DRESSING THE GHOST

A short story that asks if a dress belongs to the living or the dead

"Brooklyn Ghost” (1974) by Larry Racioppo/NYPL Digital Collection

None of my friends wanted to model a dead girl’s dress, but after they did they all posted photos of it to their Instagram accounts. The outfit was black with a gold belt, and black bows on each shoulder. A pleat ran across one hip, making the fabric of the skirt drape in a sexy way. I didn’t remember having ever seen my roommate in it. When my roommate was killed, I’d been left with a stack of blue jeans and blouses and an empty room.

Her name was Olive Baker. I’d met her through a friend on social media when I’d posted that I had an extra room. I didn’t know the friend well and I hadn’t lived with Olive more than three months when she was hit by a ConEd truck while cycling home from work.

Her parents, Stan and Jodi Baker, had that broad Midwestern stature, feet shoulder-width apart, standing tall and wide even in their grief, like very old trees. They came and collected some of her things—fit three boxes into their Toyota Corolla. They had driven nine hours from Parma, Ohio to ID her body and make arrangements for her cremation. I cried a little and gave them almond milk and cookies, as if they were children, and told them I was sorry. They took Olive’s vintage typewriter, some photographs in frames, her laptop, a couple pieces of pottery she’d made, a box of books, a teapot, and an old plush dog with a chewed-up ear. They asked me if I could look after the rest.

“Of course.” I didn’t know what else to say. Olive died five days before rent day but I couldn’t bring it up.

Since moving in the only purchase Olive had made that wasn’t edible was a bookshelf she ordered online from Dot & Bo. I took a photograph of it, and sold it on Craigslist for $150 to a couple in Ridgewood. In Olive’s closet I found vintage dresses: mostly unworn, probably because she biked every day across the Williamsburg Bridge to a small publishing office near Union Square. I struggled into a few different garments. The looser styles didn’t look bad on me—I snapped pictures using the full-length mirror in her room. I posted them to my Etsy and kept the descriptions brief. Wool cardigan with rhinestones, good condition, size small. Floral 1990s shirt-dress—cotton. And the measurements. A-line skirt with hot air balloon appliqué. I priced everything $30 more than I thought it was worth.

The Etsy page was left over from my vase project—a couple years ago I collaged old black-and-white photos onto flower vases and mugs. It went awry when I pasted a grainy image of General Josip Tito of Yugoslavia onto a purple pitcher. I didn’t know he was a Communist dictator. By the time the ban was lifted, I had tired of collage on objects, and now I mostly used my Etsy to sell stuff when I was short on cash.

I tried on a pair of Olive’s Mavi jeans, but they were too snug. She was a size ten. I texted my friend Gabi, who was small-waisted, and asked her to come over and help me sort. It was while I was waiting for her that I spotted the black dress. I could see right away it was too little for me. I laid it down on the couch and took a photo of it against the blue seating. I couldn’t decide if it looked sad like that, empty and flat, so I picked it up and took it back in the bedroom.

I tried to shimmy into it, but it was stiff—not a lot of give. One of the bows on the shoulder kept flopping in my face as I half-turned to try to do up the zipper. Very confined, slightly overheated, and maybe even nauseous, I looked at myself in the mirror: my breasts pressed against the fabric obscenely. I was suddenly self-conscious to be putting on Olive’s things. I had liked Olive. I remembered learning about ethics years before and a wave of words seemed to swarm me—accountability, assent, beneficence, conduct, relativism—words one never reached for in daily life.

But I was also determined. I knew it would sell.

The buzzer rang and it was Gabi.

“That isn’t ’80s,” she informed me. “ It’s actual ’50s. Price it high, Sue.”

“Aren’t you a size ten?”

Gabi raised an eyebrow at me. “Six. Eight on a bad day.”

“So you can wear it.” I began to peel it off, but she stopped me.

“I’m not wearing it. Put it back on. I’ll take your photo.”

Gabi knew I needed the money from the sales, but she never understood why I couldn’t just phone my mom for it. That was the problem I’d always had being friends with kids from wealthier families than mine. At the end of each month I had my rent ready plus another 100 or two, if I was lucky. Gabi knew a lot about fashion though—and made some adjustments to the bows, smoothing them over the shoulder in a way that tickled. Then she told me how to stand. “Lean into the light. Put your foot back. No, the other foot. Your toe, yes, like that. Chin up. Don’t look so annoyed. Channel your inner Kim.”

“The dictator?” I asked, worried I was stepping into another Etsy ban.

“Kardashian,” she clarified.

I closed my eyes and let my mouth hang open a little. I felt twisted and faint in the shape she’d put me in. The bulb in the lamp was making the room hot. “Did you take it?”

“One more.”

I didn’t have the patience. I unsnapped myself from the position and stood staring at her, my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. She took another. “I can’t use that,” I said.

Gabi shrugged. She passed me her phone camera. I looked over the shots while she rummaged through the dresses in the closet, fingering the material. “Cute, frumpy, kinda cute, frumpy, frumpy, hideous, oh, maybe—no, never mind. Oh, this blouse is Anthropologie, and this is Madewell.”

I looked up from the shots she’d taken to insist that she model the dress.

“Did you see they left her jewelry?” Gabi poked her hand into the closet and came back out with a honeycomb necklace. There was an opal pendant, another of hammered gold, and something antique-y and green that looked like it might be half valuable. All the necklaces had been hung on tiny cup hooks along the back wall. “Why would any mother leave this stuff? What were they like?” Gabi’s nose wrinkled.

“Stan and Jodi?”

“Maybe they didn’t get along. I mean, you didn’t like Olive much.”

“That’s not true. We didn’t have as much in common as I thought we would.”

My phone dinged. I looked. “It’s from Serena.”

“Again?”

I barely knew Serena Alton except that she was the one who had introduced me to Olive. We’d only met once in real life before, but since Olive died, she’d been texting me constantly. I didn’t understand it—I didn’t think they’d been great friends either. Gabi leaned in and examined the message.

“It’s because you’re Olive’s roommate. You’re on point for grief,” Gabi said. I grumbled that it was a big responsibility and she said, “Pick a sentence she wrote and text it back verbatim as if you’re agreeing.” Gabi pointed. “There. It’s terrible—I can’t stop thinking about how it happened. Add an exclamation. Trust me, I do this all the time. Sometimes I say the same thing but with a question mark instead, and then the person just answers their own statement back again. It’s conversation without the danger of thought.”

I said I couldn’t, but in the end I modified only slightly: I can’t stop thinking about it either! It is just terrible!!!

“I should be sadder,” I said.

I had dodged past Olive every other morning as she made her way out of the shower down our narrow hall, and one time I heard Olive giving head to a date in her bedroom. I remembered how she had sweat on her lip when she came in from riding through the city, and how every once in a while I would hear her talking on the phone through the wall, her voice a little warmer, more buttery, than it usually was. I wondered now who she’d been talking to—a best girl friend, or the Hinge date she never talked about again. Mostly I knew her stale granola in the kitchen, her special gluten-free flour, the two 1970s cups she’d added to our cupboard: green with a chevron pattern.

The phone chimed twice more—Serena didn’t notice the trick.

“Am I a horrible person?” I asked as I read the new messages aloud to Gabi.

“Yes,” Gabi said.

I texted back a sad emoji and felt better. The yellow circle was more real than my words.

Gabi emerged from the closet with a vase I’d made a long time ago. It had been wrapped up in a shirt. Hadn’t that room been mine once? she asked. Before Olive—before the last roommate? Yes, it had, but I hadn’t left it in there. In fact, I’d wondered where it went.

“Maybe Olive liked it and wanted it,” Gabi speculated, tilting the vase to the side to examine the image on it: a pair of 1950s girls riding bicycles, windblown hair and high-waisted shorts.

It creeped me out a bit that that was the one Olive had decided to steal, given how she died. It creeped me out even more than the fact that she’d tried to steal something from me instead of just asking. It didn’t seem like the Olive I’d known. But what had I really known about her? Just that she wore tortoise Ray-Bans and left each morning at 7:45. Gabi took a photo of the vase for my Etsy.

“How come you stopped making these?”

I didn’t answer. I went and got a half-empty bottle of wine from the fridge. It had been in there a couple days, but she wouldn’t care.

“I miss living here,” Gabi said when I came back.

She agreed to slip into the dress, but she frowned down her torso. She pirouetted once and I snapped her pic, blurred at the edges, before she ran back to the mirror, groaned and began pulling angrily behind her at the zipper. She went to the window and climbed out onto my fire escape and smoked a cigarette. “You can use it,” she said when she came back in, her voice flat from pretending not to care.

*

I posted everything except the black dress. I considered putting up the photo of myself in it, but I was vain. A couple of Olive’s frumpy floral dresses sold first. My vase sold quickly, and the honeycomb necklace I’d promised to Gabi if it didn’t sell. But by the thirty-first of the month I’d only made $220.

I texted Gabi and she texted back: The honeycomb necklace sold? It was one of my sentences, only with a question mark on the end. I couldn’t decide if it was a joke, or if she didn’t know she’d done it to me. I went back through a bunch of our texts and saw she’d parroted me back to me at least ten times before.

On rent day there was a knock on the door. I almost ignored it—could it be the landlord demanding my check already? When I looked through the peephole, I saw a guy about my age: well built, a beard and eyebrows that looked like they’d been waxed. I don’t know why I opened the door. He had a nice face, I guess. He introduced himself as Devon. He said he’d been dating Olive.

“Come in,” I said. “I’m Sue.” His hand was soft and firm when we shook.

I watched Devon moving around the space, eyeing the old window frames and the new windows. He looked serious, but not particularly upset.

“You’ve been here before? With Olive?”

Devon nodded. “I can’t believe it. I feel horrible.” He went to the door of her half-empty bedroom. “You’re being really brave.”

“Am I?” I followed him in.

He leaned into the sill and looked out. Olive’s view was the better one—all of Manhattan lit up, far across the rooftops, though it was not yet sunset. Below us were the slab flat buildings of industrial Greenpoint. Devon asked me why I’d given her the best room.

I shrugged. This had been my room once before, over a year ago. I didn’t tell him that since coming to New York I considered most of life to be changeable, negotiable. Things could shift in an afternoon, just as they had when I’d found out about Olive.

“How much is her half of the rent? Today’s the first.”

I was surprised that he thought of it.

“Maybe I could help you out.” Devon grazed a hand across his combed beard. He had incredible eyes, and a great chest. The longer Devon walked around the room, the more aware he made me: of the space, the silence, and his body there and what I heard him do with Olive. I felt as though he was waiting for an invitation. He had a contemplative expression. Then he said it: “It’s available?”

I didn’t know how to answer so I stared down at my phone. There was a message from Serena saying we should do something meaningful.

We should do something meaningful! I texted back.

“I don’t understand. You’re looking for a place?” I wondered if I’d got it wrong.

Devon looked out the window. “I just—” There was a new neediness in his voice. “I have to find a place. They sold my building. I was looking, and then, well, I lost most of last week because Olive and I were fighting and texting. And this week…she’s gone.”

I noticed Devon couldn’t say dead. I felt that struggle.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to ask. Actually, all I wanted was to get this. I gave it to her.” He held out a book I’d cleared off the shelves I’d sold. Her parents had left it behind. I watched him handling it the way one might touch a baby. “Don Quixote. The illustrations are by Salvador Dali. First edition of this version.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to ever open the copyright page to check an edition in my life—that it could be worth something, and I’d overlooked it, stung. I asked how long they’d gone out.

“A month.”

I set down my phone and went to the closet. “Come here,” I said. My whole body felt hot as I reached up and pulled out a men’s style shirt. I held it up to Devon, smoothing the fabric across his chest and shoulders. “You should have this. I saw it in here the other day.”

The other day. As if I hadn’t been going into the closet every half hour looking for things to sell. I bet the Quixote would have fetched hundreds.

Devon put it on over his gray T-shirt. He rolled up the Oxford’s sleeves before buttoning it. It wasn’t going to close. “Doesn’t really fit,” he said, looking down at himself. He plucked the shirttail up, and held it against his mouth. “It smells like her.”

Devon sat on Olive’s bed.

“I’ll give you a minute,” I said. My phone chimed, a new text from Serena: Drinks? I checked my Etsy and saw that I’d sold the full-length mirror. I had no idea if the price would cover much more than the shipping. My guts tightened with guilt at what I was doing.

In the kitchen at the far end of the apartment I wondered if this guy was going to start crying in Olive’s room. I found an unopened bottle of Remy I’d seen in Olive’s cupboard, and some crackers. I put glasses and saucers on a tray and carried them back to the bedroom. Devon sat looking at the floorboards. When he looked up and saw the drinks he said, “Oh yes, definitely.”

There was nowhere else to sit, so I sat beside him on the bed. We clinked glasses and drank silently. The brandy stretched across my tongue like a silk ribbon. Devon’s was already half empty.

“What did you fight about? You said you were fighting with her.”

Devon reached out and took a Ritz. He chewed through it and then another. I poured us each another drink.

“The day she got hit, I wanted to come here with her. We were having an argument about it actually. She said she didn’t want to bring me back here because she wasn’t comfortable hanging out here.”

“Because of me.”

“She said you never left.” He reached up and touched my shoulder, an arm around me for just a minute. “But don’t take it that way. It isn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have yelled at her. She took off on her bike without her helmet. Why didn’t she take her helmet?” He stood up and stalked around the room, furious with himself.

“I’ve been selling her things online.” I blurted it out like a confession. I expected him to hate me—and maybe I wanted him to. I deserved to be hated. But his eyes turned soft and he came over and touched my sleeve. Not my arm this time, just my sleeve. I got a funny electric feeling, like when you’re a kid and you put a battery on your tongue because someone has dared you.

“Sure you won’t let me move in? I could give you rent right now.”

I hadn’t realized I’d said no, but having never answered was an answer. “I’ll think about it.”

The closet was still open and he saw the black dress hanging in there. He let go of my sleeve as he moved past me.

“This is the best one,” I told him. He reached out and touched one of the bows the same way he’d touched my sleeve. “No one will model it.”

“I will. I’ll help you.”

Devon was still wearing Olive’s button-up shirt, and now he pulled it off, along with his T-shirt. He held the hanger out from him, peering at the dress. “Why does wearing her dress feel more personal than that shirt?”

I picked up the shirt and felt its buttons. I shook my head.

“Like invading her privacy,” Devon insisted.

“We’re already in her room.”

“A room belongs to anyone. A dress only belongs to one person.” But he was already undoing the dress zipper.

“You don’t know,” I said. “Dresses get lent, swapped, donated, rebought and turned into hairbands. We don’t respect clothes.”  

I let my gaze climb up and down his torso. He had a smattering of black hair in the center of his chest and a script tattoo on his shoulder that said: “Life itself is a quotation.” He was part thick and part muscle. It wasn’t a bad mix.

He glanced up and saw me looking.

“What’s that?” I pointed at the tattoo to cover my embarrassment.

“Borges.”

“I’ll give you a minute.” I went out and closed the door behind me.

*

When Devon came out of the room in the dress, he looked surprised and happy with himself. I aimed my camera but he wouldn’t stop moving. He was walking in a softer, coyer way, his gestures more elongated. The dress was stretched as far as it would go and he hadn’t done up the zipper. A triangle of pale back flesh peeked through along with the tattoo. I went into my room and came back with a makeup kit. We poured another couple drinks. We were both good and drunk by the time I took photos. It surprised us both that the bottle was empty. Devon rested one hand on his hip and stuck out his lips at me. He looked theatrical with cosmetics and a beard, but cute. I’d dabbed a red color called Fearless on his bushy lips. We both laughed and then he said: “You know, you’re nothing like she said. I don’t know why you two didn’t get along.”

“Wait, what does that mean?” I yelled as he went into Olive’s bedroom to take the dress off.

When he didn’t answer, I followed him in. He turned around and then his Fearless-red mouth came down at me. The lipstick had a waxy taste and a different smell on someone other than me—and his lips were hard even though Olive’s dress granted him more feminine movements. The hairs of his beard tickled. On Olive’s bed, I ran my hands up under the dress. He was still wearing boxer briefs and there was nothing elusive about what I found there.

I told him I didn’t know his last name and he said it, but into my mouth, the kiss muffling it. I didn’t stop him when he snagged his cargo shorts off the floor and found a condom in the wallet.

*

After, he didn’t want me to post the photo. It wasn’t because he’d been in drag, he said. But he didn’t want anyone to think he’d put on her dress. If it had been my dress, it would make all the difference. He didn’t want to be seen as callous. Besides then people would know there had been something between us, and obviously it was too soon.

“It’s Etsy. How will anyone know?” I asked, but he just lay there, shaking his head, a red shiny smear across one cheek. I said he wasn’t even on my social media, then he picked up his phone and clicked and said he’d just added me, and I heard the faraway of chime of his friendship on my phone as he followed me on two platforms.

I told him he was still drunk.

“Just ashamed.” Devon let his arm fall back over his face and pretended to sob. “Is this how women feel?” He sat up suddenly, unsmiling.

“No. Much worse.”

“You should leave,” he said, pulling back the curtain on the window. It had become night. The Empire State Building was illuminated in red and blue.

“I’m not leaving. This is my place.”

“I’m just saying, if you can’t afford the rent.”

“Are you still trying to get my apartment?”

I turned over and fell asleep, a bit angry that he wouldn’t let me post the photo. When I woke, I realized we’d done it in Olive’s bed. I hadn’t even thought about it. The bed was much softer than mine and had a good frame. I could easily sell it on Craigslist. I stood up and looked around. Devon’s clothes were gone—his boy clothes. The dress lay in a black circle on the floorboards where it had been shed.

*

Three days after rent day, Gabi posted the picture of herself in the dress. There it was, below her handle @DowntonGabi. Twirling and blurred, caption: #nomakeup.

I was at work so I couldn’t even get angry. On my way home, I got a new text from Serena. I feel so alone right now, the text said.

I feel so alone right now! I wrote.

What’s your address? she asked.

*

“Donate what’s left to charity,” Serena said, walking around Olive’s room. We’d already had a couple glasses from the bottle of rosé she’d brought over. The apartment was emptier now because I’d moved Olive’s bed into my room, and sold my own bed. I still hadn’t paid the rent and there wasn’t much left to sell. Serena took out her phone and emailed me the names and webpages of three different organizations that took donations to help women. I liked Serena more than I’d remembered, though I had a hard time reconciling the emotion she channeled into her texts with the restrained woman in front of me.

“This is nice,” she said, one finger whisking the black dress with the gold belt.

I told her she should take it, have something of Olive’s.

She frowned. “I don’t believe in that. Possessions are just objects. We don’t lend our energy to them. That’s what I’m sad about: that her spirit and her energy is gone.”

“You don’t think it’s terrible that I’ve been selling her things?”

“Why,” she asked. “Do you think it’s terrible?”

“A little.”

Serena held the dress up to herself. She was a tall, athletic woman. I could see the dress would fit. “I think there are more effective ways of making the money,” she said. “If it had been me, I’d have asked her parents. It’s their obligation to fulfill, even if they are grieving.”

“You would?”

Serena nodded.

I knew she worked in the nonprofit sector—a place called Homesteads. I had Stan and Jodi Baker’s number and said that I’d consider it. Would she at least try on the dress? “Look, it’s just right for you.”

She gave in. I hadn’t thought her beautiful until she put on the dress. That was what I was thinking as I took her picture, that she was one of those people who physically transformed depending on a situation. It was why I’d felt like I didn’t know her well—and how after we started talking it was easy to know her.

As she posed for me, she told me she’d done a book drive and contacted the publisher Olive worked for to get donations. They’d hit it off and gone on a couple of bike tours together. I told her she knew Olive better than I did, and Serena said she didn’t think so. She turned around and tugged at the zipper.

She undressed in front of me, and put on her other clothes. “I knew her when she was out with friends. You knew her in the morning.”

As Serena was leaving, she gave me a long hug, which surprised me. When she pulled back she had tears on her cheeks. “Damn,” she said, swiping at them as if their existence was a personal flaw. Something caught her eye in the apartment and I turned to look. I had a photo collage I’d made above the table, something I did a decade ago at school.

Serena walked over to it. “Do you still do this kind of thing?”

Homesteads had a silent auction fundraiser coming up and an artist had called her that afternoon to ask to drop out. She could put this in. Homesteads would take a percentage—I’d make at least a few hundred.

*

After she left, I stood there for a moment staring at the blank wall: an outline square where my work had been. A sunbaked shape. New York had convinced me that everything had a value, except me.

I found a large old frame in my closet: what to put in it? I swiped through the photos I’d taken of Olive’s dress: me, Gabi, Devon, and Serena, then the shot of it draped, empty, on my couch. I went and got the dress from the closet. I put it on. This time, like Devon, I didn’t worry about the zipper. I wondered what Olive would have wanted from me—a near stranger whom she’d only tolerated because of New York’s rental shortage.

I took the half-finished bottle of rosé Serena had brought up the stairs to my roof. I phoned my landlord as I walked out on the tarpaper.

“Listen, I need to give notice.” I took a slug of the wine and hoped he wouldn’t hear. I never understood why other women liked rosé. It was like trying to drink a sunset.

“Why? It’s a good apartment, and a fair price.” The landlord seemed offended. Apartments in New York were personal.

I apologized: I’d be using my deposit as my last month’s rent.

If I could count on the art price Serena had promised, I would be at a thousand dollars, enough to buy a ticket somewhere. I didn’t know yet where I would travel. Walking toward the roof ridge between my place and my neighbor’s, I realized I hadn’t been up there all summer and couldn’t fathom how that had happened. Staring out at the salmon color of the sky behind the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, I wondered which street Olive Baker had been riding on when she died. A Brooklyn breeze came up, swirling my hair and climbing into my nostrils: warm garbage, with the promise of the ocean only ten miles away.

The breeze stirred the bow on one shoulder, forcing it against my mouth. The material was musty and sweet at the same time. I reached across myself, not caring what I would damage.

I yanked, feeling the soft sigh of the fabric as it ripped. I held it in my hand, a stiff black bow shaped like a dog’s toy bone. I gazed across the East River at the city skyscrapers. I went back downstairs to my apartment and grabbed the scissors. I peeled off the dress, and kneeling in my underwear on the living room floor, cut the garment into long strips and lay the ribbons out. With every snip, I felt I could breathe a bit better.

Then I braided the black pieces together with the ghost-colored slip lining and twisted in the gold belt. When I finished it was a frayed but pretty thing, arranged in zigzags beneath the glass. She was gone, and soon, I would be too. Whoever wanted the apartment could have it.

A version of this story was originally published in The Hopkins Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2020.