(In Honor of Spring Cleaning: Seven Days. Seven Dresses. This is Day Three. Day Two is here) 

The Salvation Army store on Williamson Road, in Roanoke Virginia, was barely more than a shanty (one whole portion was walled in with corrugated plastic and the red dirt floor puddled when it rained )but it was a mecca for Dior-style party dresses. I imagined there must have been a whole mess of elderly ladies that downsized out of their historic homes into retirement homes or simply died with walk-closets full or New Look gowns.

The more extraordinary part was that one of those women was my size, an unheard-of development. Fancy vintage dresses were for lithe minxes with delicate waists, not flabby, ponderous elephants like nineteen-year-old me. But even among the debutantes of 1948, there must have been a few heavy bottomed geese no amount of genteel starvation and corsetry could transform into delicate swans. And one of them had donated what looked like her whole wardrobe in a single day.

I bought them all. Probably ten dresses total, perhaps as many as fifteen. It set me back about 25 bucks, which sounds like nothing, but it was a not-insignificant chunk of my Freshman Year allowance at the time.

“I thought we were here to find the Holy Grail,” asked Cardigan, when I dropped the stack on the counter.

“I did,” I said, and showed him a battered old brass vase, chalice shaped, with 25¢ scrawled on the bottom. I had found the Holy Grail, though, and it was a 1940-ish silk crepe dress the color of a blue-green sea on a cloudy morning, delicately beaded, that fell to the floor and fluttered gracefully around my ankles as if I were Ginger Rogers.

Texas sighed and held up her own dented goblet. “What about mine?”

“You definitely found something magical,” I said, but I wasn’t talking about her cup.

 

#

She met Cardigan on the internet.

In 1995, that still sounded pretty close to science-fiction.

Most of us had never seen the internet. We didn’t know how it worked. Women’s College offered ethernet to dorm rooms, but it cost extra, and you had to buy cables. It was a big enough deal that I had an actual computer (most of the girls on my hall had word processors, if anything) with a full-color monitor and an inkjet printer that I lied about being broken so the girls on the hall wouldn’t bankrupt me via ink cartridges. Most of the girls on my hall still had word processors. I had a campus email address, but I wasn’t entirely sure why I needed it. I honestly still think most people would prefer to just write a letter, I remember telling my high school best friend, with all the tragic confidence of the last buggy-whip manufacturer in Dearborn, Michigan. Why would I need internet?

My roommate had a fancy new Mac, with the cables connected, and after a time (of course) we all started using it to check our email, and then later, on the advice of some friend of a friend, we ended up in this early chat room called Foothills, which was basically a blinking cursor on a white screen and occasional perplexing mood statements like a brook babbles over the hill,  where we started spending hours after class, talking to legions of faceless people with too-clever-by-half user names.  I can’t remember what we talked about, but I know we talked about it for hours, each taking turns.

Cardigan was a regular on Foothills. His user name suggested he might be into the same flavor of punk rock as we were. And at the beginning, we talked to him almost exclusively about music, ‘zines and the finer points of MaximumRocknRoll columns. He was nice and funny. After classes, we’d hurry back to my roommate’s computer to see if he’d logged on. Texas worked in the library, so could chat with him during her shift. I’d sit at roommate’s desk or the computer lab and join the conversation.

At some point, the character of the conversation between Texas and Cardigan changed. She knew where he went to school. She knew his real name. She knew what his voice sounded like, because their conversations left the virtual realm and moved to the phone. I felt left out, he was both of our friends, but I could read the writing on the dorm room white board.

Back in January, in some escalating double-dog dare of an overcaffeinated conversation, Texas had sworn she’d shave her head if I wore my senior year prom dress to class. It didn’t seem exactly like a fair trade, I mean, it’s women’s college and when have I ever worried about being overdressed? But I think Texas was looking for an excuse that was neither as weighted with all the dumb gravitas people assign to dramatic haircuts nor as prosaic as I was bored. I don’t think the first draft of this conversation occurred online, but certainly the follow up did, which is how Cardigan got involved.

A plan coalesced. Cardigan would visit. Texas would shave her head. We’d all hang out. The two of them would hang out and see if they could make explicit the implicit flirtation in the spaces between keystrokes. I was skeptical. They’d never exchanged pictures.  He could be a serial killer. He could be a monster. He could be anything. What if you don’t like him? She didn’t seem worried. We’d meet him at the gas station that sold Elvis lamps off Interstate 81. If he was nice, he could follow us back to campus. If he was crazy? Well, I guess we could send him home and call the police?

 I needn’t have worried.

He turned out to be a cute nineteen-old-boy from a place I’d never heard of in Northeastern PA. He had the kind of shy smile that could melt a heart at ten paces, but his expression  when he set eyes on Texas in the parking lot on the interstate? It was luminescent. It was full-on wonder. Because she may have been charming onscreen, but, in person, Texas was real deal beautiful, the kind of beautiful that entranced people, the kind that regularly caused perfect strangers to stop on the street and ask if her she knew how much she looked like a particular supermodel of the era (she did, thanks, and that’s so nice of you to mention).

After hugs and introductions, after we bought some more cigarettes and gave him instructions on getting back to campus, I spent some time, hours, days, weeks afterward trying to figure how different that scene would have played if it had been me to get out of the car and not Texas.  If he would have felt the same, if he would have tried to hide his disappointment, if he would have found some excuse to creep off back to Pennsylvania—whoops! Turns out my grandma died, but you seem like a real sweet person and it was sure nice to meet you. Maybe we’ll run into each other again on the internet someday. I doubted he’d be mean to my face. Wasn’t his style. Cardigan wore cardigans for christsake, even if he did wear them over Clash shirts.

There was no need to think too hard on it, though because Cardigan was suddenly, totally, completely smitten with Texas. And Texas was my best friend. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about the fact that I suddenly, totally, completely smitten with Cardigan

#

In the interest of time, let’s spoil the ending:

This is not a story about a love triangle. At least not one in which I’m a player. I never told Cardigan I had a crush on him. He maybe sussed it out, but never acknowledged it. I wasn’t interested in betraying Texas and I couldn’t have competed with her even if I had. High school had taught me a lot of things, and among them, that the road to Hell is paved with the myriad tiny horrors and humiliations of trying to love someone who doesn’t love you back.

I didn’t try to break them up. In fact, I spent the rest of the semester cheerleading their relationship for the simple reason that I liked having Cardigan around and I thought if they broke up, I’d never see him again. I tried to graft all of my infatuation onto a local guy (another redhead) who I kinda liked (who also, as it turned out, was very, very much not interested) and would hold forth for hours talking about all my feelings that weren’t for him at all, but for a boy I couldn’t ever really talk about. Whatever pinch of resentment I felt drifted away over time, as did the guilt I felt for feeling it, as did Cardigan and Texas’s relationship, as did my crush on Cardigan, as did Cardigan himself, who would eventually become another faded entry in my Big Book of Unrequited Love.

For now, we return to the Salvation Army checkout line, to my stack of dresses, to our Let’s go to Thrift Stores and look for the Holy Grail scavenger hunt we were using to fill the afternoon hours before Texas got her iconic haircut (she had the bone structure for it) and Cardigan fell hard.

“What are you going to do with that?” asked Cardigan.

I held up the cup. “Well, if the whole immortal life thing doesn’t play out, it would probably make a decent ashtray” (It did).

“No,” said Cardigan. “The dress. What are you going to do with the dress?”

The saleswoman, with a Franklin County accent and church lady hair, paused in her calculations and gave us a scowl. She held up the blue green dress and the sunlight caught in the glass beads.

I would marvel that it fit me, that held up, even as the beads loosened and silk faded to almost pink with sweat and I required additional underwear to make it look as flattering as it had when I was nineteen. I wore it to shows. I wore it to parties. I wore it plays. I hung it on the wall as decoration. I wore it to one ill-timed arts gala in the gut-churning middle of the 2000 election recount. I wore it for my birthday. I might have worn it for yours. It outlasted Cardigan and college and the vicissitudes of my friendship with Texas in its stormy patches. And yet it lives. I can’t bear to get rid of it. Even though it’s in terrible shape now and it smells funny and I haven’t worn it in years.

I mean, you don’t just throw away the Holy Grail. Come the fuck on.

“I’m going to wear it,” I said. “Obviously.”