It starts with the memory of my mother in a dark brown mink coat, the story of how I grew to like dressing up. Some details in this memory are fuzzy, but what I recall with certainty is that it was a winter weekend night, that the bora wind whooshed across the city, and that a frenetic energy electrified the apartment, lighting up every room with a sense of urgency that meant only one thing in our household—my parents were getting ready to go out with their friends.
The bora terrified my mom. It somehow was the cause of the common cold and the flu and pneumonia and meningitis and many facial droops to which, allegedly, we from the Adriatic coast were particularly susceptible to, which is why, on the night I remember, she pulled out a long fur coat from the depths of the armoire and zoomed across the hallway in search of the right accessories.
I watched her from the living room in reverie. She opened boxes of jewelry and tried on necklaces and earrings and then abandoned them. She excavated purses and gloves and scarves I had never seen before and then abandoned them. The apartment metamorphosed into a sartorial entropy as she curated her outfit, a process that by then had already become a routine and that seemed amusingly unnecessary to me, because I knew—even as a kid—that nothing exciting ever happened when they went out. They saw the same friends at the same restaurants where they ate the same food and laughed at the same jokes, again and again, and they always came back home before midnight and nice was always the word they used when I asked them how the night was.
But for some reason she deemed this routine necessary and, however inefficient it seemed to me, it always worked and so it worked that night as well. From the chaos she created at last emerged a complete outfit: the fur coat layered over a taupe knit sweater and black dress pants, punctuated with black leather gloves, brown leather boots, maroon scarf, and burgundy lipstick. The final touch then ensued: Lancôme’s Magie Noire, the perfume she kept tucked away in the fridge and that she wore only on winter nights, when the scent’s dark notes of bitter greens and oakmoss and civet could reign freely in the cold dry air.
She was suddenly no longer the mom who wore a drab apron and baked potatoes but a mystifying and magnetic character from some other life she led, one more glamorous and more elusive than the one she led with us. And though I knew that night would be like every other and that she would simply say nice when I asked her how the night was, the moment she completed her look and told dad she was ready, I believed with conviction that it would be the best night she ever had.
The thing is, despite my nearly perfect recall of that night, I had shelved the memory of it deep in my mental file cabinet and lived unaware of its existence for almost twenty years, until the night of my friend’s thirty-second birthday, a time by which I had been living in San Francisco for many years, separated by continents and oceans from my mom. The night I am talking about was yet another winter night in the city on which nothing new happened. I saw the same friends, we hung out at the same bar, we drank the same drinks, we talked about the same shows, I heard the same gasps when I said I had not yet seen The White Lotus, and I went home before midnight on the same bus.
Yet I still felt pleased with my life. My cropped navy leather jacket with red accent stripes and pull-straps, my print baggy jeans, and my square-toe platform military boots were all a hit. Heads were turned that night and I had learned to see that as a small victory worth living for. And when I came back home that Saturday night, for the first time I thought there was perhaps a familiarity in those late hours to the image of my apartment, where many pairs of jeans lay abandoned on the floor and many folded jackets hung from the chairs and the citrusy benzene notes of Dior’s Fahrenheit lingered in the air.