Southern Lady Code: Essays(9)

No, I didn’t notice right away. I noticed within the week. It didn’t smell like me (Chanel’s Sycamore, peppermints, and a faint whiff of cats). It was shorter, I’m sure of it. It was snug in the bust. And then there was the issue of the buckle, which I tried to convince myself that I was remembering wrong. My diagnosis: menopause was upon me like a panther in the night. Hot flash: in less than a week, I’d gained weight and lost my mind.

But I did my due diligence. I emailed my friend Carolyn, who’d hosted a dinner party.


April 2, 2017

Subject: Weird question

Me: By any chance did I take your Burberry overcoat out of your closet instead of mine?

Carolyn: Nope, I still have mine.

Me: I think I must be going crazy. I’ve been walking around thinking I’m in someone else’s coat. Hmmm.

Carolyn: Remember on your way out the door from my apt. you said you were able to tell your trench by the hair dye marks near the collar? You at least left my apt. with your trench…



This is true about the hair dye. I dry-clean my trench coat—not because of city streets and subway seats, but because of my ring around the collar. But, again, this is Manhattan: forty-and-older brunettes are as common as monogrammed SUVs in the South. I visited Vermont recently and was shocked by the silver heads that dotted the Mad River Valley like thistles. A friend told me Alaska is also like this: full of wild-haired women. You do not see gray hair on the Upper East Side. Salt and pepper is for the dinner table. Women like me will give up rent-controlled apartments before we go back to our roots.

I emailed my friend Terri, who’d hosted our bridge group.


April 3, 2017

Subject: Weird question

Me: By any chance did I take your Burberry overcoat out of your closet instead of mine?

Terri: No.

Terri (a day later): Did you find your coat?

Me: NO and I am positive I’m wearing someone else’s.



I retraced my steps and no other woman had reported that she’d walked away with the wrong coat. So, I took the trench (that wasn’t my trench) to the good dry cleaner. “The good dry cleaner” is Southern Lady Code for the one that costs so much you rip off the receipt before you open the plastic bag, then crumple that receipt like a dirty Polaroid and cover it with cat litter in the garbage can because you are so ashamed of how much you spent. The good dry cleaner made the trench look brand new. I wore it until it started to smell like me, but it still felt wrong. Every time I put it on, it felt like a lie. I felt like a thief. I was in someone else’s skin. Or I was the tiniest bit of a lunatic. The coat did not spark joy.

My husband asked, “Do you want to give it to Goodwill and buy another one?”

“No,” I said. Believing I was wearing another woman’s trench coat was one thing, but giving it away and buying a new one would really be crazy. The Case of the Mistaken Trench Coat is not a mystery that should be solved.

This is the way I handle a lot of problems that are not real problems. Aka: Rich people problems. I’m lucky to have the life that I have, so my motto is: Oh, it’s fine.

I don’t send food back in a restaurant unless there’s a finger in it. There’s never a finger in it, so I don’t send food back. Oh, it’s fine. If the chicken breast is as pink as a prom corsage, I just don’t eat it. I pay for it, unless the waiter offers to take it off the bill.

When I sold my short story collection, I took a chunk of the advance to redo our bathroom. This included wallpaper, tiles, fixtures, and plumbing. We kept the floor (original), tub (huge), and toilet (tank-free with a flush as strong as a riptide). But the tile went up wrong. The contractor picked a harsh grout, so it scratched all the tiles. The tile was redone, and I was pleased until my husband shut the door to christen the bathroom and I heard him say what you never want to hear your husband say behind a closed bathroom door: “Uh-oh.”

The second round of tile had been put up without shaving back the walls, so the walls stuck out so far that the toilet lid hit the wall and wouldn’t stay up on its own. To boot: the plumber installed the shower knobs backward.

I said, “Oh, it’s fine,” which in this instance was Southern Lady Code for I’m not going to have them redo this a third time, the room looks gorgeous (who cares if it’s not 100 percent functional?), let’s just get on with our lives.

My husband and I live with such problems (undercooked chicken and a toilet lid that he holds up with one knee) because these are the kinds of problems that we want to have. We’ve faced real problems. My husband watched his parents die. The two of us watched his brother and grandmother die. I was raped. So what if I’m wearing another woman’s Burberry trench coat? I mean, really? It really is fine.

But I did worry that I might be wrong about the coat being the wrong coat. Going crazy would be a real problem.

For my forty-seventh birthday, my husband walked me to the Burberry store on East 57th Street. A saleswoman escorted us to the second floor and the first thing I noticed about the wall of trench coats was that none of them have metal buckles. They all had plastic or leather buckles (I still can’t figure out the material).

I said, “It’s official: I’ve lost my mind.”

My husband said, “No, you were right about the buckle. I didn’t know it at the time, but I bought you a coat from their cheaper line. The bright side is that it seems you traded up and someone else got the cheap coat.”