Jacquard

It’s the celebration of my grandparents wedding anniversary in 1960. My mother sits across from me at the long table in the restaurant. Her face is half turned away and she is smiling. Her ears are bare but there’s a single rhinestone strand around her neck. The emerald engagement ring she always wears, matches her green eyes. Her dress has cap sleeves, a sweet-heart neck, a fitted bodice and the narrow skirt of the dress is darted to the waist seam. The material is jacquard: blue and black velvety leaves; and she’s sewn the dress herself. Her shoulders are straight, and the way she’s turned means I can see a slight gap between dress and skin where the back zipper starts from a low scoop. She wears high-heels; the stockings shine when she stands up and moves away. I don’t want her to come any closer to me—although she will, and I’ll have to pretend I don’t love her as much as I do. Her beauty and grace, her refinement, are anomalies in this family of goofs, jokers, story-tellers, Newfoundlanders—and  the happiness this vision brings me wakes me up in the middle of the night more than fifty years later. I look again: I was wrong about her ears: she’s wearing small pearl screw-ons—but she never gets them even and she never keeps them on for long.