LADY FACES
Coming “of age” as a female was more about gender than sex. I didn’t really pay attention to all those Walt Disney cartoon movies for “Modess” that featured more birds and butterflies than humans. I mean, even kids can recognise advertising, esp in those days — the Fifties — when our teachers were desperate to make sure we didn’t fall for propaganda. At least not the propaganda for the other side.
There were two kinds of thought that were right and proper: Americanism and men. That is, loyalty and gender roles. Because we’d just come out of war and to win we had to fight for those things. It did occur to me that maybe all kinds of propaganda were bad and should be avoided, but I couldn’t figure out what to do about that since self-evidently America and men were good and basic. I was maybe twelve.
Then I hit puberty (b.1939). I overheard my mother (b. 1909), who had just resumed college after being forced out by the Depression in her junior year, talking to my father (b,1903) who had the curious idea that “puberty” was a dirty word and forbade my mother to say it. Going back to college made her defiant but not a confronter.
When it was evident how the Thirties economy was going, my mother’s father could see he would not be able to afford the third year of college, but in an effort to evade the inevitable, he presented my mother with a field, a mule, and a sack of seed corn. “Here’s your tuition,” he said and repeated that his four girls were as competent as men. She got that seed into the ground, raised it to harvest and sold it. The money wasn’t enough. The school was Albany College which eventually became Lewis and Clark in Portland, but when she went to classes, she attended Portland State College.
Just as that began, she had two things to do with me. One was that I appeared one morning, puzzling over how a blood spot had gotten onto my pink seersucker pj’s. No cut, no overzealous scratching of a skeeter bite — ??? At my house we didn’t do Modess — we did Kotex. I had to learn “the belt” and how to roll the used napkin into a ball wrapped in tp so that my brothers wouldn’t uncode it.
The other thing was my rampant red, curly hair which I refused to cut. To my mother hair was sex. To be fertile with that much hair invited disaster. But one could forestall trouble with a bit of bribery and then luxury. The bribery was a kitten — if I would get my hair cut, I could have a kitten. (It turned out to be a tomcat who slept stretched out alongside me in the most comforting way. My family was not physically affectionate.)
The luxury was a haircut at Meier and Frank, the department store, the height of middle class style. We went to “Monsieur Louie” whose name was prononced “Loo-EE” because was French because the French understand sex and hair. My mother and Mr. Looeé talked over my head while he snipped. The sexiest moment was when he asked my mother in his fake French accent whether she would like my “nape to be shaven.” I knew right away that the nape of the neck must be sexy. Indeed, my tomcats grip their victims by the nape.
Afterwards, my neck cold and itchy, I waited for my mother to shop for some household necessity. Noticing that I was next to the hat department and that the clerk was missing, I tried on a $300 Lily Daché wide-brimmed hat, a swirl of blood red roses in velvet. The clerk returned, gasped at my audacity, but then admitted I looked beautiful in it. Even if I did wear glasses. I never forgot.
Not long afterward I discovered makeup and began using mascara, the old-fashioned Maybelline kind that was set up in a red slide case holding on one side a cake of watercolor style paint and the other side a little brush. It was one of the ingenious little kits once meant for actors, but now females all acted to be beautiful. Lacking water, we were known to spit on the paint cake — as it were, lubricating it. Slightly dirty.
It was a fine day when I discovered waterproof mascara with a pull-out applicator. Then when I took dramatics in high school, the drama teacher showed me how to line my eyes, ending the stripe with a little upward curve that imitated the eyelashes. Because of the glasses, I did this daily, first thing in the morning. One day I didn’t, for some reason, and my mother kept asking me if I felt well, looking at me closely without understanding why I was different.
She herself had excellent hair, full and wavy, but relatively short and sparse eyelashes, which she complained about. One day when she had agreed to have a lady lunch with her two sisters, up for the day from the Roseburg sheep ranch, I had graduated to glue-on eyelashes and agreed to stick them on her for this fancy event. It was not easy, but we managed. She said her sisters kept looking at her closely and asking if she had lost weight, but they never figured out her eyelashes. She thought they felt peculiar and never wore them again.
My lipstick color was Revlon “Persian Melon” which was a bit on the coral side. They still sell it, though “Cherries in the Snow” was more popular. I think it also came in nail polish. We all wore turquoise eye shadow. Late in my life as a clergy person I had some gilt gold shadow and wore it to a fancy evening event. No one said anything until a young man, standing close, gasped, “Your eyes have gold shadow!” Like the hat clerk, he seemed to think this was unexpected, but not unattractive.
At some feminist event, we were asked to put on a little altar our man-pleased adornments. One of my abiding faults in giving up things in a surge of virtue and then regretting it. I set out my L’Oreal preaching lipstick which had gilt in it which gave me courage and emphasized my works — I hoped. Someone stole it. It had to have been a woman. I never found that color again. Now I’m too old for makeup. Maybe. I am not a feminist. I have some dust-on rouge with gilt in it . . .
