"No."
"Give it to me, it's mine, give it to me."
I pulled, and she let go, and I fell back on my heels with my arms full of it. It was so light. That's the thing I remember most. Six months, and it weighed about as much as a towel. I looked down at what I was holding, and I couldn't make it into anything. It had been a dress. It had been a white matte crepe column dress with a square neckline and two-inch straps, because the dress code said two inches and I'd measured them myself in the fitting room with a tape measure Mrs. Kibler's seamstress lent me. It had a low V in the back that came down to the bottom of my shoulder blades and thirty-one covered buttons running down the V like a row of white peas. The skirt had fallen straight from the hip to the floor and moved when I walked like water moves, all of a piece. Now the skirt was ribbons. She'd started at the hem and gone up, again and again, long slits a few inches apart, some of them almost to the waist. One of the straps was cut through. The other one hung by a thread. The buttons were all still there. Thirty-one.
I looked up at my mother.
She hadn't moved. She hadn't put the coffee down. She was looking at me now instead of at Hadley, and her face was tired and closed, like a door with the bolt thrown, and I could see in it that she had been sitting there the whole time. Not that she'd just walked in from the kitchen. She'd been sitting right there on her end of the couch with her feet under her the whole time, maybe ten minutes, maybe more, watching her younger daughter take her older daughter's graduation dress apart one inch at a time.
"Mom," I said.
She took a sip of coffee. She looked at the dress in my arms, and something went over her face, quick, I couldn't read it, and then it was gone and the door was shut again.
"Stop being dramatic, Marlo," my mother said. "It's only a dress."
I think it's important for you to understand about the dress, and why it wasn't only a dress, and why it was. Both of those things are true. It took me most of that month to figure out how.
I grew up in Bramwell, Virginia, which is a town of about four thousand people in the Shenandoah Valley, west of the Blue Ridge, with a feed mill and a poultry plant and a Dollar General and two stoplights and more churches than I have ever been able to count. Bramwell High School has a graduation tradition that goes back to 1938, and everybody in town knows it, and everybody in town has an opinion about it, and nobody has ever been able to change it. The girls wear white dresses. Not gowns. No caps, no gowns, no tassels. The girls wear white dresses, floor-length or tea-length, with straps at least two inches wide or sleeves, and they each carry a dozen red roses. The boys wear white dinner jackets and black trousers and a red rose on the lapel. On the last Friday in May, at seven in the evening, they walk two by two down the middle of Hupp Field, between the bleachers, while the band plays the same march it has played since before my grandmother was born, and they climb the stage at the fifty-yard line one at a time and get their diplomas, and when it's over every girl walks to the fence and gives one of her roses to somebody in the stands.
The Walk of Roses, they call it. It's on the town's welcome sign. When I was six years old, Marcus put me on his shoulders at the fence so I could see over the crowd, the first year we lived in his house, and I watched sixty-some girls in white come down the field in the long gold light with their arms full of roses, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, and I decided right then that I would have a dress. Not a borrowed one. Not a church-sale one. A dress that nobody had ever worn before me. I didn't know yet what that cost. I just knew I wanted it.