That I survived the “not pretty” incident without much of a dent to my self-image does not mean that I am impervious to the shortcomings of my physical appearance. On the contrary. In addition to a number of small grievances I nurse, there have been three big ones: my tendency to gain weight easily has been a burr on my white school socks since, at the age of nine and in standard three—the equivalent of American fifth grade—I observed that I was chubby compared to Lana and my cousins. Since I wasn’t fat enough (yet?) to be teased, I might not have paid my weight any heed had my mother not at this time become au courant with counting calories: probably imagining that she was done with babies after giving birth to four of us, she was on a post-childbearing makeover. She went on a strict diet. Since we did not have any bathroom scales, she would track her weight by dropping in at the doctor’s office when we found ourselves in Marikana. Her primary feedback, though, was the notice she elicited from friends and family: compliments flowed from all directions. My mother was at pains to explain to her admirers that her diet was “scientific,” i.e., based on a restricted calorie intake.
Without discussing it with anybody, I decided to reduce my calories, too: I stopped taking sandwiches to school for playtime and held out for dinner at home. My weight eventually stabilized at a body shape closer to that of my sister and cousins. I continued watching what I ate through elementary and high school and never again felt fat until I became an exchange student in the United States. During my year living with the Henning family in Breda, Iowa, I was no match for the temptations of American food, particularly that of my American mom, who was an excellent cook, and the pounds piled on. Toward the end of my year at Carroll High, and no doubt spurred on by the stress and excitement of the upcoming prom, I took to walking around the Carroll downtown rather than having school lunch. I dropped down to my pre-American weight.
After the births of each of my two children, I managed to return to a weight at which I felt good, albeit one higher than before I had my babies. Just before we emigrated from South Africa to the United States, the import of shifting our household across the Atlantic had worn me to the skinniest shape I had been since I planned my first pregnancy. Once in Utah, we lived in a hotel with a microwave and wash basin for a kitchen, and by necessity ate out for most of our main meals. Once we had found a house, our usual healthy eating often fell victim to the inexpensive possibilities of buying food that only had to be heated or, even worse, fast food. While my weight did not go completely overboard, it hit a higher peak than it ever had since my children were born.
Once I entered grad school in my forties, my figure went from bad to worse. Rather than the “freshman ten,” I gained forty pounds, though over several years rather than all at once. There I became stuck until my mid-fifties. With the focus a steady job brings, I started exercising more and eating better, thereby losing the saddle of lard I had been packing for far too long. Since I have retired, it has become much easier to keep the creeping pounds at bay.
When I entered boarding school at age eleven and had daily access to a full-length mirror, my sparse allotment of thin brown hair became a second bugbear. In my last year of high school I caught the anxiety about the upcoming Matric dance. Since there was a girl in my wing who did hair, I felt mature—and even pretty—with my hair done up. The next year, as an exchange student back in high school, I was astonished at how much effort my peers put into their hair. American high school was a breeze after the South African Matric, so I, too, took more time with my hair and washed it more frequently than the once-a-week shampoo encouraged at boarding school. That, together with my first regular access to a blow dryer, helped separate the fine strands into a fullness that at least ensured my scalp would not shine through. In my fifties when I went to much shorter hair, I happily tossed out the hair dryer. Today my hair is even shorter, a crew cut in fact. It is almost white, though a little bit of gray still lurks at the back of my head. Like my Kalahari grandmother, I had started sprouting gray strands in my twenties.
My maternal Ouma Truia’s hair had been a wonder that fascinated me as a child. When I was in elementary school and she in her fifties, it was already all white. She wore it in a bun. During our month-long yearly visits, she let it loose of an evening so I could brush it. It was soft and shiny and smelled of Lifebuoy soap and malva pudding. Once a week, she invited me to the back stoep to help her wash it in an enamel basin with black poxes where the white had chipped off. Since the farmhouse’s water was cranked from a well that ran dry during droughts and the buckets had to be carried seventy yards to the kitchen, water was used sparingly. After the first wash, I would carry the sloshing basin to the pepper tree and slowly empty it around the trunk. For the final rinse, Ouma would let me fetch clean water from the kitchen where the day’s two buckets were each covered with a muslin cloth. Taking care not to spill one drop, I would measure five cups into a magnum-sized enamel jug enhanced with a blue, pink, yellow, and green flower pattern and bear it to the stoep to dribble over Ouma’s hair while she worked out the last bit of soap. The remaining water was still clean enough for washing my own hands and feet.
My nostalgia about Ouma Truia’s hair meant that my early graying never bothered me. Through my thirties and forties, I rather liked the white strips that started outlining my ears, and I made no attempt to hide them. Midway through graduate school when I started thinking about job prospects, though—upon the advice of friends my age who occupied lofty positions on their own career ladders—I took to coloring the white strips medium brown to match the yet un-grayed hair on the rest of my head. Those white parts did not take kindly to the makeover: they did not take color well and the roots also grew out very rapidly. I had to apply color every two weeks not to feel unkempt. And so I battled on through two different jobs in the corporate world over a period of seven years.
A few years into my University of Utah position in Gender Studies I decided that coming out as a gray-haired sage in an environment where diversity of all stripes was supported and encouraged would be the sensible thing to do. Accordingly, I cut my hair very short and grew out the roots. Even I was surprised at how different I looked—during the years of coloring, my hair had turned as white as my Ouma’s. For the first time in my life, my hair was a trigger for more compliments than I had ever had before about any physical feature.
From my forties onward, when my inheritance of the family jowls had become evident as a result of my PhD program weight gain, the pocket of fat dangling below my chin became a third bête noir on my list of gene-determined attributes I would rather be without. I knew from family examples that my neck would eventually turn into whole cascades of fat-filled folds. Telling only my family and closest friends, I succumbed to liposuction. I have never spent a ridiculous sum of money on a more worthwhile shallow activity. I liked my face in the mirror so much better—for almost two decades. At the time of my liposuction, my surgeon had said that I would need “a tightening up” when I was older. He was right. However, now that I am in my sixties, I have become resigned to settling for that much-fêted and, in my opinion, greatly overrated “inner beauty.” However, I am not yet beyond distracting people from the havoc time is playing with my features by gearing my clothes to the age I feel rather than look. As Maya Angelou, the famed poet whose unretouched magnificence reaped her as one of Glamour’s 2009 Women of the Year, puts it, “The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.”
Dementia Field Notes
3-2-2014
I am trying to change from my winter to my spring wardrobe. I have been working on this for several days, but just can’t seem to get my closet organized. When I try to arrange my clothes in the same logical order as I have always done—hanging the major components of an outfit side-by-side—it does not seem to work anymore because there are a few
tops and long T-shirts I wear under short tops that I mix and match in different ways for different outfits. In the olden days it didn’t matter, because I could remember the different combinations. I have lately found that I get very confused if I start mixing outfits around: I forget some possibilities—even my favorites—for weeks on end. So the decision I had to make was: outfits together or pants, shirts, skirts, etc. grouped together “each according to their kind” like the animals in Noah’s ark. I have tried working on it today, but as I tried to implement the “each according to their kind” option, I knew that on a daily basis I would never be able to remember what to put together with what to create the mixes I really love. I had earlier written down some winter outfits in my journal to remember them, but that seems impossibly complicated to do for all my clothes.
3-7-2014
I had an idea of how the “each according to their kind” clothing arrangement could work: I’m going to take my time, put together all the various outfits I can think of, and take photos. So I have launched the huge project of setting out each outfit on the bed and taking pictures. Peter took me to Walmart to get a mini-photo album to keep the photos together so I could easily consult them. I’ve been taking photos for days now and have printed the daily batches as I go along. This morning I got the last of the photos taken and printed and looked forward to putting the clothes guide together. However, the photos I had printed in daily batches were utterly lost. I could not find them anywhere in the house. So I printed them again, and now finally have my mnemonic device ready for use.
One of my favorite pieces of jewelry is a memento mori (“remember that you will die”) pendant that I wear on a chain together with a same-length string of pearls. The pendant, made by American designer Betsey Johnson—known for her over-the-top and embellished work and her performance of a cartwheel at her fashion shows—is a 5 inch long by 1½ inch wide white-enameled and bejeweled skeleton that declares itself as female with a red-yellow-orange fringy skirt and a hat made out of multicolored enameled fruit and rhinestones in primary colors. Her heart is represented with a glittering costume ruby fixed to the left of her sternum so that it sits lightly atop one of her ribs.
The other day when I was wearing the pendant, the skeleton’s sternum and heart clicked out of the clasps that attach them to the rest of her. Fortunately, jewelry is among the wide variety of items that Peter alters and repairs for me. I put the broken-hearted skeleton on Peter’s red toolbox in his study, meaning to ask him to fix it, but then forgot. The next morning, I found my skeleton-girl on the kitchen counter, still in two parts, and neatly laid out in a paper coffin that Peter had made for her—complete with a headstone enjoining her to RIP. After we had hooted about his joke, he fixed her heart, as he always does mine.
In the “Ask a Woman” column on the website Dappered—“for guys who value and feel most comfortable in a classic, sharp, tailored style… but also value having a real savings account and retirement plan”—Beth writes that “each of us engages with fashion and style whether we want to or not.” Beth goes on:
[Do] men dress for women, and women dress for… other women? [Why, then] do women wear [clothes] that… men say they dislike? At its worst, women dress to one-up other women because we are socialized to compete with each other for attention and positive reinforcement in a way that men are not… Our motivations [are not necessarily] to be sexier, thinner, prettier [than our friends], but mostly less nefarious: we just really care about being perceived by other women as well-dressed and attractive.
I wear clothing that I find beautiful and fun and elegant, hoping that some of those qualities will rub off on me while I wear those pieces.
Other fashionistas have their say:
Lady Gaga: I’m just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time.
Alexander the Great: A tomb now suffices him for whom the adornment of an entire world was not sufficient.
Aliya, holding the two halves of a broken plastic whiffle ball to her chest: I have boo-boos. (After a moment’s contemplation.) I don’t actually have boo-boos—yet. I will get them when I grow up.
Dementia Field Notes, 7-26-2014: The other day I put my bra on over my pajama T-shirt.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: “Modesty is an attitude of propriety and decency in dress, grooming, language, and behavior. If we are modest, we do not draw undue attention to ourselves. Instead, we seek to ‘glorify God in [our] body, and in [our] spirit’ (1 Corinthians 6:20; see also 1 Corinthians 6:19)… If we are unsure about whether our dress or grooming is modest, we should ask ourselves, ‘Would I feel comfortable with my appearance if I were in the Lord’s presence?’”
Ouma Truia: My little lamb, do you know someone who can give you some boy clothes to mail to me? The Hotnots who came here to help with the fence repairs are still here and they have a boy—I reckon he’s about six or seven—who is wearing a dress. I told his mother to put pants on him, but they don’t have any. He has nothing on under the dress, not even girl bloomers. I just cannot behold this anymore. Deuteronomy says that if a man wears a woman’s clothes it is an abomination to the Lord God. We can’t have this thing going on at the farm any more.
Dementia Field Notes
9-23-2013
Last week I was shopping in Nordstrom and decided to try on a gorgeous gray-with-a-lilac-cast sweater. Since Peter was about to pick me up, I thought I would just try it on in front of one of the store mirrors rather than go into a dressing room. I found a mirror, put all my stuff down, and when I next looked at myself in the mirror with proper awareness, I saw that I had taken off my shirtdress and was standing there in my underwear from the waist up. I quickly put my shirtdress on again and then tried the sweater over it, as I had originally intended. I was shaken. I don’t think anyone noticed. I could have been arrested for indecent exposure!
In the first photo ever taken of my mother, she must have been about three years old. She and her brother Pieter are both sitting on the lap of her maternal grandfather, a man with a Walt Whitman as old man full white beard and blue eyes that stare sorrowfully from deep, dark sockets. Two-year-old Pieter, whose hair is blond in the photo, has a facial structure exactly the same as his grandfather’s. In contrast with these two souls who appear as if they will not sojourn long in this world, Susanna’s full face and sparkly dark eyes look flushed with vitality. She wears a simple white dress, white socks, and black shoes. Her shoulder-length, almost-black hair is drawn back from her forehead in a big, silky, chocolate-box bow, a vanity uncharacteristic of her family’s food-scarce, bookless, and toyless existence.
Left, Susanna (age 3) with her maternal grandfather, Oupa Holtzhauzen, and younger brother Pieter Myburgh, approximately 1927. Right, Boshoff and Susanna get married, Cape Town, South Africa, 1948. Susanna made her own wedding dress and bouquet.
Whether she had inherited the parental sensibility that had added the ribbon to her outfit or been inspired by the feeling of being special in her family by her only-girl status, Susanna always regarded a stylish manner of dress as her due. From her “courting” portraits with my father to her exquisite long lace wedding dress and bridal bouquet spilling tendrils all the way to her knees—both of which she made herself—through to her mid-seventies, she maintained a personal style that was a notch above the ordinary. During her final six or seven years, however, her hair (though clean) always looked somewhat unkempt and she mostly wore—or was dressed in—the South African equivalent of the “sexy crystal bling velour sweat suit with drawstring pants for easy toileting” that gave me the creeps when it popped up during an internet search for exercise wear. On the whole, she did not seem to be bothered by her appearance—at least during my visits.
After my mother had become considerably impaired, my direct communication with her took place only by phone. Now and then she would say that “she had nothing to wear.” In the same vein, my sister-in-law June reported Susanna’s lament that she did not have “enough shiny things,�
�� since “they” had stolen everything. While it is possible that a member of the staff or one of Susanna’s care center neighbors, similarly robbed of rationality, had pilfered them, it is more likely that “they” were the same people who at the time were “broadcasting from the wall of my bedroom.”
No matter the reason behind Susanna’s sartorial deficit, I asked June to buy her some costume jewelry on my behalf—mailing parcels to South Africa often resulted in “them” stealing the contents before the item had been delivered. Saint June procured a “brooch with many diamonds”: a circular confection that consists of silver tendrils of filigree tastefully finished in a matte style and adorned with sky-blue confetti of rhinestones. Now, after her death, I frequently pin it on, not only in remembrance of my mother, but also because it is the kind of over-the-top accessory I sometimes go for.
On August 19, 2013—a day so warm that the notion of fall seemed unimaginable—I took the bus downtown to City Creek Center. It is adjacent to the Mormon Church’s world headquarters at Temple Square, spans three blocks in the heart of downtown, and incorporates upscale stores as well as residential buildings. A river runs through it, albeit a simulated one. It boasts two waterfalls, three fountains, and a number of trout pools. The stores are connected by foliage-lined walkways and a skyway across Main Street. A retractable roof opens up to the springtide; in summer and winter, it unfurls into a glass-paneled cathedral ceiling that alternately cocoons air-conditioned coolness or furnace-rendered warmth.
My shopping expedition that day to City Creek Center was not geared toward gawking at its pleasing architectural features or supporting the local economy, other than maybe through the purchase of a cup of coffee. My hope was rather to attain a state of relaxed mindfulness that had eluded me for several weeks of being bogged in a malaise bordering on depression.
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