The dress-up box was an old discarded ocean liner trunk our mother had re-purposed after years of travelling between Venezuela and Quebec. The trunk was covered with stickers from ports all over the Caribbean, South and North America. Its travels ended in a basement corner in our house on the West Island, a suburb of Montreal.
The trunk's insides were bursting with long discarded formal wear. There were old dresses our grandmothers had worn to Easter masses. Cocktail dresses our mother no longer fit in after bearing four children and hosting a decade of business dinners for our father and his visiting customers.
We three girls loved to play dress up. We would create Tolstoy-like sagas of sordid suburban hues. We would act out scenes of unhappy marriages, unwanted pregnancies, and saucy women sitting on men's laps. We'd giggle and laugh and blush with the forbiddingness of out imaginations. We were wise. We were wicked. And, mostly, we were complete innocents.
(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)
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