| Jun. 11th, 2007 @ 05:49 pm Clothed In Memories |
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My mother is an only child. My father only had one sibling-- my Aunt Dot.
Her longstanding, stable career as a legal secretary and her devoted care of her invalid mother until the latter's death belied her eccentricity. One day she would be offering to take one of us to Europe on vacation, and the next she would revise her will to leave all her property to her two cats (there were always two cats; it was her ideal cat number). She had been engaged twice and actually married once (in an Edwardian lace gown, no less!), but ultimately discarded each of the men in her life in favor of her own solitude. She ended up leading around a meek boyfriend twenty-five years her junior.
Her apartment contained an entire wall of vinyl albums-- operas, Broadway shows, symphonies, and dance tunes. Her bookshelves were likewise packed, most memorably with fine art books, historical romances, mysteries, and Chinese poetry. In one corner was a display cabinet housing the Lenox "Enchanted Princesses" porcelain figurine collection. Hanging over the arched doorway to her kitchen was a stained-glass rendering of a Mediaeval unicorn tapestry. And in front of the sliding glass doors to the balcony, there was the giant stuffed bear. Her favorite cat of all time, a Russian Blue the size of an ocelot who lived to be about twenty-one, was named Smokey Bear, and one Christmas she brought the stuffed animal home for him. I used to play on it and hug it, and it smelled smoky, like its namesake, though the aroma was due to my aunt's two-pack-a-day habit. Over the course of her early schooling she had been skipped forward a couple of grades, and she started smoking at fourteen, so her peers (the sixteen-year-old fast crowd) wouldn't call her a baby. This was positively the only example I had ever heard of Dot following a crowd instead of doing her own thing.
She was a flamboyant woman, tiny of body and titanic of presence, a redheaded beauty who had charmed ambassadors into submission, a member of the Opera Society, a museum supporter, a stunning intelligence, a quick temper, and a dedicated ballroom dancer. It was not too uncommon for her to dance all night, change clothes, and then go to work. Once, presumably running late, she wore a dancing dress to work. The supervising attorney sent her home to change, but not before she tried to argue the appropriateness of her sleeveless black suede, low-cut, slit-legged, fringed evening dress for the office. "This is a Lillie Ruben original!" she informed him. I smile and chuckle every time I think of it.
In fact, she had been out dancing the night before she died. she had come home in the early a.m., and evidence has it that she ran some errands afterward but didn't even get all her groceries put up before collapsing.
The scene was grim-- apparently she had struggled around the apartment, possibly trying to get up or get to a phone. A neighbor called 911 after she failed to appear at work or answer her door the following day.
My brother and mother were the executors of her estate, and it turned out she was deeply in debt, having lived many of her extravagances on her credit cards. Anything that wasn't specifically willed to individuals was sold to pay them off. A few things of hers I have now. The Lenox figurines housed in their display case now stand in a corner of my studio. Her music box collection stands in a bookcase opposite them. I wore her platinum dinner ring on my pinky until my hands outswelled the tiny band. and the Lillie Ruben originals? She willed those... to my brother.
Being a nice guy, he gave me my pick of them before he sold them. Her closet positively scintillated. There were spectacular beaded gowns, silk dancing dresses, sequins, taffeta, satin, and of course, the sexy black suede number that got banned from the office floor. Though she was several inches shorter than me, and several cup sizes larger, most of them fit me, so I picked a few very special pieces before giving my brother the nod to cart the rest away.
I had to get rid of every size 4 in my closet after I realized I would never see those measurements again, Miss Scarlett. Motherhood has added two extra inches to my form from shoulder-level all the way down to my mid-thighs. I painstakingly culled every dress in which I had spent many happy hours dancing with naught but a rueful glance backward. But somehow it never occurred to me that those magical dresses which had belonged to Aunt Dot would be likewise affected.
Until today.
I tried on the "mermaid dress," aqua silk with silver and white waterfalls of beads cascading from sleeves and hem. Couldn't zip it. Couldn't even pull it over my hips. The golden gown I wore to Josh R.'s wedding-- I could barely zip it, it might be salvageable! The gorgeous red dance dress with diaphanous silk layers and crystal-bedecked crescent-moon-shaped clasps-- maddeningly close, but unzippable, even with all the give in the fabric! The luscious forest green beaded gown with the silk lining-- probably not. The purple woolen sheath with the huge rhinestone accent buttons-- heartbreakingly moth-eaten.
These gowns face an uncertain future with me. I will never again fit into most of them, and I doubt I could convincingly alter them. I cringe even to think of cutting them, or of disturbing a single seam! I certainly don't have the money to take them to Lillie Ruben and ask them to do what they can for me-- and even if I did, there are so many more things around the house that need fixing, I'm sure my own penny-pinchitude would never allow me the extravagance. I suddenly saw these gown as a luxury to which I could never return, much as my Aunt might have longed to return to the luxuries of her Old Money childhood, though it plunged her into debt. No, I cut up my credit cards long ago, and I won't take that glamorous bait.
But for now, at least, to hell with practicality; though they be consigned to the dark recesses of my tiny closets, I'm keeping the lot of them.
Especially that little black suede number. |
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