By Lisa Romeo
You are modeling dresses and your husband votes for the one with the bouncy hem and V-neck. “It shows your nice cleavage!”
“Yeah, for everyone.”
But in fact, you like your cleavage, and it’s good to like something about your body. You are a fat woman in your 50s, with a disappeared waistline, boulder-like dimply thighs balanced above puckered knees and bulbous calves. Your upper arms flap. Your feet spread across flats, stilettos a memory. As pounds appeared, you’ve learned what flatters and what doesn’t multiply.
And, you are lucky. You shop at stores where designers offer stylish large sized clothing. You sift, evaluating cut, texture, drape. Your rules demand black, or black-and-white, but not white-and-black. Simple, not quiet. Stylish but not trendy. No ruffles. Dresses that move and aren’t retiring, dresses that make you feel like a confident woman, not a fat woman.
In the dressing room, you watch your legs when the hemline shifts. Then, you twirl a little, wanting to feel pretty as a new dress. You twirl, an alive woman claiming space.
At home, in your V-neck dress, your husband grabs you and twirls you between the windows and the bed where you made love that morning.
The bride, it turns out, is a large woman. The bride, in her floaty white dress, and you, in your drapey black-and-white dress, are only one size: the size of love.
Your husband says, “Let’s dance.” On the dance floor, you twirl.
Lisa Romeo teaches in the Bay Path University online MFA program, and at local colleges in New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and sons. Her nonfiction appears regularly in literary and mainstream venues, including the New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine, Brevity, Hippocampus, Under the Sun, Front Porch, Under the Gum Tree, Pithead Chapel, and many other journals and anthologies.
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