Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  HEIDI: And she had to give it away because. . . .

  KIRAN: Because you inherited it. You have to give it to a daughter when she gets married.

  HEIDI: So in the story you’re writing, they’re going to visit the jewelry in the bank?

  KIRAN: Yes.

  HEIDI: That’s fascinating—the survival worry that, as a woman, you’re only worth what you show up with. Like you have this clothing, and this dowry with these linens, and these jewels.

  KIRAN: Yes. I have some jewelry that was divided among all us grandchildren, and I have my grandmother’s nose ring. It’s huge—it covers your whole mouth. Why don’t I wear that?

  PROJECT

  MOTHERS AS OTHERS | PART 1

  Send a photograph of your mother from the time before she had children and tell us what you see.

  TENKI TENDUFLA

  Born in Darjeeling, India, my mother flew across the world to New York at nineteen. It was 1951 and she was the first Tibetan to travel to the U.S. to study medicine. She attended medical school at Columbia University and became a pediatrician and mother of four. I love this photo because it captures my mother’s courage and ambition, her intelligence and poise, and her love of glamour and beauty. Looking at her leather gloves, white trench coat, stylish bag, the elegant shoes on display, I can smell her perfume, see her flawless red lipstick and arched brows, hear her delightful—and delighted—laugh. Whether in a Tibetan chuba dress, lab coat, or tailored suit and pearls, my mother was always stunning. When this photo was taken, she might have just finished a week of cramming for finals or come from an all-nighter in the lab. Perhaps she was on her way to meet friends for a showing of Cry, the Beloved Country at the Bijou Theatre, or out for sake and sukiyaki at the Miyako Restaurant on 56th Street. ANN TASHI SLATER

  DORA VOGEL

  This is my mother and two of her sisters in their hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It’s 1945, three years before she met my dad. Mom is the one in the foreground with the goofy sunglasses and striped shirt. At that point in her life, I think she felt happy. She enjoyed her job as a secretary and was still living at home, with few worries or responsibilities aside from her job. The first time I saw this photograph, the image of my mother jolted me. Never in her life did I witness any inkling of lightheartedness, especially not as we kids were growing up. Seldom do I recall her laughing or smiling. What was missing from her life? How sad that she chose not to confide in us. BEV SANDELL GREENBERG

  CLAIRE GRIFFIN

  This is a picture of my mother in Palm Beach, Queensland, in 1979. She is the brunette. Her sister, the blonde, would die of cancer at age sixteen soon after this picture was taken. The cancer metastasized from the thin brown right arm in the foreground of this picture. My mother sometimes looks at this picture and tries to find evidence of the cancer inside, but can’t. Every summer they would buy matching bikinis and flirt with the surfers together. MADELEINE STACK

  BERNADETTE CHEE GEK KHENG

  This photo was taken in the late 1960s, when my mother was about twenty years old. It’s a bit scary how much I looked like my mother when I was the same age. When I look at this photo, my mum looks so young and innocent and carefree. This was before she was married, before she had even met my father, before she had children and possibly even before she had started work. In this photo, she had just finished school forever and was on holiday in Kuching, East Malaysia. She looks so happy, and stylish too. Look at her fashionable flared pants matched with the watch and groovy sandals. My mother is great at putting together an outfit. In this photo, I see so much potential and a bright future for my mother. CHANG SHIH YEN

  DR. AGNES VAGO

  I fell in love with my mom in my mid-twenties. I remember going out with her for coffee and kind of staring at her the way I’d stare at a boy I was falling in love with. Before that, our relationship had been a little difficult. I’m pretty sure this is a picture my father took of her when they were newly married. The picture is from a series. It seems like she’s possibly thinking about something else as she’s dancing for him. Probably work. My mom is one of the hardest-working people I have ever known. She was always in her study, eyes in a microscope. Her face has a serious cast. She’s around twenty-four here, having just moved to Toronto from Hungary; she was studying to be a pathologist. That dress is great. I’m always looking for dresses like that. I move like my mother and have her body—especially her feet and hands. It troubled me when I noticed it as a girl, but now it makes me feel warm and closer to her. SHEILA HETI

  LYNNE HARRIS

  This is a photograph of my mother in the seventies. She wasn’t yet a wife or a mother. Here I see a woman who is confident in herself in a way that doesn’t require too much adornment or finery. She looks like a woman who is not afraid to take chances, or to fall down and make mistakes, a woman who is confident, self-assured, and vulnerable in a way that’s evident in her dress. Her hair is pulled back, her earrings are simple button-style clip-ons. I know it’s summer because of her bronzed skin. She’s wearing a striped cotton tank top and jeans, and is possibly braless. I think the beauty of this picture of my mother is that she’s beautiful without trying to be. You can see it in the smoothness of her skin, the dip of her clavicle, the angles of her jaw. There’s a tenderness in the way she’s holding the dog’s head, a regal bearing in her posture that mirrors the dog’s long neck. I imagine her life was just beginning at this point, that she was a young woman ready and willing to face the challenges and opportunities the world had to offer her. LYDIA JOHNSON

  KATHRYN HUEY

  When I look at this photograph of my mother, I think how pretty she was, and I remember her soft skin and how good she always smelled. I also think how glamorous she looked in her Chicago & Southern stewardess uniform. The reality of the job was less than glamorous, however, with stewardesses crowded together cooking in-flight meals on stoves located behind the cockpit. Many of her stories involved wildly bumpy flights on propeller planes and passengers running out of airsickness bags. And she never failed to add that because of the altitude and the not-so-pressurized cabins, when passengers got sick, everything they brought up was bright chartreuse. In the fifties, chartreuse was a popular color for little girls’ dresses, but not for mine. Still, my mother must have felt that being a “career girl,” as she called it, was exciting, as she kept that uniform hanging in the back of her closet in four different houses until she died. I still have her enameled stewardess pin, and I wear it on a coat occasionally because I like it. I still have the leather buttons with brass wings, too, just waiting for the right jacket to come along. KATE McMULLAN

  JUDY CAMPE

  This is my mom, in her twenties, during her “hippie phase.” She died in 1997, so looking at this photo makes me feel a lot of complicated things—wistful, sad, admiring, curious. I mostly take after my dad, and my mom was always this glamorous figure to me growing up. When she was young she sort of resembled Brigitte Bardot; I sort of resemble the cartoon Daria. I’ll never manage to re-create her beauty myself, but I do find myself examining her photos for traces of me; maybe something in the eyes, I think. JENNIFER CROLL

  MARCÈLE LAMARCHE

  My mother is fifteen years old here. The picture was taken at a hotel in New York City, when she was visiting for the first time with her family. She is holding peacock feathers, which she had bought earlier that day because she heard that they bring good luck. My mother doesn’t like to have her picture taken, so I bet her hand is extended and her mouth is open in the picture because she was saying, “Don’t take my picture!” I know she felt self-conscious about her looks as a teenager, and that’s probably how she felt when the picture was taken. In my lifetime, I have never seen my mother wear a dress or a hat. CLAUDIA EVE BEAUCHESNE

  RUTH GAIS

  I’ve always loved this photograph of my mother, which was taken when she was in her early twenties. I recognize her smile, and I recognize my face in hers, though I think she has a more beautiful sm
ile. It flatters me that people look at the photo and think it’s me. I like her clothes, which are things I’d wear today. I have a good idea of what her life was like back then, because my mother has told me a lot about her personal life, and I’ve asked her about it, too. This photograph seems to represent a moment of happiness, separate from the concerns and problems (and joys) that would come in the rest of her life. That must be part of why I like it, because she seems forever in that moment, and I can just reach back and join her there. CLARE NEEDHAM

  CHRISTINE ANDREA CAVIGLIA

  Before she was a mother, before she was a widow, before she remarried, before she had cancer twice, before she lost her own parents. Before, before, before. I love this picture for a number of reasons. For one, my mother isn’t wearing pants. Also, she always dyed her hair whatever color she wanted. And even though she’s holding a bunch of dead fish, she’s got on some rings and a headscarf that matches her bathing suit. This somehow defines my mother—up for anything while wearing a cute outfit. And the fish, the fish! My whole family fishes and hunts, so I don’t even know who caught these fish—my Italian grandfather, some cousin, some uncle, maybe even her. I do know, however, that my father didn’t catch those fish. My mother didn’t know him yet. She was still married to her first husband, and he was still healthy. In this photo, my mamma is a twenty-three-year-old newlywed married to her college sweetheart, Jim Marsh. The following year, 1970, she would get pregnant with my oldest brother. The year after that, she would become pregnant with my other brother, and then about ten years after this photo was taken, Jim would be gone. She was just thirty-four when he died, and had two young boys. There’s a lot I don’t know about that time in my mother’s life—the time she spent getting to know and getting to love and then ultimately having to lose Jim, but when I look at pictures from those early years of their life together, I see how young she was, and I see how much she loved him. And even though I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened, these photos make me so sad that she had to lose him. Of course, my father lost Jim, too. They were in the Navy together, and that is how my dad would eventually come to meet my mother. So when I see this picture, I see my fun, spunky mother, but I also see a young woman who has no idea what she is about to endure, lose, gain, and bring into the world, and who has no idea that she’ll eventually have a daughter who adores her, by a man she has yet to meet. CAROLANN MADDEN

  DIANE MARKWAT

  My mom is not a poser. She doesn’t wear makeup, she didn’t pierce my or my sisters’ ears when we were babies, she never got involved with the parking lot moms and their glamour politics. She never has a cheesy smile. I believe this photo depicts her holding a bouquet caught at someone’s wedding, and the connotations of catching the bouquet, to me, speaks of the inevitability of her betrothment, but moreover of her motherhood. She’s a natural nurse and nurturer. A sense of fun and her individuality weren’t separate from her desire to create a family. In photos, she always manages to convey this omniscient sense of knowing. She doesn’t draw attention to herself. Her humor speaks for itself. She’s fair and unassuming, quick and wicked. She has this incredible ability to let a joke sink in for a few seconds before laughing at it—there’s this smirk that creeps onto her poker face, then she gives it away. JACLYN BRUNEAU

  YUNGWHA KIM

  My mother came to the States at the age of seventeen from war-devastated South Korea immediately following the Korean War. She attended Pine Manor Junior College, then Mount Holyoke. She married my father, who attended Amherst College, six years later. I love this photograph of her because she looks so glamorous and beautiful, but also because she was modeling for some Junior League function, and I think it’s kind of amusing and awesome that she should be asked to model for the Junior League so soon after arriving in this country. KATHERINE MIN

  JUSTYNA MATUSIAK

  This is my mother, nineteen, on the beach in Rynia, Poland, with her cousin and a boy with a transistor radio. My mom is the one with fake eyelashes and headband, smoking a cigarette, being badass. I’m looking into this strange (and familiar) young woman’s life, uninvited, even though later on, she became familiar and mine—became my complicated mom. I love how feisty she is here, and how self-aware and sexual she is. She looks like this in most pictures from that time, and always with those fake lashes on. Brigitte Bardot. Her bikini is like something from Blow-Up. I know that she was really popular with boys but that she didn’t fall in love easily, so she probably buried a couple of hearts in that pile of sand. The woman next to her, her cousin, was someone she grew up with—they were like sisters—and she died a few years ago from breast cancer. That killed my mom a little, too. Looking at this picture, I think of that and how it’s nice to know that they had no idea in 1970. JOWITA BYDLOWSKA

  LAUREL LEE

  This is a picture of my mom, Laurel Lee, on her wedding day. She’s in her wedding outfit—jeans and a checked shirt to match my dad’s. Recently, my grandma told me they didn’t actually get married by the justice of the peace until later, but this is the day they made roast goat. This is the day everyone came to my grandparents’ farm. I see my mom intensely listening. She still looks like that a lot, but here she’s looking at my dad like that. They got divorced when I was five. I’ve never seen her look at him with (what I imagine to be) deep admiration. I bet my mom was happy at this time in her life. She was twenty-two, a star art student marrying a star of their artists’ circle. My dad was playing the clarinet then. She was about to start her grown-up life with this beautiful, exciting man. Still, there had to be doubt. My mom is a lesbian. She’s been out since the divorce, and now she’s finally at home in the San Francisco Bay area. There had to have been some fear, something telling her, even then, “This isn’t really it.” My mom started out thinking she was going to paint and have babies and be lovers with a man in small-town Wisconsin. Her style in this photo tells that story. She’s alternative, yes. What a rebel! How liberating, getting married in jeans! But she’s linked to a man. My mom ended up making provocative art on the other side of the country. She wore a strap-on and neon duct-taped flare-legged pants to the San Francisco Dyke March. That style tells a different story, a story that says that sometimes life screeches to a halt on the highway and drives you across a field. AURORA SHIMSHAK

  GWENN THOMAS

  My mom was a dancer before she became an artist (and an artist before she became a mother). I love looking at this photo. Pure fancy and flight. She is literally flying through the air! In her I see so much joy as she uses her body. It also makes me feel a little jealous. JOANA AVILLEZ

  CHO BOK NIM

  I’m not sure how old my mom is here, but I’m guessing around twenty-five. She had me when she was twenty-seven, so this is my mom when she was still living in Korea, but probably right before she moved to New York with my dad, and before she got pregnant with me. This is my favorite picture of her and this is actually kind of the way I dress right now: a mix of tomboy/boyfriend clothes. I love that clunky Walkman she has around her neck. It must have been like three pounds back then. I also love her pose; she is so cool! I think my dad is the one who took this photo of her. JINNIE LEE

  ELLIE CSEPREGI

  My mom’s past is something I’ve only begun to scrape. She’s gone through a lot, lived in many cities, had many jobs. I don’t think she had much stability until she had kids. Her life was oriented around the theater and poetry scenes of whatever city she was living in at the time. This photograph has always been really elusive to me, and I’ve always been fascinated by it. I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s staged. At the same time, it seems like it’s a staging of who my mom actually was. It feels like she’s performing her own personality, like she put on a leather jacket and lit up a cigarette to become herself. It’s so performative and so dramatic. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but it also takes itself very seriously. It’s hard to read, but that’s exactly my mom. EMILY COYLE

  HELGA KERN

&n
bsp; My mother never talked much about dressing up or going out. That’s why I like this picture of her, where you can spot her in party mood. She had an eye for the casual and was always quick in picking the things she liked. A simple shirt, a necklace, a tiny black watch; above all: no fuss. When she married my father in 1980, she drove from Constance to Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. She found a dark green dress by Christian Dior with a green leather belt. She tried it on, it fit her perfectly, and she bought it right away. It cost 500 Swiss francs, and at the ceremony she wore it with a summer hat. FRIEDERIKE SCHILBACH

  SUSAN MARVEL

  I love this photo of my mum. She was between eighteen and twenty when it was taken, and when I was growing up, it represented what I wanted to look like, the era I wanted to live in, and the confidence I could potentially have. I love her stripey top. GRACE DENTON