My mother took in ironing. Just being born, of course I didn’t have the words for it, or any words at all, but I think I knew. I could feel it, the warmth. Not the heat from the iron, nor the steam, but the balm of service done with grace.
It wasn’t humility. She wasn’t lowering herself. She loved clothes. She needed the money. She tested the quality of the fabric between thumb and forefinger. She knew how it would behave. How to make the collar and cuffs respond, not with rigidity, but a wantful desire to frame a face, release a hand. When finished, she didn’t just exchange it for cash, she showed them how to wear it — not as a mannequin, but a woman with style unpurchased. And they knew it. That’s why they came back. They could have gone to the local dry cleaner on Broadway, but they returned to my mother, in the white house, near the end of Van Dyke Road.
I watched her years later, doing it for herself, and I could still feel the hands that cupped the back of my head, marveling at the warmth against my resting spine. My mother took in ironing, and ever returned it with grace.
I began mothering a set of lifelike plastic dolls from Ben Franklin at around the same time Florence Henderson familied her six on Friday night’s Brady Bunch. It was clear to me, as I lined up each baby in front of the tv set, smelled their heads, tucked in their blankets, that the only thing I was missing was a polyester pants suit like Mrs. Brady. Thus began my first lesson in patience.
I hope I asked, but most likely I demanded a trip to Herberger’s basement. “I’m not sure they make them for little girls,” my mom said. I swept my arm across my plastic family to say that surely I was no longer a little girl. “Maybe Agnes could sew something for you,” she replied. Agnes was a seamstress — and by that I mean she was my grandma’s friend who sewed things periodically in her kitchen/workstation, for women who couldn’t afford luxury, but still had a taste for it.
My enthusiasm was quickly quelled by our first visit to Woolworth’s in search of a pattern. My arms hung at my side. My head tilted back. Tongue out, grasping for air. Grasping for a choice to be made among the Butterick. She only had to give me a look. It was enough to say, “You wanted this. Straighten up.” So I did, but not without a few impatient floor kicks of my bumper tennis shoes.
I had no real sense of time. I could only mark it, episode by episode. The series of painstaking events made me wonder if I would even have a pants suit by the end of the Brady Bunch season. We moved from pattern to bolt. Bolt after bolt. Searching for fabric. Then I got measured. And measured again. Each trip out to Agnes’s farm seemed to take up another week. But then the day magically arrived. In front of the kitchen-stained mirror that leaned up against the wall, she smoothed out the navy fabric across my chubby waist, and I was more Carol Brady than Florence Henderson had ever been.
I don’t know what it cost. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mirror as my mother pulled out the dollar bills from her purse. Surely it was more than we had, but what I was taught, what my mother always showed me, was that it was not more than I was worth. What a gift. She’s still giving it to me.
I think of now, and it had never been Florence. On the days I need a little lift, I still play fashion show. And standing in front of the mirror, I smooth out the fabric on my waist, standing tall, straight, hoping, praying, not to outdo, but by some chance come close to Ivy-ing as best I can.
