When it comes to haute couture, I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch, clothes that fit comfortably and keep me warm.
The first thing I do, before going to my office, is fix a hot water bottle for my feet. Then I slip on the hand-knit wool sweater I bought high up in the Andes - the kind that is meant to keep you warm when you run out of coca leaves to chew. I squeeze into my favourite pair of jeans and accessorize with two pairs of work socks, and a pair of fuzzy pink slippers.
They say you lose a good deal of heat through the top of your head, and in that area I can't afford to lose anything more. I don the toque my mother knitted (with fingerless mitts to match) that has a bell attached to the pom pom. Handy, if the writing isnāt going well and I start nodding off.
I confess I don't know any writers who've died of exposure, at least not while at their desks, but I'm not taking any chances. The other day I got up from the couch where I was resting before my coffee break, and found a neighbour at the door. He looked me up and down. "Did I get you out of bed?" he said. I don't know too many people who get out of bed at four in the afternoon dressed to survive the Franklin expedition, but I could be out of touch with current trends.
My casual look had caused other, familial, problems, too. Back in the day when I used to pick up my four-year-old daughter from daycare, she begged me to "dress fancy" when I came for her, "like real mothers do". Real mothers dressed as if they'd just come from the kinds of jobs real people have: lawyers, dentists, teachers, shopkeepers - people for whom growing up included learning to dress themselves.
I thought I'd made concessions: I always took off the slippers before going to fetch my daughter, and put on a pair of gumboots - two left feet I bought at a garage sale in Port Clements twenty years ago. I wore a lime green floater jacket I bought at the same sale (I got a great package deal), a few rainy seasons past its expiry date.
To be proactive, I went a step further in my attempts to be, if not a real mother, a good one. Before driving to Rainbow Daycare I slipped out of everything I felt natural in, and put on pantyhose, a skirt, a blouse, a pair of shoes that came with heels. I didn't want to cause my daughter further embarrassment so she could sue me, in later years, for a wrecked childhood.
There was only one other problem. It was a lot easier getting out of the car when I was dressed in sweater and jeans. Our car needed a few repairs. Neither of the doors opened so you had to climb in and out through the hatchback. But my daughter didn't seem to be concerned about that. It was the clothes, she claimed, that made me different from everyone else.
Seeing how easy Iād been to manipulate, she now decided I should buy a dress. I don't like shopping at the best of times. To begin with I'm a difficult fit - my waist isn't where it's supposed to be, and I have hips - something contemporary molders of fashion don't seem to take into account when they design dresses for women over the preschool age.
I argued that I already owned a dress, one she had bought with her hard-earned allowance, at the Previously Loved Shop in Sidney. It was a synthetic material, with a hounds tooth patterned camel coloured skirt and an off-cream-coloured blouse that fastened with a little bow at the throat, and might have suited me if I'd been a depressed bank teller in the 30s. I wept when she gave it to me. Was this who she wanted me to be? Or worse, was this who she thought I was?
I have never worn the dress. I told her it was so precious for everyday, that I was saving it for an important event. A funeral. My own. I know women often want to be buried in their wedding dress - a custom that draws some alarming comparisons between marriage and death - but I don't want to spend eternity as a bride. I'd sooner be buried in my bathing suit - though who knows if I even own one anymore. I dare say the light in a coffin six feet under would be more flattering than the fluorescent light above a change room when you go to try on a bathing suit.