Hemmed In

Rebecca Johnson

Word Count 221

My wedding dress was made of two layers of crepe de chine that fell beautifully, as they say in the fashion world. It did bear a slight resemblance to a nightgown but that didn’t bother me. The clerk at the Barneys store on Madison Ave -- a bald black guy in a suit a size too small (that was a look in those days) was so high it took him ten minutes to type in the numbers of my mom’s credit card. Sorry, sorry, he kept muttering. Well, I thought, this is memorable!

The hem of the dress was unfinished and a bit long so I made an appointment to have it altered. I was getting ready to leave for the city when my husband called; he just heard that a commuter plane had smashed into the World Trade Center. That was what we all thought at first. He could see the smoke from the West Side highway. I turned on the news. It wasn’t every day that a plane hit a building.

I could have gotten the dress altered in the weeks that followed, but whenever I thought of that jagged hem, it reminded me of the day, so I left it raw and imperfect, a reminder of the potential chaos that lies on the other side of every ordinary day.