The French Dress

I was returning to Miami and was going to stay at my aunt’s new house. A green cab picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at a parking lot in my aunt’s neighborhood. I paid the fare, got out, and there was mama, standing in the middle of the lot. She was wearing a pleated, white French dress with blue embroidered foliage and a red trim. Her arms were pulled in opposite directions by two leashed, white toy poodles. An Edith Piaf tune crackled from old speakers hung on the light posts in the lot.

I stared at mama, realizing by this point that it was all a dream, and she made a big fuss, “Surprise!,” she beamed. She was there to welcome me home, even though I would only be staying the weekend.

Then I noticed my entire extended family was there. Some cousins were in their cars with the windows rolled down, a few aunts were standing near the toy poodles. No one looked at me except mama; they stared away at nothing in particular. Their vacant eyes were frightening—it wasn’t that they seemed to be in despair, it was like...their souls had died...and far be it from me to make assumptions about what soulless people should or shouldn’t do, but I was amazed that in spite of their lifelessness they all held lit sparklers. Sparklers make me happy. Mama and I used to run around the house fourth of July’s with lit sparklers. We believed the golden fire from the lit sticks would cleanse the house of evil spirits and make the good spirits smile. None of my relatives had sparklers when I first saw them, though. The sparklers simply appeared, fully lit, in their hands the moment mama said, “Welcome home, my darling son!”

“This is excessive,” I calmly thought. Still, I thanked mama for her graciousness and asked if she’d be joining me at my aunt’s house. She said she had work to do and wished me a good time, so I walked off to the house. I can’t remember how you get there from the parking lot. The house isn’t right next to the lot and you can’t take the sidewalk to get to it...I think you need to walk along the shoreline...

My aunt’s house is amazing. It looks right over the ocean and has stone floors and a great bathroom that you can only get to from one of the balconies. The walls of that bathroom are translucent and there’s a skylight and plants growing inside—like a greenhouse. My aunt had lovingly filled the numerous stone dishes inside with purple, lavender-scented soaps. They were all oddly shaped and I figured it’s because they were the expensive hand-milled variety. I guess you can’t really hand-mill soap (you can hand-cut or hand-make it), but this wasn’t a reasonable dream. This wasn’t even my real aunt or a house I've really been in, so maybe in this unreal world soaps CAN be made with table-top mills. Maybe it's a very crafty world.

I don’t remember much what I did at my aunt’s. Being as close as we were to the water, I’m sure I took in some rays and frolicked in the sea a bit. That’s it—I relaxed by the ocean and went swimming each morning. Yes, that must be what I did, because that’s what I would do. Oh, and I took long baths with those hand-milled soaps. They were heavenly. Some even had whole flowers embedded in them and I felt like an uppity girl straight out of a Jane Austen novel.

When the time came to leave I walked to the parking lot to wait for the taxi. There was mama again, still dressed like a French flag, still holding two poodles. This time there was a cousin taking photos of mama and he kept saying, "This is it. This is your photo shoot. Look beautiful! Look gorgeous!" Mama made a very good model. I was impressed by how well she dealt with the chaos created by poodles, a make-up artist that kept retouchign her face, and a giant fan meant to simulate hurricane force winds. It was tropical storm photo shoot. Mama looked gorgeous in it. Her dress had a Marylin Monroe-ish undulation going on and her dyed blonde hair rippled behind her. She graciously waved goodbye while the make-up artist added more red to her lips, but mama wasn’t able to make a fuss with her goodbye--no kisses or hugs—after all, she had a spread to finish.