Remake me!

I have a dress that I spent far too much money on ten years ago that I have not been able to throw away. I wore it once—to Margaret’s high school graduation. Margaret is now 28 and mother of my grandson, Finn. The dress has traveled from Georgia to Italy, from Italy to Georgia, from Georgia to Italy, I don’t know how many times. When I bought it, it almost fit but was tight in certain places. I’d assumed I would lose the weight and wear it all the time to church back when I lived in Georgia and went to a church that required dresses. But instead I had gained weight and moved to Italy where people go to church in jeans. Then a few years ago, I lost weight and remembered the dress, but now it was too big. I thought then to throw out the dress with all the other clothes that were too big as a kind of Feng Shui manuever a friend insisted was crucial: If you hang onto anything too big for you, you are simply inviting your body to get fat again. Only keep clothes around that you want to fit into and wear. Only keep clothes around that define you. I loved this philosophy, and yet I could not throw out the dress.

This might have made some sense if I were the kind of woman who wears dresses, but I rarely wear dresses, and certainly have no use for one that gapes in the bust and hangs down to my ankles. I don’t like sleevelessness either because of my old-lady flabby arms and this dress, what my mother would call a summer “shell”, is lined with silk and therefore too hot, really, for summer wear. Why ever would I need to hang onto it?

Milena, my Reiki coach, told me to trust the dress, to follow the dress. Maybe the colors were calling me. Maybe my soul needed those particular shades of gold and green-- autumn colors. She could feel in my aura a need for autumn colors; I wore green a lot, she had noticed…maybe it was the gold or the particular blend of gold with the specific vibration of green. Or maybe the fantasia of vines and leaves, inviting new growth in me. Or maybe the dress did not truly belong to me, but had entrusted itself to my safe-keeping so I could pass it on to someone else, one of my daughter's perhaps, even Margaret herself, for whom I had in fact bought it, if indirectly, given I had worn it only to her graduation. Or maybe I was destined to put it in a Goodwill bin the year, the month, the day, the moment that some unknown someone was seeking just such a dress and would recognize mine as the one she'd been seeking for who knew what occasion. Puo darsi, I thought, somewhat skeptically, but also somewhat credulously because I did once have a dress I bought on impulse, then lost, then found again, that became a crucial aspect of a romance and a symbol in a novel I wrote: the dress that attracts the right suitor, the dress that changes one’s destiny.

The other day, I was doing Giri della Rocca with Zia Paola and her friend Orieta, the town Sarto, or tailor. Paola remarked that she had gotten Orieta to make her two “tubini”—or tube dresses—for the opera season, one in white, one in tourquoise. She has Orieta make all her clothes because that way Paola can invent precisely the look she wants and also rest-assured that the clothes will be the right color and fit her perfectly. “She can make anything, Orieta. Just come up with a vision and “poof!” it’s like the Fairy Godmother in Cenerontola (Cinderella)—she will turn your rags into elegant garments with the wave of her magic wand! She will turn the pumpkin into a coach and the orphan into a beloved princess."

For some reason I thought of the ten year old dress in my closet. I told the gaggle of women walking with me the story of my having held onto it. I’m sure it was out of style and not worth saving. Plus had they ever seen me in a dress? Would I even wear it if it fit right and were shortened? I am not the kind of woman to wear dresses. “Ah,” Orieta, looked at me, her eyebrows raised, her eyes themselves spalancata as she tried to appraise something in me. “Sounds to me like the dress is begging to be worn! Stop by my place this afternoon. We’ll inquire of the dress what it wants!”

I had never been to Orieta’s before, nor to a sarto before. In the grandiose palazzo, halfway up the marble staircase, a gargantuan bronze statue of Apollo stood, his lamp lifted though it was not lit and did not need to be lit in the middle of the afternoon. He seemed to stare down at me; he seemed to note my passing as though he knew, on my return down, I would be changed somehow, be someone else. I was overcome by a feeling that something marvelous was happening.

When I’d arrived, Orieta ushered me into her glorious tailor’s room…the huge expanse of cutting table covered with patterns and pins; the shelves festooning bolts of fabric; the credenze heaped with notions and ribbons and lace and bottons flashing up their colors from tiers of clear plastic drawers and boxes. On the walls, portraits of brides in wedding gowns she had made, of Opera gowns and costumes. However had I come to land in this mythic place of costumery, creativity, invention?

It was actually quite magical what she did with mere pins. I stood before her three-way mirror, at first naked (well in panties and bra), then in the dress that didn’t seem to belong to me, be right for me, the way the bodice gaped and sagged and the skirt hung around my ankles. But within minutes, using only the pins, the darts of the bodice fit my breasts, the shoulders aligned where they should across my collar bone, the length struck just right, above my knees.

What was odd is that it didn’t quite seem that she had made the dress fit me so much as she had made me fit the dress. I did a double-take--who is that woman? I looked at myself as though meeting myself for the first time. I never knew I looked like this, I think I may have even said to her. Orieta’s eyes met mine in the mirror—wise, pulsing slightly with insight and knowing.

“You’re ready,” she said as though we were embarking on some kind of quest together. “I think this is the first of many magic mantles I will make for you!”