As you might expect by now (if you have read any of my previous posts), clothing was not handled by my mother in a normal manner. There were a number of factors that converged to make a Perfect Storm that produced a Clothing Catastrophe.
First of all, my mother disliked wearing any clothes at all. She was an exhibitionist and nudist at heart. She slept naked, swam in their pool naked, and walked around the house naked. When she accidentally walked in on my brother in the kitchen stark naked, he was so horrified I thought his head was going to explode.
This is her favorite joke, which she repeated 24,000 times:
What is honeymoon salad?
Lettuce alone without dressing.
You're welcome.
My mother preferred to wear a minimum of clothes - for example, her bathrobe with no belt. She also had an ongoing war with under-garments. The under-garments always lost, except on very special occasions. She was well-endowed and needed to wear a bra, but she disliked feeling constricted. Her compromise was to put on a bra, but not fasten it in the back. It looked exactly as you would expect. She also disliked zipping up her pants. The overall effect was that her flesh went swaying in different directions and seemed to be trying to burst out at the seams. Nakedness threatened.
When my mother was very old, my daughter paid her a visit to introduce her wonderful boyfriend. Leaving the boyfriend safely in the kitchen - she was no fool! - my daughter found my mother on the porch wearing a short, ill-fitting, unfastened shirt and an adult diaper. My daughter suggested that she and her boyfriend wait in the kitchen while my mother got dressed.
"Oh, nobody cares about those things any more," my mother scoffed, shuffling into the kitchen.
My daughter was horrified - but not as horrified as her boyfriend, who had to be polite to a saggy, wrinkly, half-dressed, cuckoo old woman wearing a loose diaper. Poor thing - he saw too much. He was so traumatized he never went back.
I think it's pretty clear that my mother had absolutely no interest in her daily appearance. She generally looked like a bag lady, and did not care AT ALL unless there was an occasion that included men to whom she was not married. One of her friends once told her, "It's obvious you are rich, because only a wealthy person could afford to look as awful as you do!" She was quite proud of that. When I was young I attributed all her peculiarities to being drunk, but I later read that disregard for personal appearance can be a symptom of a personality disorder.
My mother generally wore misshapen old clothing that often was stained. She loved to wear a cheap white tennis hat that was covered with obvious black mold spots. She went out to lunch in a pair of matching flannel pajamas I had given her as if they were suitable attire. Adding a brooch did not make them appropriate. She looked insane.
My mother loved to think she was fooling people by not spending money on the correct clothing. It was her own little way of feeling smarter than everyone else. She felt superior to the other women, who were fools for wasting their money on expensive clothes while she cleverly wore pajamas instead of pants, or a long nightgown instead of a formal dress - just the way she hung cheap polyester quilts in the windows instead of buying real curtains. She fooled no one. I was mortified when the other women wore lovely floral, fitted Middle Aged Mom bathing suits from Lily Pulitzer, and my mother would come out of the ocean in some cheap, unlined jumper made of the wrong material, her boobs swinging, everything under-supported and over-exposed. There is a reason why bathing suits were invented.
It follows that my mother certainly wasn't going to waste money on clothes for her three children. I remember going with my brothers to a discount clothing store the size of an airplane hangar and searching through heaps and heaps of dark pants. She also took us to a tacky shoe store named Flocco's, where she bought boys' shoes for all three of us.
I was cursed with wide feet. (A doctor once looked at an x-ray of my foot and said, "Hmm... dainty.") There must have been shoes somewhere for girls with wide feet, but my mother simply bought me boys' shoes. I remember a pair of particularly hideous black penny loafers in fifth grade. I was thrilled to get actual penny loafers like the other girls, and I even put shiny pennies in the slots on top - but nothing could disguise their grotesque dark color and their boy-like clunkiness next to the cute slippers of the other girls. It was the dawning of my awareness that my clothes were... different.
If you grow up eating purple cabbage for breakfast, then purple cabbage seems normal to you because that's all you've ever known. Eventually, however, you're going to find out that other kids are eating pancakes or cereal or eggs and bacon, and you will begin to harbor secret doubts about purple cabbage. But the subject is never up for discussion, and you are told to be GRATEFUL for your purple cabbage. Nothing else is on the menu. You're not old enough to buy your own breakfast. So you keep eating purple cabbage until it becomes pretty clear one day - based on the reactions of other people - that purple cabbage really is not normal. And then you realize... you're a weirdo.
I wore hand-me-down clothes from my brothers for years. Occasionally my mother would buy matching mother-and-daughter dresses, just to emphasize further that I was supposed to be her mini-me. (She had already given me her exact same name at birth, which would later confuse the Federal Income Tax greatly.) At best I looked like a tomboy, and at worst like something out of Deliverance.
Public school was academically a breeze, but in third grade we were given an exercise in which we were supposed to circle all the bad things that little Billy did. For example, he woke up in the morning and put on the same clothes he had worn the day before. Nothing wrong with that - I did it every day. Billy also neglected to brush his teeth or change his underwear, and went to school without eating breakfast. All standard for me. I didn't even understand the point of the exercise.
I remember very clearly going over this exercise as a class. I had not circled any of Billy's bad behavior because I simply had not recognized it. All the other students clearly knew things I did not. For the first time I was introduced to concepts like clean underwear and fresh clothes every day. They were a revelation. I often wonder if the teacher handed out that exercise just for my benefit.
I remember in sixth grade wearing my black boys' loafers with one of my brothers' old plaid shirts and contrasting boys' plaid pants. The other girls had pretty dresses with matching bows in their hair, pastel-colored sweaters, sweet white blouses with tidy skirts, and so on. I had a vague feeling something was not right, but the person in charge of my well-being - my mother - was completely unperturbed and was not making any changes.
I was like a weed that had grown up wild. No one bought me pretty clothes, or taught me how to wash my hair, or gave me breakfast in the morning. I gave myself a bath occasionally, while my mother would be downstairs drinking. Other than telling me to say "thank you" and to sit up straight - threatening to stick me with a fork - my mother had taught me no manners or social niceties. I had no idea that society had conventions to use for any occasion. I had just been winging it for 11 years, completely unaware of normal standards for eating, clothing, and behavior. I seldom went to anyone else's house, so I was not aware that other girls did not draw on their bedroom walls, and that they had four-poster beds with pretty coverlets and matching curtains instead of a mattress in a metal frame with six extremely heavy wool blankets and bare windows.
My Aunt Alice decided I had better go to private school. I was given an admissions test at the Misses Shipley School, which I thought went rather well. Later, my mother informed me I had been accepted.
"I thought I would get in," I confessed happily to my mother.
"I didn't," she answered cruelly, without explanation.
Why did she think there was something wrong with me? I was going into seventh grade. My anxiety and self-doubt deepened, and my isolation increased. It was impossible to be comfortable around other people. I was too busy observing their behavior and trying to find out what was "normal." I came across as creepy and detached.
It's a good thing I attended Shipley, but it was like being thrown to the wolves. My mother refused to buy me new uniforms: green tunics for different seasons, white button-down shirts (preferably starched at the dry cleaner's), green knee socks, and puffy green bloomers. Instead she took me to the Shipley Thrift Shop, where she bought the old, discarded uniforms of other students.
The uniform included brown lace-up shoes, obviously referring to a type of expensive ruddy oxfords made for girls. Somehow my mother located lace-up shoes the color of baby poop in the far corner of Sears. Within the first ten minutes of my new school, another girl looked at my feet and laughed. "You're wearing Girl Scout shoes!" My fate was sealed.
The other girls had already attended Shipley from kindergarten. They all knew each other well, and had honed and refined a distinct preppy look that was so much more than simply clothing. It suggested the right address, an easy athleticism, summers on Nantucket, and special blessings from God that included shining hair, perfect skin, and a bred-in-the-bone unshakeable self-confidence. These girls were the future debutantes of the Main Line, and they were being groomed for life in High Society. They could spot imitation Top-Siders from fifty paces, and within the restrictions of wearing a uniform they had their own set of greater restrictions, such as removing the "fairy loop" from the back of each white oxford shirt, or wearing only a particular brand of raincoat, or sweater, or shoes.
On Fridays we were allowed to wear normal clothes - but I didn't have any. The other girls wore Pappagallo flats in a rainbow of colors, blouses from Talbots, skirts from The Villager, beautiful Fair Isle sweaters, luxurious heavy-wale corduroy pants, even wool pants suits suitable for taking the Concorde to Europe. I wore my old green tunic and looked like an idiot.
I started fighting in earnest with my mother about clothing. This was a matter of survival. VERY grudgingly, she took me back to the Shipley Thrift Shop and bought me a skirt of large black-and-white houndstooth. and a lime green blouse. I knew perfectly well that these clothes were the hand-me-downs of another student. They did not even match. But they were something.
Standing in line one day, I was passed an anonymous note that read, "Why do you always wear the same clothes?" I was mortified. But I was also trapped. I had no money. I couldn't drive. My mother refused to buy me anything. Where was I supposed to get clothes?
Just then, an enterprising classmate started her own business sewing bathing suits. I don't remember why she was raising money, but orders were brisk. She brought in different Butterick patterns and fabrics and let students design their own bathing suits.
She saved my life. I started sewing my own clothes. My mother even bought me the smallest, cheapest Singer sewing machine available. I detested sewing, but finally I had skirts and pants to wear. Later I moved on to beautiful hippie dresses made out of bedspreads from India.
Eventually, when I learned how to drive, I negotiated a tiny clothing allowance each month. It wasn't much, but it meant freedom.
When it came time to dress my own children, you can be damn sure they did not look like weeds. I got out the old sewing machine and made them little outfits and sewed Halloween costumes. I knitted them hand-made sweaters. And yes, I bought them actual clothes. They did not get anything fancy, but they were allowed to be reasonably stylin'. My mother was outraged by my extravagance.
A multimillionaire neighbor whose son was friends with mine, and who knew we were poor, also took me to task. "Honestly," she said with the denseness of the very rich, "I just don't know HOW you dress your children in L. L. Bean!"
I said nothing. But I wish I could have said everything you just read.
No comments:
Post a Comment