A Dress of Gold and The Piano

I wish I had saved the dress of gold that was bought for me at Kaufmann's Department Store. As it turned out, I had no daughter who could have worn it. But it would have been meaningful to have preserved the dress anyway. Maybe just the memory of it is enough, remembering how it felt to stroke the yellow/gold and white striped cotton, my fingers finding the rough strip of gold thread that ran between the stripes through the material. Now that I'm older I have a reverence for keepsakes, for small possessions that act as keys to the rooms of the past; now that I'm older I realize how much wealth these rooms hold.

I grew up surrounded by female relatives; my mother, my maternal grandmother and my two aunts plus my grandmother's sister and her children and their children. My cousin, Maxine, was part of the clan of interrelated women and girls. Never did I feel second-rate because I was a girl instead of a boy. I was immediately welcomed joyfully, accepted unconditionally and quite warmly, and immersed into the matrix of female-ness. Life revolved around fertility, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, babies, and family photographs in albums with black pages.

There was always somebody to be with, to talk to, always somebody to go to if you had a problem. Such is the beauty of extended family. When I was struggling with arithmetic, my aunt Esther came and sat beside me at the dining room table and tried to help, but I wasn't an easy case! My aunt Maxine (there were two Maxine's) liked sitting with me and turning over the pages of Life magazine, pointing out cars and clothes and fur coats.

My aunt Esther was 14 years old when I was born and it felt a little like we grew up together. I adored her and wanted to be like her. She played the piano, so I began taking piano lessons when I was six. It never occurred to me that I might not have musical talent! For the first year I met with the music teacher who came to John Minadeo School once a week and I learned the basics about the piano keyboard and scales and notes and reading music. After that first year it was obvious that I was able to learn to play and I enjoyed it, so my young parents scraped together $50 and bought a second-hand upright piano. Fifty dollars was a lot of money for my parents to spend, and I was full of awe when the piano came and took its place in our dining room. I began taking private lessons with a piano teacher who lived on Monitor Street. I thought about my aunt Esther every time I sat down on the piano bench to practice my lessons. I loved my piano so much that I rarely had to be reminded to practice, and being a book-lover even at age seven, I liked my new piano practice books. They had covers made of stiff yellow paper and writing in dark green script.

In 1961, when I was eleven, my aunt met Stanley Skirboll. He was very cool and sophisticated; he rode around in a convertible and went to listen to live jazz in Shadyside and downtown Pittsburgh. He had a best friend named Sandy and they were cool together. My aunt was blushing and happy and all of us who made up the women-clan were full of joy. My aunt was going to marry Stanley.

My mother took me on a heavenly shopping trip to buy me a dress for my aunt's wedding. There was no other place to go but Kaufmann's, of course! That's when we found the dress of gold. It was a little grown-up for me; it had a wide, low scooped neckline and I didn't have much to fill out the neckline nicely; however, everyone was a little drunk on the happiness of my aunt marrying Stanley Skirboll so my mother got carried away and bought the dress. I had a gold chain to wear around my neck.

The wedding took place in a rabbi's study, with family and friends only. My aunt wore an outfit that few women could get away with but of course she looked gorgeous in it--a slim two piece suit and a hat completely covered with artificial flowers. My mother went shopping with my aunt for that outfit as well, at Kaufmann's. After the wedding ceremony, everyone came back to our house for food and champagne. My mother cooked and baked all the food herself. Our house was small but who cared? There were family and friends and many toasts of L'chiam. It was perfect.

However, at a certain point I was overcome with a desire to cry. I didn't know what was happening to me, on this perfect day. Wanting nobody to see me, I went upstairs and hid in my clothes closet and sobbed my heart out! My poor aunt noticed that I was gone and came to find me and I could not explain this storm of tears. As of today I still have no answer, except that I was full to bursting with emotions that were new to me, that my aunt looked so beautiful and my new uncle was cool, that my mother had cooked and baked all this delicious food herself and everybody was enjoying it, and the whole family was happy and shouting L'chiam.

I never knew that I could cry while wearing the dress of gold.