When I was younger, I believed my grandmother to be the most glamorous woman I knew. My mother was so angry with her. I could not understand why. The women who were constants in my daily life were housewives—often unhappy, apron strings tying them to their homes as they conformed to the role of 1950s housewives—and nuns, with vows of poverty, chastity, and, most alarming, obedience. In comparison, my grandmother was an exciting and inspirational figure who offered me a glimpse of what life could be for a woman freed from masculine or societal authority. I admire my grandmother for being such a rebel, doing something most women of her time did not dare to do. I think, however, that as her money ran out at the end and she rotated miserably between her resentful daughters’ homes—I remember my mother and her sisters arguing about who should have her next—she may have had some regrets. Yet even when completely dependent on the goodwill and financial support of her daughters and their spouses, she always maintained her dignity. She accomplished this through how she chose to dress. And yes, there were times when she did not do what her daughters wanted her to. I remember hearing them talk among themselves about how belligerent she was.
My grandmother’s daily ritual of dressing fascinated me. She slept with a satin cap to keep her coiffed hair intact until her next weekly salon appointment. She always wore a negligee to bed, with matching satin slippers. She removed the lace-paneled robe and laid it across the foot of her bed. She drank tea, not coffee, in the morning. First, she applied the lotions and skin care products that stayed packed in a camel colored hardshell makeup case she kept by her bed, even though she no longer traveled. Next would be the powder, then lipstick on the cheeks and on her lips. She’d spritz her perfume on the inside of her slim wrists. Then she would laboriously pull on a waist-to-knee girdle and lift her pendulous breasts into a bra. Next would be a half slip followed by a dress, or some days a skirt and a blouse. In direct opposition to my granddaughter’s preference, I never saw her wear pants. At last she would add her collection of bracelets to her left wrist and, for the finishing touch, slip into a pair of low kid skin heels. All this dressing ritual for a woman who now had nothing to do but sit in a chair in our living room and read or knit. Yet there was something so very admirable in her determination to maintain the routines from a life she no longer had. The way she dressed each day showed her great desire to keep her dignity and bodily autonomy, and it lasted until the day she died.
Read Condé Nast Traveler’s interview with Lyn Slater about her new memoir, How to Be Old here.
Excerpted from How To Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon with permission from Plume, imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. © 2024 by Lyn Slater.
