The skirt is somewhere up in the attic, zipped away in a garment bag with the rest of my mother’s old clothes, including her wedding gown, saddle shoes, ballet slippers, and the megaphone embossed with her name, Mimi, from her days as a high-school cheerleader.
I almost never saw my mother when she wasn’t beautifully dressed and had completed her hair and makeup. For a period, she sewed her own clothes and many of ours. She prepared entire meals from the Julia Child cookbook. She decorated the house with local antiques, had the prettiest gardens and Christmas tree, and still surprised us with elaborate Easter baskets well past the time when we had ceased to believe in the Easter Bunny.
My mother was just like all the other mothers, but a little better, because she felt that presenting one’s home and family in the best possible light was a worthy pursuit, and she made everything look easy.
And even though she wore White Shoulders perfume and thought jeans were for farmers, she also assumed that women should embrace this wonderful way of being called feminism.
The summer before I started second grade, my mother and her friends started reading The Consensus, by Mary Gordon Howard. It was a heavy novel, lugged to and from the club in large canvas bags filled with towels and suntan lotion and potions for insect bites. Every morning, as they settled into their chaises around the pool, one woman after another would pull The Consensus out of her bag. The cover is still etched in my brain: a blue sea with an abandoned sailboat, surrounded by the black-and-white college photographs of eight young women. On the back was a photograph of Mary Gordon Howard herself, taken in profile, a patrician woman who, to my young mind, resembled George Washington wearing a tweed suit and pearls.
“Did you get to the part about the pessary?” one lady would whisper to another.
“Shhhh. Not yet. Don’t give it away.”
“Mom, what’s a pessary?” I asked.
“It’s not something you need to worry about as a child.”
“Will I need to worry about it as an adult?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. There might be new methods by then.”
I spent the whole summer trying to find out what it was about that book that so managed to hold the attention of the ladies at the club that Mrs. Dewittle didn’t even notice when her son David fell off the diving board and needed ten stitches in his head.
“Mom!” I said later, trying to get her attention.“Why does Mary Gordon Howard have two last names?”
My mother put down the book, holding her place with her finger. “Gordon is her mother’s maiden name and Howard is her father’s last name.”
I considered this. “What happens if she gets married?”
My mother seemed pleased by the question. “She is married. She’s been married three times.”
I thought it must be the most glamorous thing in the world to be married three times. Back then, I didn’t know one adult who had been divorced even once.
“But she never takes her husbands’ names. Mary Gordon Howard is a very great feminist. She believes that women should be able to define themselves and shouldn’t let a man take their identity.”
I thought it must be the most glamorous thing in the world to be a feminist.
Until The Consensus came along, I’d never thought much about the power of books. I’d read a ton of picture books, and then the Roald Dahl novels and the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. But that summer, the idea that a book could change people began to flutter around the edges of my consciousness. I thought that I, too, might want to become a writer and a feminist.
On Christmas of that year, as we sat around the table eating the Bûche de Noël that my mother had spent two days assembling, she made an announcement. She was going back to school to get her architecture degree. Nothing would change, except that Daddy would have to make us dinner some nights.
Years later, my mother got a job with Beakon and Beakon Architects. I loved to go to her office after school, which was in an antique house in the center of town. Every room was softly carpeted, perfumed with the gentle scent of paper and ink. There was a funny slanted desk where my mother did her work, drawing elegant structures in a fine, strict hand. She had two people working for her, both young men who seemed to adore her, and I never thought you couldn’t be a feminist if you wore pantyhose and high heels and pulled your hair back in a pretty barrette.
I thought being a feminist was about how you conducted your life.
When I was thirteen, I saw in the local paper that Mary Gordon Howard was coming to speak and sign books at our public library. My mother was no longer well enough to leave the house, so I decided to go on my own and surprise her with a signed book. I braided my hair into pigtails and tied the ends with yellow ribbons. I wore a yellow India print dress and a pair of wedge sandals. Before I left, I went in to see my mother.
She was lying in her bed with the blinds half-closed. As always, there was the mechanical tick, tick, tick of the grandfather clock, and I imagined the little teeth in the mechanism biting off a tiny piece of time with each inexorable movement.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked. Her voice, once mellifluous, was reduced to a needle scratch.
“To the library,” I said, beaming. I was dying to tell her my secret.
“That’s nice,” she said. “You look pretty.” She took a heavy breath and continued. “I like your ribbons. Where did you get them?”
“From your old sewing box.”
She nodded. “My father brought those ribbons from Belgium.”
I touched the ribbons, unsure if I should have taken them.
“No, no,” my mother said. “You wear them. That’s what they’re there for, right? Besides,” she repeated, “you look pretty.”
She began to cough. I dreaded the sound—high and weak, it was more like the futile gasping of a helpless animal than an actual cough. She’d coughed for a year before they discovered she was sick. The nurse came in, pulling the top off a syringe with her teeth while tapping my mother’s forearm with two fingers.
“There you go, dear, there you go,” she said reassuringly, smoothly inserting the needle. “Now you’ll sleep. You’ll sleep for a bit and when you wake up, you’ll feel better.”
My mother looked at me and winked. “I doubt it,” she said as she began to drift away.
I got on my bike and rode the five miles down Main Street to the library. I was late, and as I pedaled, an idea began to form in my head that Mary Gordon Howard was going to rescue me.
Mary Gordon Howard was going to recognize me.
Mary Gordon Howard was going to see me and know, instinctively, that I, too, was a writer and a feminist, and would someday write a book that would change the world.
Standing atop my pedals to pump more furiously, I had high hopes for a dramatic transformation.
When I reached the library, I threw my bike into the bushes and ran upstairs to the main reading room.
Twelve rows of women sat on folding chairs. The great Mary Gordon Howard, the lower half of her body hidden behind a podium, stood before them. She appeared as a woman dressed for battle, in a stiff suit the color of armor enhanced by enormous shoulder pads. I caught an undercurrent of hostility in the air, and slipped behind a stack.
“Yes?”