Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  POEM | TEXTILE NAMES II

  Apfel

  Lethe

  Freud

  Parsley

  Birdcage

  Improper

  Arabeske

  Honey bunny

  Dancing women

  Mothballs and sugar

  Strawberry thief

  Rose & lily

  Soup can

  Aspirin

  Oomph

  Sarah

  COLLECTION

  MITZI ANGEL’s unworn necklaces

  ON DRESSING

  FILTHY WHITE DAISIES

  CHRISTA PARRAVANI

  My identical twin, Cara, wore plastic flowers in her hair. She favored stiff pink roses and filthy white daises. We were born in 1977, but she was kin to Ophelia, Cordelia, and Persephone. Her soul sisters in tragedy dressed in ceremonial garb. They shared a broken, frilly look that Cara called “romantic.” Her closet was filled with floor-skimming skirts, and peasant tops she laced so tight it was hard for her to breathe. Fake flowers fastened into her hair, a crest of faith. Cara’s bouquet attempted to conceal invisible filth. Hidden beneath cheerful immortal blooms: the unwashable mark that had been left after she’d been raped at twenty-four. A rainbow of gaudy jewelry helped make her trauma feel survivable. It made her beautiful.

  Identical twins are analyzed for their differences. Cara and I were scrutinized down to every barely different feature: My nose has a bump. It is larger than hers was. My legs were thinner, gangly beside her shapely ones. Cara’s cheeks were full, and her chin sloped closer to her neck than mine. Her hair was lighter, curlier, and bouncier. She was the pretty twin. But we were also so much the same. Strangers couldn’t tell us apart. Except for our dress: I was fashionable.

  We were lumped together, as twins often are. When Cara wore something absurd, I had it on, too, by proxy, even if I was perfectly well dressed and put-together. Twins are bound, like runners in a three-legged race. We were perceived as one, struggling because we were actually two. So if Cara was wasted, or dressed in a purple gown for a casual dinner, or wore a navy mesh blouse and sailor pants, arms sleeved in elbow-length black wool gloves with the fingers cut off—I was wearing it, too.

  Everything she wore hung oddly. She was that woman: the one whose dress was just a little too low-cut, or hiked up where it shouldn’t be. The person with an outfit that never matched the occasion, that clung to her like Saran wrap. She was often seen in a corset laced so tight her breasts were lifted in a provocative hello. She’d wear it with ill-fitting jeans and low-top Converse All Stars. It sounds hideous, it does. But these outfits were also charming, the way a velvet painting or an ornate frame around a badly painted picture is.

  Cara died from a heroin overdose on our mother’s bathroom floor. She probably died in her pajamas; she’d fixed early in the morning. The dose had been too strong and stopped her heart. She’d just moved back home with our mother to save money, her dissident wardrobe in tow. I’ll never be sure what she was wearing the day she died. I can’t bring myself to ask.

  Eight years later, Cara comes to me in flashes. It can be hard to remember her eyes, how they seemed both bold and broken, so brown and clear in the sun. Or her pleased, half-lipped smile that showed just a sliver of teeth. But I can’t forget her clothing. She’d had lovers who’d asked her why she did not dress like me, in pencil skirts and slim belts, in too-tall feet-killing heels. She tossed those men aside like heavy cargo on a sinking ship.

  She hadn’t wanted to get older, be old. Those flowers in her hair kept her young.

  Cara had hoped years would bring children, a writing career, and maybe a home in the redwoods of California. She fully expected wrinkles, and disappointments, and even the pessimism that comes with taking your hard knocks. She was a realist, but she also believed in fairies and tarot and polyester. They were her religion as much as Mom had asked that Jesus Christ be, or so many of her New Age boyfriends had hoped of the Buddha. Her clothing was her way of keeping optimistic. Her sense of humor was her way of spitting in the face of a lousy life. She was in charge.

  Cara liked baby-doll dresses, too, though she coasted thirty and it was 2006. Her clothes could also take a turn for the dark. She owned an extensive collection of subversive, curve-hugging ringer T-shirts. Her favorite was really an advertisement, a throwback television-cartoon owl licking his red sucker, a Tootsie Pop. Her rape had made her both timid and bold. How many licks to get to the center? The wry smile she wore with the owl atop her breasts, it was nearly convincing: How many knocks of the headboard till my sweet spot opens? I dare you to find out. I dare you to want me after I cry.

  I own a stash of her clothes now, closets full. I have palazzo pants. Too-long and low-cut hippie dresses with dusty hems. Pilling synthetic sweaters that were meant for one season of wear. They’re what I have left: cheap garments that Cara had hoped were merely transitional, a wardrobe that would accompany her to better stead. Now Cara’s clothes are a symbol of her, her eulogy. They define the person that she was: Silly. Hopeful. Careless. Poor. Sentimental. Always looking back. Forever tacky.

  Mom worked for years as a waitress at the Dry Dock when we were young, slinging hush puppies and popcorn shrimp. Her hair smelled of the fryer when she came home. She wore a white tuxedo shirt with shiny gray snap buttons, and a scratchy black apron and skirt, and a silky clip-on bow tie looped under her collar. Wearing formal attire to serve always seemed less dignified to me than being naked. I wanted to cover Mom whenever I saw her in her uniform, hand her something comfortable and venerable to wear.

  She’d married badly, twice, and moved us so many times that by our thirteenth birthday the number of schools we’d attended outnumbered the years we’d lived. On that account, I sought order. I learned to groom and dress myself with the kind of conviction usually reserved for obsessive-compulsives, though I was not one.

  I thought I wanted to be beautiful. That quality, the collection of features I possessed that seemed to make men desire me, they were my way out. Men had been Mom’s primary problem. Her selection of the wrong partners had her pulling double shifts, covering her bruised cheeks with pancake makeup so she could serve with a smile. The women in our line were long-suffering secretaries, house cooks, and young widows, expert knitters who developed early cancers. Mom’s mother was a farmhand, stripping an upstate orchard heavy with fruit with her calloused hands. She didn’t care one iota to be fuckable.

  Passage out of my family was assured, I thought, with the right getup, to attract the right man. I saw it that way for a long time, into my late twenties. Before Cara died, a lover finally questioned my fashioning of myself. “I want to look behind the armor,” he’d said, “the you you’re covering.” I wanted to protect myself. I wanted to be in control, too. I was more like Cara than I knew. It was just that my shell was hard and hers was soft. It had never occurred to me that a girl could win her freedom through her mind.

  Shakespeare was useless to me. (Cara had that on me. Taking the long view, I see her wardrobe was striving to be academic—the robes, the charming oddness.) As a girl, I carried copies of Vogue and Glamour stuffed in my knapsack. I learned to canvass the rack at Salvation Army. I constructed the woman I most wanted to be. Wild but perfectly groomed, with wine-colored suede pumps, and dresses that skimmed her knees. I wanted to be sexy but modest, tailored with an eye toward chic. I was part Stepford wife, part Reality Bites, and part Kewpie doll. I knew by heart which lipstick shades blushed the lips to look bee-stung or beard-brushed. I dressed myself until I was no longer Cara’s twin, and we resembled one of those Cosmopolitan city-girl salon makeovers, only a shadow of our twinned selves. Cara hated every minute of my escape through lipstick and A-lines, fur-trimmed coats and lacy stockings. And how could she not? For every piece of cheap finery I owned, I’d betrayed her, our birthright sameness. To her, I’d left her alone in the dark in the rooms of our childhood, badly dressed.

  I had, of course, imagined taking Cara’s wardrobe a
nd setting it on fire in our mother’s front yard after she died, for all of suburbia to see. Or I might have given it to Goodwill to dress the needy. That’s how angry I was at Cara. But I wore her clothes instead, like so many grievers do, until the fabric no longer smelled like Cara’s fruit perfume, but like me, the bastard version of her. The contours of that gaudy fabric lay against me until it was a cover that belonged as much to grief as it did to either of us. And I looked ridiculous, just as she had, but even more so. And for the first time I understood her, in a way I never could while she was alive. I looked at myself in the mirror after she died and couldn’t help noticing how much alike we’d looked. Her plastic and silk flowers brought color to my cheeks. Cara couldn’t die. As impossibly as daisies growing on a snow-covered meadow, she was alive in me.

  ON DRESSING

  LOST MITTENS

  HEIDI JULAVITS

  1

  I cannot bear to lose clothing. I refuse to accept as fact its loss. A misplaced sweater turns me into an obsessive, a paranoid, a believer. I fixate. I sleuth and accuse. I experience flights of ingenuity or madness (the categories, when a missing sock is on the line, so often blur) as I try and try to find it.

  2

  The other day I lost my mittens. The disappearance of a full pair seemed against the mitten odds. Initially I blamed my parents. They’d been in town for a woman’s funeral. I thought, Maybe they accidentally packed them. I sent my parents an email. I padded my mitten query with heartfelt things I would have said, that I’d wanted to say, about the woman who died. I did not want to appear insensitive or accusatory. I wasn’t implying that my parents had stolen them.

  3

  Unless they had. I’d snapped at my father that morning when he asked (I was trying to get to the library) if I might quickly speak on the phone to my ninety-two-year-old grandmother. Maybe my parents were angry and, no longer having any jurisdiction over me, decided to punish me the only way they could. Also my parents had been spending time in a Gullah community in South Carolina that sold bone jewelry and believed in voodoo. And my brother had told me that weekend at the funeral that I talked too much. Maybe my parents also thought I talked too much (though not enough to my grandmother). Maybe they were taking the mittens to a Gullah witch doctor. Soon I’d be unable to speak at all.

  4

  I returned to the library. Maybe my parents hadn’t packed my mittens. Maybe I’d left them here. They were not under the desk where I’d been working. Perhaps someone had stolen them? They were quite worth stealing. I’d bought them at a flea market in Berlin; they were bright yellow and brown, hand knit by the market stall owner’s Polish grandmother. A German woman advised me to buy this pair over a red pair. She’d said, “If you buy the yellow all the women on the street will look at you and wonder, Who is she?” Maybe another woman wanted people on the street to wonder who she was. I imagined spotting the thief wearing my mittens along Broadway. I ran through a few confrontation scenarios. I needed to be prepared in the event.

  5

  I returned home. I dug through my kitchen trash (digging through trash is the highest form of cosmic due diligence—when I want something to reappear in my life, I dig through my trash). No mittens. They were not in the laundry or between the sweaters or trapped under the blanket that hides the stains on the couch or in the Dutch oven. They were not, clearly not, in the apartment. But they were in the building. Somebody had them.

  6

  I asked one of the building porters. He said, as though in a trance, “I seem to have a memory of maybe seeing some mittens like that.” I made “Lost Mittens” signs. I posted them around the building. I offered a reward. Then I walked in and out of my building, reenacting the loss of the mittens. I narrowed the viable loss sites to three—the lobby, the elevator, the third-floor hallway.

  7

  But why, if they’d been found in the lobby or the hall, hadn’t they been put on the doorman’s desk? Or pinned to the tenant bulletin board? Why were they being withheld?

  8

  I suspected the third-floor neighbor who fried fish for breakfast. I was often vocally (because I talked too much) expressing my unhappiness with the Fish Weather System that hovered in our hallway. Perhaps this neighbor heard me complaining about the greasy low-tide smell coming from her apartment; maybe she had kidnapped my mittens and intended to sell them on eBay (because I’d said on my sign “VERY VALUABLE”). I imagined finding the mittens for sale and bidding two million dollars for them (just to make sure I won). I would walk across the hall and tell my neighbor—luckily for her, she didn’t have to pay for shipping.

  9

  It was also conceivable that a busy, tired person had taken his dog for a walk, and the dog had snagged the mittens off the lobby floor, and the person hadn’t realized until they were already at the park, and the mittens were already filthy and saliva-covered, at which point the tired person had, not without a little guilt, pried them out of the dog’s mouth and thrown them in the trash. I forgave this person. I was tired, too. But not so tired that I did not plan, after work, to walk to the park, poke through the wire rubbage bins with a stick.

  10

  (My finding mania at this point was so primal and intensely preoccupying that I’d begun to confuse myself. It was as if I were the thing that had been lost. I had a friend who lost himself in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for three days. He built snow caves and made SOS signs from old railway ties. He survived, he said, by always having a plan. This was me, always having a plan.)

  11

  While I was at work, the porter had a memory breakthrough. I returned home to find one mitten on my doorstep.

  12

  One mitten! One mitten found! Normally this would have provoked even greater regret—what is more heartbreaking than one mitten, one sock, one earring? It is not a glass half-full, it is a broken fucking glass. It is a nagging reminder of loss. Except that I had just been to the funeral of this woman. I had spent time with her husband. He was what remained of a pair. He wasn’t a painful reminder of her disappearance, he was such a welcome human symbol that she once, also in human form, existed. Because of him, I did not worry about her as I occasionally worried about my mittens when both were still missing—that maybe they’d never existed at all.

  13

  I decided (cosmic due diligence) to “move on.” I emailed a friend in Berlin to arrange for a replacement pair of mittens. I described the mittens as yellow and chestnut brown, wool, with what looks to be an icelandic/norwegian design all over. I described where the mitten stall was located (near goltzstrasse, in front of the church). I made a joke to distract my friend from my potential crazy-seemingness over the loss of my mitten. I said of the stall guy, he also sells wool socks. apparently all were made by his polish grandmother. who is locked in a room in his apartment. churning out these socks and these mittens. After sending, I worried if my joke was in poor taste. Implying that a German man might capture a Polish woman and force her to do manual labor. With the Germans, with everyone, I am always worrying that I have said the wrong thing while trying to trick them from noticing that I am, for reasons that cannot be explained (especially when discussing a lost mitten), distressed on a molecular level.

  14

  Immediately after arranging for its replacement, I deduced the location of the missing mitten. It was at the bottom of my building’s elevator shaft. This was less a clairvoyant experience than it was a hunch so unlikely that it did, true, carry the whiff of a psychic revelation. I know where the body is hidden.

  15

  I gathered recruits for the mission. Two children held the elevator doors open while I, on my knees, peered through the crack between the car and the floor. I saw nothing but paint chips. The mitten might (as it fell) have slipped beneath the elevator and out of view. I remained convinced it was there, possibly because it eased my mind to think that, even if it remained forever inaccessible to me, at least I knew where it was.

  16

  O
n my way to teach the next day—I wore my one found mitten with a mismatching mate (on the street I saw more than one person look at my hands and wonder, Who is she?)—I mentioned to the porter my suspicions about the mitten and the elevator shaft. He promised that the next time the elevators were inspected, he’d make sure to look for it.

  17

  Obviously his curiosity was piqued. Or maybe he saw my sign advertising a reward.

  18

  In the middle of my class, during which I spoke the phrase, “You don’t want to institutionalize the hurt,” my husband texted me. Your other mitten was found! Under the elevator, just as you suspected. I tried to create a teaching moment from my astonishment and happiness. This is what it’s like when you’re writing a novel and—oh, fuck it. I bragged. I told my students the story of losing and recovering my mittens. I touted my master sleuthing skills. I vowed to quit the immaterial joys of the writing life and follow my true calling, retrieving through invincible logic and willpower objects that appear irretrievably lost. I find things that should never be found. I force a reckoning. I oblige them back from the abyss to rejoin the world and me.

  19

  After my elation waned, however, I worried about the implicit downside to my gift. I worried about my ability, in the future, to accept that sometimes things or people are simply gone. It cannot be healthy, can it? It cannot be. To so confidently believe: I can conquer loss. I can love a thing so hard it must always come back to me.

  CONVERSATION

  THE WETSUIT IS NOT FASHION