The next morning, as Mom and I sat down to coffee and bagels, she asked if I would be available later that afternoon to help her move some heavy boxes from her bedroom to her car. She had decided to go through her clothes closet and box up a few things for the Goodwill store. Her closet, she admitted with a sheepish laugh, was burgeoning at the seams and was long overdue for a cleanout.
I readily agreed to help. The band had scheduled an early session to learn some new material and, if things went as expected, I should be completely at liberty by early afternoon and I offered my services for anything she might need. "Excellent," she said, smiling happily. "It'll be nice to have the company too."
The band practice broke up around one o'clock and, instead of joining the guys for the usual celebratory pizza and beer, I begged off, having promised Audrey I would be there to help her that afternoon.
I opened the front door to find Audrey in the act of setting a large box down on top of another one already on the floor in the foyer. She smiled as I entered and rose up with a groan, arching her back. She was out of breath from her exertions, and idly blew an errant strand of hair out of her face. She was dressed more casually than I had ever seen her, in a rather large, ill-fitting t-shirt emblazoned with a large comic book image of Spiderman, a rather brief pair of white shorts and a casual pair of canvas deck shoes. Her hair was pulled back, held somewhat haphazardly in place with a large barrette at the back of her head.
Compared to the stylish clothing she usually wore, I'm quite certain that Audrey probably felt this afternoon's ultra-casual manner of dress to be rather unsightly and good for nothing other than messy menial chores. But all the models in the Victoria's Secret catalog, in thongs and skimpy teddies and peek-a-boo bras, collectively possessed a mere fraction of the erotic allure Audrey managed to display in her tight white shorts and Spiderman top.
"Hey," I smiled. "I like your t-shirt."
Audrey laughed and rolled her eyes, "A Mother's Day gift from one of my daughters many years ago," she explained. "And perfect for doing all manner of dirty housework or muddy gardening jobs."
She sighed heavily and moved another strand of hair back behind her ear, "Are you ready?" She asked, looking at me hopefully.
I nodded and smiled, "Lead on, Ms. Spiderman. I'm right behind you."
I followed her up the stairs to her bedroom, admiring her broad, shapely derriere in her tight white shorts, the muscles of her buttocks flexing provocatively with each step she took. Her legs, completely bared to the very top of her thighs, glinted in the light, looking almost glass smooth with a milky white consistency giving ample evidence that her plush thighs had not seen the sun in quite a long time.
In her bedroom, I could see she had already been very busy, with several boxes in various stages of being filled. She stood at her dresser and handed me item after item and specifying which box for me to place it in. We completed two boxes of dresser items, sweaters, blouses, several skirts, and other casual items. I taped up the boxes, labeled them as to their contents and trundled them down the stairs, one after another, to place near the other boxes already in the foyer by the front door.
With the dresser sufficiently cleared to her satisfaction, Audrey turned her attention to the large walk-in closet which, I could readily see, was replete with an overabundance of all manner of clothing on hangers and also on a long shelving unit against one wall.
As had been done previously, she handed me several armfuls of things that I folded and placed into boxes, taping them when full and running them down the stairs to join all the other boxes.
She was making quite a nice bit of headway, and her closet was actually beginning to show some semblance of uncluttered order when we stopped for lunch. She ordered pizza and, when it arrived, brought it upstairs to her room with a bottle of wine.
We sat cross-legged on the floor eating the pizza while sipping wine from paper cups. We chatted amiably about anything and everything and it struck me how easy it was to talk to her. We never seemed to have any uncomfortable pauses where one of us had to think of something to say or talk about. I thought that rather telling as I found none of that particular compatibility with my wife.
With the pizza consumed and the entire bottle of wine a fleeting memory, we resumed the closet clean-up. It was a much more enjoyable experience for both of us having just emptied a bottle of wine, and Mom and I laughed a great deal as we worked to clear out the things she no longer needed.
I was toting the latest box down the stairs when I discovered the wine had made me a little unsteady on my feet, and I giggled as I almost went ass over teakettle down the stairs. I made my way back upstairs without incident and entered the closet to see what more she had set aside for the boxes.
Audrey was bent over rummaging through a large box of shoes as I entered and I was, once again, captivated by the stunning view of her derriere. Bent over as she was, her shorts were pulled up to expose her lower buttocks cheeks, a view I found to be distinctly pleasurable. I stood idly by, waiting for her direction and looked around. A dress had been set aside separately from all her other dresses, and it caught my attention.
"What about this one here?" I asked lifting it and holding it up to the light to admire it. "Wow, this is really pretty."
It was a cocktail style, party dress and a very attractively styled as well. A dark shade of charcoal with a myriad of tiny glittery sparkles throughout that caught the light and made the material shimmer. It looked very much like something Laura might wear out to a nightclub. It was a backless, halter-style dress with a rather daring bodice that would plunge almost to the wearer's navel. Wow, I thought as it suddenly occurred to me how any woman in this dress would likely leave very little to anyone's imagination.
"Mom? This isn't one of your dresses, is it?" I asked, thinking that surely it must belong to Laura or Susan. It certainly wasn't the kind of dress I could ever imagine Audrey wearing, it was just too daringly revealing for her conservative taste in clothing.
Audrey smiled, turning at my question and her eyes widened in surprise when she saw the dress I was holding.
"Oh, that," she said, abruptly losing her smile as bright spots of color rose to her cheeks. She immediately stepped forward to take the dress from me, almost snatching it from my hands, as she smiled self-consciously, and her face flushed even more. "Yes...um, I'm afraid it IS mine."
"It's beautiful," I offered with a smile, taken completely aback to know it actually belonged to Audrey.
She smiled somewhat tentatively, holding the dress to her bosom almost lovingly. "It IS, isn't it, she said. "I fell in love with it from the first moment I saw it in the shop window. I thought it was just about the loveliest dress I had ever seen." She laughed almost girlishly. "I'm afraid I purchased it rather impulsively, even though I knew I'd never have the nerve to ever wear it."
"Wait," I asked in confusion, "This looks like a fairly expensive dress. Are you saying you've never actually worn it?"
"Well, I suppose I DID actually wear it once," she responded with a smile. "But only in the shop's dressing room when I tried it on, and never out in public where anyone might possibly see me wearing it."
I shook my head, astonished to imagine how Audrey might look in such a revealing dress, and it boggled my mind. "It's such a pretty dress, Mom," I said, "I can only imagine how fabulous it must have looked on you when you tried it on that first time."
Audrey laughed aloud and her face flushed again, "Fabulous? I'm afraid fabulous wasn't one of the words that immediately came to mind when I saw my reflection in the dressing room mirror," she said. "Words more like vulgar and... indecent came mostly to mind."
"Seriously? That's it? Nothing about sensual, or sexy?" I offered with a smile.
She laughed again and tossed her head. "Yes, well, I think that's pretty much the look I was hoping for when I tried it on," she said with a shrug. "But...for as much as I might have hoped it might be, all I could think of when I saw myself in the mirror was how much I looked like some kind of overweight, middle-aged woman trying to regain her look of youth by dressing the part, and only managing to look cheap and slutty instead."
"Well, look," I smiled and shrugged. "If I might offer my humble opinion as a card-carrying member of the masculine persuasion, I firmly contend that this dress would not only look beautiful on you, but also that you would look stunning wearing it."
Audrey smiled, "Thank you. It's really sweet of you to say so. But in all honesty, you weren't there. If you had been there to see me in this dress, I'm sure that even you would have to admit that a woman my age looked ridiculous wearing such a sexy dress."
Ridiculous? My imagination did a complete backflip. To my mind, a far better adjective than ridiculous would be 'astonishing' or 'incredible'. I stared at the dress and attempted to imagine Mom wearing it. The sheer, filmy fabric would, most definitely, cling revealingly to every sensual curve of her body, leaving absolutely nothing to anyone's imagination about her full, voluptuous figure. Her breasts would not only fill out the confines of the daring bodice, but the plunging neckline would also explicitly reveal an extremely generous amount of her ample cleavage, baring her chest from her neck to her navel. As well, the hemline would be short enough to also reveal a great deal of her shapely legs.
I cleared my throat self-consciously. "With all due respect, Mom, I really have to disagree with your characterization. I don't think you'd look ridiculous at all. You keep mentioning your age as if age it might have anything at all to do with a woman wanting to dress to make herself look desirable. Seriously, Mom, for a mature woman with three grown children, you've managed to maintain a figure that most women your age would kill for."
She smiled self-consciously at my compliment as she continued to hold the dress up to catch the light.
"The real shame in this whole thing," I said, "Is that you seem to have spent quite a lot of money on a dress that you never intended to wear."
