An old boyfriend, Lee always said that I dressed to challenge, but he was from Boston, and I was a child of California, that place where if you put the country on end, all the kooks would roll to—or so it is said. He was like a lone dog scolding the night. They were all round pegs from the carefully guarded squares of the eastern seaboard in search of a home, or a state of mind. But once they landed here, they tried to re-create the places they had fled from.
Perhaps I wear the clothing that challenges the norm, but I was caught up in the shine and flow of texture and color—whether it was campy old 40s blouses with lace inserts and rhinestone buttons material training under the arms by some well-dressed woman decades long gone. Or muflon jackets and black crepe dresses with embroidered green cherries and plastic hands for buttons.
I imagine someone dressed in gabardine suits, or Rosie the Riveter leftovers from the war effort. Women invincibly moving into the workforce sort of like Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set. Or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. I even had a real Victorian blouse but it required constant mending. Fine lawn sewn by hand with tiny tucks and mysterious straps to tie to a bustle but my back was so long they were like little new bird wings on a wayward angel.
Each day I slipped into another decade of costume, mixing and matching my clothing with wild delight. In those post-1970s days in Sonoma County we were an enclave unto ourselves. It was as if time had suddenly stopped or was ossified, and we were the retro hippies keeping alive the flame long after the rest of the nation had given up the Goodwill castoffs for chinos and Lacoste shirts.
I still love finding old clothes. I envision those Desk Set women still alive again in the clothing of the dead. Now I dress in the drab uniform of the masses. Uniform Jeans and T-shirt with a pullover sweater as if I were endorsing a blandness of mind, or was I cowping to the conformity of the masses? Monopoly uniforms. Don't think. Don't challenge.
What happened to me? I guess I got tired of being challenged, or I grew up somewhere along the way and left behind the clothing of my youth. And I also left behind something of myself as well. And now another man is wanting me to dress up, to don a costume of suburbia. Or worse, to dress as a woman as object— kept, or otherwise. But he doesn't want to actually keep me.
The suburban Victorian women of the 1870s and 1880s dressed to attract a man. They were extolling virginal purity. The flappers of the Roaring 20s were selling raw sex. I have no interest in skirts or nylons and shoes too uncomfortable to wear. Let him wear those goddamn stilettos with nylons and see how uncomfortable it is. Besides, he wears the skirts in this house. There's always kilt mending on my to-do sewing list.
I was a child of the theatre, my mother was a wardrobe mistress, and my fondest memories were of dressing up in clouds of lace and yards of purple toile netting, while listening to the rustle of watered silk whispering secret assignations in deep closets.
1/30/2004 Writers' Group
