see the full glory of my form-fitting dress, smiling in a playful, naughty way. It’s a risk. Either I look like a complete sex goddess or Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
My husband stands immobilized. He looks cute and confused in his faded, baggy sweatpants. I giggle and take a step forward. ‘Yes,’ I say again, only softer this time, like I’m answering a question, not asking one.
We’re standing quite close now; there’s only the waste-bin between us. I can smell the damp warmth of his hair and the clean, fresh perfume of the clothing softener we use on his sweatshirt. I gaze into his eyes and for a moment everything shifts and melts. I’m smiling for real now, with my whole being and I know I don’t look like Jack Nicholson. Raising my hand, my pretty, delicate hand, I move forward to caress the gentle slope of his cheek, when suddenly I see something that stops me.
As my hand draws closer, his body tenses. He’s standing just there in front of me, but somehow, without ever moving, he begins to recede. A look sweeps across his face, hardening his features into a façade of detachment. It’s the look of every child who has been forced to endure an unpleasant but unavoidable physical punishment; a spontaneous expression of utter resignation.
I step back in amazement, my hand poised in the air like a Sindy doll. My husband looks up in surprise and our eyes meet. The air around us condenses into a vacuum, thick with shame and humiliation, impossible to endure.
My husband is the first to recover, his face a mask of indignation.
He holds up the waste-bin. ‘Louise, what is this?’
I look at the contents of the bin. I’m staring at it but I seem to have a hard time seeing it. ‘Garbage.’ That’s the best I can come up with.
He reaches in, pulls out a printer paper box and wields it aloft. ‘And this?’
He’s really got me now. ‘More garbage?’
He rolls his eyes and sighs the sigh of all sighs. The ‘shall I repeat this for the mentally impaired?’ sigh. ‘All right, look.’ He places the crumpled box back into the bin. ‘Now what do you see?’
My eyes are welling up with tears. I blink them back. ‘I see a box in a bin.’
‘No, Louise, what you see is a box taking up the whole of the bin. Every single bit of room.’
‘So what? It’s a bin. Empty it!’ I despise him. There’s no way I’m going to cry. Ever.
‘And who’s going to do that? Me, that’s who.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Please!’ He rolls his eyes again. I’m married to a Jewish mother.
‘You don’t have to. You don’t have to be the self-appointed garbage monitor. Somehow we’d survive.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? All I’m asking is that when you have an extra large piece of rubbish, could you please use the kitchen bin. All right? Is that understood?’
‘An extra large piece of rubbish.’
‘Yes. And don’t be that way, you know exactly what I’m talking about.’
‘Of course.’ I feel cold. I want to climb under the covers and go to sleep.
‘So, we’re in agreement?’
‘Yes, large garbage in big bin. Understood.’
‘It’s not much to ask.’
‘No, it certainly isn’t.’
He turns to go, but pauses when he reaches the door. ‘That dress …’ he begins.
‘Yes?’ Heat rushes to my face and I wish I weren’t so pale, so transparent.
‘It’s … what I mean to say is, you look very nice.’
I stare at him across the sea of parquet. ‘Thank you.’
‘But if you want to change into something more suitable, maybe we can start clearing that path in the garden. After all, it’s really a job we should do together.’
He lingers by the doorway, waiting for some sort of response.
There’s nothing to say.
‘Well, whenever you’re ready, then.’
He turns and walks back into the garden.
And I am alone.
That night, I stay up and read, searching for clues through the pages of Elegance. There must be a way out of this. Someone as wise and experienced as Madame Dariaux must be able to advise me. I’m certain, quite certain, it wasn’t always this way. If I can just find the key, the moment I should’ve turned left instead of right or said yes instead of no, then I’ll be able to understand what I did wrong.
And then the rest is easy.
I simply reverse it.
Little daughters are understandably the pride and joy of their mothers, but they are very often also, alas, the reflection of their mother’s inelegance. When you see a poor child all ringletted, beribboned, and loaded down with a handbag, an umbrella, and earrings, or wearing crêpe-soled shoes with a velvet dress, you can be certain that her mother hasn’t the slightest bit of taste.
It is a serious handicap to be brought up this way, because a child must be endowed with a very strong personality of her own in order to rid herself of the bad habits that have been inculcated during her early years. The more simply a little girl is dressed – sweaters and skirts in the winter, Empire-style cotton dresses in the summer – the more chic she is. It is never too early to learn that discretion and simplicity are the foundations of elegance.
When I was about nine, I was taken out of my Catholic day school and sent to an all girls’ preparatory school. There I met Lisa Finegold, who became my best friend for a year and a half and my fashion idol for a lifetime. Her mother, Nancy, was from New York, which made her sophisticated. Pencil thin, with long brown hair and elegant features, she moved as if she were made of fine bone china.
My own mother was experimenting with unisex dressing that year, to my intense mortification. She’d read a book on Communist China and been so impressed by the austerity of their lifestyle, that she emulated it by wearing the same red tartan trouser suit every day for a month. (This was in the seventies). While Nancy Finegold never ventured from the house in anything but stilettos, my mother regularly rounded us all up for long, rigorous hikes in the woods, dressed in thick moccasins she’d made herself and one of her favourite Greenpeace tee-shirts. I longed for her to grow her hair long and even dug out an old wig she’d bought in the sixties but she stubbornly refused to alter her trademark crop. ‘It’s not that important,’ she’d say. But I couldn’t help secretly wishing she was from New York and made of bone china too.
Lisa had her own bedroom,
