We shopped in the suburban sprawl thirty miles east of Los Angeles. My grandmother lived in a leafy college town, but to do real shopping we took the freeway to the malls, where concrete blocks of department stores sprang from slabs of parking lot, the buildings bleached so white by the sun that I could hardly read the names affixed to their top corners.
In my grandmother’s car—she went through a series of sedans, one white, another gold, the last one peach—we drove to stores with names that sounded exotic to me, Buffum’s and May Company and Bullock’s. On the way home, for the afterthought of dinner groceries, we stopped at Vons, or we dined at Taco Bell.
On early outings, her goal was to buy me a dress to pose in for photographs taken while I knelt on a blue-carpeted plywood platform at Sears. Later the search was for a dress to wear to a holiday dinner or church. Eventually, when I was an adult, it was to treat me to clothes for a good restaurant, a job interview, or a date. Our shopping was grounded in her benevolence. Conveniently, it also gave us something to do together, especially when I grew too old for a visit to the arcade or an amusement park.
The unspoken agenda was my grandmother’s mission to girlify me. She had raised two sons she adored but made it no secret that she had always longed for a daughter. She doted on her nieces and her friends’ daughters. She tried to dote on her daughters-in-law, who each proved disappointing: my aunt was ill for years with breast cancer, and my mother was an inscrutable pioneer of intellectual discourse and women’s lib and divorce.
And then there was me. The first granddaughter. Fresh meat.
The thing, and it really was a thing, had two layers: solid black cotton beneath sheer patterned rayon. The abundance of filmy material had a surprising weight, and spilled over my arms when I gathered it up. The pattern was aggressively floral. Huge splashes of flowers, blues and reds and golds, drenched a black background. Buttons ran up the front, topped at the neck by a floppy ribbon as wide as a lasagna noodle. Long broad sleeves billowed over tight cuffs.
And from the waist, wide floral pants flowed down to the ankle. I was in my last year of college. It was 1995.
My housemate Cindy held it aloft, standing in the doorway of my room. “What are you doing with a jumpsuit?” She stitched costumes for plays at the campus theater. She had a sewing machine and altered her own clothes. Her sense of style was funky, inventive, sexy, impeccable. She knew things about jumpsuits I would never fathom. “Where did this come from?”
“I didn’t buy it,” I answered. It seemed the less said the better. At least I hadn’t worn it in her presence. “I’ve had it lying around for a few years.”
I had tossed it into the Free Store box someone set up in our group house. When Cindy discovered it, she went door-to-door to find its previous owner.
“It’s amazing,” she breathed.
At that I felt a strange pride. Did she mean the jumpsuit possessed some mystique, some raw potential I had divined? There was something about it I liked. Perhaps what had previously seemed my unseasoned fashion eye was actually an astute fashion-forward vision. Perhaps only I, along with the designer, had recognized that the age-old uniform of mechanics, astronauts, and biohazard doctors could also be rendered into pretty casual wear, even in the grunge-fest of the 1990s.
“You can’t throw this away.”
Could she possibly want to wear it herself? “I keep holding onto it, thinking . . .” I trailed off, then finally confessed. “My grandmother bought it for me.”
“It’s so good.” She began to giggle and didn’t stop. “I’m keeping this,” she announced, as if it were an artifact that was simply too inexplicable, too sui generis, too breathtaking in its hideousness, to let out of her sight.
When my grandmother flew east to visit us, her suitcase was a magical trove with gifts tucked into every possible crevice. Books, candy, toys for my brother and me. On tiptoe we peered over its edge, entranced by its bounty. She always waited until we’d opened everything else, when it seemed nothing else in the suitcase could possibly be for us, before she gave us the clothes.
“Try them on,” she urged, not hiding her eagerness.
I would, eventually, try on the clothes, hoping desperately for them not to fit. They smelled of plastic and chemicals. Sometimes they still hung from plastic hangers, unwashed and stiff, price tags dangling from the armpits, dollar amounts carefully torn off or blacked out. The seams pressed in at the neck, the waist, under my arms. Labels sewn to the collar scratched my neck. If there were ruffles, they itched. The polyester layers were too cold or too hot. There were tights, like sausage casings waiting to swallow my legs. Usually, tragically, everything fit.
The bribes began early. We settled into a system that worked for both of us. I announced that I didn’t want to wear the dress in question. She countered with a reminder that I needed to look nice. This mattered little to me. Mostly I disdained nice. I wanted to look like my older brother, whom I idolized. In the case of a particularly intractable stand-off, she waited until we encountered a true temptation. A toy inside a store window, or a movie or a chocolate bar. Then she reeled me in. In exchange for the desired item, I agreed to wear the dress she wanted me to wear.
Her payoffs were well-chosen, too otherwise forbidden for me not to surrender. My brother had his own arrangement and had no trouble honoring his terms. I was still learning, however. Once, I agreed and cashed in on her side of the bargain but later thought I could avoid delivering my end. Stern reprimands followed, and insistence that I honor the agreement. I knew that was fair; I just didn’t want to. I longed for my mother to intervene on my behalf. She knew I hated dressing up this way, and I sensed a feminine appeal would be most effective. But my mom was at her own house and we were with my dad. He stayed out of his mother’s negotiations, mildly disapproving of both sides of the transaction. This was between Grandma and me.
The price I paid was the unveiling. I would put on the dress, alone or with her help to zip the back or tie a bow. I felt scratchy, frilly, and starched. It was the prologue to the main event, when I walked into the living room and presented myself for inspection.
“You look darling,” she’d say, thoroughly enchanted. “What a pretty dress for a little girl.” My grandfather would add his praise, and my father chimed in, too, though less effusively as a way of keeping the peace with me. She’d hug me, and I’d feel a little better. I understood that the whole thing made her happy, that I was giving her something she didn’t normally have.
But I couldn’t wait to change. I did not enjoy being made the center of attention for this purpose. The oohs and aahs were meant to flatter, but I felt strange in clothes I hadn’t chosen, and I didn’t want to look pretty if it meant I was not myself. In those moments I felt a fraud and was too young to know why I felt discomfort inside as well as out. I was an easy mark. I endured it for candy.
She knew what we liked: things we didn’t usually get, multiple varieties of sweets we could eat at our leisure, Archie comics, Bobbsey Twins and Hardy Boys books, a meal at a restaurant, a trip to Disneyland. She was attentive. She often explained to my father, when he protested that she was spoiling us, that it was her privilege, her right, to do so.
We knew she had money to spend. Not a ton of it, and not an endless flow, but plenty more than we usually had. She said over and over that it made her happy to give us things we enjoyed. Eagerly, we helped her find happiness. My brother and I grew skilled at the casual hint, the lingering glance or touch, a healthy dose of feigned innocence once she noticed (“Oh, that?”). We knew to wait for her to ask and we knew how to first demur, then graciously accept. We knew thank-you notes were part of our currency. It was a delicate dance and we learned every step. It was never clear who was leading whom.
When I was in high school she became truly weakened by heart trouble and extra pounds she couldn’t shed. When we shopped she found a chair at each department store and waited, people-watching or reading a romance novel, while I skimmed the racks.
I’d be lost in thought until I’d hear her calling my name. She sounded urgent, the pitch of her voice making me fear she was having another heart attack and needed me to dig for the nitroglycerin tablets in the pillbox in her purse, or release the one in a locket she wore around her neck and somehow get it under her tongue before calling an ambulance.
I’d drop the clothes in my arms and run, and, when I reached her side she would look up at me, wave a hand toward a nearby rack of clothes, and say, “Red’s popular this year.” Or she’d point to the outfit on a mannequin and announce how cute it would look on me.
I’d study the item she indicated. “You mean the sailor suit,” I’d say, underwhelmed by her choice even as adrenaline rushed through my limbs. Or the tangerine pants. Or the floral jumpsuit.
“Just try it on,” she’d say eagerly, and usually I was so pleased she wasn’t dying that I took the offending item to the dressing room. Other times I’d grow irritated and protest. She knew she could insist and I would comply. It was all part of the dance.
In the dressing room I would put on what she chose, scrutinize myself in the mirror, step outside to model for her, and repeat. The vestiges of my childhood embarrassment at this sort of modeling were faint, perhaps diluted because we were an hour outside L.A., where I knew no one. Here, I was outside my regular life. I was only her granddaughter. And I liked giving her what she wanted. I wasn’t in my eighties, in declining health, and far away from my family. If it made her happy to shop for me, who was I to refuse her?
Sometimes, I did refuse. She could rise to a stubborn, imperious grande dame, and I had her genes. I could dig in my heels when I felt strongly enough. I was still figuring out what I was about, who I was. But I wouldn’t let her buy me clothes I hated.
“You really don’t like that,” she’d muse, and then sniff as if the vagaries of my taste had tainted the air. “It’s adorable. But you say you won’t wear it.” Then she’d sigh.
“That’s right,” I’d say cheerfully, knowing I had prevailed. “I really won’t.”
Her lips pinched tight, but after a while she’d say, “I just want to get something you like.”
When she was recently widowed and desperate for company, I flew down from college to spend a weekend with her. I was beginning to find her undiscerning consumption troubling in a larger sense. We didn’t need material goods to connect. I insisted she didn’t have to buy anything.
“What else do I have to spend money on except my children and grandchildren?” she asked, and immediately I felt guilty. She was grieving. Besides, what else would we do with our time together?
I drove her car and she directed me to a sparsely populated mall I didn’t recognize. The store she had in mind targeted a clientele that was far beyond college age and had seen better days. Surely I could find an inoffensive item, I reasoned, among the slacks and muumuus. It took much searching in a department that skewed toward peppy prints and maximum coverage, but I unearthed a dress to try on: navy blue, ankle length, simple and serviceable—even, in the right light, a bit sheer and therefore sexy.
It was on sale, which posed a problem. It meant one dress could be turned into two for the amount she wanted to spend. This was not something she was accustomed to passing up.
“That’s all? You have to try on more things.”
“I’m not sure there is more here for me,” I said, trying to be delicate.
“Of course there’s more!” She was scandalized. “We’re in a whole store full of clothes.”
Off my game, I drifted away from her chair, sweating a little. If I could find an innocuous casual dress, maybe even something to wear to class, we could leave. I pulled an item off the rack for a better look: Was it a dress? A skirt? Tunic?
“That’s gorgeous!” she gushed. I hadn’t realized she was still watching me. “Try it on.”
It was, I realized, a blouse and pants. Together. A jumpsuit. “Grandma, this really isn’t my style. I’ll never wear it.”
“If it looks good on you, maybe it should be your style.”
It was hard to argue with that. I wasn’t even sure what my style was at the moment. I draped it over my arm.
She didn’t approve that I’d had premarital sex (which wasn’t a detail I’d offered up, God knows). She didn’t approve that I had tattooed my ankle (she spotted it one summer day when I thought she wouldn’t notice). She didn’t approve that I took too long to write thank-you notes, or that I waited until I was thirty to marry, that I didn’t get pregnant right afterward. She came from a world of trousseaus and girdles and waiting patiently while the men around her concerned themselves with the mechanisms of the broader world. She believed herself to be academically challenged because she hadn’t been able to finish college. When in high school I told her I’d earned an A in precalculus, her response was, “Oh my, they let girls study that?” She marveled at me, sometimes admiringly and at times as if I were an odd anthropology exhibit. We found our common ground in stores and dresses and changing rooms. Shopping allowed us to show each other who we were.
She insisted I model the jumpsuit, though that wasn’t what we were calling it; we were calling it “the black flowered dress.” As I pulled up the pants and then slid my arms into the sleeves and buttoned it up, I scrutinized my reflection in the mirror: it was a true outfit. A garment. A full-on look.
There was something appealing in the wholeness of it. I admired its all-in-one efficiency. The floral was stylish at the time, or at least not vastly incongruent with the baby-doll dresses that were a trend among my peers. The layers were so full and flowing that it might appear to be a dress, in which case it had a more respectable, Laura Ashley vibe. Or so I convinced myself. I imagined myself striding across campus, wearing the right shoes with this almost-dress, turning heads.
Because I did look good. I looked hot, actually, in that thing. I was tall and thin. I had some nice sling-backs that would add more height. I would turn heads, but I couldn’t be sure they would turn for the right reason. What if it was ridiculous?
I walked out of the dressing room to show her.
“Oh, isn’t that mar-velous!”
“It’s comfortable,” I conceded, though in that instant I noticed the seam of the crotch stretching tight, pulled north by the waist and sleeves reaching to my shoulders—pulled, in fact, by every move of my upper body. I was just beginning to realize I had a long torso and that not all clothes were created equal. “I think.”
“It looks comfortable.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Miss!” she called loudly in her urgent heart attack voice. A sales representative snapped to attention and hurried over. “Doesn’t this dress look beautiful on my granddaughter?”
“Of course.” The saleswoman’s glasses hung from a string around her neck. “A lot of people are buying those suits these days.”
I studied her to get a sense of how much she was faking. Never have I been as conscious of conflict of interest.
“It’s nice,” I hedged. “I’m just not sure I’ll wear it. At school.”
Grandma raised her eyebrows and huffed, a sure sign we weren’t done. “Well, you’ve got to get something for school.”
Back in the dressing room I turned in half-circles before the mirror, trying to check out how my ass looked (flowy and floral), how it felt to sit down on the little bench (I’d need to adjust the tight seam every time I sat, or else something really bad might happen) and how I looked midstride (the legs recalled the oversized swishing ribbons in a drive-through car wash). I tried to rearrange the seam between my legs. Most of my clothes were extra-large and baggy. Maybe this wasn’t tight but just a change from what I was used to.
The bow at the neck was big but disappeared into the folds of the thing. It could have used a belt, though I didn’t notice. This was neither a distant cousin of the pseudo-professional “pantdress” of the 1960s, nor a diluted glitzy-top-blended-with-flowing-pants à la Charlie’s Angels in the 1970s. It wasn’t even reminiscent of the shoulder-pad-armored power suits of the 1980s, nor did it somehow presage the strapless romper of the 2010s. Perhaps the outfit had surfaced only in that one store (Penney’s? Robinsons-May?) in the early 1990s. Its sack silhouette and ankle-skimming legs made it an anachronistic garment of mystery. I was intrigued.
I grasped immediately that it was going to be all about how I wore it. I would have to own it, a challenge as I wasn’t usually adventurous with clothes.
For a moment, looking in the angled mirrors, I imagined a new me, crossing the quad or the plaza, empowered, wearing a new style and shedding the things about me that I didn’t like. I’d be bold and beautiful. I wouldn’t care what anyone else thought. I wouldn’t be self-conscious. I’d wear heels and they wouldn’t hurt. Maybe Grandma was right. Maybe I did look marvelous.
I never saw her buy something that didn’t deliver pleasure at the moment she purchased it. A sale sign drew her like a bee to honey. A teenager when the Depression hit, she was incapable of passing up a good deal. Bargains, particularly church rummage sales, were her preferred milieu. But she’d shop anywhere and she bought what was on offer, not necessarily what fit best or was most flattering. She shopped for her family, her friends, herself. Each acquisition was a gesture of love. It seemed to me she was always acquiring.
I couldn’t keep up. I was raised to not be wasteful—of food, of time, of effort, and especially of money. As a child I learned money was confusing, for countless reasons including that everyone applied different rules. I already had two households, Mom’s and Dad’s, which had different spending habits. Both were founded on restraint, out of necessity, but the definition of restraint could shift. My mother’s parents didn’t have extra money, and they had too many grandchildren to buy gifts at every visit. Instead they plied us with homemade cookies and trips to the park and games at their dining table. My father’s father was a very careful spender, appraising every purchase with cool calculation. My grandmother had scrimped much of her life, and so she bought cheap, preferring quantity. As a girl I never noticed that much of what she bought was unnecessary or redundant, nor did I care about quality. I was too caught up in what I wanted her to buy me.
In the dressing room I tried on the jumpsuit once more. Just to see. There was something about it. Something alluring. I imagined leaving my dorm room in it, walking through the halls past the granola students I lived with, kids who were less mainstream than me, who bartered secondhand hemp clothes and claimed to abhor consumerism. They wore Tevas and grew dreadlocks and baked bread naked. Among them, in this, I would stand out.
More than that, I wanted to wear it so that I could be the person who could pull off wearing it. If I could be bold and truly own the look, I’d be greater than the outfit was alone.
I left it behind in the dressing room. I wasn’t that person.
At the counter, my grandmother handed the serviceable navy-blue dress to the saleswoman. “Where’s the other one?” she demanded.
“Which one?” I asked, though I already knew.
“That dress with the flowers.”
“It’s not a dress. I really don’t think I’ll wear it.” Appealing to her practicality often worked. And I did mean it. I wasn’t bluffing to get her to buy it for me. Yet we both knew the steps of this dance.
“But it’s so pretty on you.” Her voice approached a scold, as though I were wasting the gift of being young, when clothes fit without effort.
“Thank you, Grandma. But I don’t think I’ll wear it.”
“Well you can’t wear it at all if you don’t have it. I’m buying it for you. Go get it.” She looked at the saleswoman. “Wait a minute, Miss, we’re getting one more.”
It was easier, at that point, not to argue. I returned to the dressing room, both sheepish (she’d been so generous to me over the years; it was rude to turn down the gift) and annoyed (she wasn’t listening to me, and who would I be kidding if I wore that jumpsuit?).
The siren song of flattery was taking hold. Two people, albeit biased, thought I looked good in it. I thought I might look good in it. Maybe this was an opportunity. If we were all wrong, I reminded myself, I didn’t have to wear it. All I had to do was take it. Grandma would never know what I did with it.
I thanked her, as always. I allowed her to give me something she wanted me to accept. It made her happy. I also thought that I might decide, one day, to wear it.
The time came that we needed to move my grandmother out of her home into a single room at the nursing home. This meant sorting through the contents of her entire three-bedroom house, the prospect of which had been weighing on her for years.
She was wheelchair-bound by then, and she sat in her chair at one end of the kitchen table, going through her jewelry collection with my father.
The rest of us spread out. My uncle tackled my grandfather’s office, untouched since his death. A cousin went through Grandma’s clothes—dresses, blouses, pants, sweaters. The number of hats alone was tremendous, stacked and crammed onto closet shelves in an architectural feat of storage.
I helped with the jewelry at first. It was her biggest weakness by far—especially diamonds, the birthstones of her family members, and anything in the shape of a butterfly. There was an enormous quantity. Cases, trays, and chests full of small boxes, each box holding a single item. More than we could go through, in several days, though we tried. My father sorted for value, studying each item with a magnifying glass and separating out the gold and sterling from the costume and straight-up junk. I gave him the gold I found and organized the rest as quickly as I could, setting aside things I found appealing or that were clearly designated for someone in the family. Cameo brooches went to a cousin. Opals were for my brother, born in October.
When I needed a break I worked elsewhere in the house. I’d already helped my father’s cousin go through the handbags, shoes, and bed linens. We had taken the clothes my grandmother needed to her new room, and the rest of the pile was going elsewhere—where, none of us wanted to think about. After we returned to our homes an estate sale company would come in to sell the remaining furniture and the jewelry and all the other things we couldn’t get through.
I scanned the kitchen cupboards overflowing with snacks and sweets as well as dishes, the bookshelves full of volumes on jewelry and the British royal family, the Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele novels and stacks of People magazine. It was impossible to be methodical. I just had to dive in.
Grandma’s voice rose heatedly when she couldn’t find something, which occurred at regular intervals. It agitated her to see all of us opening her drawers and cabinets and dismantling her home. She accepted that she needed to get rid of things. But that was much easier than having us there doing it.
Each of us filled boxes to ship to ourselves and others. China earmarked for me, silver for my brother. There wasn’t just one of anything, even sets of china and silver and stemware. Table linens, videotapes, picture frames, blankets, tchotchkes, a silver tea service. Jewelry, jewelry, jewelry. We were initiating the grand diaspora of a lifetime shopper.
In one bookcase I found a series of photo albums, the kind from the 1980s with plastic that peeled off to expose adhesive-backed pages onto which you could attach snapshots. They were filled with pictures of trips my grandparents had taken, mostly to Scotland for my grandfather’s ancestral research, locations painstakingly written in her hand on the back of each photo and then arranged chronologically.
No one had looked at the albums in years: pages of shots of my grandparents standing outside castles and seated at group dinners with Scots to whom we were vaguely related, my grandfather wearing a kilt and Grandma in her tartan skirt and white ruffled blouse and tam, a larger version of items she’d given me when I was in grade school.
When I brought the albums to my grandmother, she glanced at them quickly and said she didn’t have room for them. Her husband had been dead for more than a decade. Her sons didn’t want them either. Neither did anyone else. I wanted to want them. How much time had it taken her to carefully label and organize the albums? I could envision her, much younger, dutifully preserving the memory of her transatlantic journey. Suddenly I felt certain that she had needed to search to find ways to fill her time.
On that exhausting trip I realized she was a collector, not just of jewelry. The house contained copious quantities of hats, Hummel figurines, Elizabeth Taylor books, thimbles, stationery, handkerchiefs, butterflies, embroidery. She had stockpiled candy and hotel soaps and shampoos. She kept drawerfuls of gifts on hand for emergencies.
We discarded—the estate sale company sold—a huge amount of the jewelry. There was more than any of us could take away. I packed four full jewelry cases, each about the size of a toaster oven. She gave me a few of the pieces I loved most: her turquoise squash-blossom necklace and an antique bracelet. I also took a pair of clip-on earrings made of bright yellow feathers the size of my hand, and ropy chains that now recall the look of a blinged-out aspiring professional athlete. I took Irish and Belgian tablecloths and embroidered cocktail napkins, her set of Lenox china, a quilt stitched by a great-aunt, a vintage hatbox, pictures of my parents’ wedding, an overstuffed sewing box she’d never used because she was so bad at needlework, cut-glass saltcellars, hand-painted dishes from Japan. I took handbags and a cloche and a cape.
It was easy to give away her Christmas sweaters and earring sets still tagged “$1.00” and the ceramic animals and gold-rimmed keepsake boxes she had ordered as gifts from catalogs like Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter. This was the shopping that had filled her recent days. It was much worse to throw away those photo albums. She had collected experiences, I realized, as much as she had collected all these things. As we moved her out of her own life, she seemed lonelier than I hope I’ll ever be. I laid the albums gently in a trash bag and quickly tied it up though it was not yet full. I couldn’t bear to look at them.
I wore the jumpsuit once, on campus. I turned in front of the mirror for a good long while, sure that if wearing it were a mistake some part of my brain would scream that out to me. When no message came I inferred that I looked passable. I was ready for a change, ready to be bold. I rode my bicycle to the coffeehouse. The breeze cut through the sheer rayon and I wished for a warmer layer.
I sat with friends, wondering if anyone would comment on my clothing. I was more comfortable sitting down than standing up because I was painfully on edge, expecting either admiration or ridicule. Slowly, it sank in that neither would arrive. With some relief, but mostly dismay, I realized that most people didn’t look at me twice. Those who did made no comment. I’d prepared for a sensation—any sensation—and there was nothing. I became so distracted by whether I looked good or ridiculous and who might notice and why that finally, furious with myself, I left. Riding my bike hurt like hell because of that one wirelike seam I couldn’t adjust.
It was a relief to change into my usual jeans and T-shirt. Even so, I chastised myself. I had not made the black flowered outfit my own, nor had I mocked it with self-aware irony. I had not owned it in any way whatsoever. I had attempted the look and wound up in no-man’s-land. I was still confused. Still me.
I kept it for a few more years, hanging in the very back of a dorm closet or rolled up into the back of a drawer. Each year as I moved from house to house I stuffed it into a corner of my suitcase, and each time I saw it again it stirred up a litany of thoughts: It’s wrong to throw away a gift. She thought it looked good on me. It doesn’t look bad on me. It made her happy to buy it. It doesn’t actually fit. I worried that once I discarded it the perfect occasion for it would arise, or the jumpsuit would careen back into fashion.
At the beginning of my last year of college, heartsick after a breakup, I became hard-hearted about getting rid of extraneous things. Items were appearing in the new Free Store box on the landing: textbooks, a few cassette tapes, old tie-dyed T-shirts, a hat, a single flip-flop. Everybody was purging as they unpacked. One or two decent things donated to the Free Store were quickly repurposed, while the rest were simply inspected and passed over.
When I was hanging clothes in my new closet I found the jumpsuit. It was time, I reasoned. I was tired of resenting it and tired of carrying around aspirational clothing that wasn’t even in style. It was time to be the person I wanted to be. An ill-fitting jumpsuit was not going to get me there. Relieved and just a little guilty, I took it to the Free Store.
Cindy wore it once that year, parading down the stairs as the rest of us watched in convulsions of laughter. She accessorized with high-heeled lace-up boots and a bike helmet. With the jumpsuit we celebrated the pinnacle of the ridiculous. I still have a photo; she’d tucked up one leg of the thing to show off the boots.
After my grandmother died we had to clean out her room at the nursing home. My brother was there that time, and my two cousins, and my father and my uncle and his second wife. It took half a day, and we were on deadline to clear out quickly so her room could be filled by another resident. The process was noticeably calmer than the last time because she wasn’t there watching us do it.
The closet was jam-packed. She’d crammed in as many clothes and hats as she could, stockings and purses and coats and dresses, more than she’d had a few years earlier when she moved in. Her Smith Corona typewriter sat high on the shelf. It was too heavy for her to retrieve and use, but she’d insisted it be kept there.
When I returned home after that trip, more boxes were being shipped from the West Coast. My own baby pictures and school pictures, letters and cards I had written to her, the typewriter and a box of typewriter ribbons I’d found. My father and uncle agreed I could take an art nouveau ring with diamonds I’d always admired, as well as the first necklace my grandfather ever gave her. I took two daily journals she’d written in during their courtship. These were the items she had wanted to keep with her, close by.
One thing I’d been sure to carry safely tucked in my purse: a small ring box, holding the diamond ring and gold band that my grandfather had given her at the beginning of their fifty-year marriage. A slip of paper inside read simply, “For Jenny. My engagement ring.” She would have added the wedding band to the box after wearing it on her swollen fingers became physically painful.
Her marriage was traditional in the classic 1950s mold; I remember my grandmother serving my grandfather his breakfast while he read the newspaper and she remained in the kitchen or ironed his shirts. It’s not a dynamic I can fathom for myself, not something close to the wife I was when I was married. But they loved each other and I loved them, and even before I was divorced fifty years of marriage seemed an accomplishment I’d only ever be able to guess at.
The rings are too small for me. They don’t even fit on my pinkie finger. She wore them as she cooked oatmeal and wrote letters to pen pals and fastened her other jewelry and opened her wallet to buy things for her family and for herself, her mottled hands with her manicured nails growing shakier with each year.
When my uncle handed me the ring box and I read my name in her handwriting, I couldn’t speak. My throat was swollen with grief and pride. We hadn’t always understood each other, but she was honoring me, the eldest female of the next generation, with one of the most powerful symbols she possessed. It felt like an ancient message, a birthright more potent than any item on sale in a store.
All those dresses she bought for me were her attempt to make me as like her as she knew how. I’d tried to surrender fully and I’d tried to stubbornly resist, and both were equally futile approaches when who I really was lay somewhere in between. We were finished trying to bridge the gaps between us in a store. At the end she gave me something she wanted me to have, and it hardly mattered that it didn’t fit and I would never wear it. She gave it to me and I took it.