The Wednesday Dress Code

The bride was twenty-six, which she told me three times during the fitting the day before the wedding, as though I might forget between pins. Her mother was thirty years her senior and held strong views about lace. I knelt on the carpet with a mouthful of pins and adjusted the hem for the fourth time while the two of them argued about whether the train should be bustled in the French style or the American style, neither of them knowing what either style was.

"There," I said, standing up too fast and regretting it immediately. Sixty-four-year-old knees are honest that way. "The hem sits even all the way around. You'll want heels the same height as what you've got on today, no higher."

"It doesn't feel like anything," the bride said, looking at herself in the triple mirror. "The dress, I mean. It feels like nothing."

"That's what a good fit feels like," I told her. "It should disappear on you."

She turned in the mirror, and her mother dabbed at her eyes with a tissue she'd had ready since the parking lot, and I stood there holding my pin cushion and feeling as though I were reading about weather in a country I'd never visit. They paid their balance at the front desk, thanked me, and left. The bell over the door jingled. Then it was four in the afternoon on a Tuesday and the salon was empty and quiet except for the hum of the steamer.

I don't know why I lingered. Habit, maybe. I straightened sample gowns on their hangers. I fluffed veils on their stands. I collected stray pins from the fitting room carpet, one at a time, because there is something soothing about a small pointless task.

Here is a thing I don't say out loud much: the last person who touched me on purpose, outside of work, was a man named Jack, and that was forty-two years ago. Jack was my one attempt at the whole business. Three months, then done, and I decided the experiment had yielded its results. I shook hands with brides' mothers. I hugged the occasional coworker at Christmas. I pinned fabric to strangers' bodies every working day for decades, and it is a strange kind of touch, the kind where the person is mostly thinking about their wedding and you are mostly thinking about the seam. Nobody is touching anybody, really.

So I turned off the steamer and stood in the middle of the showroom with forty white dresses watching me, and I thought, well, Lynne, this is what you chose, and you chose it every single day for forty years, so no use complaining now.

Then I locked up and went home to my apartment and my sewing corner, and that was Wednesday.

Wednesdays are event days, which is why the salon calls Wednesday the dress code day, because everyone working a wedding wears black. Landon Ramirez runs the catering side for our events. He's sixty-two, tall, grey at the temples, with hands that are permanently faintly burned in one spot or another because the man will not use the oven mitts sitting right there. He has worked our venue contract for six years and in all that time we have exchanged perhaps four hundred sentences, all of them about chicken.

That Wednesday the wedding was at a converted barn out past the fairgrounds. Two hundred guests, which meant the kitchen ran hot and loud until nearly eleven. I stayed late to handle a veil emergency, some crisis involving static and the mother of the groom, and by the time it was resolved the reception was winding down and the kitchen crew was breaking down their stations.

I found Landon alone in the back of the barn kitchen, sitting on an overturned milk crate, eating a plate of the wedding food with a plastic fork.

"Is that the braised short rib?" I asked.

He looked up, caught, and didn't seem very bothered about it. "It's the trimmings. The parts that don't plate pretty. You want some? There's plenty."

"I want plenty," I said, and he got up and pulled a second crate over next to his, and I sat down in my good black trousers on a milk crate in a barn kitchen, and it was the nicest seat I'd had all week.

We ate in a companionable way for a few minutes. The crew clattered around out front. Somebody dropped a tray and swore.

"Long one tonight," Landon said.

"They all are. Why do you stay after? The crew handles breakdown."

He shrugged. "Habit. And the drive home is quiet and I'm not in a hurry to get there. How about you?"

"Veil emergency."

"Those are serious."

"Potentially fatal," I said. "To the veil."

He laughed, a real one, short and surprised. Landon has a careful face most of the time. I'd watched it for six years across buffet tables. It occurred to me, sitting there on the crate, that I had never once seen him outside of a work context, and that neither had anyone else, probably.

"There's a pub two miles up the road," I said. "The one with the bad parking."

"The Squirrel? I know it."

"Do you want to go have a drink? I'm not ready to go home and I refuse to sit in this barn one more minute."

He considered it, and I watched him consider it, and I understood the consideration, because I was doing the same math myself. "Yes," he said. "All right. Let me just tell Marco."

The Squirrel had bad parking and good whiskey and was nearly empty at midnight on a Wednesday. We took a booth at the back. He ordered an old fashioned. I ordered the same, because it seemed polite to match.

"Twenty-six years," Landon said, after the drinks came. "That's how long I've been doing weddings. You know what nobody tells you about catering a wedding?"

"Tell me."

"Everybody at the wedding has somebody. The guests came with somebody. The couple has each other. The bartender flirts with the photographer. And the staff, we're the only ones in the room who go home alone. It's a whole building full of pairs and then there's the kitchen."

I turned my glass in its ring of condensation. "How long has it been for you? Since you went home with somebody, I mean. You don't have to answer that."

"No, it's fair." He did the arithmetic visibly, lips almost moving. "Fourteen years. There was a woman, Tara, we were together five years, nothing formal. She took a job in Phoenix and I didn't go, and that ended it. Since then, work and television." He looked at me over the glass. "You?"

"You'll laugh."

"I won't."

"Forty-two years," I said. "One relationship at twenty-two, three months, a man named Jack, forgettable in every respect including the respects you're thinking of. Nothing since. Not once. I'm not saying it with any drama. It's just a fact about me, like my shoe size."

Landon set his glass down slowly. "That's a long time."

"It's my whole adult life." I took a drink, because what I was about to say needed a run-up. "And lately I've been doing sums. I'm sixty-four. My mother died at seventy-nine, her mother at seventy-six. So I've got maybe a dozen good years left, and I have spent exactly none of them being touched by a person who wanted to touch me. That's the sum. It comes out embarrassing."

He didn't laugh. He didn't do the kind thing either, the gentle head-tilt thing. He just waited, which was better.

"So here's my proposal," I said. "You and me. Once a week. We use the private fitting room at the salon on Sundays, when the place is closed, and we practice. Being with somebody. Touch. All of it short of the finish line. We set rules, we keep them, and neither of us pretends it's a romance. You want to break a fourteen-year streak and I want to not die ignorant. That is the entire basis. It's not courting, it's a workshop."

Landon was quiet for a while. The bartender wiped glasses at the far end of the room and the fridge hummed.

"A workshop," he said finally. "In the fitting room."

"It has a lock and a mirror and good lighting. And it's the only private space I control."

"And the rules?"

"No intercourse. That's the big one, it keeps it from becoming something it isn't. Anything short of that is on the table if we both say yes to it, each time, out loud. No sleepovers. No talking about it at work. And if either of us wants to stop, we stop, and that's the end of it, no negotiation."

He turned his glass a half-circle on the coaster, matching my earlier move without knowing it.

"Sundays," he said. "What time?"

"I thought about that on the drive over. Ten o'clock. It's early enough that neither of us can drink our way into it and late enough that we don't have to rush."

"Ten o'clock Sunday." He looked at me straight on, and whatever I expected in his face, what was there was simpler. Relief, maybe. "You know this is a strange offer."

"It's an absurd offer."

"I'm saying yes anyway."

"Well," I said, and finished my drink. "Good. Wear something you can get out of easily. It's a fitting room, not a siege."

That got another real laugh out of him. We split the bill down the middle, because it was a business meeting, more or less, and he walked me to my car in the bad parking lot, hands in his pockets the whole way, and we said goodnight at a respectable distance like two people who had just signed a contract neither of them fully understood.

I drove home with the windows down. Sunday was four days away and I was forty years out of practice at waiting for anything.

The four days went the way four days go when you are waiting for something, that is to say badly. I hemmed a mother-of-the-groom dress. I argued with a bride about tulle. I checked the fitting room lock four times a day like it might grow a conscience and bolt itself.

Sunday, 9:52, the bell over the door rang.

"You're early," I said, coming out of the back office with pins in my mouth. I took them out. "Pins," I explained. "Habit. Come in."

Landon had done exactly what I told him, which surprised me. A grey pullover, a zip collar, nothing with buttons. He looked around the empty showroom like a man checking exits.

"Place feels different empty," he said. "Like a church after the service."

"That's the exact feeling. I've thought that for forty years and never said it out loud." I hung my keys on the hook. "Coffee's in the office if you want it. I made it strong, in case either of us needs an excuse to hold a cup."

"Noted. Do we, uh. Is there a protocol? Do we shake hands first?"

"We shook hands at the pub. We've covered that ground." I walked him back to the fitting room and unlocked it, which took two tries because my hands were doing something unrelated to lock-picking. "Sit anywhere. The stool, the armless chair, not the floor, the floor is where pins live."

He sat on the stool. In the mirror we looked like two people in a fitting room, which was the problem and the point.

"Okay," I said. "Rules, restated, because I restate everything, ask any of my brides. No intercourse. Anything else, we ask out loud and we answer out loud. We stop when one of us says stop. We don't discuss this at work. We leave separately and we don't make plans for after. Agreed?"

"Agreed." He rubbed his palms on his knees. "Can I say something first?"

"Please."

"I've been nervous all week and I couldn't figure out why, because I like you and this was my idea to accept, not yours to offer. And then it hit me. I haven't been nervous about a woman since I was thirty-six. That's the part I missed. Not the rest of it. The nerves."

"Well, you've given me nerves too, so we're square." I pulled the gown off the rail. The one I'd chosen was a sample, ivory, simple, the kind of dress that flatters nobody and therefore flatters everybody. "I'm going to put this on. Half-zipped. And I want you to kiss me. Slowly. That is the entire agenda for session one. Small agenda."

He looked at the dress, then at me. "That's it?"

"That's a great deal, actually. It's been forty-two years. You're not kissing a woman, you're kissing a national monument."

He laughed, and the laugh broke something loose in the room, and I went behind the screen and stepped into the gown. It's a strange thing, putting on a wedding dress when you're the seamstress. Your hands know every seam. I came out with the back open to the waist and the zipper parked halfway up my spine.

"Ask me," I said. "Out loud. That's the rule."

Landon stood. He was taller than me by a fair amount, which I'd known, but knowing and standing close to are different measurements.

"Lynne Hawkins," he said, "may I kiss you?"

"You may."

And he did it slowly, which I had asked for and didn't fully believe I'd get. One hand came up to my jaw, careful of the pins I'd forgotten were still in my cuff, and he kissed me like I was something being measured for. Soft, then not soft. I made a small sound against his mouth that I will not be describing further, and I felt him smile into it, and I felt my own hands do nothing useful at all, just rest on the pullover at his shoulders because they had to be somewhere.

When he pulled back an inch, we were both shaking. Not romantically, shaking. The actual tremor, the kind you get from cold or from blood sugar.

"Well," he said. "There it is."

"There it is," I agreed. My voice wasn't level. I didn't bother pretending. "Again, please."

"May I?"

"You just did ask. Yes."

The second kiss was longer and my knees, sixty-four years old, held strong views about the whole arrangement. We broke apart and I sat down on the armless chair, because dignity is one thing and fainting is another.

"Session review," I said, fanning myself with a swatch card like an old-fashioned widow, which was funny to me even if it wasn't to him. "Verdict?"

"Good. Very good. You?"

"Forty-two years of ignorance and the answer is it's good." I looked at him in the mirror. "Can I tell you the embarrassing part now? The part worse than the sums I did at the pub?"

"Please."

"I don't know what I like. Not in the philosophical way. In the literal way. Jack, the three months, he did what he did and I lay there like furniture being upholstered and I assumed that was the experience. I never learned. Most women my age, they have forty years of preferences. I have a shoe size and a hem preference. I don't