Her Bad Mother is wearing 1940's satin pajamas right now. Really.
I've always loved old clothes. Old things in general, really. When I was very small, and for a very long time after, when I was no longer quite so small, I would spend hours in an attic room in my grandparents' house, a room that used to be my mother's, but which came to serve as a repository of all my grandmother's more glittery treasures: endless boxes of costume jewellry and hats and old dresses and robes and the occasional stray piece of hard candy, invariably scooped up by my little sister for exploratory sucking. My grandmother herself was, to my mind, dazzlingly fashionable, in her red lipstick and her turbans and her wide-cut trousers. She looked like every heroine on every old black-and-white movie that we watched on her ancient television on Sunday afternoons, right down to the scotch-on-the-rocks rattling in the glass in her hand. She loved glamor, my grandmother, and I loved it with her.
When I became to old to play around in her attic of treasures - when, indeed, she died and my grandfather sold the house and got rid of her things, to my eternal dismay - I began assembling my own collection. Goodwill, Salvation Army, Value Village - these became my attics, to be rummaged through for treasure, and rummage I did. By the time I was in my early twenties I had a vast collection of vintage clothing and accessories - snakeskin stilettos from the fifties, an Yves Saint Laurent pea coat from the sixties, ultrasuede Halston from the seventies, polka-dotted Versace from the eighties, and all variety of treasures from across the decades (the perfect faded Flintstones pajama top featuring Pebbles and Bam-Bam: timeless) - that I delighted in and
which I dedicated, in secret, to my grandmother.
Treasures from that collection have come and gone - to the moths, to careless movers, to the hazards of a hard night drinking Jagermeister at somebody's wedding - but I still have most of those clothes, tucked away in storage, preserved for...? What? My daughter, perhaps, if such things become of interest to her. Or perhaps just for the sake of collection. I'm a magpie when it comes to clothes and other vintage arcana - I collect and I keep, never ever discarding - both because I love those things for their beauty and because I fear (a hangover from the loss of my grandmother's treasures, no doubt) missing out on or losing something that should be treasured.
Something like my grandmother's wedding dress, which was kept in that attic and which I was never allowed to play with, for obvious reasons. My grandmother didn't have a happy marriage, but she was fiercely proud of that dress, which was silk, her first real dress, her first grown-up dress, a grown-up dress for a bride of eighteen. And so it, unlike her other dresses, her furs, her jewelry, was off-limits for play. It was kept, sealed, in a musty old box that she never dared open; I could only imagine it, as I trailed my candy-sticky fingers over the edges of that box, wishing that I could touch it, just once. My imagination was fueled by the one picture that she kept from her wedding - a picture of her, alone, standing the garden of the house that she and her husband, my grandfather, would raise their family in. Wearing that dress, a vision in ivory silk, a starlet for one day.
I miss that dress, even though I never once touched its hem. And I think that, perhaps, all of my rummaging habits can be traced back to that dress - that elusive garment that embodied, for my grandmother, a moment of glamor in an otherwise pedestrian life and that came to represent, for me, the power of a swath of fabric (and, indeed, the power of a little bit of rhinestone/Bakelite/vintage anything) to transport. Magic.
