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That Dress, That Hat

Cynthia Lewis

    That dress was the quintessential summer shirt waist: cinched in the middle, with a full, swishy skirt; made of stiff, white cotton splashed with primary colors; featuring wide, striped straps gathered together in the back by another piece of fabric. The way the straps were joined in the middle of my back meant I couldn’t wear a bra with it. But the bodice was fitted enough, and the fabric distracting enough, that, even full-breasted and middle-aged, I could get by. From the moment I tried on that dress, I knew that to wear it was to be infused by happiness. It was also to spread happiness. Everyone who saw me in that dress noticed. And many commented.
    On a trip to New York one July in the mid-nineties, I walked all over Manhattan in that dress on a fabulously sunny day. How I’d packed it in my suitcase, I’m unsure. It had to have arrived in the city terribly wrinkled. Maybe I pressed it in my room at the University Club before I took to the streets. In any case, I wore it topped by a delicate, white straw hat with an upturned brim. It was a summer ensemble—what in high school we called an “outfit.” It turned heads. People on the sidewalks would say to me, “Great dress,” and grin as they passed by. While I waited for a crossing signal to change, a woman standing behind me said, “You should see your dress from the back. It’s gorgeous.” She was referring to both the gathered straps and the sun tan that, however ill-advisedly, I still cultivate every summer. On such an extraordinarily beautiful summer’s day—warm, dry, not too hot to enjoy walking—people felt cheerful and generous. They were in a mood to appreciate that dress, and I was in a mood to let them.
    I’d made plans to meet Franklin, a beloved former student of mine, in the afternoon, catch a coffee, then take him to dinner with a larger group. Franklin had graduated years earlier from the small, Southern liberal arts college where I teach English. A gifted artist, he was trying to make it in New York as a painter while supporting himself doing illustrations for Banana Republic. I fetched Franklin at his office, near the Museum of Modern Art, where we walked for coffee. We hadn’t seen each other in quite a while, and, at the very first moment we met up, he mentioned my dress. Then my hat. Throughout the afternoon, while we walked and sat and caught up, he’d come back to that dress, that hat. His compliments made me feel wonderful.
    Franklin and I went on to dinner in the Upper East Side with the other people on the trip with me—my husband, Jason, a fundraiser at the college where I still teach, and Lacy, another former student of mine who was by then employed in Jason’s office. She’d been in the very first Shakespeare class I’d ever taught, when I was all of 29. The dinner group also included Charles, one of my husband’s fraternity brothers from the same college, who lived in New York with his wife, Mina.
    Throughout the dinner, Franklin continued to call attention to my dress, my hat, my style—“Doesn’t she look fanTAStic!” I continued to feel flattered, as well as a little embarrassed by the fuss. Jason seemed indifferent, focused on Charles, whom, off and on, Mina needled and embarrassed. I recall knowing that Mina was an alcoholic. Her drinking seemed linked to her disrespect for Charles, which, later that night and the next day, Lacy, who had been subdued at dinner, mentioned over and over again. She repeatedly expressed sympathy for “poor Charles,” sympathy out of proportion, I thought, to my impression of what had actually happened and to a relatively small element of a pleasurable evening overall. Why was she dwelling on him, I wondered vaguely.
    Now I know. I was being set up.
    If, several years later, Jason were going to leave me and wreck a family of four children to be with Lacy, and if she were going to move the process along, they needed justification. I believe, during that dinner, Lacy lit upon a reason she could begin feeding Jason to legitimate their adultery. Eventually, they could defend the destruction, at least to themselves, on the grounds that I was impossible to live with—on the order of a nagging Mina. Like Charles, they would assure themselves, Jason would be much better off with a woman who really loved him, who saw his worth and who, paradoxically, appeared to expect and demand little of him. Made vulnerable by stress at work and anxiety over turning 50, Jason bought into Lacy’s suggestions and came to hold me responsible for his discontent. They viewed their affair as a justifiable rescue mission. Lacy was helping him escape the trauma of all of those years, now seemingly unbearable, of living with me.
    But here’s another perspective on what ensued from that night in the restaurant. Lacy wanted more than Jason. She wanted to be me. She wanted to be me in that dress and that hat with that husband. I don’t mean that she wanted to be me on a molecular level—but she wanted a great deal of what I had, so she desired the wherewithal, which I modeled, to get it. And she thought having it would give her the satisfaction my life gave me. Even then, in the restaurant, I noticed how she reacted to the attention I was getting at the table as she withdrew into silence. I doubt she’s ever fully understood her motivation. But I understand it, and I’m not alone. On occasion, when I relate the story of my marriage’s end to someone, the person, struck by the fact that this former student had once looked up to me, will say, “You know, I think she wanted to be you. How strange.”
    I remember having her in class. A transfer from an all-women’s college, she wasn’t the best student, but her peers liked her, as I did. She wanted to please, even to bond, and we did so somewhat when I became advisor to a women’s social organization in which she was an officer. Her desire for approval could be slightly unsettling, as if she wanted more from me than I could give, something that only she could give herself. I remember, for instance, that in a lecture on Much Ado about Nothing, I’d used the word ennoble for Shakespeare’s treatment of marriage. “Shakespeare ennobles marriage in this play,” I’d said. Months later, on the final exam, Lacy used that word, my word—ennoble—when writing about Shakespeare’s portrayal of marriage in Much Ado. She had probably put that word in her notes, as any earnest student would have done. But the students I teach rarely parrot their professor so precisely in written work. Her doing so stands out in my memory.
    Although she graduated and moved on to banking jobs, she always seemed to be coming back to the college in search of a job in Jason’s department. As an English professor, I taught an endless stream of bright, talented, confident students who were ideal candidates for fund-raising, and I passed along many of their names over the years, most of them women. He’d hired a number of them, and they’d proved as valuable as predicted. When he occasionally brought up Lacy’s name, I remember hesitating and saying that I could recommend many abler graduates. He had good judgment about these things. Why, I wondered at the time, was he even considering hiring her? Why did she keep reappearing?
    I later realized that, for years before Jason left home, she had been shadowing us, lurking on the margins of our marriage and family. At college functions, at fundraising dinners, at intra-office social events, I would catch her watchful eye as she glanced away. I believe that she was studying us, studying me, that she imagined a low-impact rearrangement through which I would simply be snipped out of the family portrait and she would be spliced into it, inheriting a pre-fabricated existence.
    “When the whole story becomes public, people are going to think I’ve lost my mind,” Jason told a dear friend of mine just as he was leaving home, but before the affair was revealed. He meant that they would wonder why he would leave me for Lacy. Yes, I know: in suggesting that he could see marked differences between her and me, I’m implying that, to him, she was the anti-me, the person for whom he was rejecting me. But from her viewpoint, usurping what I valued was a way to gather self-esteem. However mistakenly, she thought such identity theft would make her feel fulfilled.
    Years after the wreckage, I’m on the phone with Alexis, a good friend of mine, who has just learned that David, her husband and also my friend, has been sexually involved with her long-time best friend, Kara. Frantic with broken trust, struggling to process this alien knowledge, and choking with anger, Alexis tells me that Kara threw herself at David when he was emotionally most vulnerable. She’s discovered e-mails from Kara to David, luring him with promises of supporting him financially for life. Then she says of her best friend and betrayer, “She wanted to be me. I can see that now, in the e-mails. She wanted my life.” Although I’ll later hear many sides to this story, I don’t need further explanation to accept Alexis’ perspective. I’m one of few people willing to believe her without it: her sense of being dispatched resonates with my own. “It happened to me, too,” I almost whisper in response.
    What happened to Alexis and to me didn’t match in every detail, but I’ve heard enough similar narratives to make me wonder what causes such failure of imagination on a woman’s part. Why would she need to highjack another woman’s identity to fill the gap where her own original, authentic self ought to reside? The affair must be at least as much about the two women as it is about the male component of the equation. It starts as a rivalry over an object of desire, whether a man, a career, or a whole life, then expands nightmarishly. Hollywood has already been there. In All about Eve, from 1950, Anne Baxter insinuates herself into the world of Bette Davis, the better to take over her stage career and social life. The Web site for Single White Female, released in 1992, reads, “Allie’s new room-mate is about to borrow a few things without asking. Her clothes. Her boyfriend. Her life.” The voice-over on the trailer eerily asks, “How do you lock out the terror when you’ve already invited it in?” Eventually, the roommate, Hedra, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, says to Bridget Fonda’s Allie, “Now I’m you.” Jack Finney’s 1955 Cold War novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has seen three film adaptations for a reason—the overwhelming horror of losing your life’s substance while you, unsuspecting, sleep.
    Everyone knows someone whose bank and credit card accounts have been raided. It’s a disruption closely connected to body-snatching in relationships, since another person is inhabiting the forms that, in some crucial way, make you who you are. You are responsible for others’ actions within those forms, and, once the incarnation occurs, undoing it is arduous, possibly insurmountable. The person who forfeits identity this way—through lost property—has plenty in common with a woman whose social life has been appropriated by another woman who covets it. The tie between both kinds of impersonation lights up in the example of a woman I know who experienced both simultaneously.
    Shelly’s ex-husband and his new wife, Kate, were suing Shelly over several financial matters. But Shelly was convinced that, for Kate, who brought no children to the marriage, the lawsuits were really about capturing her two children. “It’s like she wants my children, she wants my children,” Shelly tells me as she recalls that Kate used to babysit for her boys. “I have joked with people over the years,” Shelly continues, “as it became increasingly clear to me, you know, I think what’s going on here is she’s obsessed with me.” As one of many reasons for her belief, Shelly cites Kate’s having entered a graduate program in an academic field closely related to the one in which Shelly herself was already well established.
    The story that, so far, sounds similar to mine becomes doubly horrific when Shelly relates how, during this period of emotional unmooring, her house in North Carolina was broken into by someone who wasn’t caught until months later. Only then did she realize he was someone she’d met casually when he’d walked by her house and complimented her yard. While she was out of town, he slipped in the back of the house, and, the police told her, spent the entire night there. Among the items he stole, many of them her children’s possessions, was the valet key to her Passat, although at the time she thought she’d simply misplaced it. A couple of months after the robbery, on her birthday in fact, the Passat was missing. So was the title to it. She now realized that the same man who’d entered her house while she was gone had taken all manner of documents proving what she owned and, incidentally, revealing her birthday.
    A series of flukes eventually led the police to the robber, who was still in town, teaching at a local school. He was resourceful enough to have forged a bill of sale for the car and registered it in Maine. Incredibly, he continued to drive the car in town, having put Shelly’s license plates in his freezer; Shelly thought at one point she’d seen the Passat, but was thrown by the Maine plates. A DMV worker in Maine, who thought the bill of sale looked odd, had run the VIN number when the culprit first registered the vehicle, but the car wasn’t yet coming up as stolen. Still suspicious, the steadfast DMV man held the paperwork for a month, then ran the number again. This time the car showed up as stolen. When the police in Shelly’s town got a call from Maine, they went to her house with the news that she knew her malefactor.
    Although this part of her story wraps up fairly tidily, and although the lawsuits resolved themselves, and although Shelly has one helluva tale for the telling, the aftershocks of these twin episodes endure. The break-in alone, she tells me, “was incredibly creepy,” reaching such a high level of personal invasiveness that the police classified the crime as a psycho-sexual stalking bound to escalate. The intruder “went through photo albums, leaving them on the bed,” she says, then adds, “Oh Christ, I’d forgotten about that.” One trauma intensified the other. “This was going on at the same time my ex’s new wife was doing everything she could to try to erase me from the world,” she explains. “At that time, when it was new and fresh, and she was not only trying to get me erased, she was trying to get everything I own. I was being sued for everything I own.”
    Other elements of the intertwined plots have also left their psychological mark on Shelly. One that she admits is “almost comical” occurred when both the police and her insurance company initially assumed she’d left the missing title in her Passat. “They’re insisting that I left the title in the glove compartment,” she remembers, “and I’m insisting I didn’t, and it was just, just infuriating. They would never have said this if I were a man.” She and I laugh together over this typical sexism, but, while I watch her relive the events she’s narrating as they tumble from her memory, I recognize the flushed cheeks, the searching eyes, the animated face, the body barely sitting and ready to lift itself off the sofa, the general agitation. Several years have passed since she went through her ordeal; many more have come and gone since I was subjected to mine. But once the chill of recognizing what’s happened to you has passed through you, it can return with small provocation.
    As little choice as I had in the matter, though, I suppose I’d rather be relating this side of the story than the new bride’s. In most cases, she’ll probably figure out that, by getting what she wished for, she’s wound up with something very different from what she expected—husband, self, and all.
    Real relationships unravel for as many reasons as they originally knit together. No one is ever solely responsible for a break-up. But in our culture of entitlement, some women, imagining they deserve whatever they want, feel no compunction about breaking into an established household and staging a hostile take-over. The women who do so—the body-snatchers of today—are deluded at best. The men who cooperate in these invasions are self-serving at least. How long before both parties realize that what remains is little more than a hollow dress and hat?

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