Three Days in a Wine-Red Dress

For three days in November I stood in a converted townhouse in the north of the city, beside eleven of my drawings, wearing a wine-red velvet dress that belongs to my mother. It does not fit her anymore and it did not quite fit me. I pinned the back and kept my shoulders straight.

I am not used to being looked at. My job is to look. Standing there in velvet while strangers looked at the work, and then briefly at me, was like drawing with the wrong hand. Possible. Uncomfortable. Not entirely bad.

The Dress

The dress is older than I am. My mother wore it to a wedding in Osaka in the eighties and has kept it wrapped in paper ever since, in a drawer that smells of camphor. When I asked to borrow it she did not make it a big thing. She ironed it. That was all.

She ironed it and said nothing, which is how my family says everything.

Total visitors over three days: eighty-six. I counted. Fifty-one of them were there for the other artists. Fourteen asked about the cat. Three asked whether the work was for sale and then said nothing more when I told them the price.

What People Said

The best question came from a girl of about nine who wanted to know why the cat is in every picture but is never the same cat. I said I did not know, and she looked at me with deep suspicion. I have not stopped thinking about it. She may have found the whole thing.

On the last night I walked home along the river in the dress, which was a poor idea in November. The velvet caught the streetlight and looked almost orange. I rolled it back up in its paper, put it in the drawer, and went to work on Monday in the dark blue workwear.