Free The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan

your socks?” The Red Cross package I sent for had finally arrived, and Isabel and I now spend our afternoons knitting socks on the veranda, at least until she gets to the tricky part of the heel and throws down her needles in a huff.
    “I’ll find the time.”
    “Can’t you borrow one of Isabel’s? Miss O’Leary’s wedding is just over a fortnight away.”
    “When I finish the beading, then?”
    She lifted her foot from the treadle, just long enough to rotate the cuff she was stitching. “With a few nips and tucks, one of Isabel’s will do.”
    “Which one?”
    “Leave me be,” she said, glancing up from her work, giving me a clear view of the darkness around her eyes.

    B reakfast has moved from the dining room to the kitchen. It is easier to clean up, and Father, with his increasingly late evenings, seldom manages to get out of bed early enough to join us. As I lift the teapot, and Isabel removes the cloth from the perpetual biscuits, Mother, all smiles, announces Edward is coming by this afternoon to pick up the remnants of a gown she made for Mrs. Atwell. Her milliner needs them for a matching hat. “Bess, you should put on the tea dress you made for Isabel,” Mother says.
    “I’m to pretty myself up for Edward Atwell, then?”
    Mother sighs deeply.
    “He’s staying for tea?” Isabel says.
    “He might.”
    “But I’d like to wear the tea dress,” Isabel says.
    “You just heard me say Bess could wear it.”
    “Go ahead,” I say. “I couldn’t care less.”
    Mother’s hand, alongside her plate, curls into a fist.
    After breakfast she calls me upstairs, where I assume she will assign me some menial task—ripping out a seam, basting stays into place. But instead she opens the doors of Isabel’s wardrobe, selects two dresses, and holds them out to me. “Try these on,” she says. “Then come and show me in the sewing room.”
    The first, which Isabel had not worn in years, is light peach with Juliet sleeves and a princess waistline trimmed in white cotton lace. If it were an inch or two longer, the hem of the skirt would fall fashionably, just above the ankle, but as is, the three-quarter length is better suited to a child.
    In the sewing room, I flick the peach cotton of the skirt and say, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Mother appraises me for a moment, her head cocked, her lips pursed. She smoothes her fingers over the sleeve, an unexpected melancholy palpable in the lightness of her touch, in the way her hand drops to her side. “You’ve grown up,” she says.
    The second dress is entirely white with intricate lace inserts, embroidered panels, and cutwork. As I slip it over my shoulders, I cannot help but think what a lot I have yet to master with needle and thread.
    Mother lifts my arms from my sides and guides me in a slow rotation. She frowns, seemingly unimpressed by the skillfulness of the embroidery and the neatness with which the ground fabric is cut away from the design. “It’s really beautiful,” I say, and then, as it occurs to me the work is her own, I wish I could take back the words.
    I follow her to Isabel’s bedroom where she pulls open the drawer housing Isabel’s underclothes. “It’s time you wore a corset.”
    “It’s only tea,” I say, feigning a bit of resistance.
    “Try it on.” She hands me a bundle of pale pink.
    Stays run the length of the side seams; also over the ribs, front and back; and alongside the hooks and eyes of the front opening, and the grommets of the back opening through which the lace is pulled. In my camisole and drawers, I fasten hooks and eyes from just beneath my sternum to well below my hips. I have heard of the fainting and know the complaints, also the rhetoric of the suffragettes, yet a corset is a rite of passage, which places me a step closer to making decisions for myself. As Mother begins to tighten the laces, the irony in such thinking strikes me, and then, with the final tug, any notion linking a corset with