The Apple Green Dress

You never did get around to knitting that dress. Remember, we were in that shop on Rodeo Drive when we saw it. It was apple green; just a fragment of a dress really, a limp and filmy Italian knit, but you took it into the dressing room and stepped out a moment later, and we both gasped. It was perfect.

It’s hard to believe a dress could transform a woman so, but as you stood there in front of the three-way, your feet tanned and bare – you had kicked off your Birks, remember, saying they would do the dress no justice, and you were right – the light from the fancy skylight hit your sun bleached hair and you were illuminated. Even the snotty sales-clerk who had taken such pains to make us feel we did not belong – remember how she asked us where were from? Obviously not from there, or we would have known that we did not belong in that shop – even she was stunned.

You told me to try it, and the sales clerk snorted a distressed little snort, but we didn't care, and so I did, and damned if it didn't work for me too.

Then we looked at the tag – it was the price of a good used car, and we could have used a used car in that town, because the buses were hell, remember? And you looked at me and we started to laugh at the sheer silliness of a dress – even a magic dress – costing as much as a car.

I slipped it off carefully and handed it to the snorting clerk on the way out and you said “I’ll knit one” and we laughed and laughed. Then we found that fancy coffee shop around the corner and stood in line behind that old movie star – what was her name? She was drenched in some expensive American perfume and we held our noses and laughed some more. Then we told each other that we would find a yarn shop and you would knit the dress, but you never did.