Living Out Loud (21 page)

I
see short skirts are coming back. This should make my husband happy. The first time he met me, I was wearing a skirt so short that if I had reached for something on a closet shelf it would have constituted a crime in some states. My hair was almost as long as my dress. In the years since, the trend toward shorter hair and longer skirts has often filled him with a deep sadness. He believes that women should show lots of leg and no ear.

I am of two minds. I love short skirts, although I have always had the traditional Irish girl piano legs, suitable for field hockey but not for display. But I feel as if I’m a little too something now to show my legs: too grown-up, too married and motherly, too old. Was it in an Agatha Christie mystery that the detective figured out a suspect was lying about her age by the condition of her knees? I’m haunted by that concept.

I wish this was about what I wear, but in truth
it is about who I am, or at least who I want to appear to be. A friend of mine found herself adrift recently in a department store, wandering amid the racks in some distress. She finally had the money, but she didn’t have the self-image. A simple shopping trip had turned existential. For years she had been one kind of woman, but now she had become another. Who was this person she was attempting to outfit? And was that person a good candidate for knits?

I know just how she felt. Each month the catalogues come and I pick things out: clothes I would have worn ten years ago, clothes I think I should want to wear today, clothes for the collected person that I’ve always wanted to be. (I am waiting for the catalogue for the person I fear I have become. “Chaos,” it would be called. “For the woman who can never find anything clean in her bureau drawers.”) My closet has a dozen personas lurking inside: shoulder pads, little prints, pleated pants, pleated skirts, fuchsia, black, navy blue. The worst part about cleaning it is chucking unsuccessful past lives: the carefree peasant, the funky girl-about-town, the dress-for-success suits that for one brief horrible period of insecurity and ambition I affected. You cannot give those suits away. You must drive a silver stake through their lapels.

I was a girl who spent ten years of her life wearing a forest-green blazer with a school insignia on the breast pocket, a plaid pleated skirt and saddle shoes, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Better this than my mother’s closet, filled with her own little uniforms: the nice suit with the shell blouse and matching pumps and purse for card parties, the pastel shirtwaist dress with Peter Pan collar and pleated front for dinner, the madras Bermudas and blouse for the backyard. The role defined the clothes. Betty Friedan wrote in
The Feminine Mystique
that the question for those times was “Is this all?” Now, of course, we feel differently. I hope this is all, because I can’t handle any more: so many roles, so many clothes.

I know there are people who will contend that how you look has nothing to do with who you are. There has been a recent exchange of letters about this in Dear Abby; a young woman who wears nothing but garments made of black leather wrote to complain that men got the wrong idea from her personal style. To this Abby replied in essence—and I’m with her all the way on this one—“Get real.”

Clothes are some kind of a mirror of what’s inside; otherwise, why would maternity dresses be designed to make you look like a baby? A Mohawk is a statement about how you perceive the universe. But young people make these kinds of mistakes unthinkingly. At a dinner several years ago, I ran into a politician I have known for ages. I was wearing my black dinner suit and so was he, and he began to reminisce to a group of people about the first time we had met. It was at a press conference at City Hall—my first press conference, my first visit to City Hall. I was so eager, he said, I appeared to be on drugs. I was so intimidated, he said, that I introduced myself twice to a minor functionary and then stuck to him like glue. And I was wearing hot pants, he said. Have you ever seen an entire decade’s worth of credibility crumble before your very eyes? Not pretty.

Now, of course, hot pants have returned to their former status as a condition rather than a garment, and I have developed a bit more sense. But still I feel that I have not got the self-image down, what one of my friends calls “The Look.” Now that I have passed from college to first job to marriage to other jobs to kids, I should have some sense of what to take off the rack: Silk dresses? Black separates? Stone-washed denim? It’s not that I should know how to dress; I should know who I’m dressing. But when I group my clothing according to the traits conveyed, my closet looks like a convention of multiple-personality cases.

So I contemplate short skirts. They were once me, although
that was a time in my life when my character was so ambiguous it could have qualified as protoplasm. But are they me now? And which me are they? And is that the me I want other people to see? Boy, I wish buying clothes was about clothes. I hate character analysis in front of a three-way mirror, especially when I am looking at the back reflection. I hold up a skirt on a hanger and imagine it ten years from now, a sociological find, a conversation piece: Remember when they tried to bring short skirts back, and you were dumb enough to buy one? Was that really YOU who did that?

I
was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future. Not until we were putting the food on the little treadmill at the checkout counter did I realize I had not personally picked out many of the items in the cart.

There was shoestring licorice, a small jar of macadamia nuts that was more expensive than the earrings I was wearing, and a box of Mallomars. There were also two more boxes of breakfast cereal than I had bargained for: one kind of cereal shaped like tiny ice cream cones filled with chocolate-chip ice cream, and another called Cocoa Puffs, which I remember fondly from my childhood chiefly because they turned the milk brown.

I took all this stuff back amid wild wailing and picked up the mouthful of yogurt raisins my younger child had spit all over the checkout line
in his anger and distress. “I shall not be moved,” I said in the car, looking at them both in the rearview mirror. “I wanted the ice cream cereal,” screamed the elder.

I’m under a lot of pressure to shop like a mom. My mom shopped like a mom, too, but in her day it was easier. Those were the days when people believed that fats were what God put in food to make it taste good. When my mom went shopping, she bought cookies with ingredients that sounded like a science fair experiment, fruit drinks with no fruit, and huge loaves of bread that could be compressed to the size of a handball with one squeeze. It was never enough. There were still the fights with the kids, the incredible outrage we could summon at the suggestion that a four-pound Almond Joy bar was an unreasonable purchase.

Now that I am on the other side, I can understand why a civilized woman who knows the difference between emulsifiers and real food would nonetheless shop like a mom. You want to minimize the fights and you want some appropriate food on hand if by chance you sink to the lowest levels of human degradation and start watching
The Colbys
.

I swore it would never come to this. On the subject of feeding my first child, I was what you might call a real pain. For the first six months of his life he got nothing but breast milk, accompanied by the occasional rhapsody about nourishing him from my own body. When I put him on solids, I carried a little food mill everywhere; it became traditional at family gatherings to see me hunched over a plate of steamed carrots, grinding them and mixing them with yogurt.

I knew those days were gone forever when I found myself recently splitting a bag of Cheez Doodles with my sons. (You know everything about Cheez Doodles by the way Cheez is spelled. I mean, would you buy a sauce for your asparagus called Holl-N-Daze?) It was not companionable; none of us were talking, just scarfing down those little curlicues like attack dogs
at feeding time. Finally my first child, he of the breast milk and puréed carrots, looked up and grinned, a salty orange grin. “Mommy, I like this stuff,” he said.

The father of the children is disturbed by these lapses. He does not like to come home and, reading the hieroglyphics on their dinner plates, discover that the children ate takeout Chinese food instead of roast chicken and steamed string beans. But the father of the children is not home to hear the pleading: “Please can we have dumplings? Please can we have choo choo pork? Please can we have fortune cookies?” The younger one—who takes after Sylvester Stallone and tends to confine himself to one-word sentences that sound like depth charges detonating—stomps about and shouts, “Spareribs!”

The father of the children remembers a time when I was a careful shopper and a devoted cook. He forgets that at the time my Tupperware was not being used as bathtub toys, my vegetable steamer basket had not become a pond for the plastic dinosaurs, and nobody was using the garlic press as a gun. (It was also a time when I sublimated my true nature and pretended that I thought Ring Dings were revolting, which is a lie.)

The eldest child came home the other day begging, pleading, whining for some fabulous, delicious, absolutely transcendent food he’d had at a friend’s house. It was red, he said. It had bananas; you could hold it in your hand and see through to your finger, you could make it dance. We had to have it. With horror I realized what he was saying. He wanted Jell-O.

Do you know that I once had a theory that if you fed children nothing but nutritious foods, with no additives, preservatives, or sugar, they would learn to prefer those foods? I should have recognized the reality at the first birthday party, when tradition triumphed over nutrition and I made chocolate cake for the guest of honor. He put one fistful in his mouth and gave me a look I would not see again until I brought a baby
home from the hospital and told him the baby was going to stay. The cake look, roughly translated, said, “You’ve been holding out on me.” He set about catching up. The barber gave him lollipops, the dry cleaner a Tootsie Roll. At the circus he had cotton candy, which is the part of the balance of nature designed to offset wheat germ.

The other night for dinner he was having vegetable lasagna and garlic bread, picking out the zucchini, the spinach, even the parsley—“all the green stuff”—and eating only the parts of the bread that had butter. “Know what my favorite food is, Mom?” he said. “Sugar.”