Cashmere

When home décor articles address the problem of hanging pictures, they now suggest a “gallery” or sometimes a “gallery wall” that displays items, accessibly hung, with a unifying feature or theme. We have such a gallery, it turns out, the “family wall,” upstairs between the bedrooms. We seem to have settled for theme rather than form or feature. There is no visual conversation between pictures: they are all differently framed, inconsistently sized, and in different media. Mostly they are artworks made by a family member: my older son’s meticulous recreation of a Picasso bird painting, dating from second grade; my father’s watercolor sketches of a castle in Italy and of my mother’s signature rounded purse. There are two pictures of family, if you don’t count the purse (see below for animated objects). One is by the then 7-year-old daughter of a friend depicting our most overlooked dog. The drawing, strangely mature but still exuding the palpable energy of a child artist, captures and reminds the viewer that Kendrick, despite his place as trailer in the canine pack, has a vitality all his own. He is drawn in the act of looking like a dog in a book, tongue slightly protruding, head cocked to the side, legs slightly askew as if about to leave the frame of the picture. On that wall, de-centered, he is finally the center of attention.

The last picture on the wall is a gift from my elder son, an enlargement of a studio shot of my mother in her late twenties or early thirties, stretched across a large wooden canvas. As a smaller, but still quite large photograph, it stood, unframed, and a little dog-eared, on my bureau or my desk in many different apartments and houses. When I moved to a new place, it was a ritual art of settling in to find a place in my bedroom for the “Gladys picture.” I have many pictures of my mother taken when she was around that age, because her job as, what I must have misspelled many times on various applications throughout my childhood, a “photo-liaison officer” for the United Nations, meant that she was always around cameras.  I love all those photographs: the one of her in a bathing suit looking demurely down as the camera takes in the beauty of her naked skin; the ones of her dressed for work (she was one of the first women to be photographed around Arab delegates with her head uncovered); the one, a little later, of her pregnant with me, a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But this picture is for me, and for my family, the true “Gladys picture,” indeed the one that allowed me to call her “Gladys,” if at first only to myself.

The photograph was taken long before I knew her. It’s a glamor shot from the nineteen- forties. Her lipstick breaks through the black and white of the image to register as crimson. Her hair, which I know to have plagued her all her life with its excess life, is composed into perfect waves. Although the photograph is cut off just below the neck, I can see the beginnings of a notched collar. I supply, cannot help supplying, the name of the fabric, although on the wooden surface all texture has been flattened, the nap erased through enlargement. It is a cashmere jacket, or perhaps a coat. I know this, feel this, because I feel I know my mother. I know this because I will always associate Gladys with this fabric, with the softness and thickness of three-ply cashmere. As a young and as a middle-aged woman, she could afford perhaps two cashmere articles of clothing every year or so— one for her, and perhaps one for me. It was a ritual of my father’s biannual home leaves to the US that she and I would go shopping to Bonwit’s or Bergdoff Goodman, those department stores that stillfelt like palaces. In those days, sweaters were not displayed in piles, as they are now; one sweater in each available color would be hung on a padded hanger around the perimeter of a softly carpeted room with slipper satin armchairs too big for me or, for that matter, for my mother.  I would sit dangling my legs and watching as my mother touched each sweater, wedding ring flashing among the purples, blues and greens, testing for thickness and softness, for in Gladys’s words “quality.”

Later in life, after Gladys had returned to live in New York after my father died, after department stores became something quite different, and after cashmere became two ply then one-ply, and then nothing special, my mother discovered a new source of the real stuff: thrift shops on Manhattan’s upper east side. She would make the rounds of three or four of these places over the course of a week, often returning with several sweaters by Pringle or some other Scottish company that might have been the sisters or cousins (for her clothes were always animate) of the ones she had touched and sometimes bought years ago. There were sweaters in all colors and all shades. I remember the greens:  sage and forest; celadon, mint and teal. Some had appliqué or embroidery. I remember a grey sweater adorned with a fall of three-dimensional white leaves. Quite a few of the sweaters Gladys found were my size, gifts for me that I wore through my years in the Northeast and that would eventually disappear as my clothes tend to do without having been worn out or given away or torn. My mother’s clothes, on the other hand, never vanished, never left her except for a very good reason. After she died, I found close to a hundred cashmere sweaters in her closet, each lovingly folded, each preserved for eternity, or perhaps just for me, since in the interim I had grown one size, to match my mother’s.

In telling the story of cashmere, I have let it take over the picture, the big picture. I have avoided talking about, looking at or into my mother’s eyes. Like many of the subjects of thirties glamor photography, she is gazing out of the frame from under perfect brows. If I am not looking at her face, she is also not quite looking at me.

My mother and I had a history with clothing. I would say a shared history, but that feels a little dishonest for the play of intimacy, generosity,  power, and irritation that marked our sartorial encounters. In the thrift store years, which lasted through my time in graduate school and ended with her death some nine years later, Gladys would stockpile thrift store finds of clothes she thought I would like.  My visits to New York, or hers to Philadelphia, Boston, or Houston, as work took me further and further from her, would always begin with an unveiling of the clothes she had bought for me and the demand that I try them on. I am not sure, even now, why I so hated the ritual of trying on those clothes, even those that I liked. No matter how many of them I lied about liking, my memory is that it was never enough. Clothes I did not praise, or even those that clearly did not fit, were, in my mother’s animate world, “rejected.” Like Marie Kondo today, Gladys was always attentive to, and in her own mind an advocate for, clothes’ emotional needs. Kondo declares that clothes “like” to be folded. Gladys was not quite so doctrinaire; in her world dresses and shirts preferred hangers, while sweaters liked to lie flat and encased. No article of clothing liked to be confined, except of course pants, which she never bought, despite having been the first girl to wear trousers in her progressive elementary school, the Little Red Schoolhouse, where one year her “project” was to stand on her head. Mostly, though, clothes wanted to be loved, rescued, to become part of the family.

And so the trying on was, well, trying, especially since the ritual inevitably happened, over my protests, as soon as I (or she) walked in the door. The success or failure of the trying on would shape the visit, the clothes hung like flags, but more neatly around whatever apartment we were in, segregated by whether I had approved or rejected them.

It was at time like this, that I realized, forgot, and realized again, that it was not about the clothes, or even questions of clashes in taste. Part of the problem was the role of clothing in our respective imaginaries.  I was by no means immune to wanting to look good; I would even say I liked dressing up. My mother not only had strong opinions about what looked good; she also had difficult-to-budge views on what constituted a healthy relation to clothing. For her, a lack of interest in clothing signified depression or pathology. “She doesn’t care what she wears,” was, for my mother, a judgement and a diagnosis. Self-care, as a sign of mental health, extended to clothing. I remember one long day when I was still a new Assistant Professor, when I had taken my mother to work. She had sat in the library for many, presumably dull, hours, feeling, perhaps for the first time, how much time my job required. At the end of the day, as we drove somewhat grumpily home, Gladys had a suggestion: “you need to spend one day a week taking care of your clothes, “she told me, as if she had not witnessed firsthand that I was out of hours and days in the week.

My mother and I did not even have a shared language to describe items of clothing. Her’s was of course richer and more precise. For my mother a dress was “cut on the bias” a collar was a “Peter Pan,” a neckline a “sweetheart” or a “teardrop.” I did not have those words and I did not learn them until I started watching Project Runway years after her death. This made it impossible for us even to know which piece of clothing we were talking about at any given time. We could not even agree on color, acting out in our own often absurd way the difference in perception that led to the recent viral “black dress/ gold dress” meme. A top that I saw as blue would be green to her; “beige” was an endless undifferentiated landscape that refused our efforts at common ground. The color questions were in some ways the hardest, in part because I had words for color, honed in childhood by my mother’s gift of the 128-crayon Crayola box, the only one that included “periwinkle?” My deepest conundrums as a child were about color: before I went to sleep I would ponder whether what I saw as red was what others saw as green or yellow, and whether the names we attach to colors floated free of any shared biological fact. Even now conversations about color are so frustrating that a colleague and I have given color names to all fundamental misunderstandings: borrowing from the viral black dress/gold dress” meme from a few years ago, when we literally don’t know what the other is talking about  we refer to the situation as a” blue dress/green dress problem.” Brain probably emphasizes the color in the phrase; I think a lot about dresses.