Bat Mitzvah Dress
by Elizabeth Poliner
Because my mother had convinced the rabbi
that a bat mitzvah’s dress should be the colors of her choice,
mine was a deep forest green, velvet, rich to the touch,
with lace ribbing to accent its puff sleeves.
Virginal white be damned. This was a mini dress.
This was 1973. February 2. So many years later
I’m surprised at how precisely
I remember . . . My mother in charge of our clothes,
preparing dresses for each school year, each holiday.
Her choice was to sew them by hand,
measure each hem and sleeve.
Just as her choice was to leave my father.
I felt the touch of her absence
every time I entered his home, our old home. It was cold,
like a shiver, the body’s way of saying
remember, remember . . .
Her bent head, the light too dim
for the detailed work, her frustration
with too many uneven stitches, with that old,
unreliable machine. A touch of luck
and she’d get a seam without a glitch.
No choice, then, but to carry on,
sewing long into the night. I remember
the perfect fit that dress turned out to be:
green, shiny, mini, each puffy sleeve
ribbed with lace. Tucked inside her own sleeve,
a hanky should she begin to cry at the ceremony,
or laugh. If girls tended to giggle, then we girls—
my mother, sister, and I—were touched
by a kind of giggle mania. Yet how divisive
that laughter was, a choice, really,
to exclude the men. But that night,
at my bat mitzvah ceremony, no mean giggles,
no sweet tears. I stood before my parents,
who sat shoulder to shoulder, touching,
before my siblings, grandparents,
junior high school friends, Hebrew school
friends, swim team friends. The latter
had seen me only in a bathing suit.
“Wow!” I remember my coach saying,
and I laughed, all smiles in that green dress.
Elizabeth Poliner’s books include the poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands (David Robert Books), and the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Little, Brown & Co.), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction. A new novel, Spinning at the Edges, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, Poetry East, and On the Seawall, among other journals.
