"The Blue Dress" by Sharon Olds

The first November after the divorce

there was a box from my father on my birthday—no card, but a

big box from Hink’s, the dark

department store with a balcony and

mahogany rail around the balcony, you could

stand and press your forehead against it

until you could almost feel the dense

grain of the wood, and stare down

into the rows and rows of camisoles,

petticoats, bras, as if looking down

into the lives of women. 

The box was from there, he had braved that place for me

the way he had entered my mother once

to get me out.  I opened the box—I had

never had a present from him—

and there was a blue shirtwaist dress

blue as the side of a blue teal

disguised to go in safety on the steel-blue water.

Blue Teal

I put it on, a perfect fit,

I liked that it was not too sexy, just a

blue dress for a 14-year-old daughter the way

Clark Kent’s suit was just a plain suit for a reporter, but I

Felt the weave of the mercerized Indian Head cotton

against the skin of my upper arms and my

wide thin back and especially the skin of my

ribs under those new breasts I had

raised in the night like earthworks in commemoration of his name.

A year later, during a fight about

just how awful my father had been,

my mother said he had not picked out the dress,

just told her to get something not too expensive, and then

had not even sent a check for it,

that's the kind of man he was.  So I
never wore it again in her sight

but when I went away to boarding school I

wore it all the time there,

loving the feel of it, just

casually mentioning sometimes it was a gift from my father,

wanting in those days to appear to have something

whether it was true or a lie, I didn’t care, just to

have something.
--Sharon Olds (The Gold Cell)

Father and Daughter (pencil sketch) by Kevin Candon

"I'll Stand By You" from The Pretenders sung by PS22 Children's Chorus