Perimenopausal I Buy a Navy Blue Blazer

SHAUN HUNTER

I don’t belong in this expensive clothing boutique: it’s for executives and society types, women who live more public, polished lives than I do. I’m underdressed in my loose cotton shirt and sloppy capris, but I ease open the glass door and allow the attentive European saleswoman to help me. This stop is a whim, a way to kill time while my husband tries on a new suit at the shop across the street.

I’ve bought new shoes, I babble to the saleswoman — a holiday splurge — and now, I want something to wear with them.

Some women, I’ve read, reprise their high-school hairstyle in midlife. For me, it’s shoes — a pair of brogues, the same kind I sported in Grade 12, back when I was indomitable. Wearing them, I shore up my mushy perimenopausal self and sense the return of my adolescent self-confidence. But the shoes only get me part way there. Now, I need a blazer.

“Are you set on navy blue?”

Suddenly, I am not so sure.

The saleswoman looks a few years younger than my mother. Her accent is as soft and elegant as cashmere.

“Let me see what I can find.” She heads toward a wall of jackets and I trail behind her like a puppy.

I keep my eyes trained on the racks of clothes and avoid the mirrors. I didn’t come into this chic boutique to be reminded of my sagging, softening body.

So far, perimenopause hasn’t meant hot flashes or insomnia, but it has ushered me into new emotional terrain. A story in the news about the suffering of a stranger can spark sudden tears and stir up the depths of my own losses. In the countless hours I spend as a writer mining my past, decades-old feelings come back, bitter and sweet. Sometimes the triggers are embarrassing. A line in a Taylor Swift song about her happy childhood sends me — every single time — into an aching about my own happy childhood. And then there are the sinkholes of self-doubt. Some days, I am almost ready to give up on this crazy-assed dream of being a writer — an aspiration I started to pursue perhaps too languidly and too late.

Thrown into this mix of emotions is a world that averts its gaze from aging women. I know the look because I, too, have averted my eyes from hormonal middle-aged women. Now I catch younger colleagues — female and male — scanning the room for someone more interesting when they are talking with me, or worse, staring straight through me as if I didn’t exist. My body conspires with this slide toward invisibility. At times, the easiest thing to do is slip out of view in stretchy pants and shapeless old sweaters and let the boggy body-mind of perimenopause swallow me up whole.

The saleswoman holds up a blazer. “What about a nice charcoal? This season, we don’t have much in navy blue.”

My face crinkles no. I realize I am set on navy.

It’s been thirty years since I owned a navy blue blazer, and back then, it was my mother’s idea. I was a sophomore at a women’s college in New England and my mother had flown in from Calgary to rescue me from a crisis of confidence.

“I can’t do it,” I had whispered on the phone.

It wasn’t the work: a year into my studies, I was finding my footing. Now, I was struggling with my identity as a so-called foreign student. In my mother’s hotel room, the story came out in jagged sobs. My closest friend, I sputtered, doesn’t understand me. Nobody does. They think I’m the same as they are. But I’m different, I whimpered. I’m invisible.

My mother listened and consoled, but I wasn’t sure she understood. In between tears and confidences, we went shopping.

I imagine how I must have looked to my mother that weekend. She knew I was resisting the prep-school style my classmates copied straight from The Official Preppy Handbook. My cropped hair mushroomed. My corduroy trousers were cut off and gathered at the knee. I had traded my high-school brogues for clunky wooden clogs and sported a cherished batiked silk scarf around my neck.

At the mall, my mother held up a navy blue blazer.

“You should have one of these.”

My mother’s shoulds were cemented in common sense, tested by experience and difficult to ignore. I took the blazer from her and agreed to try it on.

My mother’s fashion advice was predictable. She had weaned me on black patent Mary-Janes and brass-buttoned wool coats. Later, as the fumes of the Sixties wafted into our Calgary suburb, she put an embargo on blue jeans and hippie hair. To her, the navy blue blazer she pressed into my hands at the mall said classic — a wardrobe essential for smart ambitious women. To my twenty-one-year-old self, the jacket smacked of giving in. I didn’t want to lose myself in a sea of bent-on-success, conventional American women.

I remember my mother nudging me toward the department store fitting room. Inside the cubicle, I eyed the label: Evan-Picone, one of my mother’s go-to brands. I fingered the jacket’s plain, substantial wool fabric. Navy blue: my mother’s colour. Sophisticated but not showy. Sharp and sensible. A shade that never goes out of style. Reluctantly, I pulled the blazer on and studied myself in the mirror. Whoever Evan-Picone was, he possessed magical powers. With one well-tailored garment, he had smoothed out the messy, ragged seams of my life. My blazered self was still me, but better. Pulled together. Self-possessed.

I stepped out of the fitting room, draping my scarf around my neck. As I walked toward my mother, I knew I would let her buy this expensive blazer for me even though I wasn’t sure I could wear it. When she headed home that weekend, I stowed my brand-new blazer in the closet and tried to forget about it.

In the boutique, I peruse the sale rack. Shirts and jackets in turquoise, canary yellow, and orange — peacock colours I favoured in my twenties and thirties, before I slipped into a decade of black when I wanted to blend into the background. I was still figuring out what I was going to do with my life after raising my children and I wanted as few people as possible to notice me while I did. Now in my fifties, I am experimenting with colour again — bold, beautiful scarves and vibrant, paisley tops — because, well, why not? But the blazer has to be navy.

The saleswoman walks toward me, her eyes gleaming with success.

“Why don’t you try it on?”

Over the course of my undergraduate degree, I remember wearing my Evan-Picone blazer at least twice. Months after my mother’s visit, at a Rotary dinner honouring international students, I spoke in full, insightful sentences about my expatriate experience. The next spring I was living in Toronto, finishing up the junior year “abroad” I’d cobbled together. After interviewing for a coveted summer job at an Ontario government ministry, I got the position. My qualifications were excellent, but my boss told me later it was the navy blue blazer that cinched the panel’s decision. I knew she was only half-joking.

In the boutique fitting room, I slip on this new blazer. The jacket’s pearl-grey satin lining glides over my arms and across my shoulder blades. In the mirror, I take myself in. My hair is cut as daringly short as I wore it in high school. I am heavier than I was then, but this jacket flatters my figure. The shoulder pads are slight, the lapels slender. The waist tapers at the sides, the back vent graces the natural curve of my body.

Much of what my mother and I talked about that weekend in New England has slipped away. But now I understand what she was trying to tell me when she pressed that blazer into my hands. “This bubble of emotion you’re stuck in won’t last forever,” I can hear her say in her clear, sure voice. “All your talk about quitting … sometimes you just have to keep going. Engage with the world. Dress for the occasion.”

I unlatch the cubicle door and walk into the fitting room foyer with its large three-way mirrors. The saleswoman waits to one side, beaming as if I were her daughter stepping across some new threshold. She scurries around me, smoothing the fabric, clucking compliments. The tailor is summoned from the menswear shop across the street and I stand still as she marks the length of my sleeves. In this magical moment, my mind, body, and blazer seem stitched together in exquisite alignment.

As the saleswoman rings up my purchase, I stroke the fine wool and imagine myself clad in blazer and brogues, claiming my place in the world. I glance at the credit card slip before signing. Perimenopausal, I will pay whatever it costs to make this navy blue blazer my own.