Annabel - Kathleen Winter [83]
Gracie Watts asked Wayne to the graduation dance.
Every second day she asked him if he promised he would have a boutonniere to match her gown. He was sick of hearing about it and wished he had told her he was not going. But you had to go. This year Donna Palliser had announced they had to call it a prom, like in the States.
The dresses came to the Hudson’s Bay store as soon as Christmas was over. Old Eunice White, who had a purple birthmark covering half her face, hung them from circular racks in the back section used to store seasonal merchandise. Every year there was something new in dresses. One year it was greens: all the dresses were shades of lime, chartreuse, forest, mint, and emerald. Another year it had been sequins sewn under layers of net so they glimmered like scales on dream fish or glitter on dragonfly wings. In ’84 the dresses had been cut on the bias, with asymmetrical hemlines that had made Wayne uneasy. This year he watched, in a way that other boys did not, to see what Eunice would wheel into the back section once she had cleared out the last of the Christmas garlands and New Year’s Eve streamers.
He knew what he would wear. Each grade twelve boy in Croydon Harbour rented a tux from sliding flats in Eunice’s back section. The only thing that changed each year for boys was the colour of the cummerbund; they had been purple the year before, a great disappointment to Brent Shiwack’s older brother and all his friends. A real pansy colour. This year they were scarlet, and you could get them in matte linen with a black stripe, which everyone wanted, or in satin. If you had a whole dress the colour and feel of the satin cummerbunds, Wayne thought, then you would have a dress worth talking about.
He tried not to let Eunice see him examining the dresses on the racks, one by one, to find the dress he would choose for himself in a perfect world. If Eunice came near him with her long pole that had a nail on it, to snag a World Famous bag or a reflective vest off the top shelf, he pretended he was looking at the fly-tying gear. One minute he was looking at gauze and lace, the next at feathers and glass beads. You could hook some of the fly-tying stuff onto the dresses and it would look pretty good.
There had been a revolution somewhere in middle America, where the heart of prom-land lay waiting for its prince, and the dresses this year were short. The girls felt cheated.
“Actually,” Donna Palliser announced in the schoolyard, “short dresses were in two years ago. It has taken them this long to reach Labrador. My mother has ordered me the latest: a lemon gown from California. It’s the exact colour of lemons in the lemon grove south of San Francisco where the designer has her summer home. It sweeps the floor. You have to wear four-inch heels if you don’t want to trip over it. Short dresses are actually from 1983.”
But Wayne liked the short dresses. Not only were they short, one in particular was restrained in its line, fabric, and colour. It had no gauze and no sequins or beads. The dress was brown and had a green satin ribbon in the hem, which could be seen only if you turned up the edge and looked. The green was a muted, shimmering green that had brown in it. The dress had a fitted bodice, and it was different too from the other dresses in that it was sleeveless, without caps, bells, or any of the shoulder details that puffed and spoiled the other dresses’ shapes. The brown dress with the hidden green hem was elegant. The cloth felt cold, and you could crumple it in your hand and hide it there, the material was so pliant.
“Are you interested in that dress, Wayne?” Eunice said, the third time he visited it. “For your date?”
“I might be.”
Eunice shook out the crumples Wayne had lovingly made it suffer. She laid down her pole and hung the dress over her wrist. “It’s a nice dress.”
“Yeah.”
“It has a hint of the twenties about it.”
Eunice’s birthmark was shaped like Africa, and it was about the