An expatriate in my own land
In the last year that I went to work, on almost every Monday, I wore the same item of clothing — a pair of red, Royal Stewart tartan trousers that I bought in London. I was not there for vacation, but to attend a memorial service for my husband.
Continue reading “The Magic of Monday Pants”
The Scottish Widows ads baffled us. It was 1995, which in the UK of yore was still like the ’80s, pre-New Labor, with post-war vestiges and the occasional luxury of a deep bath. And there was a lot we didn’t understand. Scotland, north of us, would be colder and more damp. Being a widow there might be more sad, especially if you could not afford to heat your castle.
Continue reading “Welcome to the Widowhood”
Day One: Gray is the new pink
Your Disney Experience begins long before you arrive. You are supposed to pre-select the color of your wristband, which you will use as a room key, admissions ticket and credit card. It probably records biometric data.
If you don’t log into the app before you arrive to select a color, you get the gray band of shame. I am going to play it off like I chose gray because it goes with everything. It’s a sophisticated neutral.
Continue reading “My Disney diary”
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”
First of all, know that these sounds are normal: birds very close to the house, the way our cat belts out torch songs of boredom in the middle of the night.
The car horns and sanitation workers you have in New York will be replaced by a throbbing chorus of cicadas. You may call a friend and hold the phone in the air. Just try to imagine, you will say, what I am going through.
When you tell your parents of your plan to take up residence in Alabama for three weeks, as our dogsitter, they fear for your safety in this place where anyone and everyone could be carrying a gun. Manhattan, the devil you know, has its dangers to be sure, but out there, in wild America, you can’t be sure of anything, only that you are an outsider.
Your mother reminds you that you are Jewish, that you might have car trouble, and that this is a place with storms and snakes. Or maybe they don’t know about the snakes. My daughter mentioned the other day that she sees them pop out of holes in the ground on her way to school. I don’t think I will tell you about the snakes.
My husband, who understands what people from New York City can be like, because he is married to one, emphasizes that people in the South are friendly. It is customary to nod or wave as you drive down our street or even speak to people in the supermarket. You ask me about this later and I confirm that it is true. You don’t need an exit strategy.
Even as I tell you that we live on a suburban street, I know that you are picturing a swamp, the only means of escape a rusted out truck with manual ignition. As you pull repeatedly on the clutch the cicadas drown out all other sounds.
As I write the instructions for how to look after the dog and where to find things, you ask questions I hadn’t anticipated. I am trying to tell you how to navigate my life while you are busy inventing your own.
In one email you ask if I own a mandolin and where to go to an open mic night to sing. I know where to find a cigar box banjo, but I am not even sure these are real questions. Since when are you a musician?
You clarify that the mandolin is for slicing cucumbers from the farmers market and that you have a fantasy where you will unleash your inner cabaret persona. You imagine a nearly empty nightclub—I am picturing a raucous table of missile defense engineers drinking Monkeynaut, a local brew, cheering you on. This is not a place where we celebrate loneliness.
You ask what to bring. How can I tell you? A bathing suit. A sweater for the supermarket. But maybe also a cape and a tricornered hat.
What time does the dog go to bed? You ask. Does he like to chase balls? The questions keep coming: ziplining, manicures, health food. I am researching a new life rather than instructing in my own. You are free from the burden of being me. All I ask in return is that you let me know how it goes.
This piece was written last spring in answer to a writing prompt of Operating Instructions. My friend did come here and became good enough friends with some of our friends that she returned. She could have been the only person in all of NYC to visit for New Year’s. She found the experience broadening in some ways and the experience of having to drive everywhere oppressive, which I think very few Americans get. People think cars are freedom, but if you have grown up being able to walk out the door and get anywhere on foot or public transportation a car is a big, needy beast with its own agenda. You have to negotiate with it to get anywhere. You have to pay attention to it and to “the road” first thing in the morning. She has drafted her own version of the experience, which I will share here as a companion piece.
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.
Drive south for 300 miles.
I was anti-GPS when they first started appearing on the dashboard of SUVs everywhere. I saw them as just another way to use technology to insulate us from the uncertainty of actual experience. Expat drivers who feared public transportation on suburban principle used them to navigate London. As someone who had had her share of frantically consulting an A-to-Z map at stoplights, you would think that I would have jumped at the chance to use one, but instead I saw them as a vote for ignorance. I don’t need to know where I am because the machine will tell me where to go. La la la.
There were stories in the news about drivers being commanded to traverse streams due to mapping errors. Using her new iPhone, my friend found herself down an alley in Baltimore while being told that she had arrived at the museum.
But that was a few years ago. Technology improves and now there is the talking Google maps app, which I prefer over the Siri/Safari one, where it shows you and your route only. If you miss your turn, there you are as a blue dot traveling away from the blue line while your husband snaps at you. With the talking map, your husband won’t even know you have missed the turn because it adjusts and reroutes. It anticipates your questions and says things like, in 500 feet, slight right to stay on whatever road it is.
It’s not perfect, but in general I like it. It is a good thing to use in Dothan, Alabama.
I am in Dothan for a tennis tournament. I don’t know my teammates very well and we don’t know our way around Dothan, a large town with a huge ring road. We have four key places we need to get to and go between and the talking map is a big help.
In 200 feet turn right.
I become the map girl. We get into the car and I punch in whichever court we’re going to. Because we don’t know each other that well, they don’t know about my love of photographing old signs. I am shooting out of the car window, toggling between camera and map.
On our last day, I ask D. if we can stop on the way out so I can get a shot of the oyster bar/nightclub. The other car is following us. They stop, too. Now there are two cars of tennis ladies outside of a nightclub. A guy comes out to see what’s going on. Get the mural over there, too, someone says. It becomes kind of a team effort.
On our way home, it’s just D. and me. If there’s anything you want to stop for, just tell me, she says.
Leaving Dothan, I shoot the sign for the Hobo Pantry convenience store out of the window and am amazed to find out, further along the road to Montgomery, that it is some kind of chain because there is another one, another Hobo Pantry, what were they thinking??, between Ozark and Troy, when we stopped for gas. If you do a search for Hobo Pantry, you find surveillance camera stills and videos of robberies, mug shots, QR codes and Juggalos, but no corporate presence, no explanation of when, why and how this became the name for a business.
Furthermore, the guy working there, this enormous, heavyset black man, is in the midst of a transformation, his massive forearms hairless, his eyebrows redrawn and his voice low and melodious. What must it be like to be a transgender Hobo Pantry employee in Ozark, Alabama? One hopes he has a community that is larger and more diverse than what we would imagine he might find there. I ask D. if she noticed him and she did.
She tells me about a girl she knows who, at 10, who despairs of the conservative views of her family and their town, which has a population of about 15,000 and is in a dry county. A church sign there bears the message “Dusty bibles lead to dirty lives.” This is the town I wrote about, where we collected our side of grass-fed beef from the deer processing place the first summer we lived here and each packet of beef came with a sticker that said “Smile, Jesus Loves You.” It has a main street you could fall in love with, like a movie set version of what a small town should look like.
The girl finds the disapproving attitudes of her family and peers about same-sex marriage stifling. She wants them to see things differently. I don’t know what D.’s views are, but she tells the girl to hang in there and that when she goes to away to college she will find lots of people who think as she does. The girl, she says, is just thinking about things at a different level and the world is a bigger place.
We turn back for this amazing motel sign. As in Dothan, a man ambles out of the office, just to check. Do we look like troublemakers, still in our tennis clothes? I wave, get in car. Later, there is a big aluminum sign with holes riddled through it to read “Ye need to be born again.” A little ways on, we pass a large wooden water wheel, which I remark on. Oh, she says, somewhere along here there’s that sign about the devil. And as she says it, there’s a second water wheel, smaller, and a huge sign, which says “Go to church or the Devil will get you!” It makes dusty bibles sound euphemistic. This is the real deal: a devil with curling toes and his scythe out to harvest souls, never mind with the symbolism of housework. The water wheels suggest Blake’s satanic mills and also an unforgiving and relentless faith that fashions signs for motorists with the word Ye in them.
Drive north for 800 miles.
Do you want to go back? But I figure enough people will have stopped already (and they have) and we will never get home, driving in loops.
The world is a bigger place, but are the small towns only for the conservative? People ask us about the move from London to Alabama, as if one is stuffing an inflatable pool dolphin into a matchbox. Why must the girl leave? Can’t a place expand in its own way? Maybe the transforming clerk is happy where he is. Isn’t it a matter of perspective?
In a quarter mile, exit right.
Your destination is all around you
Screenshot of the devil sign from this blog.
Ever since we moved to Huntsville, I have been curious about our public transportation, both by the blatant lack of it and its actual existence in the form of a bus network. Some of the buses are fitted with bike racks, suggesting a kind of Northern European progressiveness, when in fact walking or cycling as a mode of actual transport denotes economic catastrophe. Most buses advertise a local bail bondsmen.
Our city’s transportation system is a shuttle bus that runs in a loop, a closed circuit, a journey of back of and forth with no promise of progress. You see the shuttle stop signs here and there, but seldom passengers waiting to board. There are not, generally, any bus shelters, no signs to indicate when a bus will come and where it might take you.
I find the maps on the city’s website and decide that I have some kind of moral duty as a citizen to ride one, just to know what it is like, where it goes, who rides, even though I have a pretty good idea, because I see the people who wait for it at the Bad Wal-Mart.
But what else compels me to ride? It is my epiphanitis, a disease invented by the Older Daughter as she studied English and science vocabulary in the weeks leading up to her midterms, turning each of the words into conditions.
If you were to read about what she’s got, playing with language would not be one of the attributes. Language would be listed as a deficit, as would sociability, whereas she is the most outgoing member of our family. Even our dog is an introvert.
I wait for the bus in one of the city’s few bus shelters, in the mall parking lot. The buses run on an hourly schedule. As soon as I sit down on the bench I join a community. People nod and wave to me, but discreetly, and the mall, on this overcast Monday, becomes more sociable than I have ever known it to be. Not everyone says hello, though, not the older people who come in workout clothes for walking laps in the atrium, but the workers do, the people who are in less of a hurry, including the lady who joins me on the bench, who will, fifteen minutes later, hold the passengers in the front of the bus rapt with her warnings that wireless fraudsters are stealing your credit card information right out of your pocket on this bus.
I had thought I was getting on a core loop bus but it is soon clear that my map had not indicated that there were other buses that stopped there. There are loops off of the main loop and this is one of those.
When I see the buses around town, they look empty but when I board, nearly every seat is taken. A man moves his bag off a seat so I can sit. The seats feel like they have been taken as parts out of other vehicles. They are tilted back too far so that either you have to slide down in them or sit up somewhat awkwardly.
The woman occupying three seats with duffel bags and a powerful smell and the pregnant, something-a-little-off girl get off at the hospital. More people get on. At the Nice Wal-Mart we pick up a gaunt man with long greying hair who I sometimes see walking along the roads and think of, therefore, as Walking Jesus. We pick up adults with disabilities. A woman and some too-young-for-school children. The ad racks inside the bus are empty, with only one poster, which is coming loose, with information about having a collapsed lung.
The bus takes us into modest developments with optimistic names, like Malibu. How strange it is to travel along these familiar roads as if I had dropped entirely out of my own life, where we meet inconvenience with a sarcastic, deadpan, “Really?” and into one of disenfranchised resignation and the obedient punctuality of those who know that what could be a 10-minute drive is an hour’s journey plus the time to get to the bus stop and go from it to wherever you’re going and repeat the whole thing to get back and whaddya gonna do about it. No one runs for the bus. People who ride the bus know the schedule.
A middle class looking retiree in a wind breaker gets on. At the Target mall, the bus pulls into the center of a section of parking lot, at the way opposite end of where the Target is, and waits for several minutes. A guy wearing a stonewashed jeans and jacket combo and Devo glasses gets on. Later, when my seatmate starts to tell me about a shooting on the number 4 bus and about all the enemies in the world and technology, but there’s only one true enemy and we know who that is, the man in the Devo glasses raises his eyebrows and gives me a half-smile.
1) You assume there will be more to it than that.
2) You turn to books.
When you, as a parent, first catch a whiff of a developmental issue you dive headfirst into the literature. If you can figure out what they have maybe someone will tell you how to fix it. You go to appointments and answer a lot of questions, you fill out hundreds of surveys. You keep thinking that at the end of all the questions there will be some answers, some light at the end of the tunnel, but there is always just the tunnel, the fattening file.
3) You find the answer in people.
After a while you start looking for different things: a program, a service, something for the next stage, a resource. Each experience yields something unexpected. Through the block of six sessions of language therapy we meet T., who told us about the school the older daughter would go to for seven years.
We lived two lives, one at the private international school, another at the state-run primary school. I went to parenting groups on housing estates and to Harley Street for speech therapy, sensory-integration therapy. Parents are parents. Kids are kids. Resources vary.
Over the years, I got good at locating programs. Once you have school placement figured out, you need activities. Summers are challenging. There will not be a program for your child, but maybe we can try it out. You will have to list their deficits on more forms and describe them as truthfully, hopefully, protectively as you can stand to. You leave out the humor and lyricism, though on a daily basis I can’t imagine what we would do without it. Epiphanitis is not an affliction, but a gift.
Now we are trying to find a summer camp. Ah, the application process for a kid with a disability. Does an attempt to be more honest mean that your child might miss out on something, losing her place to a child who has been more victorious in their battle to kick the ass of what would otherwise define her?
We’re not looking for answers, but for the right person.
4) You overthink it.
5) You weren’t expecting this.
Sometime before the Older Daughter was born I bought a big box of crayons because having them was like looking down the road to childhood. I didn’t know anything about the first couple of years. What’s a receiving blanket? Why do I need this or that? I didn’t know how far off crayons were, how many discussions I would have about pincer grip and shoulder stability and fine and gross motor skills. That what had come easily for me as a child would be a struggle for her. And anyway, I had found crayons frustrating, too. Once applied to paper their intense colors were thin and insubstantial and I gave them up for oil pastels and then watercolor markers. A fresh box of crayons is what childhood is supposed to be like and then how it isn’t.
6) You keep looking for answers.
You realize that epiphanitis by another name might be hope.
7) You live for epiphany.
Riding the bus here is like being the parent of a child who is different, or maybe being like a person who is different. The bus is a slower vehicle in a restricted path moving through its route, while the cars travel an easier, more efficient path. When the man tires of telling me about Satan he starts speaking to a man nearby, Haven’t seen you for while, been off the buses, getting rides with my brother.
You are in a community, you recognize each other, members of the tribe, the particular hurdles you share, like the way people were nodding hello at the bus shelter. Hard times, we know. There are more people on the bus than you would have thought. So you will always be on the bus, but the bus doesn’t have to be the way it is. The bus could better integrated into the city. The bus could be happier. The bus could be better understood by those who only notice it in passing and never stop to think, that could be me, or wonder what it’s like to not be them. Really? Yes, really.
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 Other Side 