That's me up there, in our office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt? Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of course, there is the room itself, the armoire mirror obscured by smudges, the partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my desk chair so that I don't get a backache when I write, the old boxes in the corner that my mother puts in the back windows at night during her visits to block out the neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous world.

I don't tend to get dressed up during the week (or ever), because what's the point? Most mornings I sit around writing or letting my mind go in four or five dark directions, and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the library. Over the years I’ve worn many short and form-fitting outfits, but since my son was born I've apparently given up on looking good. It isn't worth the bother or the expense, and who am I trying to impress? My husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer familiar.

But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm starting to think about what I wear, to attempt to dress like I'm still in the game, like I haven't given up completely on feeling attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't worth it, but I make the effort. I've started to go shopping for clothes in person again, not online or at outlet stores, but in resale shops, places like the Crossroads Trading Company, where I might find funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where I'm likely to find interesting options in small sizes.

This is where I found the sweater dress.

The dress was short, slate blue and formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair of knee-high black leather boots that I bought at the same store. When will I wear this thing? I thought, but clothes shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a sunny place where I shower seven days a week and get my hair cut four times a year, where I remember to brush my teeth hours before I pick up the kid from preschool, where I decide to put on cute dresses every day instead of baggy pants. The dress was under twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an investment in fantasy. My husband and I were planning a nice dinner at Oliveto to mark the completion of his dissertation, so I had an occasion.

On the evening of our dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual, waiting for him to fall asleep, for his breathing to become even and light before I tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy asleep, dress safely on, I applied the tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband was talking in the living room with our babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one, effortless with both adults and children, and as I came closer I realized that I was wearing a dress, that I was wearing the dress. It was as though I had just put on a buttless formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed, like I was pretending to be something I wasn't, a young person, a stylish person, non-maternal.

I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I whipped it on before the babysitter could see me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered out the door with my husband before she could notice that I was dressed as an imposter, that I was attempting to play the part of an attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.

Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the whole thing? (Remember how neurotic I can be?) The dress had one more chance to prove herself. We had a cocktail party to attend.

The party took place in a typical Berkeley house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had escaped their kids for the night, a mix of thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs, and men in dark colors, of manicured toes peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt positively demure in my turtleneck sweater dress with black tights and scuffed black boots. The princess waist seemed too youthful, like I should have had an oversized lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I could have removed my boots and taken off my tights, could have swung the tights seductively around my head, grazed the faces of the other partygoers before tossing the hosiery out of an open window. But instead I pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at the bared collarbones around me.

Apparently clothes are all about context.

I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need to start fresh, to begin with the foundation garments. Next week I will jettison my vintage underwear collection for a more contemporary look.

You won't be reading about it here.



First image: Me, in the office, this morning. The frump-quotient has gone up since then. I got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and socks.

Second image: Sweater dress.

Tags: feeling frumpy, sweater dresses, aging, feeling forty, imposters, mommy-frump, stay-at-home mom blues

Forget your assumptions. This isn’t any mountain man, not an aging hippie who dropped out of “conventional society” in the mid-sixties, when his beard was still burnished brown and his face unlined and serious. Look at the clothes. His hat is new, the jacket thick and warm. It’s a recently acquired look, summer slumming, an underground acting job.

Because Frank Smith is an investment banker. A lawyer. A high-powered PR executive. Or so the rumors have it. He showed up in Bank Nile about a month ago, rolled into town in his ’49 Ford truck, which looks beat up but runs suspiciously well. Maya thinks he’s wearing a mouth piece. He talks like he’s been eating ice cream, his tongue slightly numbed, the words not totally clear, but there is no stink of alcohol or sign of the needle. There is no ice cream cone. She swears she’s seen him adjust those just-so nubs of his when he thought no one was looking.

His hand are smooth. Even though the palms are filthy and his fingernails blackened with earth and compost, those aren’t the hands of a man accustomed to hard work. He keeps a dust bowl hoe by the garden patch, makes a show of rustic tools, the rusted metal rake, a long pointed shovel. Frank claims to know about healing herbs, says he’ll fix you up with something for those migraines, will make a poultice for your aching back.

But don’t let that investment banker/lawyer/PR man sell you a goddamned thing.

****

Image from an online costume shop. This post was originally my response to a photo prompt. I keep on returning to it for the blog, but didn't want to use the original picture, for obvious reasons. And if you are in the market for a fake beard, I recommend the fine selection at the Etsy shop I Made You a Beard.

I've been struggling to write and hopefully will be back on track in the next week or two, writing, thinking, and visiting other blogs.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, imposters

At sleepovers, I deconstructed entire linen closets. I would sneak into the hallway, a child prowler working by nightlight, and seek out the towels, fabric-softener-fresh mounds of richly hued terrycloth, thick and plentiful. At home our towels were hodgepodge and pale, thin and stained. Inexpertly folded. We put them in haphazard stacks, shoved them in the bathroom cabinet or never even bothered to put them away, passed the spinach souffle over them at the dinner table. I observed the technique of those in the folding-know, took the stacks apart, unfolded and folded until it became second nature. The trick was to fold the towels evenly in thirds lengthwise, then fold the result in half and in half again. It was the kind of skill one learned at a mother’s side, like ironing or playing poker or throwing chaotic birthday parties.

Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.

Last night my small book group met to discuss Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero. It's a flawed book, or at the very least a book that requires both careful reading and a lack of attachment to resolution. I was the only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the characters are damaged and abandoned, solitary types with hidden motivations. But they are my people, sketched out in Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.

What I can't get from careful observation, from cracking open other peoples' linen closets, I get from books. Stories show me the possibilities in life. Sometimes I know the characters, fellow strangers in a strange land. There is solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary bookish people trapped in the amber of personality and circumstance. Freedom is possible. Maybe it is as simple as self-acceptance and if there is hope for them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is no hope and I should just get on with it.

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.

Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.

I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.

Maybe it's time for another story.

Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.

Tags: Michael Ondaatje, towel folding, Divisadero (Novel), imposters, fitting in, autodidacticism