Southern Lady Code: Essays(10)

I looked at myself in the mirror, wrapped in the other woman’s Burberry coat. Identical coats hung on display. I said, “I can’t trade this coat for the same coat.”

“But you hate wearing it,” my husband said. “Just try some on.”

The saleswoman, who’d been listening to our conversation as if she heard The Case of the Mistaken Trench Coat every day, sprang into action. She brought me three cuts of tan trench coats. I tried them on but felt like a fool.

My husband said, “Maybe try a different color.”

The saleswoman showed me the trenches in black.

My husband said, “Any other color?”

The saleswoman excused herself to the storeroom. She came back with a trench coat in a color that would never sell in Manhattan, so they didn’t keep it on the sales floor. On the Upper East Side, women wear black and tan. Except they call tan camel. And camel-colored anything is synonymous with chic. I’d wanted to be chic. I’d wanted to own a timeless fashion staple. The coat in the saleswoman’s hands was a bright paperclip.

The trench was royal blue. It’s a color Mama wore when she went to law school at forty. It is very Delta Burke, circa Designing Women. I slipped it on and the royal blue turned my pale skin to porcelain. I blinked and my eyes were sapphires. I was in love, but I wouldn’t blend in.

We bought it anyway. It cost $1,895.

My husband said, “It’s an investment piece.”

After seventeen years of marriage, my husband is fluent in Southern Lady Code. An “investment piece” is Southern Lady Code for costs more than a bedroom set, but you’ll wear it for decades. For me, it’s an insurance policy. I’ll never again take another woman’s coat by mistake.





PEGGY SUE GOT


            MARIJUANA





The first time I saw marijuana was in the movie 9 to 5. I was ten years old, and Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda had been done wrong by the boss and were commiserating with an old-fashioned ladies’ pot party. They shared a joint, savored leftovers, and hallucinated feminism. This looked—and still looks—like great fun to me. Would I like to lasso, hogtie, and roast a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot over a spit? All while wearing cowboy boots and fringed suede? Why, yes. Yes, I would.

But I am not a lady who knows how to get pot. And I am not the kind of lady to whom pot is offered. I don’t look like a pothead. What does a pothead look like? Somewhere between a Jamaican glass-bottom boat driver and Susan Sarandon.

I’ve been to Jamaica, I went to college in Boulder, Colorado, and I moved to New York City at twenty-two but was never offered pot because I looked so preppy you’d guess my tramp stamp was a monogram.

In the early nineties, I worked at Talbots on the Upper East Side and had access to a bottomless pit of hair bow clips. A hair bow clip is a Southern lady’s tiara. It’s made of stiff ribbon, brightly colored, and is as fat as a titmouse. Back then the whole country was wearing them, and there was a theory that you could judge a woman’s IQ by where she fastened her hair bow clip: the higher the hair bow clip, the lower the IQ. I wore my hair bow clip at the nape of my neck. Still, if you saw me from behind, you’d think I’d been tagged with a tracking device.

One night after work, my friend Patti and I raced home to watch TV. We ran out of the subway and barreled down the streets toward our apartment on East Twenty-Sixth. When we broke through a clump of Rastafarians, one called after me, “Watch it, Peggy Sue!”

See, nobody offers pot to Peggy Sue.

My friend Patti also looks like Peggy Sue. Peggy Sues used to wear poodle skirts and cardigans, and then we wore hair bow clips and cardigans, and now we wear Alex and Ani charm bangle bracelets and peasant blouses. Or cardigans. We travel in pairs or in packs and, no matter our age, look like we’re straight outta composition class. We’re gigglers. We look like good girls. And nobody thinks we want to get high.

But we do. We just don’t know how.

I’m not a smoker. I’ve never been able to whistle and I’ve never been able to inhale. When I whistle, my breath is as quiet as a bunny poot; and when I suck a cigarette, I hack like a cat coughing up a hairball. And then coughing up another one. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, all I know is I’m not doing it right.

And once you’ve had trouble doing something you thought you wanted to do, you quit wanting to do it. I’d like to be a lady who cliff dives and wanders lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, but I ass-flopped from Rick’s Café in Negril and crash-landed in a hot air balloon. So, these things are not for me. They’re not in my wheelhouse. “Wheelhouse” is Southern Lady Code for comfort zone. A comfort zone is inside the box. And here’s what no one is telling you about living inside the box: it’s nice in here. There are Snuggies and Klondike bars.

I’ve been successfully high one time, thanks to my friend Patti, who moved from Manhattan to Denver, where pot is now legal. Patti does not do pot, but she is my best friend and an excellent hostess. So at forty-four, I went to visit her.

In broad daylight on Halloween, she drove me to a distillery that looked like a Starbucks. Two middle-aged ladies sat in a reception area wearing skinny headbands with alien antennas. They took our middle-aged lady drivers’ licenses and buzzed us through a door, where pot was laid out in every form: houseplants, fudge globs, sticky rice, and candy. No, I don’t think these are the proper terms for what I saw, but I’m Peggy Sue, not Procter & Gamble.