Object-ives # 11: The Hardest Working Dress on the Planet
Memories of cloth and armor for a rebellious promgoer
This is a story about a good girl with a rebellious streak who didn’t believe in archaic rituals like high school proms and so she vowed not to attend her senior prom. She was fine with that decision (daring to assert her authentic self!), but the pressure to go was very intense, coming at her from friends, from parents, from everyone who believed in this so-called rite of passage, which she saw straight through as childish nonsense riddled with bad music, and why was she the only one who felt like that?
This is also a story about a dress, but more on that later.
The prom dust-up wasn’t the first time the good girl had zagged when everyone else zigged. She refused to prep for the SAT because she didn’t believe in standardized tests and couldn’t understand why her free-ranging imagination should be yoked to a stupid set of fillable dots demanding answers to nonsensical math questions.
In Honors English, her box collage designed to reveal her innermost identity (hey, we did this sort of shit in the ’70s), elicited gasps and stares and conversations that lasted for days. What had she revealed, exactly? All she’d done, for God’s sake, was paste a bunch of cut-out magazine pictures onto the sides of a Lucite box. But you’d think she’d shared the codes for nuclear Armageddon. The good girl doesn’t remember the message but the reaction spoke volumes: Different is as different does.
So back to senior prom.
The good girl is dating the class valedictorian, Alex, who sports a thick mop of golden hair (which apparently he lost entirely years later) and gold-rimmed glasses designed to telegraph his intelligence.
She and Alex share a best friend, Larry, who’s secretly in love with the good girl, but she doesn’t know that, and Larry is too loyal to give himself away.
Naturally, Alex asks the good girl—his girlfriend—to the prom. Naturally, she refuses—not him, per se, but the prom qua prom. Larry intervenes. He’s cuter than Alex, but oh, well, too late now.
“You have to go,” Larry tells her. “He needs you. You can’t do this to him.”
“You really should go.” That’s Mom and Dad, so discomfited by the prospect of their good girl acting out, they forced her to begin dating against her will in middle school because that’s what girls did at that age. Her dad literally forced her to drink alcohol despite repeated protests on her 18th birthday because that’s what you did when you came of age. Who skips senior prom? Not good girls, certainly.
The good girl doesn’t want to cave, but she fears she’s going to cave, because who can withstand all this pressure?
She’s got her principles, that’s for sure. She believes that as a person mature beyond her years, a person who feels deeply about the world, senses meanings beyond surfaces, watches all the abstruse foreign films shown after school (think French New Wave and early German Expressionism), this person should own the right to take a hard pass on a silly, ephemeral event like prom. Her judgment ought to be respected.
But it isn’t. And only when the dress enters the picture is the good girl able to compromise. Not happily. But she does. Because that’s what good girls do.
This dress is like a foreign ambassador sent to make peace between enemies.
This dress is a definite zag, not a zig.
This dress allows the good girl to feel a bit like herself in circumstances that scream in opposition. Because the dress itself is oppositional: An all-black, full-length sleeveless sheath with a bandeau neck that somehow elongates the body and frames the shoulders elegantly.
The other girls wear unstructured maxi dresses, ruffles and lace, pastels, and delicate fabrics like chiffon, as well as synthetic fibers like polyester, rayon, and Qiana.
The good girl stands out on the dance floor like a witch at a fairy ball. The good girl fancies herself Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s while the rest are Marianne from Gilligan’s Island.
That’s why this works. The only reason this works: because she wears her difference like an honor roll.
Alex and Larry are pleased because she looks va-va-voom and more to the point, she falls in with their plan. Their Cinderella attends the ball, and dances, and generally behaves herself.
But who gives a shit about them? (At the time, she does, but later, she won’t.)
She wore the dress just once before it was put onto a padded hanger and stored in a closet in a home her parents left behind shortly after the good girl left for college.
She never saw it again. It was as if the black dress was too hot to handle, an artifact proving that the good girl had rebelled by remaking the world in her own image, if only for one long night.
The dress disappeared, but it had done its job. Still, the good girl searched on and off over the years for replicas of that dress everywhere, and never found it.
But no matter. That black dress is timeless.
Amy L. Bernstein writes award-winning, genre-crossing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is Wrangling the Doubt Monster: Fighting Fears, Finding Inspiration, a hybrid work of prose-poetry for self-doubting creatives, shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Her fifth novel, Seed, is forthcoming from Running Wild Press. Amy is also a professional book coach, helping nonfiction writers to develop great books that land agents and publishers. She publishes Doubt Monster on Substack.
Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.
Recommended reading on possessions:
“Retail Market So Dire I Made My Own Couch” by
, PIGPEN“100 Days of Junk Journaling” by
, Cattywumpus“ALEX’S VICTORINIX” by Jaimie Li,
“New: My Condo Is Not Just Where This Man Lives …” by
“I Keep Meaning to Donate This Damn Box” by
“Are you a hoarder or a purger?” by
, Books + Bits | A guest post by
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Love this! In the early 2000s, I also wore a sleeveless black sheath dress to prom. It was a classic as yours sounds, and I was so pleased to be going in a group of friends, not pretending to have a boyfriend. I was also pleased because going to dances (and dancing) were forbidden in my ultra-straightlaced extended family, but this was one rule my mom let me and my sisters break. We lived in a small town (my graduating class was less than 50!), so we pretty much all went to prom every year (or there wouldn't have been enough people). But senior year was the only year I didn't pretend to be on a date (also not really allowed in my upbringing but expected at school). That black dress was part of my bid for freedom to not follow anyone's rules for a night (though I didn't really realize it then!).
I cannot claim to have been this rebel girl but wow, how I wish I had been. Thank you for the great story telling!