home early. She slinked up to her room and took off the navy graduation dress. She hung it back up next to the green plaid dress. There were no other dresses. She had run out of options. Standing there in her slip, Ruby studied the two dresses hanging there empty, and felt her own hollowness, the thinness of her armorless veneer. 

She knew then that she would never set foot in school again.