MRS. BARBEE

I don’t know about the rest of the Delta, but in our little quiet nook of it, the one time of the year that we used to get whole new outfits was for Easter Morning. For weeks before the date, we’d discuss our Easter Dress, and our Easter Shoes and even our hats and hairbows. And most of us in town had the same seamstress---Mrs. Barbee, who by my time had outfitted a couple of generations of little girls, teens, and their mothers in “special” apparel. She was constantly in demand, for every piano recital, formal dance, (no proms in those days, but somehow someone somewhere in the county was always having a dance---a formal, or a tea-dance, or even a sock-hop on somebody’s hardwood floors at home) and for every High School social and Wedding-related soiree. 

I'd stand there, my sturdy little round body rigidly stiff, as she and Mother conferred, marvelled at my hopeless embonpoint for a such a running, tree-climbing, swimming, ballplaying neighborhood Sheena of the pre-teen set; then they'd sigh in resignation and make it fit. I can still SMELL the stiffness of those materials, the corners and the edges and the little ravellies that burrowed beneath your arms. No hair shirt could tickle like a pinned-together or just-darted bodice with the seams untrimmed. Ow.

Mrs. Barbee had one son, a quiet man who almost always wore white; he was a slim, pale, pearly person, quite like the descriptions of Boo Radley, and though slow-moving, could vanish from the living room like smoke when you knocked on the door for your fitting. You could see him through the eight panes of the front door, through the haze of the pinched-together white sheer curtain with the rod shirred top and bottom, and sometimes even before you knocked, he’d see your shadow through the door or catch a movement out of the corner of his eye, and get up from his brown recliner and disappear through the dining room arch, not even stopping to turn off the ballgame.

Mr. Malcolm did radios, and made a little bit of their living, but he was a gentle shell of the bright lively young man Daddy described from their teens. He'd been badly affected by the War, but not wounded, I don't think. He was more within himself than with us, for all the years that I knew him. And he was good to his Mama.

One year, three of the Moms picked the same pattern and the exact material except for color. So three of us in stiff cinch-waisted, poufy-skirted peau de soie brocade with Anne Shirley's dream-of-Heaven sleeves appeared in the same piano recital.   (I looked in several online pattern books just now, and there we were---the exact dresses, and we certainly felt as chic and cool as those imaginary ladies in the picture up there).    My dress was yellow, in the most deliciously patterned taffeta, and if those enormous shoulder-puffs WEREN’T leg-o-mutton sleeves, they missed their chance. And I LOVED it, even though we were triplets. We took one look at each other as we arrived, and burst out laughing. And MRS. B HADN’T SAID A WORD.

And we felt gorgeous in those dresses---there's no dressing room, no rack of clothes, no expensively-perfumed, luxurious store in the world which can give the totally beautiful feeling of one of those several-fittings, pins-in-the-mouth, turn this way, scratchy-fabric dresses crafted by that artist who was our Mrs. Barbee. You felt important in her clothes, as well as pretty.

It's like those descriptions by Gallico in Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris---the details of the hand-sewing and all the perfection expected, and the calculation of the cost, down to the last hook for the last eye, and the sheets of tissue in the box. I loved that book. And after Mrs. Barbee's, I could smell Dior's salon, as well---the little steam in the air from the iron ever-ready for pressing seams, and the dry, crisp scent of heavy fabric, with a lingering hint of Coty in the air.