L’Oréal may have a $2.3 billion advertising budget, but it stole its slogan from my mother. Long before I arrived in America all the way from Sri Lanka to attend college with nothing less than her belief in my potential and my two suitcases stuffed with puff-sleeved dresses, toothbrushes, toothpaste, gardenia talc, and ballpoint pens—things she didn’t believe America could provide for me—my mother had engraved an aphorism into my brain: buy pretty things for yourself because you are worth it. Or, the unplugged version: always buy beautiful things, and buy them for yourself first. Before you buy anything for your husband, your friends, or even—and this last was inconceivable to contemplate in a culture such as ours—before you buy anything for your children.
Her life was testament—she often demonstrated and I dutifully observed—to the fact that doing otherwise had been the biggest mistake of her life. Bigger even than falling in love with a radical communist whose notion of a good time was reading Karl Marx and leading an uprising against the Official Languages Act of Sri Lanka (passed, 95 to 5), bigger than becoming pregnant before her marriage to her thwarted revolutionary, bigger than letting her shame distance her from her high-caste relatives, bigger than being too afraid to let her own oldest son apply to American colleges in the mid-1980s though she had already been sidelining as a guidance counselor for a decade, one whose legion of students she managed to place in the finest colleges across America, earning a special award from Harvard University for her work. Nothing could compare to, though it certainly explained, the setbacks in her life better than the fact that she did not buy herself a new sari and a pair of shoes with every paycheck. It was advice that her own mother had imparted to her: my Buddhist grandmother, who had, herself, given up school to marry at the age of nineteen, who expended her intellect in serving on the board of the Catholic convent she had attended and in running the estate she brought with her as dowry.
In an effort to inculcate in me a love of—some may call it an addiction to—beautiful things with which to clothe myself, my mother spent money not on herself but on me. As a schoolteacher, she earned two hundred and fifty rupees a month for most of her life, a sum that had increased to nine hundred and sixty by the time she retired, after twenty-five years of service. Except for the years of austerity the country went through during the reign of the world’s first female head of state, Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, when there was nothing pretty to be seen in the shop windows, let alone purchased, my mother made it her business to locate and buy lengths of fabric that she kept in a suitcase on top of her almirah. She participated in a system referred to as a seettu, a forced-saving program that her fellow teachers dreamed up, whereby they all contributed a hundred rupees each month to a fund that then went to one or the other of them. When it was her turn to collect, she bought finery for me, even though, by the prevailing standards at the time, I was utterly devoid of any redeeming feminine charms: I was extremely thin, flat-chested, dark-skinned, short-haired, quick-tempered, opinionated, and, in general, a boy without the boy package.
And yet. There I was, encouraged to look at the fabric and design my own clothes, almost all of which she approved of and which she then turned into wearable creations by hiring the best tailors she could find. The dresses I designed—for my skinny boy body—veered between strapless, tight-fitting numbers that she once exclaimed made me look like a spaghetti wrapped around a noodle, and flowing fairy-tale dresses I modeled on the gowns worn by Princess Diana. Yes, I dreamed big. I was going to stand prettily and at ease in the center between road-tart and royalty.
It was also my conservative mother, who never wore so much as a swipe of lipstick, who placed a giant check mark next to my spending the entire salary I earned at my first job after high school (seven hundred and fifty rupees, and a little extra borrowed from her) on a designer party dress in yellow silk for New Year’s Eve. I cringe a little, recalling my appearance at the dance where my beau at the time—I realize only in retrospect—was not knocked off his feet by my beauty but, rather, was reeling at the glare of my canary-in-a-coal-mine presentation or, rather, the coal-mine-decked-in-canary-feather presentation.
What I was learning along the way was that there was nothing wrong in wanting to possess something I considered beautiful no matter what was considered fashionable; I loved the feel and shine of that yellow silk. And when my father had the opportunity to go to Italy in the course of his work for the government and he asked me, the only girl in the family, what I might like, I replied “patent leather pumps with four-inch heels.” He wore out his own sandals walking the length and breadth of Rome, being told by one scornful shopkeeper after another that four-inch patent leather pumps were no longer in style, until he was able to find the last pair in existence and bring it home for me. They did not fit me and so I sold those shoes and, once more, borrowed a little extra from my mother to buy a different pair, one that matched, exactly, the color of a dress that I had designed and sewn out of a length of fabric that she had bought for me at Harvard Square where, once more, she thought nothing of spending most of the money she had brought from Sri Lanka when she arrived to attend my brother’s graduation, on a $69 (five thousand, four hundred, and fifty-one rupees at the rate of exchange at the time) extravagance for me. I wore that dress and those shoes to my own boyfriend’s—now husband’s—graduation from the college we both attended.
That boyfriend tried to temper the message my mother engraved on my heart. In America, perhaps this is necessary for, after all, unlike in Sri Lanka where money is a fluid commodity, borrowed and shared and going where it is needed, here I am reminded daily that money is finite and “more” comes with steep interest from banks. When I was dazzled by the tchotchkes at K-Mart as we were checking out one day, early in our romance, he asked me “to just consider how many hours you have to work in the library at $4.25 an hour in order to buy that.” It was a grim reality that I had to face. I had a full scholarship to college, but everything “extra” I had to earn with the three jobs I held on campus throughout my time there—one at the library, one at the gym, and one at the science building where I had to feed and water (though I also picked up and caressed, holding each against my chest in commiseration, my Buddhist upbringing so at conflict with the entire business) hamsters shipped in for experiment and eventual slaughter.
I took stock and I adapted. I discovered Goodwill. Each fortnight when I collected my check, I gathered my best friend, Josh Kennedy (son of the poet X. J. Kennedy), and had him accompany me to the local store where I shopped for clothes. At the annual dance I sallied forth in a lace-trimmed ankle-length creation that cost $5. The boyfriend-now-husband, oh he who was not on scholarship, said, with some amazement, “You look nicer than all the girls in their fancy dresses.” And that comment served to ice the cake of my fantasy, the fantasy in which I would manage glamor by hook or by crook.
I have a closet in which I can still see some of the dresses I once designed, the cut-lawn top, the Gipio lace–edged blouse that I wore to my thesis defense with the factory-reject deep-green paisley skirt, the outfit I would wear each time I met one of my future in-laws, the good girl suit, as my then fiancé, now husband called it. I still have those green shoes my mother found to match my green dress. And I have hundreds, yes, hundreds, of other items, the shoes, dresses, skirts, pants, jackets, scarfs, and jewelry, that remind me of what sits at the core of my anticonsumerist left-wing activist self: the knowledge that beauty is 99 percent belief, 1 percent standard; the proof that there is no funk, no setback, no ridicule that can erase the bliss of knowing that I can put myself together faster than most people can relieve a full bladder. And that at the end of it I can look pretty damned good.
I don’t have a lot of discretionary income. By the rules of sanity I have none. I do not have six months of savings “in case of,” I do not have cash diligently socked away for a retirement I may never live to enjoy, I will not be able to pay for college for my three daughters, I cannot afford to shop at Anthropologie or Free People or even Macy’s, and most of what people go to buy as bargains at T.J. Maxx are out of the reach of my unique purse. What I do have is eBay and consignment stores and a keen eye for knowing that how I carry myself makes my fashion current. What I do have is a daily boost of happiness as I walk past my beautiful possessions on my way to the shower or on my way to bed. What I do have is the incredible joy of watching my daughters come shopping among my purchases (and the double joy of knowing that every purchase I make will be happily worn by one or the other of them). What I do have is the uplifting thrill of knowing that each one of my girls is slowly absorbing that old message passed down from my grandmother to my mother, neither of whom were able to live the truth, that we earn money not to save for the future but to live today, that all money is mad money: It is just a matter of where you choose to indulge your madness.
I did not grow up to be the high-profile policymaker fighting for justice at the United Nations. I did not grow up to be the high-profile human rights lawyer I always wanted to be. I do not live in an artsy community in Park Slope or Soho, inhabiting a loft and being called by NPR for my opinion on this and that. There are half a dozen talents that I know lie dormant in my unfulfilled other life, the one that author Cheryl Strayed described in one of her Dear Sugar columns as the ship that did not carry us, and on more than one occasion I have described myself as a MacBook Pro operating at 2 percent capacity. But for everything that I have not done, for every disappointment that I have ever faced, for every loss that I have endured, including and more devastating than any other, the death of my mother, I have a life in which I feed my soul with the artifice of adornment.
Somewhere out there my mother is delighted each time she hears me shut my eyes and quote her as I make a purchase that has nothing to do with anybody but myself: the clothes, the shoes, the bangles, the lotion, the better shampoo, the fancy haircut. Somewhere out there she is whispering in my ear the priceless gift she gave me: You are worth it.