What I Wanted, What I Got

My mother recently confessed to me that, when I was a child, my paternal grandmother periodically sent me new clothes from a department store in New York City, outfits that I never saw. My mother regularly intercepted the packages, returned the items, and used the money to buy food for our family. So many decades after the fact, we both laughed. My mother had guessed correctly that, rather than feeling betrayed, I’d be amused to learn belatedly of yet another example of her resourcefulness—along with the plywood furniture she built for us, the inventive meals she made for us using government cheese, the cookware she acquired by saving up Green Stamps—in the years when she and my father were just barely getting by.

Not all my grandmother’s packages were intercepted, so I know that I would have wanted what she sent, would have revelled in the novelty of receiving matching items with the tags still on, perhaps from Danskin, her preferred brand, layered in tissue paper and giving off that special new-clothes smell (on account of formaldehyde, they now tell us). But the story of my mother exchanging those gifts for cash is itself special. Deprivations of various kinds were my sentimental education, or so I’ve come to believe. As a child, I almost never got any clothes I wanted. I took pleasure in clothes all the same. My relationship to them was built on yearning, on a sort of not-yet reverie that mere possession, simply having things, could never have offered me.

The clothes that my brother and I wore as children, growing up in Eugene, Oregon, were typically hand-me-downs or from Goodwill. The parents of an older girl named Sarah Summers—the very name still carries a shiver of excitement—gave me her old clothes from time to time, in washed, folded stacks that were permeated with a middle-class laundry fragrance, the smell of another world, better than my own. (We were hippies: weird soap, everything line-dried, dingy, stiff.) There was a pink hooded raincoat with a softly flocked lining that I cherished. It made me feel like “Sarah Summers,” a person of whom I strangely have no actual memory, except that she was my brother’s friend and later moved away. If my brother or I requested some specific garment that we could not find used—I remember him wanting a “disco shirt” for the junior-high dance—our mother would propose that she get the pattern and sew it. We sewed our own pajamas on her Singer Featherweight, and mine had one leg that was narrow and the other wide.

In 1976, when I was seven, I constantly wore a T-shirt that I had got at the Lane County Fair, from a booth where you could choose your own iron-on from those displayed (so many possibilities!), and the color of shirt you preferred. I chose an image of Farrah Fawcett, a famous photograph of her in a one-piece red bathing suit, on a kid-size yellow T-shirt. I think that what I loved most about that shirt was how the red of her bathing suit contrasted with the yellow of the T-shirt fabric, which was soft and thin. But, also, there was something about her posture that I liked. She was so contained. She had conformed her body to the dimensions of the photograph. Her hair was like a work of art. Maybe I didn’t think those things at the time. Perhaps I chose Farrah because she reflected what people admired in the seventies: feathered hair, big smiles full of white teeth, suntans. Our county fair, an annual late-summer event, was itself a pageant of glossy teen-age girls, mini-Farrahs in their tube tops and bell-bottoms, golden hair down their backs like palomino ponies.

I wore my Farrah T-shirt for a year, day in and day out, before someone, an adult, I don’t remember who, told me that it wasn’t “appropriate,” because of Farrah Fawcett’s visible nipple under the fabric of her swimsuit. I was suddenly ashamed; the joy of my shirt, poof, gone. Now it strikes me that what makes a child’s innocence so burningly real, so heart-pricking, is the way in which it’s rarely “pure,” and is more often a misinterpretation: I probably sensed that there was power in this Farrah image; I simply didn’t know that it was sexual power. I didn’t yet know about sex, or that I should someday try to figure out how to become a sex object, instead of wearing one on my shirt. My confusion was a kind of protective glory, if a temporary one.

Unlike Farrah, I was fair-skinned with auburn hair of an unusual shade that seemed incredibly unfortunate. My hair was thick, which my mother said was a desirable quality, but its body only accentuated the choppy and uneven look of the chin-length haircuts she insisted on and inexpertly provided in our kitchen. (She believed that my hair was so thick because she kept it short; never mind that hers was also thick, and allowed to be long.) Old ladies said that my hair color looked artificial and asked me, admiringly, or maybe teasingly, what henna I used. Other kids, whose opinions mattered most, were not impressed. I had freckles to go with my auburn hair, and I didn’t like my face on account of them. I would wander the aisles of Woolworth’s in downtown Eugene, studying women’s beauty products, and secretly bought a cream called Porcelana that advertised itself as effective at removing “sun freckles.” It didn’t work, but now it occurs to me that the cream’s promise to erase freckles was, at least unconsciously, construed as a promise to erase my face and give me a different one, perhaps more like Barbie’s. I had a Barbie Beauty Center, which was a giant Barbie “head,” whose neck was supported by a pink plastic tray for storing the makeup that came with her and could be applied to her face. The wavy blond tresses on the crown of her skull had the magical ability to grow longer when you tugged on them, and, if you tugged harder, to roll back into her skull, like the cord of a vacuum cleaner. I could never look like Barbie, whose features were those of an infant. But I could focus on her, practice on her, revere her as the godhead in my bedroom.

The popular girl at my elementary school—let’s call her Denise—was not blond like Barbie but pretty in a conventional manner I envied. She had brown hair, skin that tanned easily, and a confident personality. In a town of loggers, hippies, and students, Denise’s father was a doctor. Although her family was probably just comfortably middle class, they seemed, in contrast to the rest of us, fabulously and deliriously wealthy. Almost everyone at school was on the free-lunch program, as my brother and I were. Many kids lived in modest and identical units of university-subsidized student housing. Denise’s family was out on a foothill in a large, modern ranch house. Her mother, a housewife, dropped her off at school in a Mercedes.

Kids in Eugene had paper routes, or collected bottles and cans for the deposit refunds. The year I turned eight, I worked, through a school apprenticeship program, at a bakery. Like my brother, who two years later worked at a restaurant managed by a friend of our mother’s, I was compensated with food because paying us money would have been illegal. Denise got an allowance and seemingly whatever she asked for. She wore new jeans often. I still remember the brand: they were called Luv-its. I once asked her where she’d got her new Luv-its, which had red satin hearts sewn on the back pockets. “You can’t afford them,” she said. The thing about bullying is that the bully typically has no memory of it later, while the wounded party never forgets. Denise told other kids that there was nothing to eat at our house, if you went there to play after school. This was true, unless you were in the mood for bread with corn syrup slathered on it. She said that my brother and I didn’t bathe regularly. Also true, but hey, Denise, you know what? I still don’t like to get wet. An obsession with cleanliness was one of the things my proud mother relegated to middle-class anxiety. People who had nice stuff, full fridges, showered daily—that was common, which we were not.

My brother and I were generally allowed one new pair of shoes a year, purchased in late summer before school began—inexpensive sneakers, such as Jox by Thom McAn, or irregular samples of familiar brands from the discount-shoe outlet, pairs of Nikes or Adidases that had some factory defect. My brother could not make it an entire year without developing holes in the soles of his tennis shoes. When he complained of wet feet—this was Oregon, where it rained a lot—he was given a product called Shoe Goo and told to patch his shoes to make them last. He was not happy about getting Shoe Goo instead of shoes, which were always a source of friction at our house. That we grew out of them was treated almost like a kind of youthful defiance, obnoxious and inconsiderate. Wearing them out was even worse. A memory that I still, churlishly, can’t quite get over involves my desire for clogs the summer before fourth grade. It was the late seventies, and clogs were madly popular. Every girl in my elementary school wanted them. My mother found a lime-green pair at Goodwill and brought them home. I was terribly disappointed. Clogs were supposed to be earth-toned. Denise’s were the shiny rich brown of horse chestnuts, with a leather braid over the instep. Maybe we can try to dye these, my mother said. I abandoned them to our rotted back porch, where banana slugs roamed.

Later that year, after seeing the film “American Graffiti,” I decided that I wanted to be “fifties.” I rolled up my pants to simulate pedal pushers and wore them that way to school. “Why are your pants rolled up like that?” a girl asked me. I said it was fifties style. “No, it’s not,” she replied. Everyone made fun of me—this was the unpleasant spring of fourth grade, when Denise got a group of girls to pick on me as their extracurricular—but I continued to try to be fifties. My mother told me about “pin curls” as a fifties thing, and I used crisscrossed bobby pins to hold my wetted hair in place and slept like that. I was trying to get my hair to look like Candy Clark’s in “American Graffiti,” poofy and playful. The effect was disastrous, my hair crimped weirdly, with sections shooting out in different directions like the discordant notes of an orchestra tuning up. I later bought pink sponge rollers at Woolworth’s and slept in those, unconcerned about them pressing into my scalp because the discomfort would be worth it; the rollers themselves even looked fifties. The results were no better than before. I went to school with crazy hair. “You keep trying that even though it never works,” a member of the Denise gang said to me.

Our school play that year, just my luck, was “Bye Bye Birdie,” a musical about an Elvis-like singer who is drafted into the Army. My mother sewed me a ruffled skirt with a floral pattern, probably from fabric she’d scrounged up for free somewhere, and an acetate-and-voile “crinoline” to go under it. I finally felt fifties, even though I was given no lines in the play. I was just background and chorus. Denise, a talented singer and dancer, was a lead. At our dress rehearsal, the other girls said that only poodle skirts like the ones their mothers had sewn them were fifties, and that mine wasn’t right. I felt sad for my skirt, and for my mother, who had put so much effort into making it. But, by that time, I had learned the “Bye Bye Birdie” songs, and I didn’t think the play was so great, not like “American Graffiti,” which contained a world I would willingly seek out. I would find that good-looking hoodlum with the yellow Deuce Coupe, whose name was John, and who rolled his pack of cigarettes in his T-shirt sleeve. I would find a way to live in his reality, where he and people like him floated on attitude, with cars that had the power to back it up. In the meantime, I rolled a box of raisins from the school cafeteria into my T-shirt sleeve, as if they were Marlboro Reds. I played my cassette of the “American Graffiti” soundtrack over and over, especially the song “Runaway.” When Del Shannon sang in his tortured, smoky voice that he was “a-walkin’ in the rain,” I, too, was a-walkin’ in the rain. I was walking toward my future, toward my plan to become a moody teen-ager.

At the end of fourth grade, after several weeks of Denise and her gang following me around at school, imitating my requests that they leave me alone, I lunged at her. We tumbled into a fight, mostly scratching and pulling hair. We attended an alternative public school with a radical hippie pedagogy, where I was “tried by a jury of my peers,” and suspended for a week, because I’d taken the first swing. When I returned to school, something had burned away. Denise, with a fingernail-shaped gouge under one eye, approached me in the hall and was nice.

That summer, she and I went down to the Willamette River, where older kids hung out, and swam through the rapids under the bridge, something I was forbidden to do but did anyway. We pretended to smoke with safety matches, the long ones used for lighting a pilot, and then graduated to trying actual cigarettes, Kools, which I purchased from a machine in the Atrium shopping complex downtown; we took puffs without inhaling and decided they were gross. I was about to turn ten. Whenever the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” from the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, came on the radio, I was enraptured. I’d seen the movie with my brother. It was rated R, and so my mother, giving in to my brother’s pleading, had pretended to come with us, bought three tickets, but then left us to watch it by ourselves. There was a rape scene and a rumble scene, both of which terribly upset me, but still I wanted to be “more than a woman,” like in the song, or at least an almost-woman—anything but what I was, a mere kid. I owned a curling iron and feathered my hair. I wanted makeup, but wasn’t yet allowed to wear it. I clip-clopped around the house in my mother’s chipped old Dr. Scholl’s, thinking they sounded like high heels. I longed for real high heels and became obsessed with a pair I’d seen on display at Burch’s Shoes.

Burch’s, where Denise bought her clogs, was out at Valley River Center, an indoor mall on the outskirts of town. I told my mother that I’d picked out my back-to-school shoes for fifth grade, and, to my surprise, she agreed to go with me to look at them. My mother loathed the mall and everything it stood for and never went there. I went often, always alone, even at age nine. That was how life was for a child in the seventies, at least in Eugene. On weekends, I would pay my bus fare and ride out to Valley River Center to wander, gazing into shopwindows and browsing the racks at the department stores. There was a lunch counter with scalloped paper menus, where I ordered clam chowder and felt mature and independent. The shoes from Burch’s that I had come to covet on these excursions were Candie’s-brand slip-on sandals. They had a three-inch wooden heel. The upholstered foot bed and toe strap were of burgundy suède. That rich color, the soft texture of the suède, stirred in me all the promise of autumn, of a new school year, of a chance to have instead of to want—in other words, to finally be.

Those solitary hours I spent at Valley River Center, attempting to escape the waiting room of childhood by staring at lady mannequins with their magically arched feet and inhuman aplomb, perhaps explain why I have a special love for movie scenes in which women look at department-store displays. Barbara Loden in “Wanda” (197src), for instance, examining a stiff but smartly turned-out mannequin, with a look of both pathetic admiration—the character herself is a penniless drifter—and ironic distance: the mannequin projects poise and vitality but is unconvincingly lifelike, and Loden’s character knows it. In Kent Mackenzie’s film “The Exiles,” from 1961, Yvonne, a young Apache woman living in Los Angeles, wanders, pregnant, while her boyfriend drinks with his rockabilly pals. It’s night when she stops to gaze at the illuminated display of a dress shop downtown. As she studies a housewifely mannequin whose tiny waist seems grimly sadistic, she muses in voice-over about how she always wanted to leave the reservation, to go someplace where someone would make her “feel different, be happier.”

For our outing to the mall, my mother wore short shorts she had sewn for herself and a top she had woven on her loom, the top semi-see-through, her underarm and leg hair on display. With her slim figure and her long red hair, she probably looked amazing, but because I had already learned something about the status quo in the world outside my family, I assessed her distance from convention and was mortified. Only once had I seen her dress in a way that conformed to my sense of how she should look: she was going to the bank to try to get some kind of loan, and she wore a tight pencil skirt with nylons and heels, and her leather biker jacket, which was a petite size and fitted. That jacket, which had a red satin lining and a label from Sears, had been left at my aunt’s house in Oakland when some bikers came through. My mother looked so chic and sexy in it, with the tight skirt. I don’t know if she got the loan.

My shoes were still in the window at Burch’s, at the center of the display, with clogs around them on lower platforms, also-rans to my winner. When I pointed to the Candie’s, my mother was confused.

“Those? But they’re for a grown woman.”

I was dumbfounded. Not so much by her response as by my own foolishness. I’d convinced myself that, in saying yes to Valley River Center, my mother was saying yes to my dreams. But I was still in elementary school, and she was not going to buy me these high-heeled shoes.

My memory is that she didn’t humiliate me and, instead, argued against the shoes on practical terms: they’d be immediately trashed in the rainy season, my feet would hurt, and so forth. But the lesson I took was that childhood was going to continue at its interminably slow pace.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, in his book “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life,” says that he is struck by how often people in psychoanalytic treatment talk about experiences they have not had, “and how authoritatively, with what passion and conviction, they talk about what they have missed out on.” His book is a meditation on the gap between the lives we live and the ones we imagine for ourselves. “We are made to feel special,” he says, “then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.” We remain special, he goes on, “if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives.” I missed out on the Candie’s, but missing out is not necessarily a bad thing. Having everything we want would leave us nothing to desire, to hope for, to expect. We need both the reassuring delusion of what we imagine, and a reality that can’t deliver it. Life’s pleasures are, in part, pleasures we never partake in.

Although Phillips doesn’t apply the paradigm of missing out explicitly to our notions of beauty, or of style as the means to achieving it, reading his book convinced me that this daily habit of getting dressed, getting a new chance to be, or to appear, in some way that we long ago decided we should be, or deserved to be, or wanted to be, allows us to live a fruitful double life, both the one that never happens and the one that always does. It’s a way to practice for reality and also reality itself, a dress rehearsal and the performance.

Phillips goes on to describe a patient of his, a child who longed to be bigger, and who believed, as I did, “that being an adult is the solution to being a child.” In fifth grade, I did get a kid’s version of high heels, sandals with a clunky wood platform of an inch or two, a brand called Bare Traps, which dug into my feet and made them bleed, though that did not deter me from wearing them.

That year, I had a crush on my brother’s friend whom I’ll call Sandy, who had dark feathered hair that fell in waves to his shoulders, and rode around town on his bicycle, shirtless in white painter’s overalls. He was four years older, and the first kid I knew to sport hickeys on his neck. Once, I came home after school and went into my room to do a headstand, which was my daily home-from-school ritual. Such habits structured my inner reality in a superstitious manner: I had to do a headstand when I got home. That day, when I lowered myself to the floor and looked up, I saw that Sandy was lying on my bed, propped on one elbow. “Well, hello,” he said, as if greeting a lover. He’d decided to play a trick on me, probably thought it was funny that a ten-year-old had a crush on him. I realized that my feelings were no more likely to be reciprocated than those I might have for a movie star on a poster.

When I saw the movie “Little Darlings,” I was primed to worship Matt Dillon’s character, because he reminded me of Sandy. He and his love interest in the film (played by Kristy McNichol) are two streetwise beauties in jeans and jean jackets, even if McNichol’s character is secretly not as tough as she claims. I wanted McNichol’s tomboy style. By that time, my family had moved to San Francisco, where kids dressed in work pants and thermal shirts, with “derby” jackets that had a seam around the shoulders and a paisley-print lining. The most striking girl in our neighborhood, whose name was Damie, wore black Ben Davis jeans with a matching black vest and had a carabiner with a litter of keys on it dangling from her belt loop. I asked my mom for black Dickie’s chinos. I learned to pilfer rock T-shirts from the barrel by the front door of the Record Factory. One weekend, a girl I’d met in my neighborhood invited me to “get ready” at her house. We were eleven and going to a kegger. I was wearing the black cotton Mary Jane-style slippers we called “Chinese shoes,” which cost a couple of dollars and had buckles that instantly broke and had to be replaced with safety pins. It was better to be in tennies, for running from the cops. “Try these,” the girl said, handing me a pair of nicely worn-in white Converse high-tops that she’d pulled from her closet. I put them on and stood before her full-length mirror.

“Wow,” she said, “you look so much more . . . into life.”

To feel into life and to look it: it’s what you want when you’re young, the real solution to the problem of being a child, a way to access the promise of experience. The into-life-ness of adolescence meant not having to wait any longer. My dream of becoming a woman was exchanged for a different fantasy, a kind of eternal world of teen-agers, who had nothing but contempt for adults. If the girls in San Francisco wore heels, they chose platform heels with a flat sole, such as those made by Cherokee, which Damie wore with striped athletic socks. If girls carried a purse, they hid a Buck knife inside it. In their tight satin pants, they hocked loogies, flicked cigarette butts. Every feminine accoutrement and sexualizing modality had to be undermined by an attempt at toughness, a practice that seems, from this distance, to have been a way of making the unsustainable world of youth feel endless. The focus was on now, on later today, or this weekend. It was never next year, my future, my life to come.

The Converse high-tops were so transporting that I was reluctant to give them back to the girl I’d borrowed them from. When she stopped by our building unannounced, to try to retrieve them, and hollered up, I ducked out of view, under the window ledge. It seems that I’ve had this habit my whole life. When I find a garment that has the magic, that makes me the person I aspire to be, I cling and refuse to let go. In my early twenties, I became attached to a thin, worn-out T-shirt that said “Joy Division” on it in wonky finger paint. My friend Deirdre had made it for herself at camp as a teen-ager. I borrowed it and never gave it back, wore it from roughly 1991 until 2srcsrc8, when it finally disintegrated. By that time, it had faded from black to a waxy lavender color. Deirdre, meanwhile, ended up with my mother’s Sears biker jacket, which I gave to her, but later wished I’d kept even though I would wear a biker jacket now only if I were actually on a motorcycle, and I no longer ride. Biker jackets are meant to imply an edge that the wearer seldom has, because the wearer is anybody who buys one. The other night, I was at an avant-garde music performance whose audience was filled with people from CalArts, where the biker jacket is still au courant. The man next to me kept his on for the entire program, and each time he moved it squeaked loudly, making the biker jacket not just a pose but a theatrical disturbance.

And yet I did wear a leather jacket all through middle school, and it didn’t feel corny at all. It wasn’t a biker jacket but a blazer, dark purple-brown, in size extra small, with daintily puffed shoulders. It hangs now in the closet of my childhood bedroom, dotted with mold from the dampness of the Sunset District of San Francisco, saved by my mother as an archival garment in the museum of my childhood. I got it on Canal Street in the summer of 198src, after sixth grade, while staying with a friend from Eugene who had moved to New York City with her mom. They lived on Mulberry Street, in Little Italy. My grandmother, the one who sent the department-store clothes, had given me thirty dollars to buy a dress to wear to a dance performance I was to attend with her at Lincoln Center. I went to Canal Street and spent the money on the leather jacket and then wore it to the performance. My grandmother was upset. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about dance, and, more significantly, I felt aligned with myself in that tough little jacket, and this was a million times better than dressing up.

I still search for that feeling of alignment in my clothes, a sensation of “rightness” between inner life and outer. Even at home alone, even in my pajamas, I pursue that feeling. For my wedding day, in 2srcsrc7, I bought a fancy dress but changed my mind the morning we were set to go to City Hall and put on the same old elastic-waist skirt I’d been wearing every day for a month. (I was five months pregnant, and the skirt was comfortable on my belly.) Dressing up, for me, should never require me to leave my zone of “rightness.” Every day is a new chance to accurately fix the coördinates of my appearance in clothes, to make tiny adjustments, as if focussing a lens. Every day is the day I put on the costume that I have spent my entire life cultivating.

I did eventually return the Converse high-tops, and moved on to wanting Wallabees-style suède shoes—not Clarks but a cheaper brand that could be purchased at a work-wear outlet called GET on San Francisco’s Sloat Boulevard. My mother took me, and, when I showed her the shoes I’d picked out, she said they looked like what hoodlums wore. By that point, I was a hoodlum, but this was not the angle I pushed. I don’t recall if I succeeded in getting those shoes. The irony is that now I wear them every day, in the more expensive version, actual Clarks.

By the time I got to high school, I shoplifted most of my clothes. Not for the thrill but to get what I felt I needed, in order to dress the way I wanted to. In Fiorucci or Guess jeans, in clothes made by Esprit. There were awkward years, of teased hair, frosted lipstick, a halfheartedly New Wave phase, a failed attempt to look like Madonna in the “Borderline” video. When I was in college, at U.C. Berkeley, there was an interim when I tried to look preppy, in white Keds and polo shirts, in order to blend in, in a world where no one was dressed to run from the cops, where people were going to football games and fraternity parties. The preppy phase was short-lived, and then I was dyeing my hair purple and wearing black. By the time I graduated from Berkeley, I was back in San Francisco, and dressed to tend bar, to be on display, in silver leggings or vintage tuxedo pants with Doc Martens, a thrifted waistcoat over a lace bra.

You study the world when you’re young, the same way I studied window displays. You concentrate on what you think you want, and, eventually, you refine this want to a style, your taste. This process takes time. The style I seem to have arrived at in adulthood, and to have maintained for the past thirty years, is some fictionalized version of who I thought I was, or hoped to be, at thirteen or fourteen. It’s a system of parts that can be reassembled, but, ideally, not replicated by anyone else.

When my Clarks wear out, I order new ones, identical to the ones I’m replacing. I wear Levis, the same pair day after day after day, for years on end. I wear a denim shirt, always the same one. Under it, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt handed down from my teen-age son, who outgrew it. Or, lately, a vintage yellow T-shirt that says “Women miners can dig it too.” At thirteen, I aimed for a blend of Kristy McNichol and Matt Dillon as they looked in “Little Darlings.” On some level, I believe I’m achieving that now, at the age of fifty-six, having completed my reverse adolescence, which others call menopause. I’m a tomboy again. I’m dressed for the kegger that hasn’t happened yet. Our nostalgia, after all, is for some version of the past that did not occur. If I dress up, I wear a suit. If the occasion is formal, I wear a tuxedo. I might choose heels, but never if they rob me of my alignment. I’m a woman, and more than, in the sense that I’ve finished the work of distilling my gender, my image, in an attempt to recognize myself. I’m free of all that, and finally, simply, into life.

Children want to change, as Adam Phillips asserts, but adults want to stay the same. I have no regrets about my eagerness to flee childhood in order to get to the future. If I had loved myself as I was, I might not be who I am. This is the cunning of reason. We long to change and eventually do. Who is to say that the longing wasn’t the most purposeful agent of that change? It’s the things I wanted and never got, the way I focussed in an almost religious manner on idealized scenes, that prove to me now that I really did have a childhood. Childhood is a strange and slightly melancholy dream from which you finally awake. You’re there. An adult. You’ve made it. ♦