FASHION TIPS LEARNED AT MOTHER'S KNEE AND OTHER JOINTS

We have this dear photo of ourselves as small girls. It’s taken at Christmas. Pat and I are posed together with our new matching dolls. It’s actually a professional photograph and it shows me curled into my sister’s shoulder, the Christmas tree gleaming in the background and the reflection of the bubble lights glowing on the polished hardwood floor. The dolls were identical, that was important, with a hard wooden composite of some sort for the head, eyes that closed when you lay them down, fabric bodies stuffed with whatever. Pat would probably know. They also had the same composite for hands and feet. Pat’s doll was dressed in blue and mine in pink. The bodies were soft-ish, cuddle-able, and the head could deliver you quite a crack when connected with yours by a roundhouse swing.

Pat was probably about seven, because I was a definite pudgy two. It’s actually quite a cute photo but it makes me wonder when Mom and Dad actually gave up forcing girly things on Pat. Not yet, anyway. I’m sure that was the last doll that Pat ever had.  I wish I’d been a fly on the wall as the parents came to realize that Pat not only listened to her own drummer, she was conducting the whole band, writing the music, organizing the choreography, booking the tours, and taking care of the financials.

It must have become apparent to Mom and Dad, either one day finally, or gradually over time, that Pat wasn’t textbook. Pat and I were cut from different cloth. I don’t recall that we were ever dressed alike, but it soon became apparent that trying to be fair with the Christmas, birthday, etc. gifts would mean that equal, is different. The dolls just mentioned, for example, led very different lives. Mine was cherished, bathed, fed, cuddled, and loved to a death that finally arrived, sadly, many years later.  Pat’s made it to the third quarter of a football game she played with the kids in the neighbourhood and had to be replaced in favour of something slightly more football shaped. 

I can’t imagine what Mom and Dad might have been thinking when they got me and Michelle dolls for Christmas one year.  There we sit, in front of a Christmas tree, holding our dolls, my hair braided and tightly secured to the top of my head making any facial movement painful.

I think, and my memory is admittedly hazy on this point, they were Shirley Temple dolls. What I do remember is that Shirley somehow was rendered unfit for cuddling after a long incomplete forward pass. Well, as long as a 7 year old could toss it to be sure. Shirley had wonderful, long, blond hair, and like her iconic successor, Barbie, she was intended to be a model for all young girls. She was cute, clever, well behaved, and her hair was always in place with long ringlets that probably happened naturally.

As different as Pat and I were (are) I was never aware that either one of us was preferred or favoured over the other. To their eternal credit the parents bent over backwards to be sure that neither of us was treated with any advantage over the other, well no more than Nature had meted out already. When they finally got the measure of Pat they adjusted as well as they could. 

Mother dressed us both in plain and practical girl wear. I was definitely a patent leather Mary Janes type of little girl, but she insisted on brown oxfords. My heart pined. I yearned for long white stockings, at least. I wore brown. Mother was not one to dress herself in frills and furbelows either, but she did like fashion, fashion as defined by good quality in tailoring and fabric.  Timeless was the watch word. In those days, when it made economic sense, she sewed our clothes. Well, she sewed Pat’s and mine. Hers, I remember, came from the sale racks at better stores. They had to be bargain priced though.

Well, I was cute (sort of), clever, well behaved (for short periods of time) but hair was always a problem. Girls were expected to have long hair, of course, but as Mother never failed to remind me, my hair was thin and tangled easily. Thin, thin thin!- which meant that it could never be left free to fly in the breeze. Much too disorderly. The result was either that it was braided (with accompanying raps on the head from the hairbrush when I squirmed during the daily ordeal of braiding) or else was subjected to a home perm.

The sharp odour of the Toni Home Permanent, and the blessed relief of the neutralizing lotion are with me still. Hair was rolled onto smallish plastic curlers, with a thin sheet of tissue paper between the hair and the plastic curler. This rolling was seldom accomplished in one easy motion and occasioned much muttering, knocks on the noggin, and imminent threats.  The hair would come off the roller; the little tissue papers would fall on the floor, I would drop the next roller I was supposed to be passing to Mother.  Making me hand Mother the rollers was akin to the Inquisitors asking their victims to hand them the thumb screws.

After the entire head was wrapped in curlers of different sizes and colours, a toxic substance of god only knows what was poured all over your head (although I believe one was supposed to just dampen each prospective curl). After a calculated amount of time, the neutralizing formula was applied, and shazaam! Beautiful, naturally curly hair.  That, at least, was the theory. Well, after my perm we all knew which twin had the Toni. My hair was wound as tight as a Persian Lamb coat. But at least its thin strands no longer hung down limply or fluttered in the breeze. 

There were rules to female fashion that were gospel and have held up well for me over the years. Mother made a few mis-judgements like oh-don’t-buy-the-red-dear-you’ll-get-so-tired-of-red rule. But for the most part her judgement was sound. I loved the colour red. Still do.  Mother hated red because she was red-haired and never wore anything but the “earth tones”.  But she never realized her dislike of red came from the simple fact that it just didn’t suit her. Some of us, those of the not-red-hair position, after we left home, looked rather fetching in reds. However, reds, and all bright colours were anathema. Thou shalt nots.  And so we learned fourteen of the different words for beige from ecru, to bone, to oyster, because you-can’t-go-wrong-with-the-classics.

I would have loved ruffles and bows. And rhinestones! M-m-m-m.  The family of four of us went to the movies every Friday night in those days, very much before television. I eagerly awaited being a grown-up and wearing what I saw at the movies. Strapless evening gowns with sequined bodices, and yards-wide tulle skirts, silk evening wraps, and long, long white gloves up to my arm pits. That’s what I saw grown-up women wear and I could hardly wait! It never crossed my mind to wonder why Mother didn’t have a pair.

Mother had very strong preferences about what I should wear. Long before house parties were held to help people find their season and appropriate colour, Mother had determined that I looked best in brown, rusts and yellows. And the appropriate style? Tailored. Always tailored – neat, orderly. As near as I could figure out, tailored meant straight lines, dark colours, and no ruffles or bows.  Think Joan Crawford in a suit with the shoulder pads that made her look like a linebacker with the Chicago Bears.

Most of my clothes were home made, so I didn’t have much voice, even if I had wanted input, into what was made. This was partly due to economic reasons, and partly due to a sense of obligation. This is what Mothers were supposed to do if they were good mothers.  Somehow, though, I had acquired a white blouse with large sleeves which I thought made me look like Errol Flynn, swinging down from the ship’s deck, dagger between his teeth, or Zorro with his sword emblazoning a huge Z whenever he encountered villainy.  The only available villain, however, was Michelle, so mostly I stuck my rubber sword into her.

One of the classics Pat and I both wore was a pair of woollen “ski pants”. It was a nerve calling them ski pants.  They were very heavy because of the felted wool, and very broad in construction which could only have hampered any aerodynamism as actual ski pants, but no one on this continent went skiing anyway in those days. However, it did get as cold here as in Switzerland, I suppose, and so “ski pants” they were. They were a dark buffalo brown. I felt like a buffalo in them. They chaffed my legs, and I also walked like a buffalo. They had elastics to slip under the feet in case you went so fast there was a likelihood of them being whipped off by the breeze.

They weren’t new when they came to our house. With that quality, it would have been optimistic to think they were only second-hand.  Anyway, Pat wore them a few years, and following that I wore them for three years. For one year I was almost growing into them, for the second year they were nearly a fit, and by the third year we could probably get one more winter out of them, and then they were “ready for the farm.” The relatives in Saskatchewan were the next port-of-call for all pass-me-ons.

The ski pants were a classic. They would never wear out. Never. I wonder who’s wearing them now. I sometimes watch documentaries on the nature channels, and I notice even primitive tribes wearing T-shirts with American advertising, English words so strange to see on the Serengeti.  I’m told that some of the T-shirts that end up in third world countries are those of teams that didn’t make it to finals, and there wasn’t enough time to cancel the order for the championship shirts. Nobody here wants a shirt with Toronto Grey Cup 2008, so send them off to where they don’t care who made it to the playoffs. What’s a playoff? What’s a Grey Cup? Apparently, a great deal of what even the charity shops don’t want is sent “overseas”. It seems to me that our international version of “the farm” is to send this clothing over there, and I wonder if we’re doing them a favour really, or just cleaning our collective house. However, as I surmise, I’m keeping a watch to see if some old shaman or goat herder is wearing some excellent brown wool trousers.

The hair battles continued until the summer of ninth grade. It was the summer of a white sports coat and a red carnation. Of white bucks. Of Elvis Presley and his sanitized counterpart, Pat Boone. All the boys and some girls (those with thin hair, I suspect) wore some version of a duck tail cut. My crowd did not refer to it as a DA cut among ourselves, and certainly never to our parents.  I did, however, want to get one. It seemed like the perfect answer – no muss, no fuss – just a little dab of Brylcreem would do it! I probably mentioned my admiration for this 50’s fashion statement but Dad was unusually adamant. I was not to get my hair cut that way.

Working on the principle that it was easier to get forgiveness than permission, I took myself over to a local hairdresser’s establishment, and got a duck tail. I thought it was terrific. Mother was not happy but I suspect secretly happy about one less battle to fight and merely said, “Wait until your Father gets home”. Dad was not happy, but I don’t remember there being any supplemental discipline. Guess he figured that what had been done couldn’t be undone. A lesson in pragmatism that I carry with me to this very day.

I was a little disappointed perhaps that the roof didn’t fall in as I expected when Pat went beyond “back talk” to actual defiance. She’d gone out and deliberately got her hair cut in a duck tail, something she’d clearly been forbidden to do. I don’t know about Pat but I waited in a frenzy of worry until Dad got home. Oh, BIG trouble, and I didn’t like even small trouble. And then, I couldn’t believe how it could all blow over so easily. But it didn’t even tempt me to push boundaries. I learned nothing from it. My Dad just wasn’t feeling well that day I surmised. He lived with a “heart condition.” We all knew he could have a heart attack at any minute. We just didn’t know which minute it would be. For me, it was always pending.  Just not that day.

Some summers Pat would get to go to the farm and stay there with my Grandmother, Aunt, Uncle and cousins. She always came home though. I know she was there riding horses, and... well, I don’t know what all went on. I wasn’t there, but I know she was having all the fun. And I know she was making quite a name for herself. Everybody knew Pat, even though the farm is in the middle of nowhere. She would come home dropping neighbours’ names like they were all old friends. 

A particular birthday stands out for me. It came after the summer of one of Pat’s solo adventures. For my sixth birthday that year she gave me a red (Red!) plaid shoulder purse. She had purchased it at the tiny general store in the village near my grandmother’s farm while she was there. I’d been in that little store and was surprised they carried such a delight among the staples and supplies. Maybe they’d gone to one of the larger towns nearby, but that didn’t bear thinking about if she got to ride in the truck flying over the dirt roads at speeds that left your stomach behind on the hills and dips. No, I wouldn’t think that.

My first purse! Oh heaven! It was the perfect choice for a six year old girl who had never had a red accessory in her entire life, or any accessory for that matter. Even then I marvelled at how un-like Pat it was to firstly, buy me a present, and secondly, choose something for me that was so very girly. Maybe she was just giving up on making me see the sense of more exciting choices.  

I see the hand of my grandmother in this gift, now that I have granddaughters of my own. I always buy in multiples so no one is left out, and I now see that the red purse on the store shelf didn’t scream my name to Pat, at all. It wasn’t even likely that she paid for it, or even knew she was giving it to me for my birthday, or even that I was going to have a birthday. Nonetheless, I loved the purse, and for a time I thought Pat and I spoke the same language. That was nice.

By the time I started high school in tenth grade, Mother had pretty well capitulated in the wardrobe battle. She didn’t tell me what to wear and I didn’t consult her. Seemed to work for both of us.

The Nuns of St. Mary’s Girls’ School, however, were another matter entirely. Girls were hauled into the principal’s office for having sweaters too tight, bras too pointed, and lipstick too red. In retrospect it seems particularly ironic that women who walked about swathed in black serge would appoint themselves as fashion doyennes. For those women, though, fashion and morality were inextricably linked. Fashion equalled immorality – it was just that simple.  This was a Catholic School after all!