"Would you help me get into it?" Isabel turned to face her sister.  She felt deeply the shame that caused the question to stick in her throat like a partially chewed slab of meat.  Her sister did not answer but turned on her satin-slippered heel and left the room.

     Isabel studied the sun-filled room, a guestroom in her mother's enormous, empty house, that echoed a tenuous silence now that Gert was out of it.  Dust danced in the thick, fluorescent bars of summer sunlight that angled through the windowpanes and bisected the room on their journey to the floor.  Their dance was chaotic in the perfumed frenzy that Gert had caused.  The corporate, territorial smell always made Isabel feel nervous, inadequate.  How did that perfume smell on its many laps through the air system that swept across the sea of cubicles in the office tower where Gert administered insurance policy after insurance policy? The dust danced and Isabel wondered.

     "I can't believe she's wearing that, Mother," Gert said to the women's aging mother, who was dressing in her room down the hall for the occasion.
     "That dress is her," Mother muttered.  Isabel heard the voices amid the clatter of the dowager's dresser drawers: stockings, lipstick, foundation, comb, clip-on earrings.  Isabel could see in the scrapbook of her mind the woman assembling everything she would need for her costume along the surface of the dresser before she would sit down and assemble herself.  A self-repairing Ford, Isabel thought.  That dress is her.  The process of laying out was, Isabel knew, Mother's way of not forgetting.  She would move from one end of the dresser to the other, thinking from head to toe, "What do I need?" and retrieving that thing.  In this way, she could think solely of the process of caring for herself, caring for her hair, eyes, ears, teeth, arms, and so on.  She could be absorbed in her toilet for hours once she knew she had not forgotten anything.

     Dead aunts and uncles and grandparents smiled at Isabel from behind the clouded glass of the dime store frames that delineated their images along the edge of the dressing table. They were stuck to the glass, mottled in a world in which geraniums around the patio of the family's backyard could be in bloom, the sand at the beach could still be wet, her father could still wear short pants.  Isabel did not need to sit at the dressing table, though she remained there out of a sense of occasion.  How many pictures had she seen of her mother and aunt and grandmother sitting at this very dressing table just before an occasion? The chiffon, georgette, taffeta, or lace and the mysterious glinting bottles that littered the table before the contemplative images reflected in the mirror in those black and whites bespoke the importance of the day in those old albums. She would sit.  Then, too, there was her obligation to Mother.  Mother would not like her to rush her toilet on such a day as this one.  It was all she had asked.

     Isabel had not lived in Mother's house for years; she had returned for the occasion, to dress.  "Get married in a cow shed if you want; just let Father give you away." Thus, her mother had responded to news of her engagement.  Who was the boy? Who were his people? Neither mattered.  Father must give her away; she must sit.