The Tamesis
I loved Disney vinyl records when I was a kid cinderella I listened until my parents got tired of hearing it. My feminist mother didn’t agree with this story about a girl who is saved by her godmother and handsome prince, but she didn’t believe in censorship. Instead of taking it away, she bought me a coloring book called Great female paper doll.
Published in 1978, the book begins with Sappho in the ancient world and ends with Golda Meir. No nonsense here, when you wish on a star, your dreams come true. Instead, “I will issue such a battle cry that you will always remember it!” appears under Joan of Arc. “No time to get married, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith declared. I dyed Lady Murasaki’s kimono blue and orange, then dyed Golda Meir’s boxy purse a sweet pink.
“Golda Meir would never wear a burgundy purse,” my mother said, looking at my work. I was hurt, but my mother was a stickler for herself and I believe she knew the colors that great women wore. Even so, I still suspected that my mother was one of them.
She is confident and self-deprecating at the same time. I learned this word in high school Sprezzaturawhich meant effortless brilliance—the elegance and wisdom sought by Renaissance courtiers. My mother embodies this quality. She values wit and delights in the absurd, making you think that writing a scientific paper, organizing a conference, or balancing the budget of a major university are within the reach of her wrist. She’s witty, elegant, and loves good style. She doesn’t think cute clothes are frivolous. She never separated style and substance. Instead, she understood the importance of expression. She was a decisive, fearless shopper, and I, the impatient and frankly uninterested one, let her choose my clothes even after I left the house.
When I was working on my PhD and had my first child, my mother came to visit and took me to the Stanford Mall in Palo Alto. Mom had me try on one elegant outfit after another while my newborn slept in her car seat. “Graduate students don’t dress like this,” I pointed out.
Anyway, she bought me three outfits. “Looks like you’re almost done.”
She may look naughty. As a young professor in 1970s Hawaii, she wore a green Marimekko hat, high-heeled sandals, a sleeveless dress and oversized sunglasses. Honolulu’s Jackie O. She can look sexy. On a New Year’s Eve in the 1980s, she wore tight black satin pants and a tube top decorated with colorful sequins (red, blue and silver). My sister and I call it her Wonder Woman costume. She is tall, slim and younger than other mothers. She was 21 when I was born, so by the time I was a teenager she was already in her 30s. When she became vice president for academic affairs at the University of Hawaii in the 1980s, she wore a square-shouldered suit and carried a briefcase. She laughed and asked my dad, “Do I look scary?” I still have her pebbled leather bag. I found her card in one of them.
