An expatriate in my own land
At the beginning of his hospital stay, I had a sense of urgency that things at home needed to be put right because as soon as he was out there would be no time to attend to anything. Our lives would be falling apart in the rearview mirror as we embarked on the road to recovery, maybe even in another city. I would need to leave behind a manual for all of it.
Continue reading “Exiting Memorial Parkway”
Originally published in 2012.
The best laid plans can go astray in the run-up to Christmas and you may find yourself having to buy a last-minute gift, as I did yesterday.
In the weeks leading up to holiday I have felt that I have been engaged in a kind of stress challenge, a triathlon for moms that measures thoughtfulness, organization and endurance.
Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” recently had guests Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and journalist Deborah Orr on to debate the extent to which an Asda supermarket commercial was celebrating reality or perpetuating gender stereotypes and whether or not Christmas is a mother’s realm, her undoing, or her finest hour.
It hits a nerve, right?
In an anthropological aside, an American ad would never end with giving the mom a glass of wine. Instead mom gets external validation, male approval or female envy, a sticky kiss from her son or Santa winking from the rooftop or the husband’s arm around her shoulders.
So, here, in an effort to help you in this final push before the big day, or as on online note to self as I train for next year, are some last-minute gift ideas: Continue reading “Keep calm and win Christmas: 10 last-minute gift ideas”
You guys! The new Wal-Mart is open. Months of feeling sad about how they were knocking down all the stuff that was in the way of it are over. We can forget about all those old 60ish places because they were sort of like what did they sell anyway? And fond thoughts about a place aren’t the same as patronizing it. You get that, right?
Everyday we would drive past the building site and one day there was a banner that said Opening Soon and then last week they changed it to Now Open. Happy day! We have been talking about it at our house. When can we go? Saturday!
The Old/Bad/Dirty Wal-Mart was one of the first places we shopped at when we moved here. They opened at 7 AM and carried all the crap we didn’t own which we were buying at a frantic pace. We had no appliances because we were coming from a place with different plugs and voltage, no outside things because we didn’t have outside space, no sports equipment because people don’t take little kid sports as seriously, no school supplies because they just went to school and all used the same paper and pens and folders and it wasn’t such a fetish. Things we bought, toasters, radios, can openers, kept having to be replaced. The box store shopping was endless.
It smelled of plastic shoes and didn’t have groceries. People said it was dangerous. And in the strip mall next to it: used CDs, guns, sex shop, pizza, title pawn. Things would be so different if they could move across the street, right?
The old store now stands forlornly at the corner of a major intersection, letters prised off so that only the ghost letters remain. There are still a few cars in the lot but perhaps fewer pigeons. There is still merchandise in the garden center. This seems like a much better location than of the new one, a corner served by turn lanes versus mid-block, but those battles were fought and retail wisdom said it was better to move. You, corporate says to the old lot, are not a Wal-Mart anymore. Oh, it says, yes I am. The ghost letters will fade, they’ll smash the hideous blue concrete, but for years hence we will refer to this spot as where the Bad Wal-Mart used to be. But forget about that. Let’s go to the new store!
First off, new sign. With a yellow sun that tells you your program is loading and everything is awesome. Outside, they are grilling the USDA-inspected steaks and handing out sample strawberries in little plastic cups like doses of medicine. We didn’t take a cart or a basket because we were just coming to look and all we needed were a few things. So there’s what we got. It’s all pretty self-explanatory, right? But it’s a genre these days, people writing about and filming and photographing the haul. Because these things define my existence in the moment. And you get bonus points for embarrassing your kids when you take the picture, so there’s that.
Quaker Real Medleys cereal. Selected by the older daughter who makes her own bowl of cereal in the morning. Okay so the medley is real how? Because dried fruit, oats and nuts are not the same thing so it’s a real medley, not just a bunch of oats trying to differentiate themselves and pretending to be a medley? We just need the word real on the box, people. Don’t over think it.
Cutex nail polish remover. I think it has aloe and that seems like a good thing. It all smells. It’s all bad for your nails, but the green is a nice change. Oh, and also Target doesn’t sell this, only own-brand, so score.
Burt’s Bees pink grapefruit make-up remover/cleansing wipes. The younger daughter, who may write about this product in her own way, got these, which are in some way necessitated by doing sports. She keeps asking me to get them for her when I go to CVS and I don’t want to because I’ll just be annoyed at her if she says I got the wrong kind and I disapprove of the product on principle. That said, shiny new Wal-Mart has an ample and well-stocked selection of this brand and I like some of their other products, but unlike other haul bloggers I am not a paid sponsor so I’ll just leave it at that.
Small, plastic toys. Just can’t get enough of these!!! Birthday money to spend. New store has nicer selection.
General Electric aux cable for car. Add aux cable to the list of crap that breaks. Cord in car now frayed and music cuts out. Have suffered enough. Last trip to RIP Wal-Mart was made to buy one, forgetting that the imminent closure meant thin stock. About three people in the store, even more depressing shopping experience than usual, but look! Here we all are, a broader-than-usual social spectrum, families, not the harried mom pajama hour; everyone’s back!
Pomegranate. Something to make people like me feel like we could just start doing our grocery shopping here after all.
Lemons. They are very small. Get two.
Essie dark blue purplish color nail polish. New color! Essie! At Wal-Mart! Same price as everywhere else, but you’re here. Somehow the younger daughter gets me to buy this without reminding her that it should come out of her allowance.
What did you buy at Wal-Mart?
Ads like this are my weakness. I tell myself I could pull it off, this two-piece print ensemble, even though I know I wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling that everyone will think I am wearing pajamas, especially if I don’t wear it with heels, which I probably wouldn’t.
Someone in my family would ask, “Are those pajamas?” or, “Are you really going to wear that?” and so maybe I could get the top, just to prove that they can’t boss me around, but of course the idea with an outfit like this is the total effect, pajama-like as it may be.
This is why doing the capsule wardrobe project last month was, for me, arbiter of bad calls in my own closet, a relief. I moved most of the clothes to the other side of the closet and enjoyed the luxury of space.
Dressing was faster and easier. I rediscovered a 20-year-old jacket and a skirt with deep, not just decorative, pockets. I acknowledged my capacity for questionable judgement and I restrained my urge to buy printed things.
I had forgotten about this, but I spent my last two years of college in a capsule wardrobe of about seven items. Very unisex. Things wore out. Hems frayed, seams came undone, coins were lost in the jacket lining until the pockets wore out entirely. All the while, other clothes languished, unloved, worn a few times while the same favorite items were in steady rotation.
There are many ways in which the Americans are not like the French. First of all, they don’t dress with irony, as with the two-piece ensemble above. But I think a big part of it has something to do with how they view clothes in an entirely more three-dimensional way, that it is a form of two-way communication rather than self-expression, my/our perusal of print media and liking of a certain color or trend or idea. I will stand in front of a mirror and contemplate something, and have thoughts about it, as I did in the communal changing room of an Agnès B. in Paris last summer. I asked the woman I was with what she thought—she gave the ensemble a once-over and commanded, “Marchez un peu!” No, she shook her head. “It does not move,” she said.
Maybe I’ve been hanging out in the wrong communal changing rooms, but an American would tell you to turn around, not to walk. We think about our self-presentation in a more static sense. It was a revelation. It explains the way French clothes can have annoying little drawstrings and ribbons hanging off of them. These are not for you, the wearer, but for others. You are not just dressing to suit yourself.
So, I didn’t buy the long black skirt or the jacket at Agnès B. I would love to have a grey or a black trouser suit that I could dress up or down, but it eludes me. It is in my fantasy capsule wardrobe. Yet I didn’t find the month of 33 items a hardship. Thirty-three items means you know your mind and you are in control of your circumstances. Four pairs of shoes out of maybe 30 or 40, if all footwear actually counts, can see a person through a month.
Sometimes I buy something like a red skirt because I wonder what it would be like to wear it. I imagine it will create possibilities. I love my red skirt but it is a troublemaker in a closet of more neutral things. You look at your clothes and it’s shouting, Me? Are you gonna wear me today?
Why would I wanna wear you? I should wear you with a neon pink blouse.
I’m thinking of getting together another capsule for April. I liked having the small selection of things that went together. But they don’t have to go together like pajamas.
It’s that time before a meeting when people are having free-floating side conversations and the topic of Barbie appearing in Sports Illustrated comes up. Only I have misremembered it as Playboy. Like we’d have said in middle school, same difference.
My colleague identifies this as “confirmation bias.” Which is a fair cop, but I guess you could say I am … unapologetic. I am middle aged and cynical.
Is Barbie a woman we—and we, as in men, more specifically men who read Sports Illustrated, not we as in 7-year-old girls—love? A role model? It’s such a tedious, well-trodden path of collegiate debate that I can’t even believe I’m writing about it, but on the other hand, here we are all these years later debating the messages that come with giving little girls an unrealistic body image toy, the appeal of it for grown men, society’s discomfort with female sexuality unless it serves a commercial purpose, etc., etc. Are we still having these conversations?
Oh, wait a minute, are they pandering to us? Do they want middle-aged women to connect with their Barbie-approval? Oh, yeah, sorry, ladies, Barbie’s not stupid; she’s totally hot.
And, also, are there actually women in real life who ever wear just heels and a bathing suit? Where is she going dressed like that? Who is she being a role model for in those sandals? Someone get her a nice Boden beach tunic.
I had half-heard the Barbie story on NPR the other night and they had mentioned something about Target selling the Barbie swimsuit. I assumed, incorrectly, that they were selling the Barbie swimsuit, which is kind of icky, whether for girls or women, ugh (which is worse?) and not unlike, in my mind, how BHS in the UK had done a line of children’s clothing with the Playboy bunny logo on it, but now that I look for “Target Barbie swimsuit” what I find is that that Target is selling a remake of the original doll that is appearing in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and that this doll is not intended for children, but “For the adult collector.” And that’s icky, too.
As it happens, the NPR story ended with the line “The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is one step away from Playboy magazine,” the commentator said. “It is potentially sending the wrong message to girls.”
Not that all girls will hear, receive or care about the message. Girls are bombarded with messages, both well-meaning and malicious. They have their own stuff to deal with without having to worry about what a lot of adults think they know about what they think. The thing about being a teenage or pre-teen girl is that you don’t objectify yourself. You don’t think of yourself that way, which is great. It’s just that the rest of the world is busy objectifying and defining you, which sucks.
I am told that “reputation” is still a factor during rush week at our state universities. For all the empowerment girls allegedly have they are still condemned if they cross the line by acting the way so much of our culture is encouraging them to act or dress. We are constantly commenting on their looks, their bodies and their self-presentation in a way that we don’t with boys. As a girl, you have to discern and then tread the line very carefully because even if mainstream culture is cruder and more explicit or “permissive,” girls are still being judged by a double-standard. And in some ways it is harder now because the lines are so blurred, but still there are lines.
The fact that Barbie is in the swimsuit issue says that Mattel wants the doll to be a sex symbol and is taking a so what if we do (unapologetic) stance. Sports Illustrated is embracing the discomfort. Mattel is promoting Barbie as a symbol of this empowerment and tagging the campaign Unapologetic. In some ways, it seems kind of sad and irrelevant and yet it is happening.
On the heels of all of this, as it were, I find myself in Victoria’s Secret. Even the name is worth a thousand 200-level women’s studies term papers. As much as I hate so much of what they do, I go there because they have bra fitters who don’t creep out my teenage daughters. The fitters at Victoria’s Secret are friendly and cute. Rather than being the henchwomen of dysmorphia, they soothe the teenage girl embarrassment/angst, and for this I am grateful. Do you want your daughter’s fitting room experience to be uncomfortable or one that makes her feel at ease? Also, the fitting system is efficient and organized in a way that puts our local department stores to shame.
This all happens in the very purposefully designed boudoir/bordello-styled fitting rooms with their saloon-style doors and copperplate script that names each chocolate box of a changing cubicle with words like “Bombshell” and “Angel.” I know better than to think that they could label the doors “Radiologist” and “Bus Driver,” but it makes you wonder, who’s doing what to whom? Whose fantasy are we living? Is Barbie a child’s toy or an adult collectible? Is this what women want or what men want us to want? The fitter is a philosophy major. She makes small talk about how the NSA tracks data on the game logic of people who play Angry Birds .
When I go to Target, unavoidable consequence of living where I do, I notice that there is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit display in the women’s clothing section. They don’t have the Barbie suit, on trend as it is with the diagonal/chevron print, but they have others, the swimwear of other role models, offered to us by the men who leer at our outgrown toys.
What do you wear from your capsule wardrobe as you prepare to maybe get stuck on the highway in a snowstorm?
The older daughter has a doctor’s appointment an hour and a half away.
I wear jeans, a black cardigan and grey sneakers. Easy. Just as well not to be distracted. I pack boots in case. The boots are not on the list of the 33 items I have pulled for the month’s fashion challenge, see previous post, but I am not getting frostbitten feet for the sake of “rules.”
Shopping is partly about the illusion of control. The week starts out with a survivalist determination, keeping the cars filled, the phones charged. I go buy most of the things that you should carry in your car. On the rare days when my windshield freezes over, I scrape it with whatever I can find, the unreturned hotel keycard, a squeegee, a hot tea towel. It’s time for an ice scraper and a brush. I buy a small bag of cat litter and a tow rope (that’s insane) and I pack sleeping bags.
I have driven this way many times but never alone or just with a child, never with instructions for clearing snow out of the tailpipe. There are a lot of trucks. We go by the sign for thegolfchurch.com and the most ancient Stuckey’s billboard with it’s sunfaded, blistered illustration of ice cream sundaes. Heavy raindrops splatter down at one point, but then stop. At Gardendale, the most truly enormous tallest cement cross hoves into sight and slips away.
We arrive. The weather is in abeyance. The hospital is designed to not feel like a hospital. The lobby has a cathedral ceiling with a sweep of glass and a curving reception desk.
Shopping for clothes is also about the illusion of control. The interview suit, the lucky boots, the perfect lipstick. Like shopping for milk and bread, or beer and dog food, however you imagine your disaster scenario. When I go to the supermarket the next day there has been a run on organic, free range eggs.
We shop to be prepared, to undertake an activity of preparation, scurrying about on the darkening roads, as if there were something we could do to stave off whatever is gathering in the clouds and signified by the rainbow filled shapes that pulse over the map with every weather report.
When the weather advisory lifts, will we be overwhelmed by choices?
Sitting in the consultation room we are without windows to watch the rain begin or hear the quickening rattle of sleet. We have made it this far. We’ll just have to see.
When we come out, the sky is grainy but dry. I drive and drive until at last the bridge over the Tennessee River rises up before us and we are on the final road home. And so there is no need for the sleeping bags, the boots, the tow rope, which have offered the illusion of protection, like the other half of my closet, packed with clothes for other seasons, other occasions. Each day is it’s own journey, what you wear, what you carry, what you leave behind. No one can ever accurately predict exactly what you will need, not even you.
Photo of the GFBC cross by Ben Tate via Panoramio, with permission.
It is Thursday morning, Day 6 of the capsule wardrobe, Project 333 experiment. My friends and I are recording the month. Some notes.
Monday evening: Cosmetics are not part of the project, but I go through my box of make-up and am delighted to find an iridescent, electric blue eye shadow that I had totally forgotten about. I will wear this tomorrow.
Tuesday morning: I look for my Cholly earrings and can’t find them. Charles made these for me in high school out of a sheet of metal from his dad’s sequin factory. He experimented with different shapes and sold them at a Soho boutique. Most were round and dramatic with connecting parts, but mine are long and skinny, almost like feathers. Remember feather earrings? Remember buttons? I wore these earrings almost every day in 10th grade. I kept track of them through all of those high school sleepovers, sleepovers after parties, sleepovers after my friend’s play, after Trader Vic’s. Taxicabs, Magic Tree, rain, coffee shops, the quiet key in the door. I picture the glass-topped hotel side tables I might have laid them on in January. I am pretty sure I wore them in Atlanta last month. They are a blackish blue, not shiny, but not dull. They would easily be lost on a reflective surface. The edges are worn, distressed metal from summers of corrosive beach air, 30-plus years of being handled. They are a very physical souvenir of all of these years—of a friend who is still making things, of being a kid in New York in the 80s—and completely irreplaceable, so if I left them in the hotel they are gone. I look in the bags I took. Not there. I say goodbye to them.
Tuesday evening: But I am really good about not losing jewelry. In a hotel, I slip things into my purse rather than leave them on the side table. They are very thin and maybe they are actually in the jewelry box, but I just didn’t see them, but I tell myself this is a vain hope. I take the box into good light and there they are, tucked up against the side. What else is in here?
Technically, for Project 333, you are supposed to include your accessories, even sunglasses, in the 33 items you wear but I’m not doing this. Anyway, I thought, in terms of making more space in your life, the jewelry box is going to occupy the same space whether it’s full or only has six items in it.
The box has an upper tray, where I keep earrings. This is where I find Charlie’s earrings. Right where they should have been. A reversal of loss. The tray lifts out and underneath is are bracelets and a small green velvet box. But as with so many other things, clothes, recipes, ideas, we keep skimming the same things off the top. We get used to what is there and we stop seeing. This is why supermarkets rearrange the shelves so often. It’s not more efficient all of a sudden for them to put the napkins in the far back corner, it’s that when you walk your route and lob the napkins into your cart without thinking you are not considering other purchases you could be making. You are not looking for the napkins. Once you devise a pattern, they rework the maze.
I never look under the tray. When I get dressed, I reach for the earrings on top. I forget about the necklace I had bought in the Bermondsey Market one dark and early morning. My new, now old, friend had taken me there, back in the days of her introducing me to London. We had eaten breakfast in a caff, English bacon, then new to me and not what I thought of as real bacon, but would come to love, mugs of strong tea, a place filled with mates and geezers, and always a few tourists on a recommendation from their Lonely Planet guide, “off the beaten path,” or from an expatriate women’s club newsletter (see previous post) or word of mouth among expatriate women, or the sheet of recommendations they typed up for visitors, or a blurb in Time Out.
I knew better to think I would be buying antique silver candlesticks for a song. I do not know enough about English china, nor had then logged enough hours of Roadshow to think I would in any way be able to get a bargain. This was the “thieves market,” where anything sold here, under cover of darkness, was fair game.
But I wanted to buy something, at least a souvenir of having come. Had we brought a flashlight? That was part of knowing what to do. I remember driving out we asked someone for directions and as a point of reference, a man actually said, “Do you know the muffin man?”
Inside the green velvet box are a pair of earrings I bought the first fall we had moved to Alabama. We were downtown and A. was visiting. Before we knew she would be coming, I had signed up for a 5K run for cancer research, something I had never tried before, but I was trying to fit in and be part of the community. After the race we went to an antiques store and I bought them. I don’t think they are even particularly old, but they were pretty and different to anything that I had. Not long after, a stone came loose and they joined the endless list of tasks that, when you are new, take longer because you don’t know where to go or who to ask for a recommendation. It was easier to leave them in the box.
I open the box. The stone is fitted back in and I can’t tell where the repair is needed. One back is missing. The post is bent. The box rattles. I shake out a lone earring, whose twin is in the tray, and another pair of earrings that I had forgotten about to such an extent that for a moment I thought they might have come in the box from the antique store. But then I remember them. Why are they in the green box? Had they needed a repair too? Had the earrings mended themselves, left alone in the dark for three years?
There is a lesson here, in this box within a box. Damaged treasures. The friends and places that seem to envelop them, why getting rid of certain clothes or things can be so hard because it’s not the thing itself but all the memories it conjures up.
Wednesday night: Having fewer things forces you to take better care of the things you do have.
Thursday morning: The older daughter is now taking a business and career class, a freshman requirement. One thing they can do for 10% of their grade is wear business clothing one day a week. I lend her a skirt and survey the rest of the clothes I have placed on the other side of the closet and consider what constitutes a business wardrobe for a freshman who has yet to decide upon a career. Will this require the creation of a capsule wardrobe based on anticipating the sartorial standards of a teacher I haven’t met for a career, the idea of which we hope to nurture, but which is hypothetical. For the boys, of course, this will be achieved with khakis and a blazer, whereas for the girls, do I tell her this?, it is much more complicated.
Photo, screenshot of photo of clipping (New York Magazine?) from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.
Today I am supposed to be starting an experimental month with Project 333. This was something I stumbled across a few weeks ago and it seemed like a good idea — you create a capsule wardrobe containing 33 items and this, in a variety of ways, sets you free. I floated the idea to a few fashion-challenge-minded friends and so I hope that they are reading this in some clothes that they really love because the challenge is on.
As we firmed up the details—did the 33 items really have to include shoes and jewelry??—one friend backed out, texting from Zara that she was at the point in the winter, where she was thoroughly sick of her wardrobe and, one supposes, the idea of being stuck in the same rotation for even another month would be cruel. She has just moved from L.A. to the Midwest. Earlier in the conversation, she said, despite whatever may be in her closet, she lives in the same 20 items, which I think is true of most of us. It’s the idea of limits and rules which makes the 33 seems austere.
So what about the Petroleum Wives? Where are they?
Now, while we (women), all have moments, however brief, of imagining a simple, stylish, easy wardrobe, the versatile sheath plus stunning and transformative accessories, we don’t believe it’s achievable. (Do men ever think about this kind of thing? A black dress is not nearly as versatile as khaki trousers and a look at the outfits of the audience at last week’s State of the Union address should tell you all you need to know about some inherent fashion inequality between the sexes; thick royal blue dress and jacket sets speak volumes.)
The capsule wardrobe is a nice idea but for most of us it remains a lofty ideal that follows you through the shops: is this your essential white shirt? Are these your indispensable black flats? Catalogs and fashion magazines tap this with their copy, their lists of 10 must-haves, the all-you-needs, but as we experiment with and refresh our wardrobes, and even assuming our weight remains steady, the items accrue and the volume of our closets and drawers increases our hunger for simplicity.
One is seldom forced to be limited to a capsule wardrobe. The first time I did was backpacking in Italy, the second, when we moved from NYC to London. We had whatever we’d brought over on the plane and the rest was in a container. Talk about packing for the unknown. While the plan was that I would take the first month or so off and get settled before I looked for work, I wanted to have work or interview clothes to hand, just in case. Also, it was during this time that I would be trying to present myself as respectable and grown-up, meeting the husband’s work mates, looking for a flat, being interviewed at the lawn tennis club where I would play county league squash, presenting forms to civil servants, registering as an alien with the police, opening a bank account.
When filling out my alien registration booklet, under occupation, they would not let me put writer. I had to choose between unemployed and housewife, and I was advised to put the latter, as it sounded more respectable. Grudgingly, I opted for respectable. Though I insisted, throughout my state of being a trailing spouse, on keeping my name, and making sure I kept our wedding license to hand. It was still in its mailing envelope with the name and phone number of our NYC super scrawled on the front, Tito, who had checked us out of the Tribeca apartment we would never, ever again be able to afford.
It was the 90s and minimalism was the thing. I had three DKNY black wool separates, a gray Banana Republic T-shirt I would wear until it was a rag, two pairs of black shoes, and so forth. Most of the clothes I still own, 20 years later. I arranged my small wardrobe in several tiny closets over the course of the next two months. It was April. I had only brought two sweaters and these I wore, layered together, for much of the month. I hadn’t counted on the cold.
I landed a job at an international school and it was there that I encountered the Petroleum Wives. At this point, I had absorbed enough of the indignities of expatriation, the various laments, the taking of a taxi to the one newsagent in West London that carried the Sunday New York Times, the pilgrimage to the deli that carried American food (things I hadn’t bothered to eat in America), the quest for a decent cup of coffee or a bagel. One spends part of the time trying to replicate one’s former life and maintain one’s identity as, for example, a New Yorker, and another percentage trying to acculturate, all the time being easily identifiable as a foreigner and trying to at least stake the middle ground of being not a tourist.
In the admissions office of the school where I worked, there was a table of literature from local organizations catering to expatriate families. Women’s clubs abounded. The men, when they finally organized their own club, would call it STUDS (spouses trailing under duress successfully) (really). In one newsletter, the headline, “Attention, Petroleum Wives” caught my eye. The Petroluem Wives/Women have since gone online and their website notes, “Membership is not limited to those associated with the petroleum and energy sectors. ALL women are welcome.” Their newsletter, in 1995, contained an article about how hard it was to find domestic employees who did not destroy your Persian rugs, purchased when you lived in Iran, with ignorance or bad technique.
If my experience as an expatriate housewife had taught me anything, it was that we now existed in a slight throwback era. No longer were both parents working. There were very few single parents. Now, the wives were fulfilling duties to family and children, providing stability, comforting and costly snacks of hard-to-obtain, American junk food, 10 PM dinners for late-working husbands, planning mini-breaks to European cities or the Isle of Wight, reading the Evening Standard to keep up with the gossip. Most of the women in the school’s parent organization had advanced degrees. They planned class parties with excel spreadsheets. A few would apply their knowledge of history or art plus MBA to offering gallery talks or leading book groups.
Another feature of the women’s club newsletters was a gray market of cars, electrical appliances and voltage transformers. I located an address in my A-to-Z in search of each thing we might need, puzzling over the bus routes and tube map to figure out how to get to each place. Everyone had a level of satisfaction and cultural competency, which they shared, whether they meant to or not. I tried to maintain the same minimalist principles in our flat even once our shipment arrived, to not acquire more than we absolutely needed. Most of our belongings were socked away in a storage warehouse. It was a relief to be free of them, but a comfort to know they still existed.
My next capsule wardrobe was when I was pregnant. Again, the limited choice you have once you have retired your regular wardrobe is freeing. I bought the four-piece black stretchy cotton kit that contained dress, trapeze top, trousers and skirt and some days didn’t even bother with accessories. I even had pregnancy shoes, clogs and Converse slides, I wish they still made those. Slip-on shoes and a restricted wardrobe were ideal for the lifestyle of someone who needed to be able to mobilize swiftly to stay on feeding and sleeping schedules, who hung out sitting in circles on the floor or drinking tea at One O’clock Clubs.
I am not sure what makes me want to go capsule at this point in my life. I am not at any particular turning point that I am aware of. In January, a few weekends away, living out of a suitcase of judiciously chosen clothing, almost put me off. And the extreme cold we’ve been having forces you into the same warm things again and again. I am not including my wool baselayer in the 33 items, because I am counting it as underwear. Last weekend, I cleared most of the clothes out of my closet and tidied the shoes and shoe boxes and vacuumed the closet carpet. I think I exceed 33 items. Do I need the red skirt to cheer me up or to wear on Valentine’s Day?
I guess the empty closet represents possibility. I think of coming for the first time to Little Venice, to a street of massive white colonnaded houses, flowering trees, the surprise of a canal, so many women in their kitchens selling off blenders and televisions. They were sad to be leaving, or happy. They were returning to their real life or leaving it. They had complicated espresso machines that they were selling at close to cost, because it was unused and they wouldn’t have bought it if they knew that their husband was serious about accepting the new position, or for ten quid, because the movers were coming tomorrow and they’d just be giving everything to the cleaner who had, frankly, ruined the rug, but they didn’t like to say anything.
Photo by Older Daughter, Summer 2011.
The vaguely educational, brightly lit toy store at the mall is gone and in its place is now a dark cave of weird. You know the kind of store I’m talking about: joke shot glasses, fake vomit, ass jokes, refrigerator magnets with ass jokes, and so forth, but also real weird stuff, for a community of people who shop here regularly.
We are out, touring the malls, for the older daughter to spend her birthday money. We have bought beaded Betsy Johnson sandals with a gold foot bed. It was a moment of shoe love. And now we are upstairs, where things are a little younger and cheaper.
When we walk by it the first time, I whisk them past with a nonchalant, “Not today,” and we go across the way to the luggage and bag store, but when we come out we see the classmate of the younger daughter’s and his family. This is a small enough town that you are forever running into people you know you know from somewhere else, but can’t place them. A woman in a medical uniform at the sandwich place. The woman with striking hair who turns up at events.
We are chatting with the family outside of the fake vomit shop. The older daughter is finally just unable to resist and implores me to go in. If it were Claire’s I would have let her go in alone. But it is not Claire’s.
The dad says, “They have some pretty … inappropriate stuff in there.”
“I know,” sigh, “I’ll be right back.”
She is off. I am beside her, kind of blocking her line of sight, saying no to the horns that you plunge into your ear to stretch them out, or the big grommets, a trend I don’t understand at all, because even as just objects they creep me out. The negative space of an earlobe where an earlobe is supposed to be is like that optical illusion where you hold a paper towel roll to one eye and place your hand alongside the cardboard tube and it looks like there’s a hole in your hand. I just think it’s a horrible thing to do.
But I’m undecided about this craze for tattoos. I went around Chicago this summer going what’s up with all the tattooed women? Like tattooed women in their 30s in Anthropolgie dresses and retro eyewear. I scrutinized them on the L and at the Pitchfork Music Festival and at the airport. Admiring some and clucking over others, like the young woman with “Love is my religion” emblazoned across her chest and other designs slapped like decals onto her thighs, all I could think was bad, bad decisions. For others, with black stencils rising out of the back of a shirt, or arms like colored sleeves, I gave points for decisiveness and artistry, for a tattoo that seemed to suit their affect. Shoulder poetry and any kinds of personal manifestos seem stupid. Get a rock with a word of inspiration on it. You can keep it in a bowl on your desk. When you get tired of it, bury it in the garden or throw it hard at a pigeon
The other customers in the cave are a family: a very short mom in a strapless dress that had flesh-colored panels at the side, maybe an ankle tattoo, and a little girl of about three, also in a dress, and husband in a big T-shirt and a cap, who was daring her about various bits of piercing jewelry. “If I ever do get my ears gauged,” she says, “I’m not gonna go bigger than a one.”
The older daughter is admiring the glass balls that adorn the bars you put through a pierced belly button. She wants to get a price and she is asking the guy at the counter. I am feeling all sorts of those conflicting split-judgementy mom thoughts: We shouldn’t be in here, it’s her birthday money, who am I to judge, okay just pick something not dangerous or semi-legal and let’s move on. Meanwhile, the other mom sees my deliberation and says “If she’s getting her belly button pierced…”
“Oh, no,” I say, like the uptight suburban mom that I have become, one eye on the daughter, “she’s not getting her belly button pierced.”
And if you’ve not gone shopping with the older daughter, the thing with her is that you have to be on your toes. So part of me is wishing I could find out the advice about navel piercing, or maybe it’s a recommendation for sensory-friendly piercing, because I bet that exists, and the other is wanting to wrap this up so that we can get out of there.
The next person I recognize that day is the guy who is working at the counter, either because the last time we entered a store like this, but in a different location in this mall, a couple of years ago, he worked there and I had the same feelings of surprise about the tweezed, arched eyebrows and the permed, side-parted hair, but also the three-day beard growth. Maybe he’s not a drag queen, but the bassist in a glam-rock band. Ann Taylor wouldn’t hire him and the big cookie place downstairs said they’d call, but they never did, and he went through the mall filling out applications and here’s where he ended up. And maybe this is not the old place moved but a new place and he was like, yeah, I know the inventory/the customers/the difference between a gag joke and act of bravery.
Everyone, he would point out, is a freak of one kind or another.
The first time we might have met him, the younger daughter had wanted to buy a Dwight Schrute bobble-head doll for her father for Christmas, and they didn’t have those, but the store people thought it was an excellent idea for a product. As with the man in the cape, I want to shake him down and ask questions about being (maybe) a cross-dresser who lives in Alabama and works at the mall and about the mainstreaming of piercings and ear-stretching practices and how come zombies resonate with people these days? And how are these things connected? He must have some theories by now.
Or maybe I saw him some place else.
Behind us, at the way back of the store, I notice a wall of inflatable penises. We need to get out of here before these are spotted and remarked upon. Loudly. And we do. We get a little packet of glass balls that are navel jewelry, which will become objects in the great universe of small objects that the older daughter collects, irregardless of their purpose.
Thanks for the miniature glass treasures. The beautiful man said I could keep them forever.
…
On Sunday, I remind my family that I am going to TEDx.
“FedEx?”
“Yes, I’m taking the dog. We are going to complain about the trucks.”
The tattooed ladies of our town are at TEDx. Smartphones, retro eyewear, tattoos: it’s like the triad of girl hipsterism. They don’t have quite the same, tattoo-baring necklines and bravado of their Chicago sisters, but there are the sleeveless dresses with the full-arm jobs, the tsunami foaming at the wrists. They say that they will always be happy to live in their 24-year-old skins, in the way that we lay down our irrevocable digital footprints, writing a mantra on one’s sternum rather than ruining your walls with pushpins and adhesive-backed cork tiles. At 13, I flipped through the racks of posters at the Postermat on Eighth Street, their aluminum frames chattering with sex jokes, drug jokes, cute animals, rock and roll greats. That’s awesome. I’m going to wear that forever. I will never outgrow myself.
TEDx is a celebration of weird and wonderful rather than a cave of weird. Electric car, drumming circle, model rocket, letterpress. One of the speakers is a sword swallower and at the end of a talk about overcoming fears and setting goals he swallows a sword. The idea is also that the sword is your fear and your story, the edge of it glinting as it disappears in the telling.
Picture by Diane Arbus, found via Bookman’s Log.
I have a nail in one of my tires. I call Costco because you will not be taken advantage of there. At Costco, you are all tools together, with your big fruit platters and your this and that. There, you are duped into buying many things of relatively good quality at a fair price. It’s nothing personal.
“What size tire?” the guy in the tire department asks.
“You know, car-sized. For my car.” Well I don’t actually say that, but I’m thinking, there are different sizes?? I have fallen at the first hurdle. He tells me to look at the sticker inside the door and call back.
Spring clothing ordered online has arrived. The younger daughter is opening boxes and examining merchandise. She’s not sure about the fit of her sandals. “Can I put an extra hole in the strap?” she asks.
No, I shake my head at her. At what age do they comprehend the whole on the phone/can’t talk to you right now thing?
They don’t have my car-sized tires in stock and it will be 3-5 days before they would get them so clearly I will have to make calls. This, I think haughtily, is no way to treat a Member.
I call a tire place near our house and when the guy asks me what size, I’m like, I know that one. He can get it by tomorrow morning and it costs the same as Costco. Result.
My husband enters and I tell him about my tire problem and how I have sorted it all by myself. “What kind of tire is it?” he asks.
“What kind of tire is it?” I ask him. “It’s one that will fit my car.”
He confronts my ignorance with an analogy he knows I will grasp: shoes.
“You wouldn’t walk into a shoe store and just buy any pair of shoes because they were in your size.”
“No, but that describes how you buy shoes,” I point out. Buy them and get out. And get out fast.
Black, rubber tires, I am thinking. Yuck. Boring. Hassle. Actually, I’m not even thinking about the tire as a thing in its own right, but as the solution to a problem. All of those ads for tires where they show children snuggled up in the backseat in their pajamas have not served their purpose for me as a consumer because I remember the ad, but without brand affinity, and the message to me is Don’t have car trouble because it’s scary.
I call the tire place back and ask what kind of tires they are while he chortles. The brand is something neither of us have heard of. “But they are the same price as the ones at Costco.”
“Why do you think Consumer Reports rates tires?” he asks.
“Because there are people who like to read about that kind of thing?”
I want the problem to go away as fast as possible and for my children to be safe in the backseat. My husband is furiously typing away at the keyboard and calling around.
The younger daughter has the audacity at this point to mock the name of the tire I was about to buy. “Who’s ever heard of that?”
I wheel on her. “You are in no position to say anything. You are know even less about this than I do. Name three tire brands.”
She names the brand I was offered at Costco, the brand she mocked and then she’s stumped. “Oh, oh,” she cries, “the marshmallow man.”
“Michelin,” I say, “well done, but no more out of you.”
“No,” my husband says on the phone, “I don’t want to buy the cheapest tire you have.”
In less than 10 minutes he has located a name brand tire that I can have fitted the next morning.
The younger daughter’s spring sandals that we ordered online have arrived. She is not sure about the fit. “What is your gut feeling?” I ask her.
“That they’re cute,” she says.
I’m on my own with this one. The husband’s work is done.
The Other Side 