Easter Dresses

That year in Northern Michigan—2014, the year I am thirty years-old—is the year of beautiful dresses. I am hooked on a little consignment shop, a gem, a godsend in the middle of nowhere, called Zoelle's. The other options in Manistee are Kohl's, Kmart, or Goodwill, but Zoelle's is a fashionista's dream—if you are on a budget, as I am, on my reporter’s salary. 

That year is the year of beautiful dresses because, suddenly, I can fit into them. In 2014, I lose weight rapidly, dropping pound after pound in a matter of weeks. 

Saphris—a key medication which kept me stable, along with other medications, as I coped with bipolar disorder—also caused me to gain weight when my psychiatrist first prescribed it in 2011. Initially, I gained about fifty pounds. I tried to lose the weight but found myself unable. Sick of the endless cycle of dieting without success, in late fall 2013, I snapped. I went cold turkey on the Saphris. 

For the first couple of weeks, all is well. And I drop a few pounds. I am triumphant. I feel a little sexier, a little sleeker. I go to Zoelle’s and try on skirts. 

But I don’t buy anything—not yet.

In the meantime, people give me compliments. At work. As I report stories. Around town, at the one coffee shop on Main Street, in restaurants. 

In Manistee, a town of six-thousand people south of Traverse City in the tip of the Mitt, people notice everything about everyone: “Is something different about you?” “What have you been doing?” “Have you been working out?”

I am elated. 

But by the third week, my sleep is disturbed. 

I dream that I watch a strange man sexually assault a woman. She moans. Begs him—to continue. 

When I wake, I am in a sweat. I go to the sink, fill a tall glass of water and gulp. 

I can’t get back to sleep. What is wrong with me?

The dreams continue. Night after night—nightmares of rape and murder. Sometimes, I am watching someone being hurt. More often, I am the victim.

I become afraid to go to sleep. My neck and shoulders ache as if I shoveled heavy,

wet snow every day for a year.  

But I lose weight—rapidly. My pudgy body trims, sleeks. Within months, I am fitting into a size fourteen, then a twelve, then a ten. 

Then the day arrives when I go to Zoelle’s and see a beautiful teal bird-dress in the window. As the bell chimes, I walk inside and step to the window. I finger the tag. 

Size six.  

Katie, the owner, smiles at me from behind the counter. 

“I noticed that dress and thought of you,” she tells me. “It is so you.” 

Fat, fluffy snowflakes spiral down outside. It is the beginning of what will be an epic March blizzard. But this dress makes me think spring with its bright cardinals perched on golden branches against fabric the color of a robin’s egg. The dress is sleeveless, with a puffy, layered skirt. Only I would buy it in a snowstorm. 

I run my fingers along the supple teal cloth. “It goes with your hair,” Katie said.  

Cropped short and spiky, my hair is dyed the color of a fire engine. I chopped off my long, naturally dark-blonde hair, on a whim, weeks before my thirtieth birthday. I figured I was aging with attitude. 

“But, Katie, I don’t think I’ll fit into it,” I say. “It’s a size six.”

“Try it on,” Katie says. “You’ve lost weight. Have you been working out?”

I hesitate. 

Katie walks up behind me and slips the dress off the hanger. 

“Come on,” she says, beckoning with a bright, inviting laugh. 

A mother of two girls, ages two and four, Katie is younger than I am, in her late twenties. A tiny, tattooed violet heart peeks on her shoulder from under her honey-blonde tresses. When I am around her, I yearn to cut loose. 

Katie hangs the gown in the makeshift closet space that serves as a dressing room and slides the curtain shut behind me. 

Taking a breath, I shimmy out of my conservative gray work pants, unbutton my navy-blue shirt, and slide off my boots. Then I gently unzip the dress, all the while staring at my body in the mirror, the body I no longer recognize as my own—the stomach taut, the thighs suddenly slim, the curves of the chest too small for my bra.   

“Well, look at you!” Katie exclaims as I walk out onto the main floor of the shop. “You look beautiful, Meg.”

“Thank you!” I can feel myself beaming. I touch my hands to the red birds at my waist, the silkiness beneath my fingertips. “It’s gorgeous.” 

“Turn around,” Katie says, giving me her hand. I spin. The skirt puffs around my knees. 

Another woman in the shop, an older woman—bleach-blonde hair, worn face—regards me: “You look great, honey.” 

I had longed for this moment—for decades, really. Ever since age thirteen, when I first began throwing away my school lunches and going to soccer practice, doing suicides—up and down the field, up and down the field, touch the goal line once again—on an empty stomach. 

Ever since I was in college and I would go days without consuming anything but Fun Size Snickers bars and cup after cup of black coffee even as I exercised for hours on the elliptical at the student recreation center, pushing my body on the highest incline the machine would go. 

I was so angry at myself in those days—because, no matter how hard I “worked,” I never seemed to drop more than a few pounds.   

But now, now I am losing weight, suddenly thin. It is magic. 

And all it took—all—was stopping a pill. 

I buy the bird dress in March. I intend to wear it to my Grandma LeDuc's one-hundred-fourth birthday in June.  I adore my grandmother and want to celebrate in style. The bird dress is the happiest piece of clothing I have ever owned. 

And yes, I want to show off a little, in this new body. If only he could see me now. 

But in the end, I wear it early, rather than for Grandma's birthday in June. The next time I see Grandma, she is so frail, I fear she is dying and won’t make it to her birthday.  

As it turns out, I am the one who almost doesn’t make it. 

_____

More than a year before, I wrote his name in the steam of the shower door, making curlicues below it, watching as droplets ran from my fingertips. I wished to be treasured, like something tiny and precious and fine—a gold locket, perhaps, or a minute ivory box with a secret spring. I wanted to fit into his pocket and be carried away.   

He was married, yes. Married and overworked—wife, kids, demanding job—a full life and no need of me. But I thought he treated me well. He laughed at my jokes and edited my articles. I had no actual editor, when I was first new at the newspaper, and I was alone in town, lonely and unsure and scared. However, he was inappropriate, consistently pushing boundaries, and he encouraged me to push boundaries, too, in the racy online chatting that soon developed between us. He told me I was beautiful and seemed not to notice my extra weight. But he also told me that he would “never fuck a fat-ass.”

I was available yet out of reach, willing and withholding, giving but reluctant. Gradually, I grew less and less reluctant, more and more willing. I was so willing that I would go off Saphris in an attempt to lose weight to please him. 

The relationship was on-again, off-again.  When I felt isolated or blue, I sought him out. Sometimes, he sought me out. Flirtation became explicit. 

I felt powerful, immensely powerful. I felt powerless.

This is not me, I told myself. I am not her. 

And yet—

One night, in between the explicit chatting, he told me that he had a twelve-year-old daughter who loved her ballet classes. 

“Help me, Jesus,” I thought. 

At this point, I wasn’t sure if I believed in Jesus anymore. I grew up in the church and attended a parochial grade school, but as I grew older and struggled with mental illness, I began to lose faith—if God were all-good and all-powerful, so tender that he cared about the sparrow, why did he allow bipolar disorder to ravage my life?  

But now, I found myself willing to try anything. That Sunday, I crept into the back of Faith Covenant of Manistee and slid into the very last pew. 

I had arrived just as ushers were distributing the wafers and grape juice that symbolized the Body and the Blood.  

The choir sang an arrangement of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” accompanied by an organist dressed in white. Nothing about me felt in the least holy—should I take communion? Could I take communion?  

The pastor in his vestments spoke: “Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’”

I reflected, as I took the wafer beneath my tongue, that Flannery O’Connor writes, “Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”

That day would be the beginning of my seeking. I was at a point where I needed answers: What would happen to my beloved grandmother after her death? Was there an afterlife?

And, could I be forgiven?

A couple months later, after a night in which he and I chatted, I left work and drove, sobbing so hard I could barely see, towards Faith Covenant. It was about six months since I had stopped the Saphris. I was spiraling down. 

But I also had lost significant weight. I felt more attractive. He had noticed—and praised me. 

In the church office, beneath a crucifix, Pastor Will, a younger man with dark brown hair and a quick expressive face, listened to my story of the relationship with the married man. 

“Meg, yes, you are doing something wrong,” he said. “That is what your guilt is signaling to you. But Jesus also offers hope and a way out, a new way of living, freedom from the past.”

After praying with me, he crossed to his library shelf and pulled down a volume. I looked at the title: Abba’s Child by Brennan Manning. 

“Something tells me that you need this book, Meg,” he said. “Go in peace.” 

That night, in my tiny rundown apartment, the circle of lamplight warding away the darkness, my kitten dozing on my belly, I opened the book and read: “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”

I read that book in two days, marking it up, passage after passage. Then I read it through again. I was beloved by God. His love defined me—not a relationship with a man who didn’t value me. 

But God, in the end, couldn’t save me from doing what I knew to be wrong. I remained isolated and lonely. And I was off my medication, something I confided in only my treatment providers. I lost weight but experienced insomnia so deep that it made me unstable. I turned in article after article late. My editor wrote me up. 

As Easter approached, I spiraled downwards. I reached out to the man one last time.

I send him a chat message: “Meet me.” 

Meet me over Easter. I pictured us going out to dinner—perhaps I would wear the bird dress. And then, later, later, we would go back to a hotel room—and he would slip it off me, as we fell together.  

Perhaps sensing how out-of-control I was becoming, he told me he was concerned about me. He told me he heard I had been written up.  

And finally, “No.”

I raged. I sobbed. 

I filled page after page of a notebook with ugly names for myself, in a wild, illegible scrawl I didn’t recognize.  

Finally, I found myself rummaging through the medicine cabinet, but what I found was decidedly not Saphris. As sleep overwhelmed me, I curled into the fetal position under enveloping blankets.    

____

The soft-eyed male medic, who tells me a name I won’t remember, starts a saline drip, the only treatment left to me. 

He lifts my shirt, first telling me he is going to do so. He places small, round, chill stickers all over my chest and stomach, then hooks them to wires. 

A neon graph flicks onto a screen in the ambulance—my heartbeat, my pulsating life, mapped naked and bright for everyone in the vehicle to see. To me, it looks out-of-kilter—my heart’s workings are wrong.  

In the ER, a nurse helps me undress and drapes me in one of those hospital gowns that open in the back. The tie around the waist continually comes undone, and the gown slips from my shoulders. But they allow me to keep my underwear, even my sweatpants. 

A male doctor steps in—youngish, dark-haired, five o’clock shadow. He listens to my chest, takes my pulse. He asks what everyone asks: Was the overdose intentional or accidental? 

I want to ask how anybody could be dumb enough to take that much medication accidentally. My brain is so fogged that I don’t understand until much, much later that they are asking if I’m an addict. Substance abuse simply has never been my “thing.” Bipolar disorder, rather. More recently, destructive men.   

I answer, “Intentional.” A bad weekend. A truly shitty Easter. 

A tech dressed in green scrubs whose name I might, for no clear reason, remember—Nathan—draws tube after tube of blood. The catheter Nathan leaves in the vein of my right arm looks spiky, vicious. Is it even called a catheter? I am clueless, completely out of my element, a fish out of water: Am I still breathing?

The doctor with the five o’clock shadow informs me that a bed is being prepared in the Intensive Care Unit. I won’t remember the ride up in the wheelchair. In ICU, I am either Room 2 or Room 5. I can’t keep it straight. 

Later, when I checked my cell phone log it would show that I made a couple of cell phone calls from ICU. I don’t remember them. Neither were to him. Neither were to family downstate. 

I am alone. 

But not entirely alone—after easing me into bed, my ICU nurse questions me: Why did you overdose? And, why, especially, did you call 9-1-1? Even in my drugged state, I realize her questions have an urgent quality. 

I don’t know. 

Except, that I couldn’t live with this cycle of rejection and guilt and shame anymore—until, finally, I woke up from the overdose and decided to fight. 

Cindy, my ICU nurse, lost someone to suicide. A brother, she tells me.  

Later, I won’t even be able to summon up an image of her face. There would just be her, disconnecting machines to help me totter to the toilet over and over throughout her twelve-hour shift. Her, heating milk when I couldn’t sleep despite my drugged exhaustion; her, holding the cup to my parched lips. 

She left at 7 a.m. This was all I would ever know: That name, Cindy. That she lost a brother.   

And that she was kind, kind though I was careless with my life.  

_____

One week and one day after the suicide attempt, I go hiking alone early in the morning at a natural area along Lake Michigan. Just an hour after sunrise, the sky gleams gray, overcast. Lake Michigan in this light brings to mind pewter: deep, rich, thunderous color. The air brushes my face, a hint of warmth in it. Spring is finally here. 

Striding up a rise in the trail, I sense my legs’ strength underneath me, my body carrying me forward into the world. Cresting the rise, I stand for a moment, joying in the clean, spring air, my chest rising and falling. It brings me satisfaction simply to breathe.   

At the top of the hill, I encounter a tree that makes me say to myself, “Now that’s something.” Gray, almost white, the tree rises straight for several feet in the trunk until it branches, suddenly, wildly, draped in branches that sprawl to the ground. To me, it resembles a pale woman wearing a gown of thorns. 

Walking closer, I see buds. Advancing toward the tree, I examine one of them, lightly caress its fuzzy, tight brown—a layered, intricate orb, coming to a delicate point, cusp of rose. 

This tree is a woman—a gray woman brooding over the cloudy lake—but not dressed in thorns, but rather, arrayed in flowers-to-be. She will reign here, queen of the lake, until spring gives way to summer, until summer to fall—even winter cannot overthrow her. She will live a long, long life—and die a natural death. 

A verse leaps into my mind: “God is within her; she will not fall.” 

Easter arrives, a little late to my world. Yet it arrives. 

And my heart—frozen like the earth, in winter’s icy hasps—begins to unclench. 

-Margaret LeDuc

Margaret LeDuc lives in the Detroit area. She completed her B.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She served as a staff writer for The Manistee News Advocate in Manistee, Mich., winning a 2014 Michigan Press Association Award. She also contributed to The Voice Newspapers, The Macomb Daily, and Macomb Now Magazine. She has an upcoming publication in 'Heart of Flesh Literary Journal' and is working on a memoir. To learn more about her, visit her website at www.megleduc.com