Jasmine Peteran
Jasmine Peteran (she/her) is a writer and editor from Toronto. She holds an Honours Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Publishing from Sheridan College. Peteran is currently working as a copywriter in Brisbane while offering freelance book editing services for independent authors. Click below to check out her website.
"There has to be a time when everything you thought you knew gets turned inside out. Otherwise, you just go on floating around in your own head like a deflating helium balloon."
The Shape of Silk
The Shape of Silk
Jasmine Peteran
I found my grandmother’s wedding dress in a paper grocery bag buried in a chest with old moth-eaten blankets and unworn baby bonnets. It's made of heavy silk, the quality they don’t make anymore, in a shade of off-white not unlike snow under streetlights. I turn it over in my hands, smoothing out creased lines and tracing her lipstick stain with the pads of my fingers.
My mother helps me slip it over my head. It’s snug through the shoulders and I have to wriggle and twist to get it down, but as it slips over my bust and settles into my waist, I can feel my grandmother all around me.
I picture her in a post-war fabric store sifting through infinite shades of off-white. I run my fingers over the puffed shoulders and see her sitting hunched over her sewing machine for days on end, whirring away at her happily-ever-after.
The zipper glides along my ribs like ribbon. My mother is silent as she carefully does up the string of buttons that run along the spine. I can hear her mind whirring. I close my eyes and imagine myself being led to the Chuppah in this silk. I can feel the fabric closing in around every curve and corner and it feels as though I am being held by the 1950s.
I open my eyes and suddenly––
I am a bride, not a wife. I am a prize, not a partner. I am a ghost, not a girl.
***
When my grandmother was little, her daddy walked out on them. He walked straight out the front door and left the mother of his three children on the other side. In a world where ladies were mothers and daddies were relied on, he walked right out the front door and never came back, and they never heard from him again.
Then the war ended, and all the soldiers flooded home. My grandmother said everyone was in a big hurry. I suppose they thought since so many lives had been lost, they had to hurry up and make some new lives to replace all those lost ones. So, she was swept off her feet by a decorated airman and brick by blood-and-bloody-brick, my grandfather built them a home on the corner of Finch and Maxome. And when winter came around and the house wasn’t finished, they lay a tarp over the hole in the ground and moved right in.
I thought I knew what I wanted from this life—then I woke up from a dream that was never mine to begin with. It was as if my dreams had finally escaped from places I didn’t know I could release. Dreams of matching chinaware and lace doilies, all thrust out from their hiding places. Now, they’ve morphed into something new, something unfamiliar, and I can’t stop paying attention to them.
I don’t think this ever happened to my grandmother. I think her dreams were built on things she thought she needed, things the world around her told her she should have. I suppose if their dreams had been built on anything else, they never would have had a house at all.
I think my grandmother got all her dreams to come true (which is a kind of magic in itself) but I wonder if, even just for a moment, had her dreams broken free, she might have chosen a different shade of off-white.
***
We are born and then we are told exactly what shape we are. We are told what colour we’re made of and where to buckle up and when to back down. We are told what we want but not why.
We are born and then we are put into cardboard boxes and tied up with strings and shipped away to big brick buildings only to be told that there are no other boxes, no other strings, only these, and that they are only ours—and that they are our only ones.
***
I don’t remember what colour the string was that was used to tie my box shut. I just remember it pressing hard against my skin, all those rules rubbing awkwardly, leaving bruises and tiny string-size rope burns.
Eventually it cut me open so that my shape broke in half and all my colours came spilling out. The box got ruined and soggy, dripping with the brown you can only get when you mix all the primaries, and then it crumpled onto the floor, and I was free. Sunlight broke through and splattered all over the crumpled ruined box and my pile of string and it soaked me up and formed a prism in which I was the light, and all my dreams formed a rainbow.
***
For a long time, I squished myself happily into the shape I thought the universe was telling me to be, to fit neatly into the box I had been tied up in, only to realize that the string had been tied up by a bow, and that if I simply fiddled with it for a bit, examined it a little more closely, I could have easily untied it. Untangled the string and released the box and changed the shape. So I forgave the box and the string, and I gathered up my colours into small jars and set them neatly on my windowsill and let them colour the light that poured in.
When I no longer felt the need to squish myself, I began trying to squish other people to fit me. I picked a boy with a lip ring and bought him a leather jacket and convinced him that he needed me until he offered me his grandmother’s emerald one winter in Christie Pitts. Then I picked a girl with wild blonde hair, and I bought her a copy of Love Is a Dog from Hell and inscribed it with bleeding blue ink and convinced her she needed me until she asked me to meet her parents on their porch at midnight. Then I picked a man with a cottage in Muskoka and a chihuahua named Echo and convinced him he needed me until he brought me breakfast in his king-sized bed and asked me to stay. Then I picked a man with nothing but good taste in restaurants and convinced him he needed me until he told me he loved me while still fresh inside me.
I left them all for a chance to be shapeless. To let my dreams shift into whatever shapes they felt like, to float around whenever they wanted, to become whatever shapes they wanted to be, squished or spread thin or speckled, to become whatever colours they wanted to be.
***
I used to be a fish. I would float around on the lake with my back tickling the tops of the weeds and I would blow my belly out to touch the sky. I would dive deep down to where it was cool and dark, and I would just hover, taking it all in and blowing bubbles. An endless cycle of breathe and release.
Then I died and became a girl. I would walk around in pink-painted hallways and practice tying my shoelaces and lie in tall grass where I would hide and think of all the rules I was too afraid to break. Like to sit up straight and cross my legs. To never eat apples whole and to straighten my teeth and to keep my hair long and to smile with my mouth closed.
My dreams were built on lessons I was taught by no one in particular. They would float around inside my mind like bubbles, trapped, and I couldn’t suck the oxygen out of them like I used to when I was a fish.
Then I died and became a woman. I started lying around on my back with my legs in the air and looking up at corners collecting cobwebs and wondering how I got here in the first place. I became picky about stemmed wine glasses and thread counts. I began tugging at my clothing and cracking my knuckles. Matching my body language to the women I looked up to.
Now, I am an island. With sand like silk. I became one with the sea and the breeze. Lost and far away. Fluid.
And on clear nights, when the starlight was bright enough and the sand would beam with pride, I’d pluck the buttons off my grandmother’s wedding dress and toss them up into the sky so they could become stars for wishing––for all the other women and girls and fish.
***
There has to be a time when everything you thought you knew gets turned inside out. Otherwise, you just go on floating around in your own head like a deflating helium balloon.
I have this recurring dream where I have a baby. The dream isn’t that I had a baby, rather, I already have the baby, but I keep losing it. I find myself in heaving crowds only to be startled awake by empty arms. My body jolts forward, instinctively tearing the covers off only to reveal an empty bed and twisted sheets. Then it’s morning already and I roll my legs over the edge groggily, wiping tears and sweat from my cheeks, aching and speechless and empty every time.
***
There’s this photo that used to hang in my mother’s bedroom when we were kids. A dark, mysterious photo where my mother shares the expression of Gaea giving birth to the cosmos. My mother, tall and brawn, with a wild mane of curls poking out in every direction. A virago fresh from battle.
And my sister, a thin and pale thing, squawking, blue with rage and fitful claws reaching for the curls, clutched in my mother’s bosom.
This image has haunted me always. A plaster smile on the brink of shattering, poised to frame the depth in those black, black eyes. Life. Anguish. Motherhood. I am only just now learning to understand.
I don’t think she really took to motherhood in the beginning. It’s always been a strange fit for her. Standing naked in a fitting room at six months postpartum, hysterical. I don’t blame her. To watch, helplessly, as your own creation annihilates you from the inside out. As the one person that needs you most sucks and whines and wriggles the life out of you, and you’re just expected to smile and swoon and host birthday parties, yet all the while you just can’t get it together.
I don’t blame her.
***
When my mother was planning her own wedding, my grandmother pushed her to rent a cardboard wedding cake. A cardboard wedding cake? I asked, Why? Why would they even—
For the photo. My grandmother wanted to rent an elaborate cardboard wedding cake so that my parents could pose behind it with a knife slipped into a slot at the back…for the photo.
I’ve learned a lot from my mother. My mother who hasn’t baked cookies in years. My mother, wrapped in second-hand cashmere, who built a house but not a home. My mother, the wild child, who hasn’t settled for anything since the day she was born. My mother, who has taught me how to stop a run in my tights and how to drink tequila like a woman, but not how to escape putting out on a first date or how to write an author bio.
I could write an entire book about the things I’ve learned from my mother, but I’m not sure it would do me any good here.
***
My mother’s wedding dress was a four-piece suit with a silk collar and heavy beaded shoulder pads. She had it custom-made and then she became a wife but not a Mrs. A partner, not a prize. My mother, who kept her suitcases packed until two days before her wedding. My mother, the master of quiet rebellion.
***
Last night I dreamt that I was in a small bright room with plush ivory carpets and pale pink wallpaper. I stood from a creaky wire bed frame and checked to see that the bedroom door was locked before pulling a small duffel bag out from the back of the closet. I was rushing. I held my toothbrush in one hand and contemplated whether I should turn the tap on, brush my teeth, and climb back into bed, or stuff it into the duffel and climb out the window. My gut sank deep into my knees as I hesitated and now, this clear-as-day image of my own hand holding a toothbrush over an empty duffel bag is branded into my mind.
I’m thrust forward in my bed, scrambling in sheets so tightly twisted I can’t move. Wiping tears and sweat from my cheeks once more, my body aches with a desperation I can’t explain to anyone.
***
Sometimes I feel like I’m sinking, and I wish I could just go back to being a fish. The horizon is clouded with smoke from wildfires, rising sea levels, low interest rates, and inexplicable seizures. It’s layered in polyester wedding dresses and non-conformity. It’s made of stepping stones and gender roles. Shoulder pads and baby bonnets. Build or buy. Break or fix.
Stay or quit.