I’ve never been good at fashion. Some people have the knack; even a scarf flung casually about their neck looks somehow silken and august. I, on the other hand, am a rumpled person, both literally and philosophically. I see the universe as messy, black cloth crumpled with pins and rips. My view is fundamentally pessimistic. I have never understood the expression “freak accident.” Given the existence of black holes and burst blood vessels, it astounds me that anyone really has the courage to get dressed up in the morning. Accidents are not the exception. They are the rule. Therefore, one should outfit oneself accordingly. The truly paranoid should wear yellow hard hats and carry candles. The others, like me, who live on the perpetual edge of an overprocessed ironic worry, should just be frumpy. And that is what I am.
One of my earliest memories involves clothes. I was six years old. I had a great future in front of me. I wanted to be a zoologist, a chemist, a teacher, and a tailor. Mrs. Pichonio, the old widow who lived down the street from us and had a magnificent high hump in her bent back, owned a sewing machine. It was stored in a golden-wood cabinet with iron scrollwork legs and many miniature drawers. The machine itself had Singer written on it, each letter red and formed from tiny painted flowers. The needle nosed in, nosed out with a chattering sound. Once she let me try it, and it amazed me, that cloth could come together, that the open ended could be so easily seamed, that you could cuff and button and hem.
Back at home, I set to work with a plain old needle and thread, the only supplies I could find, plus a large swatch of pink fabric from my mother’s rag basket. Within a few days I had fashioned for myself a skirt, a lopsided article of clothing, sticky with glue and snarled with knots. I proudly wore it to school. Having become frustrated with the process of fastening silver snaps, I simply clasped it at my back with masking tape. I was not the kind of kid one laughed at; people simply stared.
Thus began my clothing career, or what I should more accurately term my anti–clothing career. I looked like a frowzer, and I loved it. After a while, the love went away and it became my habit, a manifestation of who I essentially was, something snarled. I lost my interest in sewing, no surprise, but the tendency towards clothes that did not fit, ugly clothes, sloppy clothes—that became ingrained. For the past twenty or thirty years, almost every day, I have rolled out of bed, grabbed for the raveled sweater, the paint-splattered pants. I never understood why people bothered to change their outfit every day. I have always worn the same outfit, minus the underwear, for one week at a time. It cuts down on laundry and so simplifies things. During the darkest parts of my life, I have even slept in my clothes, thereby avoiding the tiring task of getting dressed in the morning.
That I am a writer, a freelancer with no office to go to, has only more deeply ingrained my tendency. But as occasionally happens to writers, a few weeks ago, someone read my work and liked it and asked me to go on TV for two minutes. That didn’t excite me. I have been on TV for two minutes before and I’ve long lost the illusion it will make me famous. And it probably doesn’t help that I have almost always refused the makeup, with the exception of my Oprah appearance, because she insisted.
The publishing company, however, the one that has consented to print my work despite obvious profit loss, that company did not share my attitude. For the publicist this was a great opportunity—it was CNN—and she instructed me to dress accordingly. She knew me. She knew that without firm direction and tutelage I would probably not look good. She told me to go to Ann Taylor and buy a suit. A suit! “Expense it to us,” she said, sounding a little desperate. Ann Taylor! I only shop at Target, and before Target came to the East Coast, I shopped at Bradlees, whose bankruptcy I am still in the process of mourning.
The publicist was so insistent upon the suit, and so worried I wouldn’t obey, that in the end she traveled from New York to Boston, where I live and where the filming was, in order to supervise my shopping. She wanted to go with me to Ann Taylor to pick out my clothes. This I knew I could not do. One does not show one’s publicist the unpublic places, the bulges and lumps. I said I would go on my own.
Of course, I didn’t. I went straight to Target and found a red suit for thirty dollars. I thought it looked fine. It didn’t entirely fit, the sleeves of the jacket were too long and the skirt was a little loose, but these were minor details, and besides, they usually only film from the neck up. I liked this suit. The red made me look happy; it underscored the flush in my face. It lit up my skin.
I went home and tried it on for my husband. “You look,” he said, “like you’re about to go trick-or-treating.”
I returned the suit. I did not want to get the publicist mad. I knew she was not after a style with any witch in it. I thought my husband was wrong, but I wasn’t going to risk it.
The next day, a Sunday, I conceded. I went to Ann Taylor. The store was in a mall, and I try to avoid malls as much as possible due to potential terrorist attacks. I figured, however, it was Sunday, I was there first thing, the mall was relatively empty, it was not prime time in terms of bombs or aerosolized chemicals. I thought as soon as I stepped foot in the mall I would get sweaty, but in fact, that didn’t happen. The mall was nice. It smelled of coffee and had booths selling wind chimes and wigs and glass cats. It was almost whimsical.
Ann Taylor itself had a charmed hush to it. There were a few women there, and they drifted between the racks of clothes like wraiths—angels or ghosts. I collided with cashmere. There was a white sweater and a matching white scarf, and it was as soft as snow to touch, but warm. I studied some velvet. It was satisfyingly raspy. These clothes were gorgeous; anyone could see that. They called attention not so much to themselves as to the way the light fell around their forms, suggesting the body beneath, at once sheathed and open.
A saleslady drifted up to me. I told her my situation, that I needed a suit and I needed it fast. She was so gracious. She flicked through the racks of soft things and stylish things and held them up to me with complete confidence. If I seemed strange to her in my big rubber boots with old overalls tucked in, she didn’t show it, not a bit. I was another customer, her charge, her mission for the moment. She brought me back to a dressing room and handed me jackets and skirts and shirts. The clothing felt cool against my skin, and it all looked good. I am not accustomed to having clothes that truly fit. I have always been content with an approximate fit, tending towards the too large. These jackets enclosed my waist, and had whalebone buttons. The skirts were straight and slit. I was, she informed me, a petite. I thought of Hans Christian Andersen’s wonderful tale “Thumbelina” and the big red flower and the river and the butterfly. Petite! In fact, I was extra petite. Size six petite didn’t fit me; size four, still too large; size two, close but not quite; size zero, perfect. On the one hand, I was truly proud. For what woman would not consider size zero to be an actual accomplishment? On the other hand, a zero? It was, for sure, a mixed message.
But here’s what really mattered: In the size-zero suit, I looked great. I looked serious and sexy. I looked like a lawyer, like someone in a high-rise, a woman with extra influence. The transformation was total, in part because of the fit. The suit at once concealed and revealed my shape. I had a shape! I had a little waist. I had a visible collarbone, which gave me an appropriately gaunt look. My throat was white and long.
I bought the suit, several hundred bucks, and on sale too. She gave it to me in a bag with velvet handles. She asked me if I’d like shoes to go with the outfit, but I was overcome, overwhelmed, and out of money. I told her no on the shoes. I said I already had some. Then, on my way out of the mall, I snuck into Payless, a discount shoe emporium, and got a fourteen-dollar pair of pumps.
At home, I tried on the suit in front of my full-length mirror. I was wondering whether the mirrors at Ann Taylor were rigged in some way and that now, face-to-face with the glass on the back of my closet door, I would see the truth. And I did see the truth. The truth was I still looked good: My waist was still small. My collarbone flared. I had a charming freckle on my chest.
The next morning, when I woke up, I didn’t reach for the raveled sweater and paint-splattered pants. I put on the suit. It was slightly itchy but immensely gratifying. I went to work, which for me amounts to traveling from my bedroom to my study, across the hall. Usually I work in some version of my pajamas, but today was different; I decided to get all dressed up, as though to meet my characters. My writing was sharper because of that suit. My characters all said witty things, and my overwrought lyricism gave way to a kind of muscular minimalism. I started to think the suit was magic.
I went on TV the next day and I was very articulate. My publicist, who herself was wearing a suit and mauve lipstick and sling-back shoes, was impressed. Huge white lights shone down on me, and behind me stood a man with a silver disc. Then it was over. I went home. The house seemed oddly quiet, in a way both creepy and peaceful. The sheer curtains billowed with sunshine. The cat wreathed around my legs. I stripped and hung the suit way in the back of my peeling closet.
But something was different. Even with the suit off, I still felt like it was a little bit on. My walk was more purposeful. I felt aloft. I felt pretty and I liked it. I began to wonder about Botox. I pinched my lips to plump them out and, sure enough, that made me prettier still. Suddenly, there were so many possibilities. Perhaps I should get a perm, some smart, springy, sexy curls to accompany and enhance my new image. I bought a fashion magazine and went to see a stylist at Lord’s and Lady’s. She grabbed a hunk of my hair and said, “Perm, no way. You’re much too brittle.”
“But I have hairspray on,” I said, which I did, part of my new experimentation. “I have a lot of hairspray on. Without it, my hair is not so brittle.”
“You don’t need a perm,” she said. “You need color.”
Color it was. My strands stripped of their darkness and gray, saturated with something gold. My husband reacted exactly as he was supposed to, just like a husband on a perfume commercial: “Wow,” he said.
I could go on. And on. I could tell you about the lid lift I thought of getting, the tarry mascara I bought, the fancy shampoo with a lather as rich as a racehorse’s. I could tell you about the pants, but I won’t. The clothes are at once entirely the point and not at all relevant. What matters is this: I began to see the surface of everything, the shifting surfaces of people’s faces, the grainy surface of my desktop, the surface of the sky, all slick and blue. I saw the surface of my body and ignored the bones. And this was all very good. Not only was it fun; it was somehow, somehow healing, to use a surfacy word. I bobbed to the top of life and blew a bubble or two. I began to understand that a life dedicated to appearances was not, in fact, a shallow life; it was life lived at the pitch of drama, life on a stage, life acted and enacted, almost Shakespearian. When you tend to your surface, you are making an image, and images are the essence of art. When you tend to your surface you are making a statement of faith. You are saying, I matter. You are saying, The world is worth dressing for. You are engaging in the best kind of optimism, an optimism that propels you out of bed in the morning, that directs you to the day. When you put on nice clothes, you are putting on hope, you are saying, Here I am. This is fun. Look at me. You are jerked out of your scrunched existence and into possibility: the pretty, the silky, the tweed. You are celebrating the excellent malleability of human experience, that you can be this and you can be that, the fusion of image with flesh.
But at the end of the day, of course, you have to take your clothes off. Unless you want to sleep in your suit, this act of undressing cannot be avoided. The night air is cold. An airplane roars. A grandmother has just died, and as well-dressed in her coffin as she was, she still looked, well, she still looked dead, the swoop of blush hideous on her sallow skin.
I wonder if there are some people who never get undressed, or who always stay well-dressed, in a metaphorical sense. If there are, I salute them. To go through life clad and stylishly clothed, with all the relentless optimism this implies, is in and of itself a herculean feat. I, in the end, do not have this stamina. I cannot run that race. I cannot bring myself, when all is said and done and stripped, to see the fabric of the universe as anything other than rumpled. Clothes are a grand vacation, an excellent adventure, but in the end, you come back to your body.
My body is aging. I have warts on my feet. My hair is brittle, with strands of gray beneath the saturating gold. I cannot stick to my surface. I sink, and in that downward decline, in the quiet moments, with the suit hung up in the closet, the flared velvet pants put away, in the quiet moments lying side by side with my infant son as he falls asleep, I think of frightening things. And it occurs to me, in these unclad moments when the world comes at me raw, it occurs to me that my images of terror are as commodified and commercialized as my newfound interest in clothes. I mourn what the media tells me to mourn. I now dress as the media tells me to dress. Even my deepest fears have a sort of surfacy feel to them, aerosolized toxins and jihadists in kaffiyeh.
What are the real dangers here? What are the actual risks that exist beneath the fabric of our American lives, beneath all our stylized surges? I cannot answer that question. Perhaps the answer is simple, though. Perhaps it has something to do with a grandmother in a grave, the way our faces crumple in time, our ends, however they happen. A person cannot tolerate it all; it is too much. Clothes are as fine a diversion as any. They may not remake your soul, but they give you a much-needed break. I would like a gown, pale blue, seeded with pearls at its collar and cuffs. I would like to dress my children in everything Gap. I would like us all to go forward, together, as beautifully bandaged as a human may be.