2004-05-21 - 12:48 a.m.
Writing course, week four - I'm still debating whether I want to post week three. I'm not totally happy with the ending on this, and the bits about my Nana probably don't make sense if you haven't read last week's... the word limit in this class is killing me. But parts of this I like...
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I don't know where the first of the dress-up clothes came from – they'd been in my closet for as long as I could remember. All I knew was that I loved them with unreasoning passion - they seemed magical to me, as though they held the key to other worlds, summing up entire imagined lives. Every new addition to the collection brought a new world with it.
My Nana (who knew something about dress-up herself) donated a leopard-print half-slip and high-heeled shoes that transported to the world of adult mystery and sophistication that I had seen in the black and white detective films my Dad used to watch, full of women with sleek rolled hair and dramatic lipstick. My Auntie Jean brought me back a blue velvet dirndl from Geneva, with bells and embroidered flowers on the yoke, and I joined Heidi, herding our cats through the alpine fields of the living room.
Great-aunt Min passed along some long white lace-trimmed slips, which my mother yelled at me for wearing out of the house, but I couldn't resist them – they spoke to me of aristocratic, menaced heroines, and I would wear them under my dress to the park, then discard my own dress and spend hours fleeing from imagined pursuers. When the role of heroine grew stale, a tweed cap and suspenders from my Dad turned me into Zachariah the shoe-shine boy, with a secret lair in the alleyway out back.
Sometimes people didn't even realise they were adding to the collection. My Gram was happy to have one granddaughter who’d wear the long cotton dresses she liked to see on little girls, but little did she know that when I put them on our house was suddenly on the prairie and the shawl I borrowed was necessary protection against bitter pioneer winds.
"I stopped fighting with Jessica about her clothes back in kindergarten," I overheard my mother saying to the mother of one of my friends. "I decided that I was not going to debate a five-year old on fashion."
My mother was pretty in a way I knew even then that I wasn't, with large dark long-lashed eyes and an aquiline nose, and I couldn't understand why she insisted on wearing the boring, utilitarian clothes that she did. But this was the difficulty with dress-up – other people didn't seem to get it. I had a couple of friends who would play, but they were silly about it, capering around in mismatched nonsense get-ups, wearing Aunt Min's old wigs like hats. They didn't understand the seriousness of this game.
As for the kids at school… it hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn't understand the language of my costumes, or that perhaps the costumes were better left at home.
Under the influence of Enid Blyton's boarding school stories, I begged my Gram to bring me back a grey flannel school tunic from England. When she finally gave in, I carefully assembled the rest of the uniform – a white shirt, black clip-on tie from my dad's closet, black cotton chinese slippers that were as close to the shoes in the pictures as I could get. Then I wore it to my public school.
"Who do you think you are?" hissed one of the grade six boys in the hallway, and cuffed me on the back of the head, leaving me too astonished to even be angry.
You'd think I would have learned, if not from the tunic then from the episodes of the tap shoes and the harem pants. But the problem was that none of my costumes seemed unreasonable to me in my bedroom at home - there was some sort of terrible transformation that took place between my mirror and the door to the school. I knew, in my costumes, that I wasn't really a pioneer or princess, that my 1970s lowrise box of a school wasn't Mallory Towers School for Girls. I didn't expect the other kids to literally believe in the characters that I was representing. But I didn't see why you wouldn't invoke other, more exciting worlds whenever you could, carry around those other lives with you.
"You're so like your Grandmother," my father would say to me as I exulted over some new find, "so creative". I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I loved my Nana and her sewing room, from which such wonders emerged, but I didn't want to get depressed and take pills and have other adults talk about me in the kind of hushed tones that children weren't supposed to hear.
So I made some effort to do what the other kids seemed to want me to do, to try and dress more like they did. But that felt to me as much like a costume as any of the others did.
