The Dress

I recently bought a dress from a catalogue, which is not something I usually do. I liked the pattern, color, bohemian length, and clean cut of the sleeves. I also liked the photo’s background of palm trees and ocean, the languid ease of the model leaning against a white column, the imagined scent of orchids and sea in the soft breeze. I placed my order like I was going on vacation.

Five days later the dress lay on my doorstep, folded into 32nds inside in a battered plastic mailer.

After freeing the dress from its cheap prison, I found it heftier and 100 percent more synthetic than I’d been led to believe. Forget a soft breeze; the sway of the drape I imagined from the photo would have required a tropical hurricane.

Still, I didn’t want to return it. I wanted the fantasy to work. In my bathroom, where the light is spectacularly unforgiving, I tried it on, driving home the four plus decades the model lounging in the photo had yet to experience.

I had been seduced by a vision, only to get crushed by reality.

I recognized the feeling of disappointment as something I’m experiencing a lot these days. The country I spent a lifetime imagining as fundamentally noble was really nothing more than a sad plastic bag holding, as my late mother-in-law would say, a schmatta, the major differences being the vastness of the deception and the return policy.