Elegance. Kathleen Tessaro
as sympathetic and normal looking as possible, but despite that, no one wanted to look at one another.
You had to meet with a counsellor before you did it. They took us in one at a time, in such a way that you never passed any of the other women in the hall. I was led into a little office where a young woman with short brown hair was waiting for me. I cannot remember her name or how she introduced herself but I can remember her deliberate, almost institutionalized kindness. And I recall her asking if I was alone and saying ‘yes’.
My mouth was dry and sticky. The office was like a closet, with no windows. There was a table and two chairs and a chart on the wall with a diagram of the female anatomy. Even here they’d done their best to make it seem normal and wholesome by painting the walls pink. It was like a beauty parlour for abortions. There were no sounds at all in the room, no traffic noise, no distant conversations. Just the woman and me.
‘I’m here to tell you about the operation and what to expect,’ she began.
I nodded.
She took out a red plastic model of a uterus cut in half.
‘This is a model of a uterus,’ she said.
I nodded again. I wondered where she’d got it, what kind of company made these sorts of things, and what other models they had in their catalogue.
She started to talk and point at the model. I could hear her voice, and see her hands moving, but my mind had gone numb. I just stared at the plastic uterus, thinking how red it was and how a real one couldn’t possibly be that red.
‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted, after a while. ‘I’m going to be sick.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
I went and threw up in a little cubical next door. There seemed to be cubicles everywhere – clean, little rooms filled with women throwing up. When I came back, she continued where she left off. She was obviously used to people throwing up in the middle of her presentation.
‘During the operation, what we will do is remove the lining of the uterus, creating a kind of non-biological miscarriage. You will have all the symptoms of a miscarriage – heavy bleeding, cramps, and hormonal imbalance. This will make you feel a little more fragile than normal. It’s important for you to rest afterwards and take it easy for a few days. Is someone coming to pick you up?’
I stared at her.
‘Did you drive yourself?’ she repeated.
The room was perfectly still. She had no make-up on. I tried to imagine her in a bar, talking to a stranger, way past closing time. I couldn’t.
She waited. She was used to waiting.
I started to open my mouth; it tasted like yellow sick. I closed it again and tried to swallow.
‘Would you like some water?’
I shook my head; it would only make me throw up again.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said at last.
She was looking at me with her clean, fresh face, the face of a mother on a children’s aspirin commercial.
I started to cry and she was used to that too.
I hated myself because I knew we would all be doing it. She passed me a Kleenex. Twenty minutes from now, she’d be passing a Kleenex to someone else, the girl with the boyfriend perhaps.
‘Maybe you’d like to think about it some more,’ she offered. Freedom of choice.
‘No.’ I was done crying. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’
It was exactly as she said it would be. An hour later I was lying in a hospital version of a La-Z-y Boy chair, drinking sugary tea and eating biscuits.
Four hours later I was shopping for a new winter coat with my friend Anne, using a credit card I’d stolen from my parents.
‘Your ulcer seems to be better,’ my father remarked a week later.
‘Yes, Da. I believe it’s gone.’
And it is gone. Until the next time.
There’s a coat that hangs in the front hall cloakroom of my parents’ house. It’s a single-breasted, navy blue winter coat; a classic cut in immaculate condition. It’s been there for years but no one’s noticed. It has never been worn.
If women are honest with themselves, they would admit that the fascination they feel for furs is not only due to the warmth they provide. After all, a fur is never just a fur – it is also, more than any other garment I can think of, a symbol, and a mink coat is the most easily identifiable symbol of them all. It stands for achievement, both for the man who bought it and the woman who wears it, as well as status and undeniable luxury. It has been said with a great deal of truth that a mink is the feminine Legion of Honour.
Furs are important milestones in a woman’s life, and in general they are purchased only after a great deal of thought and many comparisons. So make your selection with care. After all, men come and go but a good fur is a destiny.
There’s a story about a famous opera diva rehearsing for a production of Tosca at the Met. At the end of the rehearsal, she sends her dresser to collect her things and the poor woman comes back clutching a black wool coat.
The star is appalled. She tosses her head and fixes the woman with an icy stare. ‘Honey, you know I don’t wear no cloth coats!’
Divas and minks have a lot in common. You have to kill something to make a mink. Its beauty is horrible to behold. Divas are like that too. And while you don’t have to be a diva to wear a mink, it helps.
I got my first mink when I was nineteen years old. It was given to me by a friend of my mother’s, whose own mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s. She’d been a tiny woman and no one else in the family could wear the coat. Or wanted to.
It was a full-length mink; glossy, heavy, stinking of musk when it rained. It was the most un-PC garment it was possible to own. And yet it had both authority and a powerful, threatening, glamour. People reacted violently to it; they were infuriated, offended, jealous, or lustful. It was a coat of almost biblical symbolism. It hid nothing, accommodated no one. If you hated it, it was there to be hated. If you loved it, it couldn’t care less. The very thing that made it repulsive was the same thing that gave it its splendour. And it fitted me like a glove.
The trouble with a coat like that is it can take over your life; dominate your whole personality. If you don’t know who you are, you can easily become a mink coat.
I had a boyfriend at the time. He’d been a car thief in high school and was now two years ahead of me in drama school. He wore a denim jacket that had been in police chases, that still had bloodstains on it from when he’d been arrested. Badly worn, it hung together in places by threads.
We looked like brother and sister, he and I, with the same pale hair and green eyes. Neither of us knew who we were or who we wanted to be, so we became actors. We spent our nights eating at an all night diner called Chief’s, he in his threadbare denim and me in my mink, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer with our eggs, and arguing about iambic pentameter and if Pinter was really a genius or just a fraud. We were going to be great actors, famous and rich. We made up stories about ourselves, wore costumes, acted in scenes. And we were our own favourite characters.
Only, I was always the mink and he was always the denim jacket. We met wearing them, parted wearing them and despite all the drinking, fucking, and fighting, we just couldn’t manage to take them off.
He performed Romeo in his end of term project with a black eye. He got it smashing in the face of a man who propositioned me in an all night drinking club over the Christmas break. It was three o’clock in the morning. We’d been