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The
Blue Dress
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 wood, and stare down
into the rows and rows of camisoles,
petticoats, bras, as of 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.
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 that mercerised 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 of Education 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
Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford
University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980),
received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The
Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner
of the National Book Critics circle Award. The Father was shortlisted
for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative
Writing Program at New York University and helps run the New York University
workshop program at Goldwater hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. Sharon
Olds was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998 - 2000.