Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  COLLECTION

  MAE PANG’s safety pins

  ON DRESSING

  WHAT I WORE TO FALL IN LOVE

  SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

  APRIL 5

  My name is on the list: Sarah Nicole plus Alexandra. Everybody calls her Alex, but when I e-mail the party host to ask if my out-of-town friend can come, I say Alexandra to make her sound Russian, taller. He says of course.

  The theme of the party is “’80s wedding.” I have on a pair of bright silver Doc Martens, twice worn, that I ordered on a three a.m. slowdown from Adderall. I wanted to sleep, so I smoked weed, and when I still wasn’t sleepy, I went to Etsy. Now I own the only pair of bright silver Docs I’ve seen.

  I don’t go to the party. Alex should be Alex, and I should be Sarah, the girl from Canada who didn’t sleep with the life-partnered man.

  Instead we drink at Noah’s apartment, where I am staying while he’s out of town. We smoke indoors. Alex is fading. I’m flickering. I text Dana to ask if she’s still at Black Market, and when she says yes, I ask who with. She says Jesse. Is Jesse single, I text. I never ask if anyone’s single. I’m in a mild panic because (1) I’m not sleeping; (2) I’m only sleeping with this one guy; (3) I can’t only be sleeping with this one guy, who is supposed to be my friend, and who is not even answering my texts. I hate the fit of the jeans I’m wearing: skinny, tight, dark blue, a medium rise. They make me feel like I’ve recently lost the baby weight. Noah has a navy cashmere sweater, and although I dislike a V-neck I need something soft in the chill. He also has a great varsity jacket from a school he didn’t attend. When I put it on, it’s like I have an older brother.

  When I get to Black Market, Dana is leaving, and Jesse is drunk. Jesse’s gorgeous.

  I first saw him at the very end of January. I was feeling thinner and bold—I’d started boxing lessons—in a black leather bustier, vintage; a silk-and-wool kilt, both French navy and French; an old blazer. My shoes were these badass buckled things that clomped like hell and made my calves look like I might be a waif. I was dead hot. Jesse did not say hello.

  In February, I held an erotic reading at a clothing store on Grand, and wore a dress I’d bought on final sale at $170. Still too much but it’s silk, this startling say-yes green, a girl-proud thing, tied at the waist and falling in tiers to my knee. At Dana’s invitation, Jesse came not to the reading but afterward to the bar, where he doesn’t remember meeting me at all.

  The third time I saw him was in March at our friend Dana’s birthday, and I wore a long white man’s shirt with skinny, soft gray jeans and those silver Docs for the second time. Jesse came for a cigarette with me, but we didn’t talk at all. He did not know my name.

  But tonight I show up to Black Market in basic-ass jeans and boys’ clothes and a lick of feral eyeliner, and Jesse looks at me and thinks I’m so pretty. It’s like he never saw me before, and maybe he didn’t.

  APRIL 25

  Two weeks before the book party of a woman we both know, Jesse asked me to be his date. I did not believe in dating but wanted to go. Plus, who was I to say no to something two weeks in advance.

  The day of the party, I cry for six or seven hours. My eyes turn to snake bites. We’re to meet at a bar before the party. I think, I’ll skip it. But just fifty-some minutes after the time I promised to meet him, I turn the corner onto West 13th in: my number-one comfort item, a light gray sweater, stitched like a sweatshirt and bought for $200; the shortest skirt I can find, which is my roommate’s and even shorter on me, me being both leggier and hippier than she is; a pair of $30 sunglasses from Prince Street; the badass shoes. To further hide the crying, I’ve circled my eyes with smudgy, ink-blue eyeliner, like the total on a diner receipt. I lift my chin. But then he’s sitting on the steps, smoking and reading, and he looks up at me and he just has this mouth. When he asks if I’m all right, he says I don’t have to answer or talk about it, and when I say I’m fine, he smiles and pretends I’m not lying. It is pretty much the best thing he could do.

  MAY 3

  I miss nine calls from Stephanie. At ten a.m. I’m meant to get in the car and drive with her and her husband and a photographer to her house in the Hamptons. I’ve never been to the Hamptons. Also, it seems impossible that I would leave Jesse now. I call Stephanie and tell her I’m sorry, but it turns out I’m in love. PRICKETT, she says. Bring him. But seriously, get on the train.

  Jesse buys sparkling wine and I buy snacks and we meet in Fort Greene Park after I make us miss the train. We catch the next one. He likes my dress, which I haven’t worn since August. It is sky denim with white paisley leaves all over, like polka dots, and a figure skater’s shape, and when I twirl, it flies upward, but has just enough weight to stay decent. I like it, too.

  MAY 11

  This afternoon I stopped to buy jewelry at a twee self-adornment store that isn’t really my taste. I bought a vintage costume ring with a tiny baby “sapphire” and two rhinestones. It only fits my ring finger, so that’s where I wore it. I stepped outside, the sky broke, and in four blocks I was bone-soaked, laughing. Untouchable. Jesse said he’d meet me at seven.

  At six-fifteen, I changed for the party. The dress code was “silver,” and although I own silver Docs and a silver-threaded Anna Sui dress and three shades of silver nail polish, I decided to do things in blue. My nails were Lego blue, the same blue as one block of a color-blocked dress I choose. It’s light and sleek; I felt dolphinish. Because the dress is long and the slit so high, it’s a bit much for daylight with heels. So black sandals, flat. I walk quickly, listening to “Midnight City,” and for the very first time I’m not late.

  Blue is Jesse’s favorite color, and he hasn’t read Bluets, the Maggie Nelson book, so I bring it to him and he’s happy. He’s never been so happy. Neither have I. He says he would marry me tomorrow. I say yes. We’re smoking outside and then we go back inside and sit down and I’m explaining to him my tattoos and he says, Will you marry me? I say yes and it’s a different answer. It is the one time a word is enough.

  I go to a dinner party with all these women, mostly writers, some of whom are the most radical anarcho-femmes I know. I tell them I’m getting married and they all want to see my ring. For a second I have no idea what they’re talking about, and then I have to explain that the ring I’m wearing I bought myself, by accident, for six dollars. If Jesse had bought me a diamond ring, brand-new, from a store neither of us had ever been in, I think I would have had to say no.

  MAY 19

  Today is Lara and Hugh’s wedding. I’ve only known Lara for three or four years, from Toronto, but still I cannot think of a person I’d be happier to see in a $12,000 dress. I mean that.

  The wedding is on the top, skylit floor of the Gramercy Park Hotel. A few days before, I decide—definitely—to wear a stiff, sleeveless crop top in pure white broderie anglaise. I’ll wear it with slim black pants and tall black heels and straighten my hair to a high gloss and put on my silver choker, even though it’s been missing for months.

  The day of the wedding, it rains. The white top seems stupid and overpriced. At home I consider a blood-orange silk Acne dress that falls just so, or would if it didn’t feel so impossible on my hips. I bought it at my very skinniest, four years ago, when I was mostly a style reporter. At some point, my mind became a more pressing concern than my flesh, and now I’m just not sure about the dress. Anyway, it needs to be dry-cleaned. Ditto the jade-and-blue Kenzo skirt I wore on my birthday. Ditto the pinky-pale Jeremy Laing shift dress, edged in black, $400 for the sample. It’s an investment piece, I told my ex, Graeme, borrowing from the fashion editor’s lexicon when he asked how much I’d paid. How, he wanted to know. Does it turn into four of them?

  But inevitably I wear the best top I ever bought (off eBay, actually). It’s made of soft, itchy, iron-gray wool, cut on the bias into a long, one-armed swirl. Everywhere it’s tight, but not too tight. My tits look great. I wear it with six-inch Aldo heels designed for the brand by Patrik Ervel
l—they have rubber spike heels, a bulbous platform, and a Mary Jane strap, and they are hideous—and a navy polyester ball skirt I got for $10 on the Joe Fresh sale rack two years ago.

  After the ceremony come speeches, and dinner courses, and cigarettes in the atrium, then somebody orders coke and Jesse comes and I know all the words to all the Beyoncé songs. It’s two a.m. The Toronto guests want to keep going, but I live here and I’ve learned, I think, to leave when you least want to leave.

  So we leave. In a tote bag, I’ve brought the old denim shirt and black jeans and a pair of all-white Converse. We look for cops. I change on the street—this is when I really feel superheroic. We scale the black iron fence into Gramercy Park, which is gated for the exclusive use of the surrounding, superrich residents. It has recently come to my attention that the only hobby I have is trespassing. I dress—black baseball hat, white Converse—with that in mind.

  JUNE 4

  It’s hot as a fucking jungle. I wear a sliplike light pink top, chiffon, that my roommate bought from Zara, and a black leather skirt that was gorgeous and sultry till I cut half of it off with scissors. Now it’s slutty. After a meeting I go to a cheap salon and get nails as white as Wite-Out. Durga, my soulmate, does her nails white all the time, and I rarely get a manicure without texting her. This time I also text Jesse. White, I say, ’cause it’ll look so good on your dick.

  JUNE 27

  In Chinatown, my lease is up, I’m moving. Jesse comes to help me and I’m wearing a white Hanes T-shirt, a pair of purplish-gray shorts I never run in (while packing I find that I own three pairs of gym shorts, probably because whenever I decide to exercise, I’ve forgotten the last time I did), and running shoes I ordered custom from Nike. He looks at the running shoes. He says, “Do your . . . running shoes have your initials on them?” I say, “Yes. This is the person you’re marrying,” and we laugh.

  JULY 5

  I am on Fire Island to work. Jesse says he’ll take a photo of me, and though I prefer to take photos of myself almost without exception, if there is an exception, he’s it.

  I’m wearing a tomato-red bikini, shiny the way all bathing suits are when you get them free from American Apparel. I never understand how bikinis contrive to make you look, with so little material, so much worse than you do naked, but they do. Over it I put on an old striped shirt. I have a hundred striped shirts, or ten, but this one is loose and soft and mannish and also feminine, the way its stripes look painted on. It’s ink-blue and a dirty white. A favorite.

  Jesse takes the photos. He doesn’t say anything about the shirt.

  Later, he tells me about the photo he saw when he Googled me. It was taken in the winter of 2010, in Palm Springs. I was blonde. My hair full of salt. I had white sunglasses and a Bloody Mary and fresh red nails and I was wearing the same striped shirt. He told his roommate, Dan, that there was something he knew: that I would be someone for him.

  SURVEY Is there an article of clothing, some makeup, or an accessory that you carry or wear every day?

  Liquid eyeliner.—BRONWYN CAWKER • Vaseline rose-tinted balm.—BRYENNE KAY • I’m never without my The Row leather backpack. It holds my heels and my model book during the day. I always have a tiny Givenchy mascara on me. The one with three balls.—CAILIN HILL • Bobby pins. I have unruly red curly hair that occasionally requires a bobby pin to keep it under wraps.—ABI SLONE • My brown vinyl computer bag with golden-brown leather straps.—LARA AVERY • My wedding rings.—ADRIENNE BUTIKOFER • I carry a “Rainbow Viewfinder” in my wallet that my dad gave me when I was a kid. It’s just a piece of cellophane-ish paper cut in a circle—you look through it and see rainbows playing off light. Its obvious metaphor is what makes it such a good talisman.—JOANA AVILLEZ • I usually have one of my coats in tow, just in case it gets cold, which it’s bound to do in San Francisco.—ANISSE GROSS • My glasses.—MEGAN FRANKLYNE • My glasses! —MEGAN PATTERSON • These days it is a green cashmere toque I bought from Holt Renfrew six years ago. It has a few small holes in it, but it is the warmest article of clothing that I own. Plus, I spent $70 on it, so I can’t bring myself to replace it until it is completely in tatters.—ANU HENDERSON • I always have rice paper for a quick dabbing in case my skin gets oily.—AREV DINKJIAN • My heart necklace, which I bought for myself from an artist in Brooklyn. It was a kind of present to help me feel complete on my own, rather than waiting for a man to buy me things.—ALEXI CHISLER • No.—CLEO PERRY • Underwear and my phone.—DANKA HALL • Nothing, really, although I find it very difficult to wear something that has absolutely no pockets.—BETH STUART • Red lipstick.—CAT TYC • Sleep mask would be a funny answer.—EILEEN MYLES • Perfume and my headscarf.—IMOGEN DONATO • I wear a plain silver chain with almost every outfit.—KRISTINA ANNE GYLLING • I wear a red ring that my boyfriend gave me for Christmas a couple years ago every day. If I forget it, I feel nervous that I’ve lost it. It’s this vintage piece that I really like. It made me realize he has good taste.—CATHERINE LACEY • My eyebrow kit. I usually use a dark brown, but sometimes I do a faintly bluish black, a very orangey brown, or an extremely electric blue. They frame my face in a way my natural brows never could.—JACLYN BRUNEAU • Céline bag, Clé de Peau concealer.—AUDREY GELMAN • Medical bracelet.—ELIZABETH PERKINS • When I’ve forgotten to put on earrings, I often feel bereft.—POPPY TOLAND • A gold bracelet, my watch, and groomed eyebrows.—JOSIE HO • I am never without the following: a Moleskine notebook, my phone, a good pen (it must write well), a good bag (it must hold more things than you can tell).—ALY MARGARETS • Pendant with camel.—GINI ALHADEFF • A hair tie.—GLYNDA ALVES • I wear a small strand of pearls my parents gave me when I was seventeen. It’s not an expensive example of its kind, and it actually has no “style” as such. But it’s like, the more I wear it, the more it becomes an appropriate item.—JESSICA JOHNSON • I always have a scarf.—AMY RUDERSDORF • A smile is the best accessory.—SAGAN MacISAAC

  COLLECTION

  SHEILA HETI’s nail polish

  CONVERSATION

  A SCHMATTE LOOKS GOOD

  PRESCHOOL TEACHER DINA GOLDSTEIN SPEAKS WITH HER SON, RADIO HOST JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

  JONATHAN: When do you feel at your most attractive?

  DINA: I don’t know. Some days I look in the mirror and I say, “I’m so pretty.” And other times I look in the mirror and I have to look away because I’m so ugly.

  JONATHAN: Those are extreme poles. What influences that?

  DINA: I have creases on my face and they’re very pronounced, I need a hair dye . . . I don’t know. I just feel I’m not pretty that day.

  JONATHAN: It doesn’t have to do with maybe the way Dad’s treating you or anything like that?

  DINA: No.

  JONATHAN: Okay, are there any items of clothing that you have in multiple, and why do you think you keep buying this thing?

  DINA: I have a lot of fancy jackets and I go to this place where they’re really cheap and they’re really pretty. They’re so pretty I feel I have to have them.

  JONATHAN: How many jackets do you have?

  DINA: Maybe eight to ten. And I love costume jewelry. Especially if it’s a bargain, then I really love it! (laughs)

  JONATHAN: What is it that you like about it?

  DINA: I don’t know. It’s crazy. I can’t even explain it. I take them out every so often and I spread them on the bed and I look at them and it gives me so much pleasure. I get enormous pleasure from just looking at my jewelry. More pleasure from that garbage than from my real jewelry.

  JONATHAN: Really?

  DINA: It’s a sickness, I know. I hardly even wear them. I just like owning them.

  JONATHAN: Okay. What are some shopping rules you think every woman should follow?

  DINA: Buy what looks good on you, not what’s in style. Buy things that are not going to go out of style.

  JONATHAN: What doesn’t go out of style?

  DINA: Black pants never go out of style. Turtlenecks haven�
�t gone out of style.

  JONATHAN: Are there any dressing tricks you’ve invented or learned that make you feel like you’re getting away with something?

  DINA: Yes! That’s a very good question. When I just wear an ordinary T-shirt that I buy in Walmart for five dollars and I drape a scarf around it, I look dressed up.

  JONATHAN: Oh, so the trick is the scarf?

  DINA: That’s what I think. It makes me look like I’m dressed up. A schmatte looks good.

  JONATHAN: Would you rather be perceived as having great taste or great style?

  DINA: I think I don’t have great taste. I’d like to have great style, because people who are stylish always look good no matter what they wear, they just know how to put themselves together. If I had something really important, like if I was visiting the Queen, I would have to take someone with me to help me choose a dress.

  JONATHAN: If you were going to be meeting with a queen, what would be your look?

  DINA: I don’t know. I have no idea.

  JONATHAN: Scarf and a T-shirt?

  DINA: No! You see, I would have to have somebody tell me.

  JONATHAN: Who would you ask?

  DINA: Somebody who looks good all the time. I have this girl Louise who works at the day care, she always puts herself together very nicely. I look at the girls at work and I see what they wear. I don’t care, I just copycat. Otherwise how the hell do I know what’s in style?