And so I wonder: If, when it comes to life after death, I am not (exactly) a believer, why am I talking? Who do I think I’m speaking to?
When I’m talking to my mother — at home, or out on the street, or in public buildings — there invariably comes a moment when I feel I can imagine her hovering in the near-distance, usually at a modest height above the ground, just as angels in classical paintings float in the vicinity of the upper corners of their frames. And in the instant in which I imagine her this way — less as an apparition than as a memory, in which she is sometimes a young and attractive version of herself, though more often she is older, and sick, and close to her death — I see not only her face, with her mouth curving mischievously upward at the sides, creating the dimples that accompanied her laughter or a smile; and her eyes, which typically, as they did in life, wear a look of slight bewilderment, as if everything in the world were too much for her to take in; and her weak Appalachian chin, the chin that I, too, inherited from our Scottish and English ancestors; and her hair, which, late in her life, looked as if it had been speedily cut with dull shears. I see these things, and then I see the rest of the picture. I see what she is wearing. I see, for one dreadful moment, my mother’s clothes.
In particular, I see a garment that she made during the early 1990s. She was living in Miami at the time, operating a small storefront boutique that was intended as a showcase for her own increasingly eccentric fashion designs, but which was dedicated mainly to routine tailoring and alteration jobs. She never got much business. The shop was in a run-down strip mall in an underpopulated district crisscrossed with freeway overpasses, not far from the Miami River. Because the shop was not — nor would it ever be — profitable, my mother relied on her father, who lived in North Carolina, to cover the rent.
I visited the shop in 1993. I was thirty-five. Ten years had passed since my mother’s last alcoholic collapse. My father was living with his new wife in southwest Miami. My sister had moved far away from South Florida to the Pacific Northwest and begun her own family. And I was living alone in Brooklyn. My mother, with help from the insurance company and her father, had relocated from a condominium that had been torn apart by Hurricane Andrew, the year before, to a one-bedroom apartment with partial views of the Miami River. And she had opened her shop. Its name was Peace Goods.
I remember that the storefront itself was tiny, and the larger building housing it cheaply constructed. I can’t recall the businesses adjacent to my mother’s. Was there a liquor store? In front of her shop was the parking lot. I remember her being afraid of the people who walked past her door. Her space was, as I recall, brightly lit. The air-conditioning stayed on high. Carpeting was glued to the floor. In the rear of the shop were sewing machines. A tailor’s dummy — or were there two? — half-dressed in one of my mother’s raw-silk works in progress, stood beside a large worktable on which she spread and cut fabric. Scissors lay ready for her to pick up, along with spooled threads, sheets of pattern paper, pencils, measuring tape, and pincushions planted with needles. A particular pincushion comes to mind. It looked like a Holland tomato; it might have passed for a child’s soft toy. Bolts of cloth leaned in corners. The shop’s back door opened onto an alley where my mother went to smoke. She smoked inside, too, constantly, and I remember wondering what her customers thought when they carried home clothes that smelled as if they’d been worn to a nightclub. Wherever my mother was in her shop — standing at the worktable in her bare feet, measuring cloth; or rummaging around in the back, sorting through woollens and silks imported from Asia and Europe; or relaxing, legs crossed, in one of the chairs near the front door — her ashtray and her lighter and her coffee cup were close at hand. Also near the entrance were garment racks draped with clothes left by the few clients who had somehow happened on the place, or who knew my mother from AA or from her life before sobriety.
In this cramped and vaguely unsafe environment, my chains-moking, coughing mother began to realize a fashion aesthetic that was, I believe, arguably original and defiantly antisocial.
The garment I often see, whenever I talk to my dead mother, is a silk kimono. Or it is not a kimono, exactly; it is a robe, hemmed short, that appears kimono-like. The body is white. The sleeves, too, are white, and are encircled with wide bands of machine-made ivory lace. There is a hint of Chanel in the thinner white bands that occur near the seams linking the sleeves to the body, and in the bunched-up lengths of silk crepe, one in aquamarine, another in a darker blue, and a third in indigo, which are wrapped, in a slightly militaristic style, around each shoulder, and held in place by narrow ribbons sewn like belt loops. These blue and indigo sashes descend from the loops, cascading down the sides of the kimono beneath the arms, and are weighted with horsehair tassels, twelve in all, shaped like angels.
Suspended over each breast of the kimono, from threads attached to detachable shining stars, are two metallic birds like Christmas-tree ornaments. One tethered bird is yellow and in flight; its opposite is pink and at rest. Directly beneath these swinging birds is a green field of fabric in the shape of a valentine heart, half appearing on the kimono’s right side, half on the left. If the garment’s overall ground is the kimono’s white silk, then the ground atop that ground is the divided green heart, which can be made whole by closing the kimono at the front. The heart, which stands about ten inches in height, serves as the locus for a gathering of ostensibly reassuring visual elements. On one side, where, if this were a medical illustration, an atrial chamber might appear, a fuzzy white cat — a cat like the dandruffy white cat my mother then had — sits stitched in place. A giraffe peeks from behind the top of the other side, as if looking curiously over a green hill. The scene is pastoral, a nursery picture. In keeping with the theme of childhood innocence, more green fabric extends down and around the garment’s sides in the form of two winding, ever-narrowing pathways bordered with elaborately stitched flowers. I am unable to look at these flowers without remembering the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz.
There is more. Ribbons attached in the neighborhood of the green heart hang down below the robe’s bottom hem. At the ends of the ribbons are several found and custom-made objects: a piece of quartz, an empty pillbox, a charm made of metal and beads, a peacock feather, and a small pouch — a coin purse — knitted from brightly colored yarn. There are two lace sachets — of the frilly sort found in farmhouse bedroom dressers — filled with potpourri. Another ornament, made of felt and shaped like a banana, is, in fact, a yellow man in the moon, featuring a pointy nose, a broad mouth, and sleepy eyes.
In order to see the real action taking place on this garment, however, one must carefully turn it over, lay it flat, and study the back.
At the bottom, there is a section of dark-blue and white overshot — a traditional handwoven fabric used mainly for bedcovers — cut more or less in the shape of a pedestal. Flanking the pedestal are four decorative patches, two on each side, made from floral embroidered silks in black, gold, pink, bronze, silver, white, and blue. The patches are stitched on at angles. Are they meant to look like pockets? Are they badges? There’s something purposefully crazy about their off-kilter placement, as if they were intended to communicate the designer’s sense of spontaneity and play, her awareness of the life to be found in all things, even remnants of cloth. Directly above the dancing patches runs the continuation of the band of green fabric that began on the garment’s front as the flowered pathways branching off from the perimeter of the heart. On the robe’s back, this green strip is no longer bordered with flowers; it is hung with bronze and silver pendants — coins, seashells, and starfish. A lion and a horse, made from painted bamboo, descend from strings attached to the kimono’s mid-regions; they function together as toy sentinels guarding a complicated piece of Chinese fabric that looks, from a distance, a little like the head depicted in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Instead of Munch’s wailing face, however, there can be found, at the center of this fabric, a waterbird — a golden crane with a black beak, dark eyes, and a red crest. Around this crane my mother has sewn a standard — a green organza horseshoe, held in place by loops of silver ribbon. The tail ends of the standard are tasseled — not with ornamental angels but with delicate white tassels, the kind appropriate, I would think, for a fringe on a lamp shade.