Still in the Blue Dress

She has not taken the dress off. This is the thing she is aware of first — that she came home from mass, hung her coat on the hook by the door, set her gloves on the radiator the way she always does, and then stood in the bedroom doorway in the blue dress and did not move toward the closet. The dress is navy wool crepe, fitted through the ribs, and she has worn it every third Sunday for two years. She knows its weight.

She knows the way the fabric holds its shape even when everything inside it has stopped performing. The bells from Saint Catherine's have gone quiet. They rang while she was still on the subway, still pulling her gloves off finger by finger, and now the apartment holds only the sound of the radiator and, somewhere below on Amsterdam Avenue, a car moving slowly through cold that has kept most people inside. Winter light comes through the window at an angle that makes the room look like a photograph of itself — pale, considered, still.

She sits on the edge of the bed. The posture is the same one she held in the pew an hour ago: back straight, hands in her lap, knees together. The dress pulls slightly across both thighs where the fabric meets the mattress. She is aware of the hem against the backs of her knees, the specific pressure of the wool, the way the cold she carried in from outside is still leaving her skin.

Her hands are folded. She does not unfold them yet. The drawer is to her left. She knows what is in it.

She has known since she sat down in the third row this morning and the priest raised his hands and she looked at her own hands in her lap and thought, with a clarity she found unkind, about the weight of glass. She did not pray after that. She sat in the posture of prayer and felt the wool across her thighs and thought about weight and temperature and the specific deliberateness she brings to the drawer when she opens it, which is the same deliberateness she had just been bringing to the Kyrie, and that, she thinks, is the problem. Also, she thinks, the point.

She exhales. The breath comes out longer than she intended, longer than a breath that has nothing to confess, and she watches it go without trying to take it back. Her right hand uncurls from her left. She does not open the drawer yet.

She sets her right hand on her thigh, over the dress, and feels the wool under her palm — warm from her body, resistant, holding its shape the way it was made to. The cold is gone from her fingers now. Her own warmth has replaced it. She is aware of this in a way she would not be able to explain in any language she uses for other things.

The winter light moves slightly as a cloud shifts somewhere above the building. The room dims for a moment, then returns. She is still in the blue dress. Her hand does not move.