The Midnight Dress
Karen Foxlee
For Doris Winifred Foxlee
Anchor Stitch
Will you forgive me if I tell you the ending? There’s a girl. She’s standing where the park outgrows itself and the manicured lawn gives way to longer grass and the stubble of rocks. She is standing in no-man’s-land, between the park and the place where the mill yards begin.
It’s night and the cane trains are still.
It is unbearably humid and she feels the sweat sliding down her back and she presses her hands there into the fabric to stop the sensation that is ticklishly unpleasant. She lifts up the midnight dress to fan her legs. It’s true, the dress is a magical thing, it makes her look so heavenly.
The shoes she’s wearing are too big. She’s tripped once already walking in them, across the park, away from the town. She drank some wine earlier, cheap wine, behind the rotunda. She can still hear the harvest festival now. A voice over a microphone proclaiming what a wonderful night it is, then music, a slow out-of-time waltz. She can hear the crowd too, the deep rumble of voices and the sudden shrieks of laughter.
She feels excited. The girl doesn’t think she has ever felt so excited. It’s been building in her for weeks, this breathless rushing sensation. She feels the goose flesh rise on her arms just thinking of it. She’s exactly where she is meant to be, that’s what it is, it’s like a homecoming. It’s like her dreams. She puts a hand on her stomach because she has butterflies and, with the other, adjusts the coronet in her hair.
She doesn’t know how she should stand when he arrives. She doesn’t know whether she should have one leg in front of the other like a beauty queen, or legs side by side. Should she lean her back against something as though she isn’t so excited, standing in that place, clutching the little black purse in her hands? What will she do with the purse? When he goes to hold her, how will she put it down, will she just drop it? She’s trying to sort these things out in her mind.
What should she say? Her mind is perfectly blank when it comes to that. Usually she can think of words, but now she can’t think of anything. Maybe something will come when he arrives. Something funny maybe, or seductive, or both.
When she hears footsteps her heart nearly jumps out her mouth.
She laughs.
‘Where are you?’ she whispers, because she can’t see him yet.
It’s dark. Suddenly it feels darker, as though a cloud has passed over the moon. She looks up to check but there is the moon, newly struck, white hot. When she looks back he’s there. He looks as shocked as her but then he smiles.
‘What are you doing here?’ she says.
Rose arrives one night in January when the barometers are dipping and there is not a breath of air in the wide empty streets. The palm trees along the main drag hang their despondent heads and women fan themselves in open doorways hoping for something, some little breeze. Old ladies watch the evening news, take hankies from their bra straps and wipe their top lips; in public bars the sweat drips from chins. And already in countless darkened bedrooms, on beds beneath ceiling fans that thump and whir, girls lie dreaming of dresses.
The rain comes in sudden exhausted sighs and spontaneous shuddering downpours but does nothing to ease the discomfort. They drive down the deserted main street and Rose thinks it looks like a shitty little place. She’s an expert on such things. They could keep driving except there isn’t enough petrol left. The service station is closed. That alone sums up the town. They turn across the train tracks, where they see a sign proclaiming PARADISE JUST 7 KMS AHEAD.
Paradise is a caravan park. Her father kills the engine and sits still, gripping the wheel. Rose can hear the ocean, the sudden intake of its breath, as though it has remembered something, something terrible, but finding there is nothing it can do, it breathes out again. The night is dark and starless.
‘It’s as good a place as any,’ he finally says.
She gets out and slams the door.
‘Shit.’
Toads leap before every step.
The kiosk is shut too. There’s a bell for after-hours arrivals, which she rings but no one comes.
When she gets back to the car her father is still sitting at the wheel. She reaches in and takes the keys from the ignition. He doesn’t flinch. Typical. She knows exactly what will happen next. He will stay there all night thinking. He’ll try to solve the problem as though it is a huge and complicated theorem, but in the morning he’ll realise it is all very simple. He’ll stumble from the car and into the caravan, pull the little curtain around his bed and his shaking will begin.
‘I’m going to bed, Dad,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ he says, staring out at the dark.
She can’t attach the power until the kiosk is open, so she moves through the dark inside the caravan until she reaches her own small bed. She opens the drawer beside her pillow, feels for her brush, undoes her hair. She brushes it out, seventy-one strokes, and ties it in a plait. She remembers her mother doing exactly the same thing. The memory is hazy, pale, like an overexposed photo. She presses her eyes until the image burns and is replaced by tears.
Stupid. It’s stupid to cry.
‘Stupid,’ she says aloud.
It’s raining lightly. It patters softly on the caravan roof. When she was small her father said that was God drumming his fingertips. She can hear the sea very clearly, its sharp breaths and exhalations, the whole night around her, thinking. She lies down, presses her eyes again.