The Year Of The Peacock

I've decided that my style aesthetic for 2019 will be "winsome yet independent main character in British telefilm circa 1990's"

Seriously, I've spent many late nights watching these movies and I think I've got the look down. Though obviously I'm more a Serena Scott Thomas than a Tara Fitzgerald.

Now all I need is the charming village and the quaint (but realistically unaffordable) antique-filled cottage to go with it.

The Girl With Hearts On Her Pockets

Last night's dream was an unsettling one. Not a nightmare really, but unnerving somehow. I am still unsure what it means.

A winter storm was coming, a blizzard the likes of which we'd never seen. It hadn't arrived yet, but everyone was warned to be prepared. I was at home, alone. Where everyone else had gone I've no idea - it didn't seem to matter. You know how it is in dreams.

I looked around - the house was dark, and not warm, but the walls were sturdy and I figured I'd be all right if I chose to stay. At the same time, I'd had an offer - who knows how it came - from a group pf hippies who had set up a tent site on the edge of town. They were nice tents - more like yurts, really, specially insulated and heated - in which to ride out the storm.  There were 200 tents, the hippies said, and they had one for me if I wanted it.

I was doubtful at first. I didn't even know these people, and maybe it was best to keep to myself, but the hippies convinced me it was better not to be alone, especially in a storm like this.

The tents were set up in a field below mission hill, all of them bright white. All the people were dressed in white as well, although there was no obvious reason for this. It occurred to me that when the snow came we'd all be camouflaged, invisible to any predatory eye, though whether this was intentional or not, there is no way to know.

I was shown to my tent, which was indeed very nice, and put on my warm white clothes. I then went out to wander among the people in the field. All of them were strangers, and as usual I was feeling shy. Starting conversations has never been my strong point.

After making a few nodding acquaintances, I was surprised to be introduced to someone I already knew, a woman named Lori.

Stop. Wait a moment. You'll have to bear with me because here I must digress. It's not enough to just say Lori. There is a whole tale behind Lori. Well, for me, there is a tale behind Lori. For her, I do not figure into her story much, if at all.

It's the curse of being the one who remembers.

I met Lori in second grade. Probably I don't even have to describe her, because there is a Lori in every school, every class, most likely. Think back to your own schoolroom, or your children's schoolroom, and you'll see.

These days they call such girls "natural leaders" or somesuch, but to me at age 7, it was an ineffable power, a mysterious ability to control the social order simply by existing. Well, being the prettiest girl with the best grades and the nicest clothes helped, but even if I could see some of the mechanism, I couldn't see all of it. Whatever quality it was she had, I didn't have it, and I knew it.

This fascinated me.

I don't recall envying her so fiercely at first, but soon it was gnawing at my very soul. The searing pain of comparing oneself to others and coming up short.

Our characters were very different, Lori and I, but being a child I tended to see this in simple material terms. The school took a dim view of classism, but not so my family. 'Her parents are rich," my brother said, bluntly. "You can never be like her."

The type of things Lori owned that I could never have - her snoopy watch, satin jacket, spotless Keds and ribbon barrettes among them - took on even greater significance after that. And then there was the thing that I envied most of all, the point around which all my envy had begun to coalesce...her Luv It jeans.

Luv Its were the skinny, straight-legged jeans worn by the popular girls in school. Usually they had puffy satin appliques on the pockets, in all sorts of designs: hearts, stars, peaches, lipstick, ice cream sundaes like the ad above. Sometimes the less popular girls would wear cheap knock-offs but you could always tell. That little Luv It tag (with the red heart with a bite out of it) conferred great social capital in that time and place.

Having spent spent many hours sitting at my desk behind Lori's, staring at the row of satin hearts on her pocket, it was clear to me that I needed whatever power those jeans could manifest. If there was no way to swap myself out and live another person's life, it seemed the jeans might be the next best thing.

My mother nearly did a spit-take when I told her how much they cost. "24 dollars!" she shouted, appalled. "you must be crazy." It was the same conversation many unpopular girls were having that year.

I did eventually get a pair of Luv Its, though I'd have to wait until the Christmas I was 9. They had 4 stars on each pocket, like so:

I adored them, don't get me wrong, but the moment I put them on, I understood that I would only ever be an impostor. The jeans did not confer Lori-ness. I was still just a nobody wearing Lori's jeans.

...

After changing schools, I didn't see Lori again until we took driver's ed together the year we were 15. By then, Lori was busy doing the sort of things that upper-middle class girls do to prepare for the future. Rainbow Girls, Junior League, twirling lessons - you know the drill. By that time, I was modelling for a punk rock hair salon, so it was obvious to anyone with eyes that we were on different life paths. Lori would chair committees and be president of the PTA, and I would be...god only knew.

But still. I remember standing outside the temp trailer, listening to her talk about Days Of Our Lives when a sort of shudder went through me. All that potential, all of that golden light, channeled into being perfectly, sensibly and competently dull.

Perhaps that's too harsh. I'm sure people who do such things get something out of it, that there must be some worthy achievement there. It's just that I've never understood it. Garden clubs, museum boards and the like always seem to be filled with well-dressed ladies with manicured, venomous claws. But then, since that elementary school experience, social maneuvering has always left me cold.

Anyway, it does seem Lori's life has turned out just as she planned. I haven't seen her in years, but one hears things, you know. Married with 2.5 children and dog. A lovely home in a tony suburb. President of the parish council and indeed, the PTA.

So you can imagine she was the last person I'd expect to turn up among a bunch of hippies in my dream. Dream? Oh, yes, that dream I was telling you about....

I shook the now grown-up Lori's hand and said "I don't know if you remember me." She said, "oh, of course I do" and I replied "well, we have known each other since the age of 7."

Just then, though, my hand began to bleed, ghastly red dripping all over our clean white clothes. I apologized, although I couldn't quite explain it. "It's no problem" Lori was saying, but by then I had noticed that the blood had run into the lines of my palm - the left palm, the lines that mark the potential with which you were born.

That's when I woke up.

...

I still don't know what it means, though the blood in my fate lines is a probably a clue. But it seems awfully late in the day to mourn something that I never was. I've long ago given up the poisonous  envy that marred my childhood, if that was the point.Then again, perhaps I'd suddenly become stigmatic, which would mean something else entirely. And just what was Lori doing there, anyway? Unless the dream was saying that the storm we were waiting for would come for us all, junior leaguers and hippies alike.

It remains to be seen. I'm keeping my eyes open.

*It would be disingenuous to say I never had any of the things in the link above. I did manage to accumulate many of those kinds of things but it was later, after my teachers started saying I looked like Brooke Shields and suddenly out of nowhere I had some value.

Mademoiselle

Blood Of A Virgin lip tint*

When I was a young girl, I lived and died by the fashion magazine. I eagerly sought out big, fat issues of Vogue and Cosmo and Mademoiselle. The dream-world of fashion editorials, for all their artifice, seemed like so much potential. That's the allure, of course. That this could be you, for the right products and the right price.

The articles I also absorbed with great fervor. A handbook, nay, a shortcut to sophistication. So what if you're 12 years old from the boonies, you could learn to manage your jet-set lifestyle while flitting from your cold water flat in the Village to your pied-a-terre in Monmartre. You hardly needed money, even. A pretty face was your best accessory. Just stick a pair of chopsticks through your messy updo and a swipe of color across your lips and voila, you were ready to go.

It's compelling stuff. Ridiculous, but compelling, especially when you're very young. Funny how things look from the vantage point of age.

There was one article in particular I remember, and that's what's on my mind tonight. It must have been in Mademoiselle, as they would occasionally print such a wistful, philosophical piece. The writer was a young woman who had run into her old lover unexpectedly, and had Feelings about it.

The lover was a sexy (it's implied) Englishman who was Far Too Old for her, so of course it could never work, but they happen to bump into each other at an understated yet glamorous cafe and so they have coffee and madeleines and talk about things. When their meeting ends, the couple again part, sadly and longingly but knowing it's for the best.

I'm dredging this up from 30 years ago, so details are fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure this is where I got the idea that eating madeleines was symbolic of doomed romance. Also, the article gave me ideas. It filled me with the sort of anguish one only feels as an adolescent, wondering if such a grown up thing would ever happen to them. Not only having such a lover, but having a past with that lover. A yearning, gnawing, hopeless affair. What was it like? There were so many experiences I'd never had.

What I never imagined was that I'd grow up into the kind of person who doesn't enjoy this sort of thing at all. That I'd have the kinds of relationships that were so difficult to extricate myself from that no trace of wistfulness could remain. Or that when a man would break up with me, I'd soon regard our relationship as akin to a bout of food poisoning. When he would return, he'd be surprised to find I felt about him no differently than a bad muffuletta from the deli; why on earth would I want another bite?

So it's with great regret I must inform my younger self that she won't be having sad madeleines with old Englishmen while looking winsome in her shades and cashmere coat. Or her pouf skirt and ballet flats, for that matter, marvelous lipcolor not withstanding. She won't even be drinking wine out a bag with Kevin or Bryan or Ben. The past is a county that's fun to roam, but ex-lovers lay behind a locked gate without a key.

Not even a hand of glory or the blood of a virgin can open it.


*I admit I stole the idea for the art, but at least I did use my own lips.