“Well,” I pontificated, “before, women used to sew their own clothes, so they’d make them fit themselves. Naturally, what’s the point of spending days sewing something if it’s not going to fit?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Gabriel tugged at a panel of the skirt that had gotten hitched up, straightening it.
“But when people started buying stuff, off-the-rack stuff can’t fit everybody.”
“Well,” he pointed out, “they used to sell a lot more sizes in ready-made clothes.”
“Yeah,” I continued. “They certainly fit better than today, when everyone’s supposed to fall into three size categories—small, medium, and large.”
“Not that a small is really small anymore,” he smirked.
“Right,” I laughed. “More like large, extra-large, and ginormous. Anyhow,” I continued, brushing a hair off the skirt in progress, “no amount of sizing can take into account that every body is completely different. Some people have longer legs than others, some have wider hips . . . Even if you try to buy something like ‘long-leg’ jeans, they still don’t really fit, because one person’s legs might be one inch longer than someone with the same waist size, and someone else’s legs might be three or four inches longer. Basically, with ready-made stuff, you can have it fit in one dimension, and all the others are going to be a compromise in some way. They sell clothes these days that are supposed to be ‘one size fits all’ but what they really mean is ‘one size fits nobody’!”
Gabriel nodded and stepped back.
“Oh, you’re completely right.” He nodded at the skirt, having completed a full circuit of it. “It looks good to me.”
When the skirt was finished, I was pleased with the result: a warm and practical skirt, with minimal complications. There was no elastic to wear out or zippers to break: the worst that could happen would be that I might lose a button, but even if I did, replacing one of these was far easier than attempting to repair a more modern fastening like a zipper. I had made the garment entirely for its practicality; I was unprepared for the number of compliments it was to receive.
“It’s just a gray skirt!” I told Gabriel in bewilderment one day, having received my third compliment in the course of a relatively short walk. “Why do people think it’s so extraordinary?”
He chuckled. “It’s a nice skirt!”
“Yeah, but—”
A woman who had been walking the other way stopped us. “I really like your skirt!” she told me, giving it an admiring look. “That’s beautiful!”
I smiled and thanked her, but after she’d passed, I shot Gabriel an uncomprehending look. I held my shoulders up, my hands out and palms up. Why?
My husband laughed at the gesture.
After the kind stranger had passed out of possible earshot, I resumed the line of conversation. “I mean, why?”
Gabriel seemed to find my whole confusion incredibly amusing. “Not many women wear skirts these days.”
“But, if they like them so much, why don’t they?”
He shrugged. “They think they can’t.”
“It’s a skirt; it’s not a Nobel Prize in physics!”
Gabriel was still laughing over this comment when another stranger crossed over from the opposite side of the street. “I like your skirt!”
My summer dresses had taught me how much freedom skirts can give; having an ankle-length skirt opened up new realms in understanding their usefulness. Coming down just to my ankles—not below, where it would have picked up dirt, but just to them—meant that it trapped a bubble of warm air around my legs, which moved with me wherever I went. Many animals have evolved fur that serves this exact function, trapping warm air underneath guard hairs to act as insulation. As a species, man lost this. It was woman who evolved it anew.
Accustoming myself to daily wearing of a long skirt added another level of grace to my movements, at the same time increasing my awareness of my surroundings. Plunking down unceremoniously onto a public bench would often have meant throwing that much-admired skirt onto city detritus, used gum, or worse. I learned to sweep it up around myself before sitting, a fluid motion that was soon as natural as wiping boots on a mat before entering a home. On uneven ground, I would lift the skirt clear, and after I’d made myself new petticoats (ones I could wear with less anxiety), this action flashed bright silk from under the somber gray wool. (People often think these underskirts are purely decorative; they have no idea of the luxurious sensation that comes of having six yards of fine silk swirling around soft skin.) As all these little subtle movements became second nature from daily living, a new depth was added to my antique clothes on the special occasions when I wore them.
After I’d sewn myself a simple white blouse to accompany the skirt, people started asking me why I was “dressed up.” At first, it embarrassed me. There was something accusatory in the question, as though any garment that showed a modicum of care, and was not three sizes too big and off of a Third World assembly line, was shamelessly formal. After a time, though, I grew enough accustomed to the query to answer it in complete honesty. I would cock my head, giving my interrogator my own curious look.
“This is just what I wear.”
One of the side effects of wearing nice clothes that were important to me was that I grew more fastidious in my habits. I could no longer simply wipe any grease and dirt from my hands onto my pants and throw them into a series of metal boxes to make electricity wash and dry them for me. (The complaints that came later—about the cost of replacing them when the depredations of the magical decontamination machines wore out the cloth—were also unnecessary now.) Rough mangling by a mechanical device might be good enough for something that fell off a mechanical assembly line, but not for a garment I had labored over for weeks to produce. As they had been made by hand, so they should be washed by hand, and I took great care to minimize the necessity of this chore. I took more caution with my movements, to minimize their picking up dirt, and this care itself added grace.
I was astonished by how long natural-fiber clothing could stay fresh and clean when given a modicum of attention. I had known that polyesters and all their high-end derivatives are petroleum products, but for some reason had never followed the clear logical steps to the realization that plastic clothes quickly become foul to the senses. I had taken for granted the idea that a shirt worn for several consecutive days of moderate exertion would reek to the rafters; it hadn’t before occurred to me that this tendency was directly related to a high synthetic content. Natural fibers are far less conducive to odor. My main concern with my woolens was keeping them free of visible dirt.
I started carrying a small glass bottle (a size meant for perfume) of rosewater in my purse, along with an extra clean handkerchief, and used these to clean my hands when washing facilities were unavailable. It became second nature to keep my hands neat after I started wearing gloves; they served as a constant reminder to keep my hands clean, as well as protected them from contamination. Clean hands meant cleaner clothes, since I wasn’t passing on soil from other sources.
One of the little girls whom I tutored in English as a Second Language at this time noticed me washing my hands in this way after eating a piece of fruit and took to calling my little bottle of rosewater “hand sanitizer.” Given the context in which she saw me using it, this was understandable and I did not correct her. It would have been cruel to pick a pedantic quarrel with a term used by a small child already working through a language that was not her first tongue. There were, however, several significant distinctions. Hand sanitizer kills bacteria: it does not actually clean anything. All the dirt and sticky pollutants on the hands still remain after use. The germs stay behind as well, in blunt point of truth; the fact that they are dead does not make their destroyed corpses magically disappear.
When I had gone abroad one summer as a college student, my well-meaning grandmother had sent me off with a bottle of hand sanitizer. Eschewing the sinks in public lavatories, which I believed at the time to b
e hotbeds of infection, I had relied entirely on this chemical bottle from Grandma for the first few days, priding myself on my modern hygiene. It took very little time before I started noticing that my hands were covered with a layer of black grime the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the days I had played in the dirt as a child. The hand sanitizer had been disinfecting, not cleaning.
Rosewater, by contrast, does what any water does: it breaks up dirt and sugars (such as might be left behind by fruit, etc.). These are then easily wiped away by the useful and high-tech cleaning device known as the handkerchief. As a pleasant side effect, rosewater leaves an agreeable scent behind, too.
I started to wonder how much water and electricity I’d wasted over the years by following my mother’s habit of wiping soiled hands on my pants, then dumping the filthy trousers in the washing machine every day. I’m not sure whether it has been enough to drain a lake and power a small city, but I’m certain it’s been quite a lot. Simply by taking greater care, I had reduced this consumption dramatically. When I followed out this train of thought to consider it in the macrocosm, it seemed ironic to think that while I live in a society that prides itself on environmental consciousness, in some ways our forebears had a much gentler touch upon the world.
Walking dresses.
17
“All the Pretty Girls”
Parisian fashions.
My debut outing in my completed ensemble (after I’d finished the blouse to accompany the skirt) was a shopping trip with Gabriel. There is a large Asian grocery in Seattle, and it was a simple but long-standing enjoyment of ours to make a trip there, sometimes spending hours perusing the fascinating foods and wares before making a small purchase.
Pocari Sweat. Calpis. Bright labels bearing that mishmash of languages that Anglophones in Japan call “Engrish” were one of the many charms of the store for us. As we pointed them out to each other, statements such as “It gathers and it is pleasant” and “The way of using is up to you!” brought smiles to our faces, although our gaily upturned lips were prompted by different motivations. While Gabriel was amused at the unorthodox grammar, my own merriment was born of nostalgia.
Not so very long before, I had spent an entire year teaching English in Komatsu, a small Japanese town in Ishikawa Prefecture on the western shore of Honshu. Divided from Nippon’s major metropolises by a massive range of mountains that easily rivals the Alps (all my Japanese friends, even the ones who lived in Ishikawa themselves, considered it to be a remote outpost at the very edge of civilization), Komatsu’s residents rarely saw foreigners, and at the private English academy where I taught, I was the only native speaker of the language. A tall, grayish-green-eyed blonde in a country of raven hair and eyes of velvet brown, I grew accustomed to being stared at unabashedly. One day, while visiting the nearby larger city of which Komatsu is a suburb, I went shopping with a friend who was half-Japanese, half-Caucasian, and 100 percent Canadian.
“You know . . .” I told her after a man carrying a small child had passed us, the baby extending a chubby arm ending in a pointing finger toward me the entire time they were within view, “I can never quite decide whether I should feel like a celebrity or a circus freak.”
My Canadian friend’s mouth turned up at one corner, and she shook her head. Tall and buxom, she received some of the same treatment, although it was moderated slightly by her having her father’s dark hair and Asian eyes.
“A little of both,” she shrugged resignedly. “A little of both.”
On the day when Gabriel and I were visiting the Asian grocery store in Seattle, a bit of the old celebrity/circus freak feeling started coming back to me. In my new clothes and with my corseted figure, people were staring at me. Just as it happened in Japan, a small boy tugged at his mother’s coat and pointed at me. A woman started to go down an aisle in the store where I happened to already be, stopped, and simply watched me until I’d passed.
Before I’d lived in Asia, this sort of scrutiny would have horrified me, made me cringe in apology for my own difference. Had I set out on this course at that less-traveled time of my life, continued experience of the same sort might have dissuaded me. Yet, the memories of dwelling in a place where I was so clearly, irrevocably foreign, gave a familiarity to such treatment. Because I had lived in a place where there was no option for me of blending in, regardless of how I was dressed, I did not fear the stares and the pointing as I once might have. It mattered little that the staring eyes, now in my own country, had a greater diversity of color, with blues, greens, and shades of gray joining the browns; or that more, or less, melanin was present in the spectrum of pointing fingers. I knew the behavior. I had lived through a long period when it was simply another normal part of life, and I had grown stronger for the experience.
On this particular day, I wasn’t hungry, but Gabriel had skipped lunch earlier. I contented myself with a bottle of exotic dragon fruit juice while he settled down with a scatter-line meal in the store’s eating area. Next to Gabriel, and thus just to the right of being directly across from me, sat a very old man. His pure-white hair was carefully combed, and his pale blue eyes had a dreamy alertness as he watched every motion of my form, a slight smile on his face.
I didn’t mind his staring, but I thought he might be embarrassed if I drew attention to it. I pretended to take no notice as I chatted pleasurably with my husband. At last, the old man turned to the woman across from him. “She’s somethin’ outta a book!” he said happily, pointing at me.
I’d assumed the other woman to be his granddaughter, but the way in which she shrugged and barely looked up from her meal caused me to realize that she didn’t know him. She was simply a fellow diner at the crowded table.
I didn’t want to seem as though I’d been eavesdropping, but this seemed like an appropriate juncture to open a conversation with the lonely old man. I smiled at him.
“You’re somethin’ outta a book!” he repeated, addressing me this time.
I smiled more broadly and thanked him, blushing.
He told me how wonderful it was to see a woman dressed like me, and how long it had been since he’d seen it. “Is that a twenty-two-inch waist?” he asked.
I blinked, astonished. He had pinpointed my measurement exactly!
“Why, yes. Yes, it is.” I smiled again, and he nodded.
“My first sweetheart looked like you,” he explained, the dreamy look coming back into his eyes, shadowed slightly by a distant sadness. “She’s gone now, of course . . .” He shook his head and that distant pall was banished. “I’m ninety-eight years old!” he told me proudly, sitting up with the proper posture of his age. He was surprisingly tall and cogent for one so advanced in years.
His smile came back and he told me of all the pretty girls he’d known, many years ago. The brightest glow came into his eyes when he spoke of the one who had married him—“The prettiest one of all!”—his wife. I was charmed by the sweet way he described those pretty girls, the obvious enjoyment he took from their memories.
When Gabriel had finished eating and helped me on with my jacket, the old man watched us both with the same happy nostalgia. I thanked him sincerely for talking with us and wished him the best of health as we took our leave of him.
Walking out of the store, Gabriel smiled at my happy expression. “That was nice.”
I nodded. “Yeah, he was such a sweet old man.”
My dear husband slipped a tender arm around my waist. “You clearly brought back some good old memories for him.”
I smiled and laid my head against Gabriel’s shoulder as we waited for a light to change.
All the pretty girls.
“I think so.”
Hairstyles for dancing.
18
Duck the Malls
An 1890 fashion plate, showing lady waiting on bench with umbrella.
Autumn poured into winter, and Seattle December flooded onto the calendar with all its customary damp. The holidays approached, and another occasion
arose for me to visit Olympia. This time I had a logical reason to believe I truly would see an old friend there.
Mairhe had been my neighbor during my freshman year of college, and while we’d made several attempts to stay in touch over the intervening years, we hadn’t actually seen each other in nearly a decade. I did know that she was still in Olympia, designing and making jewelry. When I saw that her work would be featured at an event called “Duck the Malls,” promoting the work of local artists, I decided another long bus trip was in order.
I didn’t dress up in any special way, but by now even my normal clothes were attracting attention. After I’d tracked down Mairhe and we gushed through the customary hugs and pleasantries that inevitably accompany a meeting of old friends, she stepped back, eyeing my coat.
“Did you fit your jacket?” she asked, taking in the alteration immediately with an artist’s eye.
“Mmm-hmm.” I smiled, unzipping the fleece to show my outfit. “And I made the blouse and skirt.”
Her jaw dropped. “Are you corseted under there? You must be!”
I nodded, affirming her assessment.
“I am fascinated by corsets!” she told me, banishing any fear of disapproval I might have had and replacing it with pride at her enthusiasm. “Tell me all about it!”
“Well,” I began, “it’s sort of like a hug that lasts all day.”
She laughed at that, one of her characteristic, effusive laughs that draws everyone around her into the merriment. “I knew you were going to say that. Go on—what else?”
I started to go into the standard questions and curiosities, but she was soon flooded with customers. Not wanting to interfere with her business, I promised to email her and slipped away, returning briefly to drop off a bag of cookies for her before I caught my bus back to Seattle.
The next day I wrote Mairhe the promised email, largely in the form of my most frequently asked questions. I concluded with an injunction to stay in touch, added that we should arrange a meeting soon, and filed the more academic portion of the missive for future use. Despite both our best intentions, it was to be another season again before I would see my old friend in person once more. When I finally did so, it proved to be an interesting encounter involving not only herself, but also the kind lady to whom serendipity had introduced me on my previous trip to Olympia.
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