Page 49 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

That Saturday, I loaded Bodhi in the car and drove to Newport Beach to meet my mom at Fashion Island, the rich-people mall, to go wedding dress shopping. My mom used to work at the Bloomingdale’s there, when I was eleven or twelve, and once when I’d been too sick to go to school and my mom had been too scared to call out again, I’d spent the entire day at that mall, periodically throwing up in the women’s restrooms. It was a pretty place, all outdoors. There was a koi pond and many fountains. I hated it there.

I met my mom near Neiman Marcus. She was wearing a matching two-piece Lululemon set in beige and a flowy cashmere sweater. She looked like an elder Kardashian, only blond and with a flat ass.

“Do you want to get some coffee or something?” I asked.

“I’m all caffeinated and ready to go!” Shyanne said. “I’m thinking we do Neiman’s first, then Nordstrom’s, then Macy’s. Work our way down. You never want to do the most expensive last. That’s when you’re tired and weak.”

So off we went into the hushed beige morgue of Neiman Marcus.

“I’m thinking,” Shyanne said, flipping through the sale rack in evening wear, “that I may want to play off white, like a nod to traditional bridal white, but not trying to actually wear white? I’m thinking ecru, I’m thinking peach, something that reads more cocktail dress than wedding dress.”

“How slutty?” I asked. Really my entire childhood had been a training course in how to help my mother shop.

“It’s Vegas,” she said, “and Kenny loves it when I show off the girls. I personally want something more modest, so a happy compromise might be showing a lot of leg but a higher neckline. I am thinking shimmer, beaded or sequined, maybe pearl detailing. I mean, it’s Vegas.”

“Do you want me to go to the regular ladies’ section and pull things?” I asked.

“Sure thing, Noodle,” Shyanne said. “I’ll be in the dressing rooms over here. Size four! And look for something for yourself to wear too!”

“I know what size you are,” I said, and pushed off, the stroller gliding over the thick-pile carpet.

I knew that this was her wedding, the only one she would ever get to have. She wasn’t going to have a big reception with all her friends, she wasn’t going on a honeymoon (Vegas was to be the honeymoon, two birds, one stone; Kenny was a clever man). The least I could do was attend. I was the person she loved most in all the world. I knew that.

But I viscerally didn’t want to go.

I found a peachy wrap dress by Diane von Furstenberg and draped it over the handle of the stroller. I spaced out for a while imagining a video I could do where I poured different breakfast cereals over my breasts, then found three or four more things I thought would suit Shyanne and found her in a dressing room.

The dressing room was gigantic. The stroller and I fit in there with loads of room to spare. There was even a comfy leather chair for me to sit in, though my mother had laid the clothes she’d been wearing there. I picked them up, sat down, folded the bundle so her underwear was no longer visible, and held the bundle on my lap. Under no circumstances would my mother allow her clothes to touch a dressing room floor, a place she believed to be unimaginably filthy even in a Neiman Marcus. “If I had a penny for every time someone has pissed in a ladies’ dressing room” was a frequent refrain during my childhood, though from my count she would have wound up with only five or six pennies. Still, I guessed that was enough.

She was trying on a silver sequin number that would have been at home on the red carpet, complete with a plunging back so low it showed her actual butt crack. She was turning this way and that, examining herself in the mirror. Whenever my mother looked at herself in the mirror, she looked flat-eyed like a parrot.

“What do you think?” she whispered because Bodhi was asleep.

“I mean, it’s gorgeous, you look like a movie star,” I said. “What is Kenny gonna be wearing?”

She hiss-sighed, understanding my point immediately. Kenny would probably be wearing something god-awful, a maroon shirt and gray suit, and in that dress, she’d look like a showgirl who accidentally wandered into a wedding.

“Fine,” she said, “what did you bring me?”

I showed her the dresses I had picked out.

“No, no, no,” she said, sorting through and hanging them on the wall hooks for noes. She paused on the Diane von Furstenberg. “This is interesting.”

“There’s a kind of seventies glamour to it. It’s understated,” I said. I knew it didn’t have beading or sequins, but in my opinion she didn’t need the glitter. She needed a dress that said, I am getting married on purpose, and it is not a mistake.

She took off the silver gown and tried on the Diane von Furstenberg. At first it seemed too big, but when she pulled the waist in and tied it, the fit was perfect. She looked beautiful and powerfully herself, a version of my mother I knew and recognized and loved. “I don’t know,” she said, turning and looking at her butt.

I knew that if I pushed too much it would turn her against the dress, so I said nothing. She turned around, sighed, pushed out her belly and slumped her shoulders. This was something she did, examine how she would look in her worst moments. It was always better, she believed, to wear something you couldn’t look bad in than something you could only sometimes look great in. “All right,” she said, her tummy pushed out as full as it could go. “It’s a maybe.”

While we were at Nordstrom, my mother asked if I had gotten that job at the seafood place, a lie I had completely forgotten.

“No,” I said. We were now in lingerie looking for a nightgown she could wear on her wedding night.

“Margo! What have you been doing?! You’ve got to get your ass in gear. It’s not like you to let something fester like this.”

“It’s just so complicated,” I said, “with childcare and—”

“Make Jinx watch the baby, he’s great with babies!” She was stretching a thong like she planned to use it to rope cattle.

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