Love, Loss, and What I Wore: Jane Smiley  I made the date, I
made the dress; I was getting hitched. Was the cat trying to
stop me?  Getty Images  The story I usually tell about my one
and only wedding gown is the one about the cat, but first, there
was the proposal. I was sitting around with the other Vassar
girls, discussing where I should live once my boyfriend
graduated from Yale (I still had a year to go). One of the girls
said, "Get married; they're bound to give you a car," and so
that very night, I proposed. It took him 24 hours to consent,
and two more weeks for my parents to...offer us a car.  The gown
itself I found in a fashion magazine. It was a faux
Victorian/peasant/ fairy-tale thing with a high neckline,
pleats, ruffles, and floating satin ribbons, in the purest
white. I adored it. It somehow represented everything that we
were not (we were: tall, gawky, Marxist, bespectacled, middle-
class, suburban). I was, of course, going to make it myself.
French couture— what could be hard?  I sewed. My se