Zelenskyy's Trousers
On going through my mother's clothes.
It’s like going through Queen Elizabeth’s closet at Balmoral. I have never seen so much tweed and herringbone in one place. It’s shocking.
“How many pairs of pants have we gone through?” I ask my niece Kindred.
“Fifty?” she estimates. “What’s weird is they’re repeats. So many of the same thing.”
It is incredible. I think Kindred has lowballed the estimate. The slacks seem to multiply in front of our eyes.
It is the 18th of May, the day the three of us picked to go through my mom’s clothes together. My sister-in-law Julie, Kindred’s mom, joins us. They both travel to meet me at the house.
I say “the” house because it’s my house now, but it’s weird to call it that. It’s still my mother’s.
Going through her clothes after her death in January was always going to be a Herculean task. She was a child of The Great Depression and threw away nothing.
I mean nothing.
When I told my brother I was finally tackling it with his wife and daughter, he said,
“That sounds terrible.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll have fun together.”
I know ten minutes into the task had I been alone, I would have started crying out of overwhelm. An hour in I would have quit.
But we charge through. It takes almost all of the afternoon.
The first time I laid eyes on Julie, I liked her immediately. She and my brother married young, in their early twenties. He was recalled to active duty in the Marine Corps in 1991 for Desert Storm. Their wedding was five days later, because he was a combat engineer on his way to Iraq. He wanted to make sure she had his benefits if he were blown up.
The operation ended before he was shipped out. The marriage lasted. Their first child, a daughter, arrived in 1998. My mother and I sat together in the waiting room of the hospital, waiting for Kindred to be born.
Sam finally walked in. “It’s a girl,” he announced happily.
Excellent. I was going to have a lot of fun buying baby clothes.
I immediately become Crazy Aunt.
In Manhattan, there was a high-end children’s shop across from Lincoln Center called Bonne Nuit. I could not stop buying baby clothes. The pinnacle of my madness was buying her a pair of hideously expensive jodhpurs before she was even a year old.
I’m sorry, but she had to have them. She comes from a long line of horse women.
Julie indulged my madness by putting them on Kindred and taking a snap of her. She was placed on her hobby horse. I was delighted. Kindred’s expression could only be read as,
“WTF am I doing and please take off these tight pants.”
I didn’t care. A fashionista was born.
Kindred has become a great thrifter, which is what kids today call someone who buys clothes in thrift stores. People have commissioned her to buy for them.
I can think of nothing worse. I’ve always hated shopping, a trait I share with Julie. When I walk into a thrift store, I’m instantly overwhelmed and can’t wait to leave.
The three of us make a dream team to go through Bettie’s things. We so rarely have a chance to be together anymore. I am happy as a clam to be with them, and without question, need their help.
We laugh a lot.
My mother lost a lot of weight the last year she was alive. She was positively swimming in her clothes.
A couple of months before she died, when she was still getting dressed in the morning, I saw some cargo pants in Walmart which looked like something she’d wear. I bought the olive-colored ones and delivered them to her room.
“I saw these,” I said, holding them up, “and thought you might like them.”
She stared at the trousers like they were a long-lost treasure.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with reverence. “Yes, they’re exactly right.”
She looked at me.
“Zelenskyy,” she stated. “They’re Zelenskyy’s pants.”
For a moment I worried this was a cognitive issue. Then I got it.
“No one has ever done such a nice thing for me,” she said. “To buy clothes for me like this.”
Now. This is patently untrue. Julie bought her clothes, especially the fancy jackets my mother loved from Talbots.
I think what she meant was these Zelenskyy cargos were a compliment to her, as if I understood she were fighting right along with him.
Putin was my mother’s nemesis. Of all terrible politicians anywhere, none provoked her ire more than Putin.
The Zelenskyy trousers were a uniform. She could stand in solidarity with the leader of Ukraine, fighting Putin together.
My mother did not understand apathy. She never accepted corruption. When a politician did something heinous, they never got away with it completely. Without fail, they wound up in her notebook.
She’d wake up every morning and watch the news. By news, I do not mean Live with Kelly and Mark. She started with C-Span. She usually found the BBC somewhere, and she watched Amanpour on CNN later in the day without fail.
As she watched, she took notes. She used a 6” x 9” steno notebook and wrote furiously with one of her pens.
Her pens are rather famous, they’re so closely associated with her. I’ve gotten attached myself and now won’t use anything else. They’re Pentel EnerGel Alloy Rollerballs and have refills which she always purchased on trips to Staples.
They’ve got a beautiful flow to them. She used medium ink, not fine, and always in black.
She had a routine in the morning. It always started with tea; Constant Comment with one small teaspoon of honey and a splash of half-and-half. Then she’d watch the news and start taking notes.
We have hundreds and hundreds of her notebooks, and nine file cabinets filled with newspaper clippings and papers she wrote. Long before the internet, long before even cable news, my mother kept notes on the world. She knew what was happening almost everywhere.
Her command center was her bed. She sat up straight, propped up by a wedge pillow and several flat ones. The bed was never empty. The top quilt had bills, three check books, her receipt book, newspapers, several pairs of reading glasses, her metal nail file, notebooks, her pens. There was always a pile of mail from charities to which she contributed. She kept the request until she made another donation.
They tended to pile up.
Some of her favorites were Doctors Without Borders, Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, the NAACP, and our local volunteer fire department and food bank.
All to say if you knew my mother, you knew she was covered in ink. Most of her everyday clothes have ink marks all over them.
Until a couple of months before she died, she was still trying to hold on to the order of her life, her way of doing things. It was becoming increasingly difficult. There was one month she didn’t pay bills at all.
I’d roll in usually the second week of the month. One day last summer she said,
“I’d like you to make a deposit.”
We uncover over two thousand dollars in her bed stuck in various places from rents she’d received. Most of it was in cash. We howled with laughter.
This meant we had to check the pockets of everything. I halfway expected to find another couple of grand stashed away in them.
The categories of my mother’s clothing:
1) Khakis. Everyday, warm months.
2) Linen slacks in individual dry-cleaning bags. Dressier, warm months.
3) Tweed and herringbone trousers in dry-cleaning bags. Winter.
4) Velour zip-up sweaters.
5) Silk knit sweaters, including one frayed Dior.
6) Light cotton blouses with buttons.
7) Danskin tank tops with spaghetti straps.
8) Jackets from Talbots and Ann Taylor; waist length.
9) Coats.
10) Ancient, museum quality dresses from the 1920s in terrible decay.
11) Priceless vintage silk clothing from Asia in impeccable condition.
12) African clothing from friends.
But the hundred-year-old silk jacket from China was in with the khakis and tank tops. There was no order to any of it.
There were three sizes; eights, tens, and twelves. The three of us try on all the good things. Having Kindred around is great.
“You don’t want that,” she says frequently.
There are five piles: obvious trash, the friend/donate pile, and a pile for each of us.
Dr. Leidecker was a Sanskrit scholar who taught at University of Mary Washington. He and his wife Elsa were close friends of my mother’s. She bought clothes all over Asia and gave my mother many items.
When Dr. Leidecker died, he made the University a beneficiary of his will. A chair in Asian Studies was set up in his name.
I find something I’ve never seen before. It’s a long, heavy silk coat in gold with embroidered butterflies. It fits me perfectly. I’ll be wearing it to my stepson’s wedding in September.
I’ve been fretting about what I’ll wear for months.
My pile is getting too big. But I know it will decrease at the end when I have to put things away.
I am so happy to be with these two today. I genuinely love them, and they’re both efficient, capable, and best of all—unsentimental.
However.
I inherited some of my mother’s reluctance to depart with clothes. I’m much better with my own now, ever since I figured out I wear three outfits at a time and not much else.
It’s weird how clothing priorities change. I’ve gotten very funny about the weight of clothing. I only want to wear things as light as possible. I live in V-neck tees from Madewell in whisper cotton. They’re like wearing nothing.
Good luck getting one, they’re so popular they’re hard to keep in stock.
I don’t want to hold on to much. I am in my late fifties. I don’t have a great deal of time left on the planet. The last thing I want is more stuff. The greatest luxury in my life is space.
At one point I look up and see how many full trash bags we have. The trash is only for items that are in such bad shape they can’t even be brought to the thrift store. There are five large bags, jam packed.
Kindred finds my mom’s winter coat and laughs. Julie says she’s been wearing it as long as she’s known her. But I know its origin story.
“That coat,” I say to Kindred, “was your father’s coat in high school. Bettie inherited it from him. It was her winter, working outdoors coat.”
My brother graduated from high school in 1985, so I figure it’s around forty years old. It’s a tan, down-filled puffer. I keep it. It is, as Secret Service would say, a holy relic.
Some of the clothes are ancient.
A couple of 1920s beaded dresses originally belonging to my grandmother have disintegrated with no hope of repair. We are devastated.
The beadwork is incredible, the drape of the dresses so beautiful and simple. But the fabric, if not disintegrating, tears if you touch it. They’re terribly discolored. We try and think of ways to save them, but it’s impossible. Even I accept this sad fact.
If Julie and Kindred weren’t there, I don’t know if I could have tossed them.
I end up with two trunks of clothes and a few things to hang up; a raincoat, a couple of great jackets, a favorite good blouse, and her most-worn velour sweater in baby blue.
I encounter one pair of trousers that make me laugh out loud. They are so her, when I hold them up it’s like she’s right in front of me. Very worn khakis with ink and paint all over them.
It’s as if I’ve run into her outside in the yard.
I’m making a room upstairs the Bettie library. All her work will be there, and will take many years to catalogue. I think I’ll frame these and hang them there along with the blue velour sweater.
When we are finally done, I walk to the shower and pass the table with her orchids. One bloomed right before she died.
Another one is starting to bloom. I can barely believe it.
I’ve managed to keep them alive and healthy. I realize I am a third-generation orchid keeper.
There is so much that’s terrible after a death. Probate, paperwork, delays, decisions, grief, and stuff. All the stuff.
This miraculous day is over. We did it. I had a good time doing something awful.
I rarely learn a thing. I’m stubborn. But a lot of what I’ve been doing in this house has been done in isolation. Today I took the help of two people who love me.
And my mother.
I wonder if I can learn to accept more help. Maybe. Probably not.
But no matter. An excellent day.
Thanks so much!
I love anything Southern-I'm a Midwesterner. I would love a "tour" of you mother's house in one of your columns.