This Is Not About Shoes

Bodice Check
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I had a dream, years ago, that I still call The Green Dress Dream, that shook me out of my sleep and was neither happy nor scary nor sad altogether, but was and remains the most distinct dream I’ve ever had, full of blazing Technicolor and exacting detail.

It was long and a ramble, as dreams often are, but the part that mattered was the part where I charged into the ocean in the dress.

We were under attack on some tiny tropical island, a futuristic Pearl Harbor full of strange, sci-fi movie weapons and screaming and smoke but strangely, no blood. The enemy wanted complete annihilation but they came for something specific too: my husband. They thought he was a spy, or had valuable secrets to share, and when he was hauled down the beach by enemy soldiers and dragged into the ocean toward a bobbing rowboat, I followed. I ran down the beach and into the water after him wearing what was maybe the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.

In my awake life, I’ve never seen this dress anywhere, not on a rack or a runway or a red carpet. (I had never seen the man who was my husband—fair-haired with Marboro Man resolve—in any of those places either.) That I remember the dress so specifically is either a function of its symbolic significance in my psyche or my complete raging insanity. It was boldly one-shouldered, a green silk chiffon that crisscrossed across the bodice and tangled its way to the floor, like Winged Victory meets Alexander McQueen. It was something you’d wear to the Golden Globes, not the apocalypse, but the presence of such a beautiful thing, a jewel against the dismal sky, changed the whole timbre of the dream from horrific to prophetic.

There was, of course, an embrace in the raging surf and sobbing before the soldiers pried him out of my arms. Then, though, as they dumped him into the boat, I suddenly shouted, “You can’t! I’m pregnant!” This news seemed to shock no one but me, as though I hadn’t known it until the words came out of my mouth.

Now, alas, we had a tragedy on our hands. Although I will admit that I looked fantastic, even in delicate condition.

Yesterday, on an outing to buy a suitcase, I found that dress on a sale rack at a Union Square department store, and I bought it. It was not inexpensive, even on sale. It was not even precisely the same dress, but I knew something was up, some strange emotional memory gurgling to the surface, when I started to cry in the fitting room. I did not make the connection to the dream, in fact, until I tried it on at home and, looking at myself in the mirror, got a woozy sense of déjà vu. I even said to a friend without thinking, “I have no place to wear this, save maybe my own wedding.”

It is a pale green silk chiffon Alberta Ferretti gown that, yes, crisscrosses across the bodice. It is not one-shouldered, but it evokes the same feeling as the dress in the dream, its goddess-y magic.

I have found many exciting, bargain-priced pieces in this city and this one held that same kind of thrill, but this dress felt especially important. Like finding the piece of a puzzle. And maybe too, that’s why I like certain pieces in the first place—a color, a texture, the turn of a sleeve. Maybe they are all scraps of memory from somewhere, a sparkling thing that held my rapt attention at two-years old, a pair of my mother’s corduroys, the smell of the boy I crushed on in high school, or something unreal—a private fiction—that only came once, in a dream.