For a decade and a half I dressed mostly in “slimming” black, until I realized my look was more funereal than fashionable. These days, I’m all about color.
One year, two months, and 14 days ago, my husband glanced at me, did a double take, and said, “I like you in that color.” Then he turned on his heels and left me standing in the kitchen, speechless.
We had been married for more than eight years, and that was the first time he had ever mentioned anything about my clothes beyond saying, “Oh, good. You’re dressed. Let’s go.” My someday memoir will have to include an entire chapter titled “Couldn’t Leave Well Enough Alone.” Once again, I had to push it. I had to know why Sherrod liked my brand-new dress. I hunted him down to the living room. “Honey,” I said, “what is it about this shade of coral that speaks to you?”
“Speaks to me?” he said. “Uh, not sure I was hearing anything. All I know is that your dress isn’t black. You wear too much black.”
Silence.
“Not that you don’t look good in black,” he said. “You look great in everything.” Pause. “Don’t listen to me. I hardly ever notice. What you’re wearing, I mean. Because for me it’s all about your eyes.” He sighed. “Okay. I’m going to go check the mail now.”
I didn’t always wear a lot of black. In my early 30s, during my Little House on the Prairie period, every dress I owned looked like it was cut from tablecloths during the winter months, when the harvesting is done and a girl’s mind turns to stitchery. Lots of florals, with flouncy skirts that get caught in the door of your Chevy after you’ve locked your keys in the car. Or perhaps that’s only happened to me. Just once, during rush hour in downtown Cleveland. I must have waved in traffic for 30 minutes before one of the drivers took me seriously and called the police.
“I raised you girls to wear slips,” my mother said when I told her what had happened. “If you’d been wearing a slip, you could have stepped out of your dress”—on one of the busiest streets in downtown Cleveland— “and saved yourself a lot of embarrassment.” Speaking of Mom, I spent a lot of years resisting colorful clothes because there was no point, really, if you were going to be standing anywhere near my mother. She was the envy of peacocks, that woman.
Mom was always urging me to wear blue. “It matches your eyes,” she said, over and over, which is how I ended up with sky-blue cat-eye glasses at the age of 10. I looked like a 60-year-old fifth grader.
I started wearing a lot of black in my 40s, when I could no longer lose five pounds by skipping breakfast. Neck-to-toe black made me feel slimmer and a little more New York at a time when it was clear I was not going to be leaving the Midwest anytime soon. Never, to be more precise.
Not long after I turned 50, though, my all-black wardrobe started making me look funereal. I figured this out after a month of colleagues asking me who had died. One of them even asked if I’d had my iron checked lately.
Mortified, I bought the coral dress that turned my husband into a fashion critic and prompted three friends to ask if I’d lost weight. That was all I needed to hear. Now I have so much color in my closet I need sunglasses to enter the joint. Mom would be so glad to see I’m big on blue these days. Blue dresses, blue blazers. Blue shoes, even.
“Matches your eyes,” my husband said, pointing to my sneakers. “Niiiiice.”
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