Sacrificial Gowns of the Ancient Aztecs

Daphne Young

Word Count 1,310

After a solid half hour ignoring me, the salesgirl at Luv Bridal asks,“Um, yeah, what can I help you with?”

I look around the store at nothing but white and cream wedding dresses in lace and crinoline.

“I need something for a funeral…”

No reaction. We are not here to have fun.

I’m close to 50 and have never been married. I’ve only had punk rock girlfriends who hate traditional everything, so I didn’t realize a proper bridal shop requires an appointment with a bridal party, months of advance notice, and a sample size waist.

I’m shuffled to the sad, shadowy part of the store away from a gaggle of young girls fawning over a princess preening in fluffery and floof. I’m handed a DMV-quality clipboard filled with forms and told to fill it out.

I can’t answer any of the questions. I’ve been in the shop too long trying to look natural. All the whiteness has started to overload and I’m having some sort of visual aura. Little spots in my peripheral vision like the aftermath of flash photography (Oh, God, we don’t have a photographer for the wedding yet!) Is this the start of a migraine?

I don’t know my size, the style I want, the venue address, anything. Cap sleeves? ¾ length? I didn’t realize there would be fractions. I start to fill in my name and whimpering little tears form. I can’t cry here. Not in front of this cold bitch. Don’t cry. I’m disgusted with how easily I’ve folded. I usually have comebacks, some sass, or at least a listless “fuck you” in my pocket, but something about being an almost menopausal flushing rather than blushing bride has me weak.

“I can’t…” I say, leaning on the table for balance.

“Excuse me?” she asks. It’s hard to explain how nasally self-assured and empathy-devoid her “Excuse me?” sounds.

I slouch away from the table putting my hand up, “I can’t do this…” and walk into the searing Arizona sunshine to cry in my car.

This was an old shame, a junior high locker room humiliation where you realize you don’t know the rules and your body is all wrong. I think of the ways I can escape. I’ve done it before. I’ve been engaged a few times and bolted on them all. The runaway bride is ready to run one more time. Keep the receipts on your wedding gifts, folks, I’ve done it again!

I think of my fiancé, the cancer scientist, my love. I see his sweet face, imagine his voice, know how much I love him. If I drive away from this one, I have to keep driving and driving and driving right over a cliff. If I can’t love this one, I’ll never love anyone. He’s perfect. I’m not. All that stands between us and a lifetime of love is a fucking dress. FIND THE DRESS!

I spin out of the parking lot and drive aimlessly. As if pulled by a force more powerful than my self-destruction, I pass by a place so wild with possibility that I fear its power. The Mexican Wedding Shop: Azteca Bridal. Gigantic Quinceañera dresses explode in the window like fireworks. Nip-slip gowns are posed like prostitutes in an Amsterdam window, bold and beckoning. It’s a bridal bordello. Too much flounce and bounce per ounce. It’s undignified. It’s overstuffed. The carpets are stained.

The ancient Aztecs draped the earliest brides in robes and entwined a couple’s wedding garments to seal the deal, or “tie the knot.” They knew about this stuff.

I walk in and peevishly request a fitting.

“No appointment?!?” asks a harried receptionist behind a plexiglass barrier similar to what separates a lover from a convict in jail.

I shake my head no. The Wedding Warden asks a few questions to assess how problematic I might be and in the middle of my milquetoast shrugging insecurity, she holds up a hand of blood red talon nails and screams into a CB-style intercom, “OPHELIA!!!”

Down a spiraling staircase she came: Ofelia [sic]. She grabbed my hand and looked deep in my eyes, “So pale, so blonde…oh my dear, we will make you so beau-TEE-ful!”

She pointed to a dress on headless mannequin.

“You like? It’s like the one Meghan Markle wore to marry Prince Harry.”

I touch it. It’s so small and simple.

“Not for you! Too plain. Too boring. You need SEXY but not cheap. Come with me!” Ofelia shuffles me upstairs and begins to assess my body with great focus. I feel exposed but not judged. She rips through racks with great concentration and pulls a selection of wild horrors that instantly repel me.

“Try, try, try!” she assures. Every awful gown somehow fits. A chorus of three small Mexican ladies are sitting on a bench outside the dressing room. As I exit in one dress and then another, they coo, hiss and sigh depending on my choice. Who are they with?

Ofelia understands my body is perfect and every dress that fails to fit me is a flaw in the fabric, a stitching mistake, a designer’s lack of vision.

“You have too much boobies for this dress! This style is all wrong! I need to send this back to the factory because it’s the wrong size!”

She whisks me to a side room, the back alley of the store, where a fire sale of designer dresses are bunched together, “These we cannot tailor, but what if there is one in your size which God has put here just for you?”

I pick the most beautiful one. It’s so traditional with lace arms, a corseted bodice and long train. It’s cheap too. There is something vaguely 60’s about it. There is a veil and everything. I am without hope and brimming with hope in equal rushes. I don’t want to believe but magical thinking abounds. I slip into the dress and Ofilia helps with the zipper.

“Suck it in!” she orders, and I inhale the deep, full breath of a meditation master. The zipper softly slides all the way to the top. I breathe out. The three ladies in waiting, my defacto wedding party, all nod with reverence. One of them says to the other with a sense of knowing, “That’s it. That’s the one.”

My favorite wedding picture is in the bathroom mirror of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. It is a reflection of a serene, peaceful bride who didn’t have to sacrifice anything for love.

Taliesin was the setting of our second date, the place where I fell for him. The first date was a disaster. He asked a host of questions that included the phrase, “What is your five-year plan?” What? I don’t have a five-minute plan. When he approached for a second date, I broke out the old Annie Hall line that I didn’t want to relive the Nuremberg Trials. “Man, that was like a job interview.”

He emailed me a long and beautiful letter sharing how he saw me trying to lighten the mood as he dove back into his tiresome query, but he was ready to meet someone wonderful at the core and not be charmed by another clever girl. It was overwhelming in its honesty and intensity. He asked if I’d like to take an architectural tour and this time no questions. I was wary but he signed it, “We’ll call our second date the Spanish Inquisition.”

As I walked down the aisle, rustling in a ridiculous amount of flowing fabric, I felt exactly like a bride and fully connected to this arcane, beautiful tradition. I looked at my husband-to-be waiting for me, a man I could have married in burlap with a bag over my head, and knew, “That’s it, that’s the one.”

Daphne’s short story “Screw Worm: Larva of the American Blowfly” was published in the Wisconsin Review and her prize-winning play “Bleaching Liver With the Company Man” was produced by E.A.T (the English Alternative Theater at the University of Kansas).