I am in a room in the Time Museum, in the archives. The floor and the walls are stone, gray marble squares, precisely laid. In the center of the room is a large rectangular marble slab. On the far wall is a stone peg. On the peg is a wire coat hanger, covered with paper, from the dry cleaners on Sixth Avenue. On the hanger is a dress.

It is a particular brand of dress, one which isn’t made any more. A Villager dress, a cotton shirtwaist with a round collar, short sleeves and a straight skirt, in a delicate print of tiny blue flowers on a white background. It has pearl buttons and rows of tucks on the bodice. Each tuck is stitched down, and the pearl buttons do not open. The belt is elastic, dyed blue to match the dress, and trimmed in leather, also dyed to match, with a brass buckle.

The dress has been starched and ironed. It is still damp and the collar is shiny from the heat and the pressure. Even starched it doesn’t hold its shape. It begins to wrinkle and soften as soon as I touch it. The brass buckle on the belt is tarnishing.

I turn up the hem. My stitches are there, an eccentric hemstitch my grandmother taught me. Each stitch catches only a thread or two of the outer material and is knotted underneath with a backstitch. The stitches are precisely spaced, one half inch apart. The hem is invisible and cannot unravel.

I remember buying this dress. I was in summer school at Stanford. One evening, after my class in aesthetics, after my lab in quantitative analysis, I rode my rental bike, a blue girl’s Schwinn with three gears and a wire basket on the front, to the May Company. It was August and Villager dresses, the summer ones, were on sale. I bought three, all innocent prints: one blue flowered, one with tiny pink elephants, one printed with red apples. All three had round collars and straight skirts with set in waists and zippers in the back.

I packed away the yellow culottes and the orange bell bottoms I’d bought that summer and I wore these dresses the last two weeks of school.

It was this dress, the blue flowered one, I wore the most. The fabric was a fragile cotton. I washed it in the machine but I hung it up to dry, afraid it would shrink and fade. Then I ironed it. It took a long time to iron. The iron had to be hot and I had to spray the dress with starch. Faultless Starch, the label read. I tried to iron it perfectly. I ironed it every week for the rest of that summer and all of the next.
I wore it in Denver until Labor day, when I became engaged and went back to Wellesley. I began wearing it again in April and I wore it in June when I dropped out and returned to Denver. I wore it all that summer until I married in September, then I put it away for the winter.

The next May I was pregnant.
I never wore it again.
Until now.

I put on the dress. It is hard to zip up the back by myself. I know it won’t fit me but it fits perfectly. My body compresses to fit it.

My hair, in this dress, is long and shiny, the way I used to wear it. As I look down my hair swings across my face. When I raise my head it goes back into place. My hair is perfectly straight until it flips up at my shoulders. It is parted in the middle and pushed behind my ears and secured with a narrow black grosgrain ribbon. I have taped my bangs to my forehead with scotch tape, sprayed them with hair spray and let them dry in place, then removed the tape. The ribbon holds them in this position. It insures that no strand of hair can escape.

I have washed my hair and set it on plastic rollers. They are bronze colored, the size of beer cans, only shorter. They have their own large bobby pins with rubber tips. It takes ten of them to set my hair. I have sat for an hour under my hair dryer, a large hard plastic dome which telescopes up and out from a circular base and collapses back onto it, secured by metal latches.

I am getting ready to go out. I have taken a bath, shaved my legs, plucked my thick dark eyebrows into a narrow line. There are no stray hairs. I have washed my face with Phisohex. There is no cream on my face. I don’t wear any lipstick. But there is eyeshadow on my eyes, green on my upper eyelids and brown underneath my eyebrows; I have read in Mademoiselle magazine that this will make the fleshy area beneath my brow appear to recede. I wear blusher, a rosy pink on my cheeks. I am wearing Arpege perfume. "Promise her anything but give her Arpege," the ads say. I am listening to these promises.

I am wearing panty hose. They have just come out, and I still wear my panty girdle over them. The pantyhose are a shade called suntan and my legs look like artificial limbs. I have pearl earrings in my ears. Studs. Tiny pearls set in white gold, with six prongs. There are flat shoes on my feet. Capezios. Pastel blue. My nails are short. I have removed the excess cuticle. My hands are small and soft.

The boy I am engaged to will come to pick me up. We will go to his parents’ house. It is for sale. It is nearly empty. There is a couch and a mattress. He will give me a beer. Then another. We will start kissing. I will get excited. He will fondle my breasts. Then he will unzip my dress, this blue flowered Villager dress, and pull my slip down. He will unhook my bra and kiss my breasts. He will take my dress off. I will peel off my panty girdle. It is so difficult to remove it is impossible to pretend this action is not deliberate. When I am undressed I will lie back on the bed and he will fill a syringe with contraceptive foam and discharge it into my vagina. He will rub my breasts and my clitoris. He will lie on top of me and thrust. He will ejaculate. I will be full of foam and sperm. I will never come. I will go into the bathroom to pee. I will stimulate myself, quickly and quietly. In an hour or two he will refill the syringe and come again inside me.

His body is tan and smooth, almost hairless. Just a little longer than mine. His hair is dark and silky. I will love him because he isn’t living in his head. He isn’t an intellectual. He doesn’t read. I will think he is in his body. I will think he is part of some mystical union with the universe which I want. He is a misogynist, he tells me. But I am the exception. Later, after I marry him, after I divorce him, I will learn I was not.

I can’t see him now. I can’t feel him.
I can feel myself ironing this dress. I can feel the warm fabric and I can smell the starch.

The label of this dress is so comforting. "Villager," in script. An eagle. So New England. So preppie. As if I have a history. A tradition. As if I have a lineage. As if I belong at Wellesley. As if I am not a fatherless girl from Denver in a surplus alpaca army coat and boy’s button front jeans.

Whatever I do in this dress will show on it instantly. Sitting in a car. Making out. Perspiring. It has already begun to wrinkle and to soil.

I can’t dance in it.
I can’t eat in it.
I can’t move my arms.
I can’t spread my legs
I can’t relax my stomach.

I can pretend to be normal.
I wonder how many of those dresses they sold.

I want to be in my body.
I want to live outside my head. Beyond analysis.
But I want to be safe.
I think that conformity will protect me.

This dress encases me.
It is not immediately recognizable as an instrument of torture. It is so
innocent. Demure. It seems so benign.
But it traps me. Constricts me.
Its propriety is the most delicate and the most permanent binding I can find.

I am 19.
In this dress I have a history.
In this dress I have a future proscribed for me as certainly as prophecy.
I now understand the fairy tale.
It is backwards.
It is 1967. I won’t be kissed into consciousness.

I go to the stone slab. I lay down, in my Villager dress, waiting to be kissed into sleep.