Cozumel, 1990
My mom and I had stopped to admire an open air booth full of beautiful Mexican dresses, their colorful flounces and frills gently swaying in the Caribbean breeze, dust particles from the sidewalk collecting like sparkles on their tender fabric. The ruffled hems and off the shoulder tops looked to me to be the epitome of paradise, such latent femininity, and I wanted so badly to be beautiful in one of those brightly colored frocks. Beautiful was something I had never been. Beautiful was something for other girls, thinner girls, tanner girls, girls whose thighs didn’t rub together when they walked, girls who belonged wherever they were. Dresses in every color hung from the displays among the touristy neon tee-shirts, hats, and cheaply made sunglasses made for the sole purpose of being left forgotten on the pebbly, white sand beach by vacationing foreigners. I imagined wearing one of the dresses, carefree, grown up, having somehow evolved from a chubby, braces-wearing thing with pale skin and ruddy cheeks, freckles where I didn’t want them, newly minted breasts that were welcome but somehow the wrong shape and size.
My mom, now she was beautiful. Her perm wasn’t frizzy and dry like mine, but shaped her hair into silky loose curls that accentuated her Nordic looks. She was the swan to my duckling and I was hopeful that I would grow into her grace but instinctively knew that somehow, defying science, my DNA seemed to have come 99% from my father’s side. I wondered if any girl ever had been grateful that she looked just like her father, because even though he was a handsome man, I surely wasn’t. My mom followed my longing gaze up the side of the market stall to the object of my desire near the ceiling, a Mexican peasant dress.
She asked me if I wanted her to buy me a dress, and I excitedly accepted. My father had had an exceedingly successful year as the owner of commercial fishing boats crabbing for dungeness in Alaska near the Bering Strait; This was the first (and much later, I came to find out, the only) time our family of four took a long, luxurious vacation together and in terms of money, the spending spigot was wide open. I was too young to be a masterful manipulator, but I sensed my mother’s carefree largesse and pounced on the opportunity. She encouraged me to pick out one of the dresses. So many color combinations caught my eye, from the bright aqua blues that rivaled the audacity of the sky, to the yellows as creamy as a ripe papaya, and the bright pinks that seemed to pulsate sensuality in a way that my young body only instinctively understood at that time. Like a lighthouse through a stormy sea the dress came into focus; The pristine white dress hanging high toward the ceiling called to me like a siren. Bright, classic, clean white. I could absorb the colors of the sunset in that dress. I would be the human embodiment of a fragrant gardenia against the jungle-like paradise greenery that carpeted the island, brightly colored iguanas lining up to be my jewels. I would marvel at the mystery and majesty of the Mayan ruins, channeling the spirit of whatever goddesses the Mayans exonerated and being the object of as yet unknown desires. I would be someone who belonged in those exotic locales, those titillating adventures, my own skin.
The kindly shopkeeper with the dark, leathery skin used a long wooden stick to catch the wire coat hanger and began to slowly lower the dress down from where it was hanging with a big, jovial smile. He was about to make an overpriced sale to another set of touristas who would leave feeling that they’d cleverly haggled a bargain. I busied myself looking through a tall basket full of lacey espadrille shoes, perfect to go with the dress. My desire for this dress was visceral and tasted like vanilla ice cream in the summertime, smelled like suntan lotion made with coconuts. The shoes had scratchy, ropy bottoms with a thin layer of eyelet cloth to cover the top of the foot. These would have never worked in my hometown on the Oregon coast where it was 55 degrees and rainy practically every day, but these dainty, cheaply made shoes were a perfect costume for the me of the islands. Who would I be when I wore them? Digging deep through the waist-high basket and evaluating each shoe for size, I finally found a pair that looked like they would maybe fit my wide feet. Buying shoes was always a problem for me back at home. My body was too wide, my feet were too wide. I gingerly slid my foot with its dusty sole out of my flip flops. I dipped my big toe into the espadrille, inching it slowly, slowly deeper into the thin fabric pocket where my toes would go. With all five toes into the shoe, my fairy tale was centimeters from coming true. I was Cinderella. I was Ix Chel. I was Amphitrite. But the shoes wouldn’t budge past the bridge of my foot. I looked at the shoe in disbelief and tried to jam my foot just a little bit harder into the shoe, then much harder with an ungainly grunt. But the shoe wouldn’t fit. The wind in my sails diminished to a tentative sigh as I tossed the shoes back into the tall basket of its sisters, assaulted by the betrayal.
“You get married?” the shopkeeper asked as he busied himself with the retrieval of the exalted dress.
“Me?” I stammered awkwardly . I looked at my mom for confirmation that I hadn’t just embarrassed myself, for a lifeline about how to answer such an absurd question. She just smiled her Mona Lisa smile, as undisturbed as the masthead on a pirate ship.
“N-no. No!” I answered. “I’m only twelve!”
“Ah!” he laughed. I remembered again how my 5’4”, women’s size 18 frame dwarfed even the largest of grown up women here. I was often mistaken for being older than I was, even when I was at home. Here, I was practically a lumbering giant among petite, tanned women with long silky dark hair.
The man handed the dress on its hanger to my mom who held it up to appreciate its diaphanous quality, its exotic cultural otherness. The sun shone directly on its virginal whiteness and it may have been my imagination, or the light glinting on the fabric, or the magic I had willed into the garment with my desire, but I swear that in that moment, it sparkled. My mom held the dress up to the front of my body as I pondered the vendor’s odd question, my cheeks burning at the interaction. Did I look old enough to be someone who was old enough to be married? To a grown up man?
“Hmm.” My mom absently uttered, a cloud meandering its way over her lovely face. Her voice lowered, a timbre tinged with shame and embarrassment that I’d grown accustomed to from the dressing rooms of shops, the rows of seats from specialty shoe stores. “Do you think it will fit?”
I hesitantly took the precious dress and held it to my chest, the intensity of my wanting burning my fingers with its lightness, its promise. The dress was as light and delicate and gauzy as it had looked hanging high above, and smelled like it had been baked to perfection in the afternoon sunshine. Hope washed over me as I imagined I could hear the surf of the beach where I would walk barefoot in my new dress looking for conch shells and seaglass, sun kissing my cheeks, bathwater warm waves lapping my toes, folds of fabric caressing my legs in the seabreeze. I hugged the dress to me, savoring a reverie that had yet to happen. I took the sides of the dress in both hands and stretched the dress at the waist from both sides against my abdomen and, to my slow dismay, came up short on both sides. My mind searched frantically for any solution possible to make this fabric somehow fit my frame but came up with nothing.
A gale of subdued consternation and barely concealed shame flavored her voice when my mom looked up to the shopkeeper, asking in a whisper “Do you have any larger sizes?” She’d asked this question before. I knew that I had let her down in some way that I had yet to understand, that I have yet to understand.
“No, just that,” he said indifferently.
“Oh,” she sighed, disappointed. “Gracias,” she added, handing the dress back to him with a sad smile.
We turned to walk out of the stall back onto the hot, dusty sidewalk where hot, dusty children tried to sell us tiny, crumpled boxes of Chiclets. I looked back once as we walked away from the stall, away from the wedding, away from the beach, away from the jungle, away from the sunset, away from the ruins, away from my wedding, away from the shoes, away from the dress.
Emily Davis writes speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, and most recently, a romance novel. She lives with her husband and two children in the lovely Pacific Northwest. When she's not writing she enjoys reading, traveling, doing yoga, and being near the ocean.
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