“The remembrance of a childhood landscape is not mere nostalgia for what is lost and beyond my reach. It does not consist of longing to be back there, in the present; or of longing to be a child once more; or of wishing the world would not change. Rather it is an opportunity to be in touch again with the intensity of beginnings,” Rebecca Mead writes in My Life in Middlemarch. “…our earliest experiences provide the ground upon which our characters are built, and that some part of our character grows from the brilliant, scintillating, intense capacity for emotion that a child experiences. There is nothing particularly special about the landscape of our youth,…except for the fact that it is where we learned to be human.”
Tara, Celena, and I were shopping for everything and nothing one summer weekend in Chicago when, in one store, Celena spotted a piece of clothing that I can only describe as part robe, part blazer, and maybe part shrug. It was colorful, too. Like, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors colorful with stripes and flowers and maybe triangles but I can’t say for sure. It gave me pause. Celena loved it.
“Oh,” she said, running her hands down the sleeve/wing. “Should I get it?” She asked the question as if this was the one thing that she’d been waiting for her entire life.
I was baffled, and so I said, “Yeah. You should totally get that,” because if anyone was going to make an article of fashion like this work, it was going to be Celena. I hoped she’d buy it just to see what she’d do with it.
“What would I wear it with?” she inquired, still holding the garment, but looking at me.
I had no idea what to tell her. It would never occur to me to put that thing on myself, but Celena saw something in it and because of that, I wanted to see something, too.
“If you like it,” I said, “then you’ll find a way to wear it.”
//
Later, we found a store that none of us had heard of but looked pretty from the sidewalk and also was having a sale, so we went in.
I spotted a beige dress and a white romper with black polka dots. I picked each up off their racks and put them back. I hadn’t worn a romper since 1994, and I was certain that window had closed. The dress, I assumed, was too tight. I walked away and walked back. I circled the store looking for something else, but kept coming back to the romper and the dress that was the color of damp sand after it rained.
Turned out, the romper was the most comfortable thing I’ve ever put on. I didn’t want to take it off but I was also concerned I looked 17, or I was trying to look 17, or I was confused about how old I was in the first place.
I stepped out of the dressing room to show Celena and Tara who, when they saw me, might’ve been wondering the same thing I was wondering when Celena fell hard for the robe, blazer, shrug, and I’m wondering now whether it’s not that we are manipulating or patronizing each other when we say, “You should totally get that,” rather, it’s that we see the person in the clothes we’d never consider and how happy and perhaps full of potential she feels, and maybe it’s the person that transforms the clothes, and not the other way around.
“Plus,” I said, “there’s pockets!” I shoved my hands in each pocket to show Celena and Tara.
“Pockets,” they said in unison, and they said it like the romper had brought us flowers on our first anniversary – our romperversary.
“I’m just not sure,” I said, turning around and surveying myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to take it off, afraid I’d lose my nerve once it was back on the hanger – what’s left of the 17 year old kept in a store whose name I’d forgotten.
“Sometimes you have to just walk around in something to see how it feels,” Celena said.
I stepped into the dressing room, slipped the romper off and hung what would soon be mine back on the hanger.
I loved the dress, too. It was sassy and fun, and I was sure it was at the least a three season dress, maybe even four. The only problem was my butt. I had too much of it. I walked out of the dressing room to face Celena and Tara, very sad but still in the dress.
“I love this,” I whined.
“Then why are you upset?” they asked.
“Look at this,” I turned around and pointed to my booty. “This is not OK.”
If only I worked out more. If only I could stop eating donuts. This would not be a problem, I lamented.
“There’s an easier solution,” Tara suggested and mentioned the Super Perfecting Antidote that’s Not a Xylophone.
“Isn’t that cheating?” I said. “Isn’t that advertising false information?”
“So is making people think you have four butt cheeks,” Tara said, repositioning a bobby pin in her hair. “Nobody,” she began, stepping towards me with a finger in the air, “needs four butt cheeks.”
So I bought the dress too, and then we went to Target because I was wearing that dress at night and didn’t want to be more cheeky than necessary.
//
That night, we went to the coolest rooftop party with the most magnificent view of the city I’ve seen. The party was to celebrate the birthday of a friend who was also having a baby soon, her second. She has a cool career that is busy and important and chatting with her for a bit, I admit I wondered what it would be like to be so successful that I could throw a birthday party on the rooftop of a building.
The thought didn’t shake me. That is, I wasn’t envious or bitter. I took a look at my sparkly gold shoes and smoothed out the dress I’d just bought and thought about what I’d told Celena a few hours earlier: If you like it, you’ll find a way to wear it. It was nice thing to think as I surveyed the panorama of my youth and looked towards the home I once had, then to the deep blue, and towards the home that is now.
Next, we went to a bar that was crowded and loud, but we found a comfy and quiet corner under twinkle lights and decided that this was a great place to catch up with each other. A group of guys who looked like they’d stepped out of the set of the Midwestern version of “Gossip Girl” dropped in on our conversation, and a few minutes after that, the three of us decided this place was charming for a while, but too young for us. Like Celena said, sometimes you have to walk around in something to see how it feels.
We were hungry and not ready to go home, so Celena took us to a neighborhood corner bar where we played pool, and the jukebox, shared chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks, danced, and laughed. I’m sure we put on a show for the other patrons, but I don’t think we were misrepresenting ourselves.
//
We weren’t trying to return to who we used to be, rather, holding memories of those ferocious, lively girls within the souls of the women we are today: human, and capable of whatever it is we dream up next.
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