She died in a flimsy blue hospital gown, her shoulders bare, the gown’s laces having been left loose so as not to strangle her. She had no use for fashion in the end, was in fact entirely devoid of vanity. Not that she was ever a fashionista, she of the knit JCPenney pants and poly blouses and faded cardigans. She threw on any old thing around the house with a comic carelessness, mismatching red plaid slacks of a 1950s vintage with untucked Target blouses, fraying headscarves unfashionable since Grace Kelly decamped to Monaco in the late 1950s, ragamuffin vests her daughter had worn in the disco years. But out in the world, my mother had had definite outfits. There was in fact a certain kitschy nattiness to her; the pert slack-and-blazer ensembles topped off with a geometric Monet scarf or a string of large beads, with a windmill-shaped pin or a seasonally apt cornucopia or pine tree.
She started out stylish. You can see it in photos. The university coed and budding businesswoman in chic shirtwaists and heels, in flattering pedal-pushers and strappy sandals, in well-cut suits and lovely dinner dresses. All of the chicness dwindling out of her later; no need for stylishness in the bad marriage, in the suburban split level, in the numbing routines of stove and washing machine, in the strife and chaos of the husband’s tyrannical fathering and the seriously ill children and her own valiant attempts at coping with it all. Her fashion know-how atrophying along with so much else. In my early girlhood, before the rare evenings out vanished entirely, she could still summon the knack for dolling herself up. She hummed going about the elaborate rituals, the hairdos and girdles, stockings and makeup. She had new skirts sometimes, a new pair of heels. She could still be elegant in a picture, and sometimes was.
But in the bigger picture of her life there was the futility of troubling to be chic. It shriveled her sense of style. But it did not take her yen for it, or all vestiges of her vanity. I have said she was careless, but in truth she was not, or at least not always. For Leaving the House—for the movies or the mall, and for holidays at her daughter’s house or the welcome theater outings of the later years—she mixed and matched her pant ensembles with consideration. She had her hair done. All her life, in fact, she managed to have more or less regular perms and tasteful dye jobs and to pick up the occasional Dayton’s sale-rack blazer, using socked-away scraps of grocery money and later her pittances as a part-time teacher’s aide and insurance secretary–those desultory jobs that were such a comedown for a once trailblazing businesswoman. Even well into her seventies, she kept a surprising number of shoes lined up in her closet, a row of fetching size-7 heels lingering, long after they’d last foxtrotted, next to her sturdy everyday Rockports. She also kept a drawer stuffed with rouges and powders and the expensive creams she tried out—confessing it to her daughter, with uncharacteristic abashedness; the wistful hope and splurge of it—when the wrinkles came.
She dressed only to please herself, to be sure, having taken in few fashion cues, or clues, in several decades. Her ideas of style seemed to harken back to 1960, to a time when sleek plaid slacks were just the thing for getting together for bridge, mixing a cocktail, trying the twist. But you could see the effort she made, mixing and matching those slack-and-jacket ensembles into her eighties. The gulf between her and Naomi Campbell was clearly vast; she seemed from a different millenium and galaxy than the women of, say, Project Runway. But she was always tasteful and on her own terms, coordinated; black or navy slacks on the bottom, white blouse or turtleneck on top, rarely chancing a pattern bolder than a calico, sticking mostly to safe tweeds and burgundies (and the odd red, in which she looked radiant). She always took the trouble to accessorize. If the overall effect–especially on her tiny and increasingly stooped body–tended to kitsch, it was also true that she was occasionally darling.
The outfits were just part of it. She never left the house without color on her lips and a splash of perfume. She’d pluck one of a bevy of bottles from her dresser, spritzing her neck and wrists what she cheerfully called “a good stink,” no matter that it was from the drugstore or bore the name of a passe celebrity or had been faithfully dusted for far too long. Surprisingly, she always smelled good. The perfumes always light and vaguely garden-y, mingling pleasantly with the faint scents of lipstick and Prell shampoo. You did catch the whiff of cigarettes; there was no disguising it. But on the whole it seemed a minor distraction, just part of the aroma of her, a lingering of the lacy smoke–swirls that were as much a part of her as the glasses she wore and her sensible shoes. The toxicity of those swirls was of course odorless, or the odiousness hidden. It was inside, of course, inside her–blackening the pink of her lungs, hollowing out the tendriled air sacs, shredding the delicate tissues, slowly taking away my mother’s every last breath.
Mom in her flimsy blue gown, the whoosh of her oxygen tanks now silent. Her head has lolled to one side. Her eyes closed. Her glasses left on the nightstand. Her mouth is open, the O of her last ravenous inhalation. Pink fuzzy socks on her feet. The whiteness of her hair. Where the gown has slipped off her bony shoulders, a glimpse of the small pale rise of her right breast, plain and weary looking. Her bureau drawers here all but empty. A few socks, a comb, some denture cream, a chapstick. Her closet here just a sea of empty hangers. A handful of cardigans and hoodies; a single pair of grey sweatpants, provenance unknown, with a “Minnesota Wild” logo on the waist. A pair of never-worn pink terrycloth slippers.
No natty outfits here these past few weeks, no lipstick, no eau de anything. Just the scent of the fading bouquet next to the TV and of her body soldiering weakly on. Even so, even with all ornament stripped away, even in the flimsy gown, there was the remarkable mom-ness of her, so clear and definite and striking. Who and what she was, needed no plaid pants and cardigans for, and is no more.
