In My Closet

As a cisgender, femme-presenting woman whose job allows for a variety of dressing options and who has been largely but not entirely spared the body dysmorphia that marks the lives and flesh of so many women, my morning trips to my closet should be unfraught, indeed unremarkable. It should be so easy, especially since I have, for the first time, a walk-in closet where my clothes are arranged in pleasing-to-me ways. My hangers are largely untangled, my out-of-season clothes out of the way. I have even achieved a modest rainbow effect sorting my in-season clothes mostly by color. If that rainbow is interrupted it is for an especially large swath of the blue-greens and green-blues that calm me when I see them in nature, on my walls, and in my wardrobe. 

The act of walking into my closet, perhaps even more than my walking out, however, reminds me that for all the order I have imposed on my dresses, skirts, pants and shirts (I do not agree with Marie Kondo that shirts “want” to be folded and in drawers) closets are strange and uneasy places. Once defined as place for prayer and contemplation, a closet—at least a walk-in closet—invites introspection. Entangled in the rich history of privacy, the closet tempts us to imagine it as a sanctuary, a place where the self, the true self, can flourish. For that reason, it has of course figured as  the self’s prison. To be “in the closet,” is to be unable to get out, to express oneself publicly. Although coming-out stories, of course especially those around sexual and gender identity, involve coming out of the closet, there are relatively few accounts of the closet itself, although the space’s intimate relationship to dress and undress, expression and conformity, make it worth lingering on, if not perhaps lingering in. 

My own closet has a door, although I never close it. At the end of a long bathroom, it does feel private. Although it is my husband’s closet as well, we are rarely in it together except when I am asking him to reach something from a shelf. My sons rarely cross its threshold. Even the four dogs who follow me wherever I go for some reason do not join me there, although there was a week burned in my memory when I woke to—ahem—traces of the presence of at least two of them during the night. Despite this memory of other creatures marking the closet as their own, and despite the fact that my husband’s clothes hang there and that we use the upper shelves for all kinds of storage, it feels, when I am in it, like an almost-sacred space.

I cannot contemplate my closet—or contemplate in my closet—without thinking about my gender presentation. My dresses and skirts, hanging empty to the right of the door, remind me of what has clearly been over the years an insistent persona that I am reluctant to call my true self. The dresses, most of them too long for the space allotted to them by the lower bar, billow onto the floor. They should be dirty, but magically are not.  These are the-too-long-to-be quite-professional skirts I mentioned in my last entry, the clothes that signified to the white Houston homeowners in my search for a house that I was a hippie, a Democrat, a leftie. Although the femmness of the dresses and skirts, often colorful and floral, signals an adherence to gender norms, there is also refusal there, a refusal that registers more as touch than sight. There is almost nothing in my closet that is stiff, tailored, or uncomfortable. All fabrics are soft, almost all washable. I believe they are called “easy to wear,” although my mother and at least one dear friend have also told me I am “hard on clothes.” When, a few years ago, I signed up for one of those remote clothes shopping services, there was literally no category for the clothes I liked. The lesson of the clothes hanging there is both that I have aligned myself with a certain kind of femininity, and that—as I have felt all my life—that I am not truly a girl.      

As I reach out my hand to the welcoming touch of my clothes, I remember an incident about 30 years ago at the beginning at my time at Rice. I had confided to my colleague that my first pregnancy had cost us quite a bit of money and that I was looking for extra income. This colleague served as a consultant to local businesses; she suggested that I too might take this up. It was clear from these conversations that although I was not sure what I would have to offer the oil industry, that the real barrier was clothes. My hypothetical consultancy would require that I take on my own consultant in the form of a personal shopper, for whom my colleague graciously offered to pay. I did not take her up on her offer, in part because of a visceral sense of recoil I felt as imagined the touch of blazers on my skin, hose on my legs. 

I remembered this moment of recoil years later, when I was the one offering problematic sartorial advice to a colleague. I bumped into her one day in the women’s bathroom where she confided to me that she was in some pain from a minor abdominal surgery and that the pants she was wearing were chafing her incision. Always eager to fix rather than to listen (another apparently non-feminine trait) I asked her if she had thought of wearing loose dress without a waist. The moment the word left my mouth I saw immediately that this was not for her an option, that it went against a butch presentation that was definitional for her. “I couldn’t do that,” she said. Some clothes, it turns out, are impossible, the refusal of them an assertion of boundaries that can be spoken or unspoken, visible or invisible.

It is impossible for me to scan my closet without thinking of my mother, in part because the way I dressed was often a fraught topic between us. Once she moved back to New York to live alone after my father died, my mother spent many hours a week in thrift shops buying clothing for herself and for me. Her standards were high for bargains and for the clothes themselves: three-ply cashmere sweaters; designer dresses only a year out of date; classic “pieces” in fine materials. Together the pieces transformed into  “outfits” that on her looked both timeless and individual. It was, I think, a goal of her later years to pass this skill, that way of dressing, those outfits, on to me. The minute I stepped in the door on a visit she would lead me to a stockpile of clothing she had found for me; for her, my visit began only after I had tried the things on.

For me, these sessions were trials in several senses of the word. If delaying tactics did not work, I would wearily go through the motions of an intimate runway show. Some of the clothes were wonderful, some didn’t work for me at all. With few exceptions—mostly having to do with fit-- I would have to defend not liking some of them, as my mother imagined out loud occasions I could wear the items I had rejected. Telling her that I never attended  formal brunches and teas, never needed a “casual suit,” rarely had an effect. “Just keep it in your closet till you need it,” she would say. She would offer to pack the clothes so they would take up almost no room in any bag or suitcase I had brought along. Back home, I would open my case to beautifully folded objects in colored tissue paper that I would sometimes forgot to hang on the special hangers that she often included—and that I sometimes bundled up and took to other, less exalted thrift shops than the ones my mother frequented on the upper east side of Manhattan. Some items were the subject of my mother’s daily calls. She would follow up on something she particularly liked: Did I like it? Had I worn it? Did it go with that other item she had found for me long ago? An easy prey to guilt and uncomfortable with lying, I found myself in a constant state of prevarication frustrating to both of us. The problem was compounded by an issue I still do not understand, although it has arisen with other people since: my mother and I described individual items so differently that we often genuinely did not recognize what piece of clothing we were talking about. What was green to me was blue for her; black was navy, and Khaki impossible to define. What was a “shawl collar?” a “Peter Pan collar” a “Princess seam?” For my mother, who lived in an animated world in which special items of jewelry and clothing had names and in which clothes had feelings, the stakes of ownership were especially high, closets full of life forms requiring time, affection, and care.

It was with a lifetime of such encounters in mind that I confronted my mother’s own closet after her death. I had to ask help from my most successfully femmy friend, the one who agreed with my mother that I was hard on clothes. My mother was not a home renovator, but she had taken the time and trouble to have the tiny closet in her condo enlarged; it was big enough so that two people—myself and Robyn, myself and Scott—could enter at the same time. While of course I had seen and spent some time in my mother’s closet over the years, being there seemed both a violation and an homage. Tiny cashmere sweaters, some of them obviously being saved for me, each in a plastic bag, many of these improbably marked with the name of their original stores. Clothes hanging in serried ranks according to height and season, all in peak condition, ironed (or, as my mother would say “pressed”), starched, and bleached. Although it had been several months since my mother had been well enough to dress, the clothes seem to be thriving under her care. Everywhere were traces of what I think of as my mother’s characteristic gesture, not only for clothing but for pets and people as well: the smoothing of rough surfaces, the little pat that followed smoothing. 

Lingering in my mother’s closet I encountered what I could only think of, in my mother’s animating terms, as old friends. Her swirly print dresses from the ‘fifties that I wore as a young girl on Halloween and sometimes, as an adult, for parties. The rows of Ferragamo sandals that she had re-heeled like clockwork every two years to prolong their life. Her care made the old ones virtually indistinguishable from the new; there was no need to throw any out as each new pair joined the others in a careful matrix of color and seasonality. The brown seal fur coat my father had bought for her signaling to her his love and success. The more flamboyant seal-trimmed silver thrift-shop coat that she had bought herself as a Christmas gift from him on the day before he died. I will never forget her trying it on in his hospital room or the smile of pleasure on his face as she pirouetted bravely around the room, her face white with strain. This was how to try things on, how to offer clothing as a gift to be shared. This was what I could not do for my mother. I will never forget my own sanctimonious attacks on her fur wearing, or the dying seal sounds I made, only partly in jest, when she put on the old brown coat.

It is easy to think of my mother’s closet as all about display—even if that display was for her own eyes. Her closet, as my friend whispered, was “like a museum.” It was also an archive, and like most archives it contained secrets. I had known from the time I was 21 that my mother had had an illegal abortion as a young woman. She had revealed this over the phone when I had told her—I am not sure why—about a positive pregnancy test. Her story, her confession, overwhelmed my own; this was the woman who never spoke of sex, whose romantic life before her marriage at 36 was a blank to me. It was in that moment that I began to see my mother differently; not so much in terms of her own past, but narcissistically in terms of who she was to me. She could, I understood from that moment,  be counted on in an emergency to act with love, to act out of character or perhaps more fully in character. This was news, and this was crucial. Yesterday I received in the mail from a friend the book Abortion Stories by Rosalyn Banish. I turned first to the mutigenerational story of that friend and her daughters. The story was both about the abortion and about its telling, about how the a secret turned into a narrative that became  first a family story and then a public one. My mother’s admisision (I resist saying confession) was not a story; perhaps I could have pressed for details, but the fact, the simple sentence, was enough for me at the time.

In my mother’s closet I learned the story of the abortion: the name of her lover; details of the relationship; the orgin of  her friendship with her lover’s sister that had persisted into my mother’s final days. There were on the same shelf bundles of  letters between my mother and my father, but also letters from his previous girlfriends to him. It was an archive of love letters, the kind that would form the basis for my next book on Victorian honeymoons. If I write a book based on these letters it will be about a particular historical moment that is still not fleshed out in my mind, but that belongs with novels like Mary McCarthy’s The Group as an example of a sexual revolution before the one that shaped my life—a revolution of the 1940s that coalesced not around the pill, but around the diaphragm and around the painful freedoms of the second world war and the immediate post war period. Even as  a scholar of sexuality and marriage, I know almost nothing about this period, but I do know that in an archival box safe from hurricanes is a cache of letters that might tell me something not only about my parents but about an era.

Ultimately, I saved the letters but not the clothing. I gave the seal coat back to the thrift shop from which it came, along with the cashmere sweaters (after I had chosen a few for myself and given some to friends). I brought a lot of the clothes back to Houston with me, where they hung in my closet for a few months, until I gave them to an upscale gift shop to sell on consignment. When that shop called to tell me they had my first check, I walked to the cash register past rows my mother’s empty plaid skirts all grouped together as if in her own closet. I never cashed the check or answered any more calls. A few years ago, I entered the store for the first time since 1993 looking for a white summer cardigan, a search whose specificity would have given my mother immense satisfaction. Her clothes were, of course, long gone, but I did get a cardigan that I can wear (at least after COVID) over sleeveless dresses in Houston’s over- airconditioned restaurants. It’s not a great cardigan, and it was faintly yellow when I bought it. Channeling my mother, I soaked it in bluing, and rolled it up in a towel, patting it into shape once it was dry. It now hangs in my closet with other light cardigans in shades of blue, green, and grey; soft and washable, it violates neither my own principles of selection and self-presentation. Cared for according to its needs, it reminds me each day of that other closet different but perhaps not so different from my own.

I don’t think there are secrets in my closet. My own letters, full of what my own children might think of as such, are out in the open by my desk, handy for this blog. I confess to imagining what my sons will do with my clothing, what they make of the closet when the time comes. I think about Swedish “death cleaning,” but the closet is already kind of clean. There are many objects in our house that will puzzle them, about which they will have to make decisions. The closet should not, I hope, pose problems. My clothes, for all their meaning,  are just clothes—easy to wear, and easy to discard.