The Dress Shop

Clara Reinholt signed the lease on a Tuesday in March of 1920, standing in the empty storefront on Virginia Street with the landlord and a pen and the particular feeling of a person who has just committed to something that cannot be taken back without cost.

The storefront was narrow and deep, wedged between a druggist and a lawyer's office, with a front window that faced west and caught the afternoon light and a back room that faced nothing and was dark and would need lamps. The floor was wooden, scuffed from whatever business had occupied the space before. The walls were plaster, painted a cream color that had yellowed. The ceiling was pressed tin, decorative in a way that had been fashionable twenty years ago and was now simply old, which Clara preferred to fashionable, because fashionable changed and old held still.

She was thirty-one years old. She had come to Reno from Cincinnati nine months earlier to obtain a divorce from a man who had married her when she was twenty-two and who had spent the subsequent years demonstrating that what he had wanted was not a wife but an audience. The divorce had been granted in January. Her attorney had assumed she would return to Ohio. Her family had assumed the same. Clara had assumed it herself, right up until the morning after the decree was signed, when she woke in her room at the boarding house on Court Street and looked out the window at the mountains and the pale winter sky and realized that she did not want to go back.

Not because Reno was better than Cincinnati. It was not, by most measures. It was smaller and drier and farther from everything she had known. But it was a place where she had no history, and a person with no history is a person who can choose what happens next, and Clara, for the first time in her adult life, wanted to choose.

She had some money. Her settlement had been modest but sufficient, and she had saved what she could during the marriage. She had enough to lease a storefront and stock it with the thing she knew, which was dresses.

The shop opened on a Saturday in April. She had painted the sign herself: REINHOLT'S, in dark green letters on a white background, plain and legible. She had arranged the dresses on a wooden rack along the east wall and placed a full-length mirror near the back and set a chair by the window where women could sit and look at the street while they decided.

Her first customer was a woman named Mrs. Chandler, from Philadelphia, who was in her third month of residency and who needed a dress for a dinner at the Riverside Hotel. Clara measured her and pulled three dresses from the rack and handed them to her one at a time, and Mrs. Chandler tried each one and stood before the mirror and Clara watched her face, which was the place where the fitting happened, not on the body but on the face, in the moment when a woman looked at herself and either recognized what she saw or didn't.

The second dress fit. Mrs. Chandler looked at herself and her shoulders dropped slightly, not in defeat but in release, the way shoulders drop when a person stops holding something.

Word spread the way word spreads in a small town among a temporary population. The divorce women talked to each other constantly, at the Riverside and at the boarding houses and at the tearooms on Virginia Street, and within a month Clara had a steady flow of customers, women from New York and Boston and Chicago and Philadelphia who came to Reno to end their marriages and who, while they were waiting, needed something to wear.

She learned their rhythms. They came in the first week disoriented, still dressed for the cities they had left. They came in the middle months settling, wearing the town with an ease that had been earned rather than assumed. And some of them, in their last weeks, came looking for something specific, a dress for the courthouse, a dress for the day it would be over. Clara helped them find it with quiet attention, because the dress you wear on the day you sign a divorce decree is not a celebration and not a mourning but a marking, a way of saying, this happened, and I was dressed for it.

In June, a woman came into the shop whom Clara did not recognize. She was perhaps forty, slender, and she browsed the rack with the easy familiarity of someone who knew what she was looking at.

"Have you been to Reno before?" Clara asked.

"Years ago," the woman said. "I came for a divorce. Back when it was six months."

"Did you find what you needed?"

The woman smiled, a small smile that was not about the question Clara had asked. "I did. Eventually."

She bought a cotton dress, pale blue, suitable for summer. Clara wrapped it in tissue paper and the woman said, "I'm Helen. Helen Marsh."

"Clara Reinholt."

"You're new here."

"About a year."

Helen looked around the shop, at the dresses on the rack and the mirror in the back and the sign in the window. "It's a good shop," she said. "This town needs one."

She left, and Clara watched her walk north on Virginia Street toward the river, and she did not know the woman's story and the woman did not know hers, but there was a recognition between them that did not require explanation, the recognition of two women who had come to Reno for one reason and found another, and who had, each in her own way, decided to stay.

Clara closed the shop at five. She swept the floor and covered the window display and locked the door and walked south on Virginia Street to the small apartment she rented above a bakery on Second Street, and the evening was warm and the light was long and the mountains were purple against a sky that was turning gold, and Clara Reinholt, who had come to Reno to leave something behind, was beginning, instead, to build.

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