The Women of Maxine’s Bridal
The first evening, the woman comes alone, browses all the gown racks. It is six in the evening, the streetlamps blink on, and Baltimore’s dusk turns the sky orange, and dayworkers chase buses into silhouettes, except for Maxine’s Bridal, with its ancient electric sign and running lights.
“Entourage?” the newest nineteen-year-old sales associate, Violet, asks from behind the register, and Mena, the middle-aged senior associate sitting at a desk in the rear of the store, shrugs and says, “This ain’t uptown.”
The woman ignores them, searches through all the racks, and proceeds to select then study various gowns before rejecting and stuffing them back onto the rack. Violet studies the woman’s expression, her pursed lips shoved to one side of her face. She’s older, but younger than Mena, and her hair is messy and unkempt for a bride-to-be. Her face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions, like worried, say, or disappointed. Her gray, unwashed sweat suit is baggy, stained at the knees.
An hour passes, and Violet whispers to Mena, “She’s rushed,” to which Mena says, “No appointment, but you could offer to help.”
“So could you,” Violet says.
Mena shrugs. She has enough to do, and Violet needs to learn to step up more. The woman leaves without asking about or trying on a single gown. Violet walks toward the racks to make sure the gowns are all facing the correct direction. “Why would someone rush looking for a wedding gown? Why would they not ask for help?”
Mena focused on her work tablet. “Maybe she’s trying to get some ideas,” she says.
Some bridal and quinceañera gowns can only be ordered online because there’s not enough room in the store for all their inventory. Mena often prints photos of these gowns and dresses and pins them on the doorframes of the dressing room doors so customers can get an idea of some of the styles not in the store. Those gowns live in a small, temperature-controlled building around the corner from the shop. Sometimes Violet and Mena hurry out the back door to the storage building to pull gowns they think the brides with whom they are working might be interested in trying on. Working in a bridal salon, Mena has seen it all, the lovely families and the ugly ones who behave badly, brides who should lace up their sneakers and run far from the grooms, and conversely, the kindest grooms besotted by the most selfish, self-absorbed brides. Mothers who bring their sharp tongues with their purses, subtly and not so subtly insulting the brides, and the daddy’s girls with unlimited budgets, even with borrowed funds.
“Weddings and funerals bring out the worst in people,” Mena says. She yawns.
The seamstress, the owner of Maxine’s Bridal, comes in from the back room, holding a tray of beaded appliqués and a threaded needle in her mouth, the knotted white thread dangling past her chin. Her name is Sabra, and the store was named Maxine’s Bridal when she bought it a handful of years ago, but unlike the old Maxine’s, Sabra offers her own designs for custom gowns, designer samples, tailoring to off-the-rack dresses and detailing such as beaded appliqués to bump up plain-Jane dresses for budget-minded customers. She slides the tray of beaded and sequined appliqués into the display case with the tiaras, beaded and rhinestone hair accessories, earrings and bracelets, and then scans the empty store. She approaches the front of the store to the display window and looks beyond the mannequins in formal wear posing with expressionless faces.
“Where are all the brides?” She catches her reflection in the window—tired eyes behind black-framed glasses with thick lenses, long arms and thin fingers perfect for sewing, hair in a stylish but disheveled knot in the back of her head, a still girlish figure in stylish all-black clothing she designed and sewed for herself, accented by chunky jewelry—the bloom fading—a worrisome and harsh perception of herself, but Sabra’s perception and her eyesight become distorted when she works too long in the back room under the florescent lights, hunched over the sewing machine, working the machine’s pedal, creating long, straight stitches, pressing seams until they are flat and beautiful and finishing them off with an overcasting stitch on regular-tier dresses and painstaking French seams on higher-tier dresses.
“We’ll need to run some ads.”
“A walk-in just came in,” Mena says.
“She rushed through the racks for an hour,” Violet says. “Not dressed for gown shopping.”
“Did anyone help her?” Sabra asks.
Violet looks at her feet, knowing no one approached the customer.
“We don’t judge. We treat every customer like royalty, regardless of what they’re wearing when they step inside our shop,” Sabra says. “Everyone’s wedding is special.”
She removes the threaded needle from her mouth and works it into the fabric of her blouse for safekeeping and fusses with the smallest mannequin wearing a royal blue quinceañera ball gown with pink roses. She contemplates her hands, the skin still smooth but fingertips calloused from needles and pins. They are the hands of her father, who tailored cassocks for priests and suits for businessmen before they came to America and afterward in Baltimore’s sweatshops until the bosses noticed his skills and elevated him to master tailor. She learned sewing and tailoring skills from her father, how to make and measure patterns and work on the tailoring mannequin while he sewed cassocks at home for his own clients, but her mother, who worked on buttonholes, sleeves, hems, and pockets in the same sweatshops, taught her close, detailed stitching. They alternated work times so that Sabra would never be alone. Sabra considers the irony and smiles: never married, using skills her parents taught her, her life’s work ensuring that other women look like princesses on their wedding days. She enjoys all her customers’ weddings as if they were her own.
The woman in a rush returns and manages to again arrive when no one else is in the store. Three days have passed since her first visit. From behind the accessories display, Mena watches the woman. She wears different-colored sweatpants, a darker gray fabric, dotted with stains like the ones before. She oozes fatigue. Her hair seems more haphazard as she glances at her watch and frantically searches through the racks as if they were on fire, pulling out mermaid cuts, fits and flairs, ball gowns, in white, in ivory, in galactic blue, and in blush, holding each one above her head, examining the seams, feeling the fabric, and touching the beading and sequins before returning them to the rack. She stares at each one as if imagining what it would look like on a body instead of a hanger. Even Violet knows that some dresses on hangers look different on a bride, transforming themselves and the wearer.
“Isn’t it weird that her sweatpants look even worse than the last time? Not the way a woman looking for a wedding gown should look,” Violet says in a sotto voce. She crouches behind the display case next to Mena and studies the woman, who does not notice.
“Maybe she works all day doing a dirty job, like cleaning houses,” Mena says. “Dirty work is honest work.”
Sabra walks in from the back room, carrying the requisite small platter of cheese and crackers offered to brides with appointments.
“Royalty,” she says to Mena and Violet as she strolls by them.
“Something I can help you find?” Sabra asks, setting the platter on one of the sofa tables in the entourage area. “Please, help yourself. Would you care for some wine?”
The woman shakes her head. “Don’t have a vision yet,” she says.
“Sometimes the vision doesn’t come until you’re actually wearing a gown. Maybe you’d like to make an appointment and bring some friends to help?” Sabra says.
The woman shakes her head again and hurries out of the store. Sabra carries the cheese tray with her into the back room, where there is a small kitchen for staff.
“That was a waste of time,” Mena says. She sounds jaded. “Royalty,” she says loud enough for only Violet to hear, rolling her eyes.
Still, Mena cannot deny being intrigued by the woman, who searches the racks regardless of price points. Brides usually like to stick to budgets, but the woman pulled gowns of all prices, from less than $100 from last season’s floor samples to the designer gowns with hefty price tags. The shop rule is never showing a bride a dress higher than her budget because it’s heartbreaking for a bride to fall in love with a dress she cannot afford. By the woman’s sixth visit, her sixth search through the racks, the sixth untouched cheese platter, Violet finds herself inventing stories for the woman’s visits. Maybe she is not getting married or not having a wedding and just likes looking at wedding gowns; maybe she would have been getting married, but her intended was killed in a car crash or in some kind of traffic accident; maybe she’s on some kind of draconian diet that does not allow her to sample cheese and crackers; maybe she’s planning a secret wedding; maybe she just dreams of having a wedding like the lady in the movie Muriel’s Wedding, and she hasn’t yet found the perfect groom to stand in as the necessary prop. In all her nineteen years of life, she can’t fathom what would inspire a woman to repeatedly visit a bridal shop wearing the dirty sweatpants and oversized tops and never ask a single question about any of the dresses. Violet imagines how she’d look and behave if she were shopping for a wedding gown. Then she glimpses the always working and never married Sabra in the back room, glasses low on her nose, eyes trained on the close stitching for alterations, and wonders if working in a bridal shop would jinx any of her prospects of finding a man to marry; both Mena and her mother tell her she needs to focus on career goals instead of a man, because promises made are not always promises kept, and she needs to support herself regardless. She cannot think of what career she wants to focus on. Her father suggests health care, specifically nursing, but when she tells him she doesn’t like being around sick people, he suggests becoming a mortician, because people die every day, and she’ll never be without a job. She thinks he’s joking, then realizes he’s serious when she laughs and he doesn’t.
“That’s an immigrant philosophy,” Mena tells her. “A recession-proof job. Wish I would have listened to that advice.”
Being divorced twice already, Mena understands the messiness of life, how the mysterious woman may be searching for the perfect gown for something romantic like renewing vows, or maybe a second wedding, and she doesn’t have time to fool around. Maybe she’s already married, and her husband counts the minutes it takes for her to travel from her job to her home. She wonders what’s worse—a man who cheats or a crazy man who counts the minutes it takes to travel from Point A to Point B. She wonders why the woman comes to the shop dressed as if she’s homeless in grubby, cheap clothes when weddings cost money, regardless of how low budget they might be. Even the cheapest gowns carry a price tag, and that’s for a floor sample on sale in sizes smaller than the woman appears to be.
Sabra refuses to speculate about the woman. “Stop judging clients. It’s rude,” she tells Mena and Violet. “We shouldn’t talk about her like that.”
Sabra bends her neck and strains her eyes on the close stitching on indigo fabric, the needle slipping through the fabric and her calloused fingers while she contemplates the necessary alterations on six identical gowns, slated to be picked up at the end of the week. She also contemplates hiring an additional seamstress before the wedding season begins at the first of the year when savvy brides understand that January is the best time to buy a gown.
Two entire weeks have passed since the woman’s last visit, and the trio—Sabra, Violet, and Mena—forget about her. Bridal season is about to start, and early-bird brides have seen the store’s ads. The shop becomes full of brides wanting perfect gowns that may not exist; theirs and the groom’s mothers wanting to celebrate their children’s weddings while enhancing their own beauty. Too many entourages voicing rude opinions about each other and about the gowns; too many bridesmaids squabbling over the styles and colors, not counting the girls stepping into quinceañera gowns and tiaras. Too many accessories to track, trunk shows and bridal conferences to prepare for keeping them busy, and Sabra loves the excitement and energy electrifying the atmosphere inside the store. It helps, too, when Sabra’s interview in a local style magazine highlighting her original designs and her ability to mimic designer styles hits the newsstands with the title “A Hidden Gem Bridal Shop Flourishes on the Eastside.” A large photo of Sabra peering above her glasses low on her nose, cerulean-blue eyes looking up into the camera above her radiant smile, needle in hand, accompanies the article, and after that, the salon’s phones ring off the hook, the appointment book overflows.
But the night the woman returns, it’s fifteen minutes before closing time, and the store is empty. Sabra, Violet, and Mena all focus on preparing gowns for two separate occasions, a wedding and a quinceañera, due to be picked up first thing as soon as the store opens in the a.m. The shop door is locked, although the shop is not yet closed. The woman waves to be let in, and the trio realizes that they know nothing about her. Maybe her previous visits happened so that she could case the store; maybe she intends to rob them? Maybe her stained sweat clothes and haphazard hair disguise her true identity of a thief, or a spy from one of the fancy uptown shops?
“Are you looking for something specific,” Violet asks. “Maybe if you tell us what you’re looking for, we can find something suitable. When’s the wedding?”
“I will know it when I see it,” the woman says. “It’s for my daughter. She’s over at Church hospital in the cancer unit.”
“I am so sorry,” Violet says. “Do you want the gown for a different purpose? For a funeral?”
Eyes wide, Mena and Sabra stare at Violet, shocked by her direct question and afraid of the response. The woman smiles.
“Oh, no, no, no…a terrible misunderstanding. The groom’s sick. I’ve been running all around town doing things and getting things for my daughter. She doesn’t want to leave his side. This will be a bedside wedding in the hospital.”
Just then, another woman with thin brown eyebrow lines painted on like perfect semicircles bursts into the shop. By the way she moves, she appears drunk. Violet recognizes the ravaged and wrinkled skin, sagging from a long time of alcohol and drug use, brownish teeth, her expression resembling that of Violet’s next-door neighbor, an old cocaine addict and drunk who lives to aggravate her adult children. Violet knows the painted eyebrow lady is the kind of lady who brings a show everywhere she goes.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the painted-on eyebrows lady yells. “I told you. No hospital wedding. Not over my dead body.” She slurs as she moves further into the shop on unsteady legs.
“Johnny wants this,” the woman in sweatpants says. “He’s making his own decisions. He’s an adult.”
“Why does your daughter want to marry a dying man?” painted eyebrow lady yells. “Why would anyone? Want. A dying. Maaaaaaaan?”
“They love each other!” the woman in sweatpants says.
“There’s only one reason. Money. She just wants Johnny’s money.”
“Money? What are you talking about?”
The painted eyebrow lady shrieks and flails her arms. “You know perfectly well!”
“You’re the only one worried about money,” the lady in sweatpants shouts. “Why don’t you worry about Johnny for once in your life?”
The painted eyebrow lady hurls herself into the bride’s mother, and then they are on the floor, the eyebrow lady slapping and hitting the woman who has been envisioning a bedside wedding for her daughter and her fiancé. The woman in sweatpants tries to get up, but the painted eyebrow lady knocks her down again.
“You can’t even pay for his funeral!” the woman in sweatpants yells, further enraging the painted eyebrow lady. “They’re paying for a funeral instead of a wedding!”
Sabra, Mena, and Violet look on in horror, shocked by the violence and not knowing what to do. Arguments and disagreements have happened in the salon before, but not with the intensity of the fight on the floor. The bride’s mother pushes the painted eyebrow lady away.
“You and your daughter aren’t going to profit off my son’s death,” the painted eyebrow lady screams. “I’m his mother, and everything he owns is mine. Not any short-term wife.”
“It’s his last wish,” the woman in sweatpants shouts.
Sabra remembers stories her parents told her about losing all their earthly possessions as newlyweds, escaping their homeland with nothing but their lives. They taught her breathing is the truest gift, that possessions can be replaced, but loved ones cannot; they mourned the murders of their parents and grandparents, of aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. Of extended family members. Of neighbors and colleagues. Their oppressors stole their things but could never steal what lived in their hearts or their heads. In this new land, they bought needles and thread, worked in sweatshops, saved for a sewing machine that helped them make a better life, no, a different life, minus all the things and small luxuries they lost, but rich beyond their imaginations because they inhaled and exhaled while their beloveds no longer did. Breaths in and out, stitches in and out, her parents sewed themselves into existence and her too. Sabra has dedicated her life to creating beautiful gowns with love and beads, faith and pearls, and hope and sequins for brides to wear on their happiest of days, and she imagines the bravery of a bride vowing her love to a man with a decreasing number of breaths to inhale and exhale.
Mena and Violet retreat to the area behind the display case, leaving Sabra closest to the pair scuffling on the floor. Behind the counter, Mena and Violet hold each other, wishing neither of these ladies had walked into the store. Their hands tremble from the violence of the painted eyebrow lady, whose face is distorted in rage. She jabs the woman in the sweatpants with the heel of a display shoe. Some of the gowns, pulled off their hangers in the scuffle, tumble to the floor. Crouched behind the case, they squeeze their eyes shut, until suddenly they hear a loud blow, then another, and a thud, followed by silence.
They see Sabra helping the woman in the sweatpants into a sitting position, and on the floor next to her, the stainless steel platter upside down, the cheese spread around the area rug in the seating area like polka dots; the crackers, broken and crushed into crumbs, form swirls like abstract art. Beside the platter, the painted eyebrow lady lies on her face, unconscious. The woman in sweats looks dazed, her hands tremble. Sabra helps her into one of the chairs in the seating area. Her face bleeds from where the painted eyebrow lady assaulted her with the sample shoe.
“Are you okay?” Sabra asks.
The woman nods, then stands and locks her eyes on the groom’s mother, one shoe on, the other missing, a wig that no one noticed before now askew on her head. In her hand, the sample shoe, its heel smeared with blood.
“Violet, please bring a bottle of water for our client,” Sabra says.
Violet emerges from behind the case and sprints to the backroom kitchen for the bottled water, but before she returns, the woman in the sweats turns towards the door.
“Holy fucking hell,” she says, her voice high-pitched. She rushes toward the door of the store just as Violet returns, a bottle of water in one hand and wet paper towels in the other.
Sabra is speechless. But Mena is not. From behind the counter, she shouts, “Stop! Hey, you! You can’t leave!”
Holding her face, the woman doesn’t look back and hurries out the door.
Sabra bursts into laughter, knowing it’s not the appropriate response. But the absurdity of the situation strikes her as funny, and she cannot stop laughing. If she were the woman in sweats, she would do the same and drive herself to the nearest emergency room. And also, the painted eyebrow lady still lies on her face on the floor of her shop—as she laughs, she wonders about the liability. Luckily, the only blood is smeared on the sample shoe. She pulls herself together.
“Violet, help me clean this up. Mena, call 9-1-1 and tell them a drunk lady fell and is now unconscious on the floor in the shop.”
Sabra removes the sample shoe from the painted eyebrow lady’s fingers and gives it to Violet. “Please set this in the kitchen sink and pour some hydrogen peroxide on it, for now.”
She hopes the bride’s mother returns so that she can help her find the right dress for a bedside wedding in a hospital. She wonders if it will still take place, considering the commotion that has spilled into her shop.
“Are we going to tell them about the fight?” Violet asks.
“Of course not,” Mena says. “We didn’t fight with her. She fought with someone else.”
“Let’s get the gowns back on their hangers,” Sabra tells Mena and Violet. She bends over the unconscious woman to see if she’s breathing and is relieved when she realizes that her breaths seem regular. Without touching the woman, she searches her head, looking for evidence of an injury. She finds and sets her missing shoe near her naked foot. Then she vacuums the crumbs and cleans the seating area. Sabra thinks the messiness of some people causes all kinds of pain and suffering, how their small, banal actions inflict unintended wounds on those around them, how the son of the painted eyebrow lady wants to marry—an act of hope and faith—before he stops breathing, with his own mother standing in the way.
The paramedics arrive.
“She’s either drunk or high,” Violet says, remembering her neighbor routinely falling when drunk, but then realizes the thuds stopped her and becomes afraid for Sabra, for the three of them. “She sounded angry before she fell.”
“We never saw her before tonight. She’s not a client,” Mena says. “We were about to close when she came in.”
“She’s taken a hit to the head,” Sabra says.
The painted eyebrow lady begins to groan as the paramedics strap her into the gurney, stuff her purse underneath, then roll it out to the ambulance. Outside, under the streetlights, a crowd has gathered, attracted by the ambulance lights.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Sabra says, mostly to convince herself and soothe her employees.
© Rosalia Scalia
Rosalia Scalia is the author of the story collection, Stumbling Toward Grace (Unsolicited Press 2021). Her second collection, Under the Radar, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in January 2025. She has published in numerous literary journals. She holds an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University and is a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist’s Award recipient. She won the Editor’s Select award from Willow Review. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her family in Baltimore City. http://www.rosaliascalia.com.
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