"The Recital Dress" by Becky Gould Gibson
Each of us would have a dress made specially. My ears perked up.
I imagined, over and over, the blue of my dress, deep and velvety, the color of evening, just as the stars begin to come out.
For fifty years, Becky Gibson has written mostly poetry, publishing it in journals, anthologies, three chapbooks, and five full-length collections. She turned to creative nonfiction only recently, seeking to expand narrative beyond the constraints of a poem. Her essays appear in Snowy Egret, Canary, Cold Mountain Review, and two PSPP anthologies, Twists and Turns and Sooner or Later. Becky taught English at Guilford College until 2008, when she retired to write full-time. She lives with her husband in Chapel Hill.
Author’s Talk
Becky Gould Gibson
My story “The Recital Dress” began on a friend’s screened-in porch. She and I had agreed to write fast for three minutes about a childhood memory involving a dress. Hers was a white dress for her first communion, mine a blue dress for my first and only dance recital. That dress in the wrong shade of blue. For my entire life I have carried the image of that dress, along with my confusion and disappointment. “Evening blue” was promised. Surely that meant the blue of evening and not the blue of the noontime sky. Surely the dance teacher could see that! The child trusts adults to deliver what they say they will deliver and words to correspond to what they stand for. I want to hug that child for her naivete. Bless her little heart! The action ends, and the last line reads: “Perhaps that was the moment I realized adults could not always be counted on to tell the truth.” Now as I write the author’s note, months after submitting the story, I find the conclusion might not have gone far enough. The child may be puzzled about the dress, but the adult writing the story is not puzzled. She understands quite well that the dance teacher and seamstress were merely doing their best, and that their best was not good enough to satisfy the child. The story is not so much about adults betraying a child’s trust as it is the inevitable failures built into human communication, and how, despite our best intentions, we fail one another and disappoint one another again and again and again.—Becky Gould Gibson
