My Balenciaga
My mother and I were living on the Upper West Side in New York, with my aunt Fely, who was at work—she was the chief thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai—when I heard that the film star Nora Aunor had passed.
I knew that my mother had brushed elbows with Nora at a few movie premières in Manila in the seventies, so I delayed telling her the bad news. When I finally did, she went completely silent. She was already seated, but her rib cage sank into her hips.
We forwent social media. We knew that the sites would be overflowing with tributes and condolences from various Filipino expat communities. Ours was only a small sorrow, because it had been decades since we’d seen one of Nora’s films, and we were grieving more for ourselves—our individual vanished youths, during each of which Nora had been a big, big light—than for the deceased performer. Eventually, my mother remarked that seventy-one was far too young to be making an exit from life. She herself was only four years older than Nora had been, and Aunt Fely two years older than my mother. She clutched my hand. But we all understand that Nora had her troubles, she said.
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
Softly, she spoke of Nora’s beauty, which, to her, needed no qualification. She had the most exquisite face, my mother said. To think that some Filipinos were forever debating her looks! She shook her head. We really are a nation that doesn’t deserve anything good. Dark skin this, mukhang-achay that—what a country of self-loathers! Thank God I got you out of there, Lucy.
Here I could be excused for thinking that my mother was really using Nora to talk about herself.
My mother knew from beauty. On a trip to Rome with her parents when she was fifteen—undertaken so that my grandmother could secretly ask God, at a church in the Vatican, to compel her husband to reform his cheating ways—a strange man who turned out to be a modelling scout had stopped my mother to hand her his card. Imagine my mother’s surprise when my grandfather had encouraged her to turn up at the address on the card the next day. By the late sixties, she had been in Dior’s stable of models, and her crowning achievement had been her anointment as one of the in-house favorites at Saint Laurent, in the seventies, the designer’s most hectic decade.
Because the American market had deemed my mother “exotic”—a label that did not have commercially positive implications until many decades later—she’d worked only in Europe. In Manila’s inner circles, my mother’s beauty, just like Nora’s, had been put between quotation marks by some snipers in the gossip columns and, most distressingly for her, by the film-studio heads, who couldn’t see her either as the star’s love interest or as the female villain—the only two paths for an attractive woman in film in those days.
My mother was a smiler, a cackler. But I was worried that the death of Nora, the most lachrymose of movie actresses, would have the power to reveal—if only for a short stretch—the shadow slivers of her otherwise well-curated self: the worrier, the weeper.
Not having inherited my mother’s looks, I had grown used to a certain calibre of so-called compliments—from Aunt Fely, who cooed them, and from my mother, whose sense that I needed consolation was clear: what a “pleasant,” “comforting,” “reassuring” face Lucy had! More or less the same pitying remarks had been offered by the teachers at the Catholic schools my mother sent me to, first in Manila, and then in far-flung places like Spain and Italy, from which, to everyone’s surprise, I had emerged as a girl who loved books, whose future was in writing.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Han Ong read “My Balenciaga.”
It had been the singular luck of my life to have a mother who waylaid strangers at parties with the tireless subject of her “great novelist daughter.” She told anyone who would listen that I had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (not true); this was later amended to two Pulitzers! Of course, these people had never heard of me, and though I underwent some initial embarrassment, I soon joined her in these, to me, harmless impostures. Once, I expected a friendly woman to contradict my mother’s claim that I had been “short-listed for the Nobel Prize,” but the woman’s mouth opened in awe and admiration, instead of in anger. My two novels had been only modestly successful—in sales, in critical praise—but I suspected that among the reasons my mother was proud of them was that there was a character in each book who was clearly based on her: a great beauty who, in old age, maintained the convictions of her reckless youth.
My mother had raised me on her own, with my Aunt Fely’s help, financial and otherwise. It was like having two mothers. This had caused great dismay for my grandparents—my grandfather in particular. In the last years of his life, he’d grown overly solicitous with my grandmother, hoping to make up for his past indiscretions, and I once overheard my grandmother telling my mother that she wished he would exhaust his energies on other women so that she could be left in peace by “this arthritic pest.”
Here was the great triumph of my mother’s life: she had run circles around her authoritarian father, baffling him so much—and perhaps even scaring him—that he’d expended all his vigilance on his other daughter, Fely, who, under his stern eye, he’d been sure, would become the most esteemed lawyer or doctor, and whose success in life would redound to him.
For many years, the identity of my own father was unknown to me, though I was never especially eager to find out. My mother was two parents in one, both male (decisive and withholding) and female (melodramatic and fanciful) at the same time.
And then, one day, she asked to speak with me alone in her bedroom in the old family house in Pasay, to which we had returned for the last months of my grandmother’s life. This had required another of the frequent uprootings of my growing up—from a Swiss boarding school, in this instance. My grandfather had died the year before.
My mother said, I suppose you want to know about your father. (I didn’t.) He is a famous Italian movie director. And then she told me his name. (This man was not Fellini but could be considered “famous,” in the same way that I could now be considered a “great” novelist: we were respected in our circles.)
I was not moved to contact my father. All I did with the knowledge was to confirm my suspicions that I was the result of my mother’s partner’s ugly features: image searches at the libraries vindicated me with many pictures of a jowly, long-nosed man, whose eyes were almost always shielded by sunglasses.
My mother said, Your father saved me, for a time.
She meant that, when they met, she was at a low ebb financially, and their arrangement was that he would pay for her living expenses. In other words, she was a kept woman. This did not shock me. In a way, I had been raised to be my mother’s most trusted confidante. She thought nothing of telling me that, before her full-time employment at Dior, when the days between modelling gigs sometimes stretched into nail-biting months, she’d slept with men to pay the rent, to buy groceries and new clothes, and to maintain her hairdo. Her regrets, if she’d had any, had, I supposed, been sanded down in the many revisions of her self-narration. She later said that this means of earning money had continued intermittently even into her successful modelling run—and, not to excuse herself, but many of her peers, all of whom knew that they would not be young and good-looking forever, had done the same thing. Their clients were from a higher economic and social bracket—aristocrats, industrialists, movie directors, record moguls, rock stars.
I loved having such a character for a mother. Perhaps my approbation was unusual, but I didn’t know any other way.
From the time I turned eighteen until I was twenty-four, my mother made many energetic efforts on behalf of my romantic future. She never failed to introduce me to the sons of her friends, and she encouraged me to make good use of matchmaking services. But, in recent years, she’d finally admitted her relief that I was, in my early forties, still single, for who else would be willing to devote their life to taking her to doctor’s appointments, escorting her to church services (when fear of death turned her penitent), and going with her to the opera? This last obligation was the most unpleasant, because I was unnerved by the sounds the singers made, and, though I loved melodrama, the plots in these operas were in a category of foolishness that I could not abide. But I understood what I was actually there for: at no other time would I be witness to this woman’s free-flowing tears, ostensibly inspired by the onstage tragedy, but perhaps really, secretly, shed for herself, out of a self-pity that she knew to be unwarranted but that, as a Filipina (perhaps under the guiding star of such figureheads as Nora Aunor), it was her duty to indulge.
Aunt Fely clutched her chest when my mother told her of Nora’s death.
Was she ill? Aunt Fely asked.
I told Lucy not to read that part of her obituary, my mother said. She turned to me. You are not going to speak about it in my presence.
Aunt Fely looked at me and rolled her eyes in sympathy. She asked my mother, You knew her, didn’t you?
Only in passing. Every six months or so, we sat next to each other on a talk show.
There are also pictures of you two together, Aunt Fely reminded her. At Imelda’s film festival, for example.
That couldn’t be, because the festival was in the eighties, when I was no longer living in Manila. That was during my international phase—Hong Kong, the Riviera, Venice, London, Berlin.
You were never in Berlin, Aunt Fely said.
In my imagination, I was.
This was another glory of my mother’s: not only did I not mind having a fantasist for a parent, I counted on her romantic fabrications to enliven our days together. (Was I too forgiving? Perhaps. But only for the things that didn’t matter.)
Aunt Fely said, Nora was always my favorite. She was also Mama’s favorite.
And Lucy’s, too.
Is that true? But you’re far too young, Luce!
I said, Her old movies were always on TV. I wanted to be Nora when I grew up.
I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress.
Thank God you’re not! my mother said.
Not an actress. But I used to lock myself in the bathroom and practice crying in front of the mirror. Like Nora, I could do it without moving any part of my face except my lips.
When was the last time you cried, Lucy? my mother asked.
I never cry.
I’ve trained you well. It’s like having a son for a daughter, my mother said approvingly.
That’s not healthy, Lucy.
Of course I cry, I told Aunt Fely, humorously reversing myself.
At movies? my mother said. That doesn’t count.
Of course at movies. When else? In life, I’m either laughing or clenching my fists.
Don’t lie, Lucy. I’ve never seen you angry. You are the Buddha. You are the Virgin Mary. My mother took only the slightest pause. Emphasis on virgin! She burst out laughing, slapping her thigh to emphasize her maniacal cheer.
Lucy has men, Aunt Fely said.
I do not, I replied.
She does not, my mother said.
Aunt Fely turned to me. You’re not a Perez for nothing. You’re an attractive girl.
I will forever be a “girl” to both my aunt and my mother.
What if I tell you that I don’t have men but I have women?
I didn’t know where this courage was coming from, but I had “joked” about my sexual orientation enough times over the years for me to consider that I had said something without having to say it.
As lovers? my mother asked.
Is this a confession? Aunt Fely asked. Always, the two women acted as if this were the first time I’d mentioned the subject.
I’ve been waiting for this very day! my mother said. Tell me if you are a lesbian! Tell me about your girlfriend!
Finally, here was a downside to being my mother’s daughter: it was impossible to faze her, to throw her off balance.
If I have men or women—I’m not telling either of you, that’s for sure.
You know we don’t judge in this family, right? Aunt Fely said.
You judge all the time! I replied. To hear you tell it, all of your co-workers are morons and incompetents!
We don’t judge about the important things. So is this really true? Are you a lesbian?
Of course not!
My cowardice did, and didn’t, astound me. More than anything, it gave the lie to how old I was. Acquaintances often put my physical age at thirty. Emotionally, in daring and in spirit, I was much younger even than that.
Love is love, Aunt Fely said.
You should sew that on a pillowcase, my mother teased.
Thank you, Gertrude Stein, I chimed in.
Let’s watch a Nora movie tonight! Aunt Fely said.
Of course, there would be tears during the movie—waterfalls! Many of Nora’s weepies were festivals of suffering, cherished by millions. The plots seldom made sense, until you realized that the whole point was to get Nora to cry, and then cry some more. But, in the back of my mind, I was afraid I’d discover that the foundational love of my childhood was erroneous, simply poor taste. Thankfully, the movie we watched that night, “Bona,” by the director Lino Brocka, did not let me down. How well it held up! Nora debased herself for love of an action-movie bit player, who used her as a servant, while tomcatting not only behind her back but right in front of her face.
My mother disavowed her first tears. How embarrassing, she said. She, too, was afraid to come face to face with the entertainments we had once fallen for, now that we had grown so much more sophisticated. These days she wept for a higher level of kitsch—her operas. But tonight her sorrow flowed freely and she stopped wiping her tears away.
I knew that my mother was not crying for some man in her past, but I also knew that she had secret griefs, and that it must have been a pleasure to be able to weep openly for Nora—the onscreen as well as the dead figure—while being the star of her own private soap opera. As for me, I wept for all the times my classmates had called me ugly—which had been all the more painful because I had a mother who was considered the “Sophia Loren of the Orient.” I wept for all the times my mother hadn’t shown up when she was supposed to, and for Aunt Fely’s spinsterhood (but, oddly, not for my own). But, mostly, I wept for Nora’s death—which was also the death of part of my childhood. As for Aunt Fely’s tears—I could not even begin to guess for what or for whom they were being shed.
For the occasion, my mother had put on her Balenciaga, a black dress with two wide shoulder straps, a firm bodice, a full skirt that ended a few inches above the ankles, and the illusion of an underskirt supplied by a band of taffeta ruffles, also black, that peeked out from beneath the hem. A perfect festive mourning costume. It had supposedly been made in the nineteen-forties, for an Italian countess or an English lady, then scrapped, and afterward either smuggled out of the workroom by a starry-eyed seamstress or, with the atelier head’s approval, given to one of the in-house models. It ended up in the hands of another model, who bartered it with my mother for something precious that my mother couldn’t remember—some days, it was a carton of Marlboros, on others a cannister of expensive Chinese tea. The designer’s label was not stitched inside the garment, which was to be expected of a discard, although so few “failures,” if any, were allowed to leave the Balenciaga workroom that no one could know for sure if that was indeed one of the house protocols.
It was my mother’s opera outfit, and, each time she put it on, she crowed that she still had the figure for it—until about two years ago, when she no longer did. The dry cleaner who’d kept the dress immaculate over the years made a joke when my mother took it in to be altered—“Someone’s enjoying life a little too much, huh?”—and, on the spot, my mother changed her mind and took the garment back, and she never patronized that dry cleaner again.
For Nora Aunor night, the dress was zipped only halfway up my mother’s back. She also wore a napkin around her neck so that her tears would not spoil the dress (a shawl served the same purpose at the opera). She meant for me to inherit it after her death, although lately she had been bugging me to try it on and wear it “on a date” or to one of my book events. She made no secret of wanting to live vicariously through my girlish-boyish figure.
There had once been talk of selling it and spending the proceeds on a cruise for both of us, but, as I mentioned, there was the matter of the absence of any label, and to authenticate it might mean, as I understood it, taking it apart, and, more crucially, where would we get the money to pay the experts? (I believed my mother when she said that it was a Balenciaga. I did not think that this was an instance of her taking baroque liberties with the truth. What reason did she have to lie? In her closet were seven Ungaros, three Rykiels, a Kamali bathing suit and a Kamali sleeping-bag coat, five Kenzo dresses, two pieces from the Ballets Russes collection of Saint Laurent—all of which were trades or payments in kind, none of them mothballed, but instead worn ostentatiously and often. To my mother’s credit, she owned no Chanels, having refused several gifts. She took every opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that the Frenchwoman had been the lover of a German military-intelligence officer during the Second World War. Who was this high-principled priestess? She was, because of such stances and suaveness, the love of my life.)
Sad Mom was the version of her I liked the least, and Cackling Comedian my fave. Maybe it was a mistake to watch “Bona” that night, because, over the next few days, she grew introspective.
Seventy-one is too young to die, she repeated to me.
When I didn’t say anything, she continued, Of course, drugs will do that to you.
Nora was on drugs? Though I understood that Nora had been only playing characters who were martyrs and moral exemplars, in no other country’s film industry was there a greater effort to conflate an actor’s onscreen life with her real one.
You know, when I go, it will not be because of drugs or drink.
It was true—my mother was a kind of adept of the principle of refusal. And yet, despite that, there had been the weight gain, just enough for the zipper on the Balenciaga to become her sworn enemy.
How is your new novel going? I never see you staying in your room for long these days.
I’m twiddling my thumbs.
What is the book about?
You know I won’t say anything, so why do you ask each time?
I’m hoping, not for myself but for you, that you’ll publish soon. I know how unhappy having to teach makes you. Living with you while you teach is a chore.
I know that’s not true, I told my mother. You love hearing me complain. It confirms your bad view of the world and of young people.
I don’t believe their writing is really as terrible as you say.
You’re not going to get me to read from their work. I’m not turning their awfulness into your personal entertainment.
You’re so discreet, my mother said, clearly intending to wound me. Where did you get that trait from? Certainly not from me! You know what the two most useless qualities in life are? She didn’t wait for me to reply. Discretion and dignity.
Also, no matter how many times you bring up my love life, the answer is not going to change! Actually, have you ever thought that if you left me alone, I might be able to find somebody?
I don’t like this game of Blame the Mother. I ask about your love life just so we can have some contrast in our days! Three women living together—what are we, a Chekhov play? Just have a fling—but tell me all about it!
Why do you never bother Aunt Fely about her love life?
Fely has always lived under the shadow of my beauty. She will always consider herself a runner-up, not good enough for love.
What about your love life?
Ha! my mother said. None of the first, and barely the second!
Nora Aunor’s death would continue to send ripples out into our consciousnesses. I didn’t know this when I went to the hair salon, but, when I came back to the apartment with my newly shorn head, my mother opened her mouth wide and pointed at me. Just like Nora! Nora Two! She is back in our lives.
It was true. I had, without realizing it, asked for Nora’s famous haircut, which, on her, did not produce a gamine effect but rather that of a tomboy. Though this was a Filipino slang word for butch, for lesbian-adjacent—another way in which Nora had been disrespected by the gossipmongers—I meant it in the conventional sense of an outdoorsy adolescent, whose long hair could only get in the way.
On me? I didn’t know quite how to think of my new look or what had driven me to request it.
You look so beautiful! Aunt Fely said.
The word shocked me, but I didn’t say anything.
My mother advocated once again for me to put on the Balenciaga. She would not relent, and, perhaps because I was still stunned from having been characterized as “beautiful,” I gave in. Five minutes later, I walked into the living room in the dress. It fit perfectly—it did not wrinkle or gap or pinch anywhere.
Model! Model! My mother was clapping her hands.
Of course, I could not take my mother’s instructions seriously and had to exaggerate my catwalk march.
Hold it, Aunt Fely said, and I posed for her phone. This will be my new lock-screen pic, she said.
Happy now? I asked my mother.
You know that photographer from Vogue? my mother began.
Alfonso? Among my friends there were successful and not so successful artists, photographers, filmmakers, many of them diasporic or second-generation Filipinos, Alfonso being one of the latter. (You could say that my mother’s decision to move us to New York City, more than twenty years earlier, had been made on my behalf, with a perfect understanding of the kind of ecosystem I would need in order to thrive. She would not have to worry about me after her death, and there was also the not insignificant fact that New York was Aunt Fely’s home—her true love.)
Tell him that I will commission a picture of you with the hair, in the dress, my mother said.
Alfonso would gladly do it for free, I replied.
At least let him know that I will take him out to dinner. We are not “La Bohème.”
Aunt Fely was beaming. Lucy, I can already see your new book-jacket photo.
I refrained from saying that I would never endorse a professional version of myself as a mid-century society hostess or starlet.
The commission was carried out a few days later. Alfonso was even more excited to see me in the dress than my mother and Aunt Fely had been. I left his studio that afternoon with a print of the best frame in hand, and Alfonso’s hundreds of shots sent as a single zip file to my e-mail.
I could not say that the marriage of the new haircut and the Balenciaga had worked a kind of alchemy (I was still so, so recognizably myself), but there might have been the stirrings of some approaching, numinous change. The short hair made me look neither gamine nor butch but, instead, courageous, as if I were daring the world to look at my naked face. It transformed my plainness into confidence.
And the Balenciaga, surprisingly, did not come across as a costume. On me, it somehow evoked a nun’s habit—this was because of the heaviness of the dress’s construction, and also because of the generous touch of chiaroscuro in Alfonso’s black-and-white photography.
The genes are alive! my mother trilled when I presented Alfonso’s print to her, meaning, I supposed, that I wasn’t a model’s child for nothing.
You are beautiful, Aunt Fely said again.
At least my mother was more honest. Very jolie laide, she said, with satisfaction.
Of course, I had transported the dress with me on the subway, and put it on only once I was at Alfonso’s studio, and the first thing I did upon returning home, even before presenting my mother with the prize from the afternoon’s excursion, was to restore the Balenciaga to her closet, as if to say that my relationship with it had been brief and that it had ended.
The next time I had dinner with Alfonso and our circle of artist friends, at a midtown restaurant, he passed around a dozen prints from our session. If I had known how many compliments my short haircut would elicit, would I still have chosen to have it done? Yes. I loved my new no-muss, no-fuss morning routine. But I would have made myself less available for social occasions. I did not want people talking about my face or my hair—two of the more inconsequential things about me, or about anyone, really.
Chloe, one of the friends at the dinner, was an assistant curator at the Met. Though her remit was not fashion history, she was swift with her opinion on the dress. Could your mother be mistaken? she asked. The dress did not look like any Balenciaga that she had ever seen. After studying my portrait once again, she remarked that the dress looked more like a Givenchy than a Balenciaga. She added that since Givenchy was mentored by Balenciaga, the dress could be viewed as a Balenciaga-by-patrimony, so my mother might not be far off. Alternately, it could have been an experiment by the master. An early draft. A failed caprice. Or it could have been the sum of a series of weary capitulations to a client’s requests, happily nixed. All of which would make it even more valuable, she said.
I asked her if she knew how I would go about authenticating a Balenciaga.
She called me a few days later and said that she was friendly with a researcher in Paris who had just been granted access to the archives at the Balenciaga Museum, which was in Spain, in the master’s home town. She said that the researcher would need to take a look at the dress firsthand, in Paris, before taking it to Spain, to have experts at the museum examine it as well.
Here were the risks: although Balenciaga was known to be a meticulous record keeper, he was a perfectionist and considered his botched efforts akin to criminal evidence, so if that was how he’d thought of this dress he would have understandably kept any trace of it out of the official history. Also, God forbid, but the examining team might need to unstitch a section of the dress, and there was just the slightest chance that it wouldn’t be put back exactly as it had been received. Also, of course, there was always the danger of damage in transit, of human carelessness. The dress would need to be insured, but the damages that I could recoup, if it came to that, would not be of the value of an archival Balenciaga. And the greatest risk of all: the dress might not be a Balenciaga, or even a Givenchy, but instead the handiwork of an unknown tailor with an out-of-the-way shop in Rome, London, or Paris, to whom my mother had taken photographs, asking for a copy to be made that would help her maintain a model’s occupational chic on the tightest of budgets. (The garment was clearly a product of genius. Still, a genius with no name might as well be no genius at all.)
The total fee required to launch my mother’s dress on this byzantine odyssey was seven thousand five hundred dollars. And that, Chloe said, was a “discount.”
I told Chloe that I would get back to her.
Meanwhile, she wanted to know if I would go on a date with her.
I said yes, without having to think twice. Although Chloe was ten years younger than me, she gave off a far worldlier air.
Our date, a week later, ended with a kiss, at her apartment. She was not the first, second, or third woman I had ever kissed. The week after that, I was taking off my top so she could play with my breasts, so she could kiss them. At some point, I signalled with a shiver that I could not go any further than that. And she said the most beautiful thing to me. Nodding, she said, Steps.
Maybe it was Chloe, whom I kept a secret from my mother and from Aunt Fely, or maybe it was the “moral” of Nora’s premature death—Seize life, while you still have it—that made me start working on my novel again. Maybe it was also Alfonso’s photograph of me, which I push-pinned to the wall in front of my writing desk, though not directly in my line of sight. I did not want to fail that woman, a creature I called Laide-Laide, proudly, defiantly ugly. I tacked a photo of Nora right next to mine. Unhappy with the conventional portrait, I made a new Nora by Xeroxing my photographed Balenciaga, cutting it out, and pasting it over her body. Now we had matching dresses and matching haircuts.
My evident happiness was catching, and my mother, too, was lifted out of her depression. I took her to Central Park. I took her to “Aida” at the Met, and then, two weeks later, to “Salome.” She loved the hoary classics—she lived for the arias. She was not a swooner, but was instead someone who got quiet and extra alert at the moments of most profound emotion in her operas.
Her replacement outfit was an Alber Elbaz Lanvin pleated knee-length—black and funerary, like the Balenciaga, but much more forgiving.
My mother’s tears were never about the loss of true love. I knew she was not that kind of woman. They may have been for her own mother, who was devoted to her, but only so long as she was allowed to keep silent on a vast swath of her daughter’s life, her “wrong” turns and decisions. It was a love that was conditional on a fantasy that was best left undisturbed.
Our subsequent Nora movie nights had to be spaced apart because a pall descended and lingered for days after them. We were hypnotized once again by Nora’s constant suffering, and yet, at the same time, we couldn’t bear it. Our Nora sorrow was no longer so small. We had been fully reconciled to our pasts, to our many wasted opportunities.
Still, three weeping women arrayed before a giant flat-screen TV: I pictured one wall of our apartment being sheared off so that our updated production of “Three Sisters” could regale West End Avenue! This was the truest Filipina spirit: crying was pleasure! Authentic sorrow fed on the performance of sorrow, in a never-ending loop.
That fall, I took a teaching job at a local university that paid double the fashion researcher’s fee, for a single semester. This was a windfall for an adjunct, so rare as to be stupid—you just had to smile and not peer too closely.
I finally told my mother about Chloe. I was now spending at least one night a week at her apartment, and my mother and Aunt Fely had been afflicted by a rare tact, though, in my mind’s eye, I saw them giggling at dinner when I wasn’t there.
I asked Chloe to put me in touch with the fashion researcher, who estimated that the process of authentication would take two months.
I told my mother that I had been wearing the Balenciaga on outings with Chloe—to the theatre, to openings at the Metropolitan Museum, to the nuptials of our straight and gay friends—and so could I hang the dress in Chloe’s closet, for a while? This was a lie, of course. My mother gave me her blessing. Surprisingly, she did not ask a single question about Chloe.
I shipped the dress to Paris. I made sure to tell the fashion researcher that I wanted the results to be sent to me via regular mail—nothing over e-mail. I did not want to be pestered, on the same screen where my novel was forming, by the accusatory bold type of yet another unopened e-mail.
Sometimes I pictured a gang of Balenciaga experts gathered around a table, slapping it in hilarity over the fact that someone had been gullible enough to waste so much time and money, when one look at the garment was enough to dispel the idea that it had been touched by the master’s hand. But I didn’t linger too long in these self-recriminations.
Eventually, the day came when I received the envelope with the results. I had asked Chloe to keep mum on the subject, in case she had touched base with the researcher. Chloe promised to lay off any questions—about whether I’d opened the envelope, about what was in the report. And she kept her word.
The Balenciaga was back in my mother’s closet, and when she put it on for our next Nora movie viewing, I kept looking to see if she could tell that it had been interfered with and poked at by so many hands, but she said nothing; she made no adjustments to the way the dress fit all evening long.
I did not open the envelope.
I continued to entertain my mother and Aunt Fely by complaining about my students’ poor compositional efforts. For six straight weeks, the stories and novel chapters handed in for my creative-writing class were predictably grim, and then, out of nowhere, a student revealed herself to be a true writer. Her previous story had offered no reason to expect this seismic turn of events! I rejoiced. I told Chloe.
Chloe introduced me to her mother, and then to her father. (They had been divorced for two decades.) To meet her father, I had to travel to Chicago. Chloe had to ask me twice before I finally arranged an introductory brunch with her and my mother and Aunt Fely. My mother was unusually quiet, not cold toward Chloe but certainly cool. Perhaps, now that my theoretical love life was upon all of us, my mother was having second thoughts about the value of my happiness.
What I had taken to calling the “French packet” sat unopened on my writing desk, day after day. I thought about unsealing it every so often, and then just as quickly decided against it.
I’d begun by being overwhelmingly certain that the Balenciaga was a Balenciaga; I would not have paid for the research otherwise. And then time and silence did their work, and I slowly, slowly came to the opposite belief, but I did not call off the researcher’s efforts. I was afraid, yes, but I was also strangely exhilarated. For years, I had delighted in my mother’s sunlike quality, and then a stray cloud—of doubt, when I began to question the harmlessness of her inventions and exaggerations, centered on, of all things, a costume, on pieces of fabric—had come between us, and I had wanted to extend that moment for a little longer, and longer after that. But could that be what I still wanted? Did I have the courage to see my treasonous impulses through to their logical end point?
Still, I understood my torture to be self-inflicted, because there was an equal, if not greater, chance that my mother would be vindicated. I might even open the envelope to find a ticklish new dilemma: Would I sell the authentic, one-of-a-kind dress to the museum? What if the researcher had lined up her own buyer? Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail informing her that I would not be reading the results for a while, and asking her to wait for me to contact her, instead of reaching out herself.
My mother spent a few days in the hospital, following some chest pains, but she made a quick recovery. I still had not opened the envelope. It began to seem to me that one thing was linked to the other, that her fantastic turnaround was due to the French packet staying sealed.
Then it was my aunt’s turn to visit the hospital, this time for a dizzy spell, but she did not have to stay overnight.
To please my mother, I was soon trading the dress back and forth with her. This happened at home, in the evenings. My mother wore it when we rewatched our handful of Nora movies, always with the half-zipped back, with the napkin bib, and with a rotating complement of designer heels: Louboutins, Ferragamos, Manolos. I wore the dress at my writing desk. That first time I put it on for this, I witnessed once again my mother’s immense satisfaction at the dress’s fit on my figure. How little it cost me—relatively speaking, since putting on the dress was still more of an imposition than otherwise—to provide her that thrill! And how mysterious that the locus of someone’s entire happiness could rest on the narrow runway of a smooth, fully closed zipper. Also, the novel I was writing was turning into a comic affair of a kind I had never written before, with misunderstandings between characters taken to semi-farcical but good-natured ends. Alfonso’s nun in her Balenciaga stared out at me dolled up in mine. My laide-ness had finally found the armor that completed it.
My mother’s and my domestic cosplay drew great amusement from Aunt Fely, of course, but she never, not once, volunteered to take her turn inside the Balenciaga.
Then one day I took the bold step of wearing the dress outside the apartment, to accompany my mother, on a walk around the lower of the two paths that encircled the Central Park reservoir. She made only one comment about my unexpected and bizarre—you could even say operatic—extravagance, my rare extroversion. I take it your writing is going well? she said. Or that your student crush’s is? She could just as easily have asked about my love life, but she did not.
Walking was a good sign for her health; she was ready again for “vigorous” exercise. It was the most beautiful winter morning, after many days of rain and having to live indoors. The whole city, it seemed, was out for a walk.
My hair was still short. A wool capelet kept the cold from my shoulders, and I was also wearing the ugliest but most comfortable pair of Hoka running shoes. On this subject, it took tremendous self-control for my mother to hold her tongue.
I’d never before had to move much in the dress; when I made small turns the lining would swoosh against my hips and legs, giving me a sensation of fluidity and ease. Now came the surprise of my effortful steps, the shock of how unyielding the dress’s shell was, as if I were being held in place by a firm hand. It seemed as though I had played a joke on myself, leaving the house in a cardboard box. I would never be like my mother, with her model’s understanding of punishment as a ritual of refinement—a woman who thought nothing of stiffening her neck and shoulders to best show off the dresses assigned to her, walking on her fashion calvary. Poor dress, I thought, downgraded to my drab spirit, my lack of fire. Still, I was happy. The dress’s true severity had been made clear. Of course, the dress was by Balenciaga, the master of the manipulated female form.
Take a picture and send it to Fely, my mother ordered, and I complied.
Aunt Fely’s response was instant. Where are you?
We gave our location. We would be close to her office in fifteen minutes.
Aunt Fely said that she would meet us behind the Metropolitan Museum. Lunch break! her cheery message declared.
My mother did not let the number of heads that were turning our way go unremarked upon. You’re the subject of many whispers, she said. And then she added, lampooningly, Who could she possibly be? Who does she think she is? But, before I could exercise the wit that my mother loved so much, she continued. You’re the empress in exile, she said. You’re the Italian Nora Aunor. How about, I asked, the Filipina Anna Magnani? Even better, my mother said. She asked me to walk ahead of her, so she could have a view of my back in the dress. But no funny business, she added. Do it straight.
I felt like a plank—a stiff line up and down, with no hips and no boobs. But I remembered my mother’s lessons. I held my arms akimbo on my waist and tilted my chin just slightly north of where it usually hung, to better expose my face to the light. I swayed my hips more than I normally would, but—because of the dress and by personal inclination—the motion was still comfortably minimalist. After a minute of modelling, I turned around and stopped, allowing her to catch up to me. She looped her arm around mine. That Señor Balenciaga really understood the pain of being a woman, she told me.
What do you mean? I was alarmed at the sudden intrusion of dark clouds into our cheerful excursion. And not very pleased to be reminded that the inheritance of the dress might be one of sorrow. There were not going to be any tears at my writing desk.
Don’t worry, my mother said. I’m really happy. And when I remained unconvinced, she swung our entwined arms back and forth. Only, from behind, you remind me of my early years. But as soon as you turned around—poof!
Poof, I echoed quietly, as if it were an incantation.
The best thing about you, Lucy? Is that you are not me.
I am, too.
Not like me and not like your father. I’m sure Mr. Balenciaga wanted the wearer to exert self-control, to feel like crying but to hold it in. I’m sure I was a disappointment to him at the opera, but you? He would take one look and be completely mystified.
I regret to inform you that there will be nothing whatsoever to hold in. I will not be crying in this dress, I said.
That’s what I’m saying. You’ll be frowning, but only because you are thinking of your sentences. And, mostly, you’ll be laughing and laughing. I live for that sound, she said. After a silence, she said it again. Aunt Fely, with her compliments and her contrived umbrage at the theatricality of my sartorial gesture, was only a minute away. ♦