To the good girls…
When I was little, I was absolutely certain that the two classiest, fanciest, most beautifullest women in the world were my Grandma and her sister Eileen. I knew this because they wore beads that sparkled and they had trays of miniature perfumes. Their birthday cakes were completely consumed by overgrown rose gardens of buttercream icing and closets filled with rainbows of shoes that required you take the wooden thingies out of them before you “dressed up” and pretended to be half as fancy as they just….were. They would cheers to the “good girls” with their legs crossed, feet bopping, and sing stories in a string of chatter using words like “just lovely” and “panty-hoes” and “clearance rack”.
I grew up and my grandma grew old. As there were 20 grandchildren before me I learned a lot of what I know about her from the (strangely disproportional number of) women who had been in my family longer than I had. Us little girls would hold her hand as my aunts would ask grandma questions and tell grandma the stories that she had once told them; her body filling in the gaps with sparkles and squeezes and, on occasion, she would throw her head back and just plain laugh. As life goes, eventually we had no one to tell those stories to but each other and more importantly, Aunt Eileen.
She went out in style with perfectly pink nails and ring placed as straight on her finger as the day my grandpa put it there- dressed to the nines in an outfit she borrowed from her sister. We had luncheons with gold-rimmed teacups and Bombay Sapphire in crystal glasses while we told stories using words like “garage sale” and “loving mother” and then fought over all of the things that she once made sparkle. None of us could help but to want to keep her close by.
Now, when any few of us are together, it’s all too obvious that she is never far away. My grandmother has infected our family with sense of Mid-Western glamour- the kind that creates miracles armed with nothing but a cloth diaper and a tube of “05-Geranium”. It’s all over Sally’s rose garden of a living room and Susie’s ability to so simply express the most sincerely beautiful things. It’s the garage-shopping luxury Aunt Joanie makes so much fun, our silver tea spoon collections and Maryann’s unbeatable assortment of sparkles. It comes through so clearly in that lipsticky kiss from Aunt Ann and it trails out the door on Friday nights in the expensive perfume that my mom wears like an old pair of jeans and it fills my sister’s shoe closet.
Today I felt “it” in me- I returned from volunteer duty at the resale shop with a treasure: A beautiful pair of handmade leather soft-toed kitten-heel pumps…for eight dollars. They certainly weren’t new but they were perfect, and, in a too-perfect-to-be-earthly-sort-of way, just my size. I smiled the whole way home and then slipped them on at the doorstep- just to make my lunch. And I gave them a click and I gave them a dance. I felt like the classiest, and the fanciest, most beautifulist woman in the world- and I wasn’t pretending- my shoes fit! And there it was- that ability to turn trash to treasure, that very simple something that made it “work”. In some quick miniature coming to age ceremony I grabbed for a teacup and tube of lipstick, hit the button on the kettle, gave my lips the once over and celebrated the thought of being like that woman, like these women, with a little “cheers”, foot-a-boppin, “to the good girls”.
