The Love of a Good Woman

on,” she said.
    “Me?” Ann said. “It’s made for somebody with a twenty-four-inch waist. Did Derek get away to town? With his film?”
    She didn’t listen to Karin say yes. She must of course have heard the car.
    “He thinks he has to get a pictorial record,” she said. “I don’t know why all the hurry. Then he’s going to get it all boxed and labelled. He seems to think he’s never going to see it again. Did he give you the impression the place was sold?”
    “Not yet,” said Karin.
    “No. Not yet. And I wouldn’t do it unless I had to. I won’t do it unless I have to. Though I think I will have to. Sometimes things just become necessary. People don’t have to make it all into a tragedy or some personal kind of punishment.”
    “Can I try it?” Karin said.
    Ann looked her over. She said, “We have to be very careful.”
    Karin stepped out of her shoes and her shorts and pulled off her shirt. Ann lowered the dress over her head, shutting her up for a moment in a white cloud. The lace sleeves had to be worked down delicately, until the points they ended in were lying on the backs of Karin’s hands. They made her hands look brown, though she wasn’t tanned yet. The hooks and eyes had to be done up all down the side of the waist, then there were more hooks and eyes at the back of the neck. They had to hold a band of lace tight around Karin’s throat. Wearing nothing underneath the dress but herunderpants, she felt her skin prickle at the touch of lace. Lace was more deliberate, in its here-and-there contact, than anything she was used to. She shrank from feeling it against her nipples, but fortunately it was looser there, pooked out where Ann’s breasts had been. Karin’s chest was still almost flat, but sometimes her nipples felt swollen, tender, as if they were going to burst.
    The taffeta had to be pulled out from between her legs and arranged into a bell-like skirt. Then lace fell in loops over the skirt.
    “You’re taller than I thought,” Ann said. “You could walk around in it if you just held it up a bit.”
    She took a hairbrush from the dresser and began to brush Karin’s hair down over her lace-covered shoulders.
    “Nut-brown hair,” she said. “I remember in books, girls used to be described as having nut-brown hair. And you know they did use nuts to color it. My mother remembered girls boiling walnuts to make a dye and then putting the dye on their hair. Of course if you got the stain on your hands it was a dead giveaway. It was so hard to get out.
    “Hold still,” she said, and shook the veil down over the smooth hair, then stood in front of Karin to pin it on. “The headdress to this has disappeared altogether,” she said. “I must have used it for something else or given it away to somebody to wear at their wedding. I can’t remember. Anyway it would look silly nowadays. It was a Mary Queen of Scots.”
    She looked around and picked some silk flowers—a branch of apple blossoms—out of a vase on the dresser. This new idea meant she had to take the pins out and start again, bending the apple blossom stem to make a headdress. The stem was stiff, but at last she got it bent and pinned to her satisfaction. She moved out of the way and gently pushed Karin in front of the mirror.
    Karin said, “Oh. Can I have it for when I get married?”
    She didn’t mean that. She had never thought of getting married.She said it to please Ann, after all Ann’s effort, and to cover her embarrassment when she looked into the mirror.
    “They’ll have something so different in style then,” Ann said. “This isn’t even in style now.”
    Karin looked away from the mirror and looked into it again, better prepared. She saw a saint. The shining hair and the pale blossoms, the faint shadows of the falling lace on her cheeks, the storybook dedication, the kind of beauty so in earnest about itself that there is something fated about it, and something foolish. She made a face to crack that face open, but it didn’t work—it seemed as if the bride, the girl born in the mirror, was now the one in control.
    “I wonder what Derek would say if he saw you now,” Ann said. “I wonder if he’d even know it was my wedding dress?” Her eyelids were fluttering in their shy troubled way. She stood close to take the blossoms and pins out. Karin smelled soap from under her arms, and garlic on her fingers.
    “He’d say, What kind of a stupid outfit is that?” said Karin, doing a superior