Category Archives: bio

Fitting Clothes

An article in the Christian Science Monitor confirms what I have long suspected: clothing size has nothing to do with body size, and indeed is not uniform even from manufacturer to manufacturer.

I began to wonder about this years ago, when shopping for shorts in a mall. Much to my surprise, I ended up buying a pair in size 8, at a “Petites” store. I don’t think much about clothing, but I do remember clearly that, when I was in college in 1983, I had a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans. They were, as the mode of the day demanded, skin-tight, the kind you have to lie down on the bed to slide into. And they were size 12. Ten years and a child later, how could I possibly wear a size 8?

I had also been experimenting with sewing my own clothing. I never got good at it, but it kept me amused while I was home with the infant Rossella, so, during this same trip, we went shopping for sewing patterns.

“What size do you take?” asked the clerk.

I shrugged helplessly, my usual answer to that question. “I have no idea.”

So she measured me, and announced: “Size 14.”

This sounded reasonable, but I was still puzzled about the shorts, and told her the story.

She replied: “The clothing industry keeps deflating the sizes, to make people think they’re skinnier. Pattern sizes have never changed.”

According to the article, the clothing industry now has a lot of new data about the shape of American bodies, which they will use to redesign their styles to fit people better, although it is already clear that most brands will not be altering their sizing to achieve uniformity with the others. So you’ll still need to know what size you are in a specific label in order to get a good fit, a marketing trick to ensure brand loyalty. It works, too – part of the reason I buy a lot at Lands’ End is that I already know what size will fit me.

For me, buying clothing in stores is endlessly frustrating. My basic problem – incomprehension and dislike of most clothing – is compounded by living, travelling, and shopping in so many other countries. European sizes might be uniform across brands for all I know, but I don’t shop enough for the numbers to stick in my mind, so I never know what size I’m buying. Except shoes – I know that I wear a size 39 in Italy and 8 1/2 in the US.

Shopping in Italy is difficult for me because Italian women apparently have a very different body shape than I do. Judging by what’s in the stores, Italian women when young are thin and straight – no hips, not much chest. In middle age they become barrel-shaped. Either way, the clothes don’t fit me. (Luckily for them, they also don’t have the stomach curving out in front that I have.)

The best solution to the clothing problem for me has been custom-made, in India, where wonderful fabrics and talented tailors come very cheap. I still wear a beautiful skirt and jacket of black raw silk that I had made back in 1986 – it’s almost too dressy for business occasions. Unfortunately, I haven’t had enough time on recent trips to India to pursue this solution. And people wonder why I dress like a slob.

The Bride’s Bouquet

A year after we met, Enrico and I attended the wedding of two high school friends of mine (I was a bridesmaid). At the end, I stood among the other unmarried women while the bouquet was thrown. I wasn’t particularly keen to catch it, and am no good at catching things, so I didn’t even raise my arms. I looked up, watching the trajectory, as the bouquet arced high and then fell – straight down into my startled face (good thing I wear glasses). It bounced off and into my hands, and so I “caught” the bouquet.

I took the accidental and unsought catch as a sign that, whenever I did get married, there would be something unusual and surprising about the circumstances. Turned out I was right about that, too. But that’s another story.

Melancholy Baby

I’m no good at flirting. I just haven’t had much practice. There were times in my life when I would have liked to, but the opportunity rarely arose; I seem to give off a “don’t come near me” vibe. The year in Benares, when my female teammates were abundantly grabbed and “eve-teased” by Indian men on the street, no one ever came near me, and few even said a word. I think I scared them off (for one thing, I’m larger than many men in Benares).

So men never approach me, and it’s usually been up to me to make the first move. Which is usually a miserable failure, because most guys don’t like that, either.

There is an exception to the rule, however: when I’m feeling horrible, whether for physical or emotional reasons, that’s when men suddenly get interested. I suppose I look more vulnerable, and therefore approachable. In Washington once, in the deep of winter, I had a bad cold and was freezing my butt off on an outdoor subway platform. That’s when a guy came over to chat me up. Another time, riding home on the bus, I was immersed in my own thoughts, and ill as well. As the bus pulled to a stop, a guy brushed past me, murmured, “I think you dropped this,” and handed me a note. I was so befuddled that I barely even saw him, but I was pretty sure I’d never seen this piece of paper. I opened it up, and it read: “Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re beautiful and I’m in love.” With his phone number. It was touching, but I was already taken.

That Italian Shoe Thing

My daughter has a shoe fetish, sympathizing whole-heartedly with Carrie Bradshaw‘s need for Manolo Blahniks. Ross herself owns about six pairs of sports shoes – not to run in, but because they’re fashionable (who would actually jog in Pradas?). She also owns various stylish flats, and of course riding boots. She still fondly remembers shoes she owned when she was small, such as the pink and white sneakers with cat faces and, more recently, the pink Converse All-Stars with Spongebob Squarepants laces. At least the pearly violet Fornarinas with the clunky heels didn’t last too long; she outgrew them and gave them away to a friend’s daughter, who stands in awe of Ross’ fashion sense.

I undoubtedly owned some shoes as a child, but I couldn’t tell you anything about them. Whenever possible, I went barefoot, even on the blistering-hot sidewalks in Bangkok. Yes, they were literally blistering hot, at least for novices. When Julianne moved into the big house up the soi (lane) from us, I offered to show her the neighborhood, including the pool next door that we were entitled to use. “Should I put my shoes on?” she asked (in Thailand, no one wears shoes in the house). “Oh, no, it’s only around the corner.” By the time we got there, the soles of her feet were covered in blisters. I guess mine were too callused to feel the heat.

I also went barefoot at my aunt’s place out in the country in Texas, where the hazards were bull nettles and cowflops. If you had to step in something, cowflops were preferable to bull nettles.

Anyway, growing up in the tropics, I didn’t need much shoeing, and to this day am most comfortable in sandals, or no shoes at all. But, having moved to colder climates, I had to come to terms with closed shoes much of the year.

This wasn’t a huge problem in high school and college, where I could usually get away with sneakers (as we used to call sports shoes). Sneakers were even cool. I remember how impressed we all were with the first running shoes we ever saw (Adidas) in Delhi, around 1979.

But now I live in Italy, where an adult wearing sports shoes outside of an actual sporting event (aside from the odd – very odd – jogger) is immediately marked as an American tourist.

I ignored this for years in Milan, didn’t much care what people thought. My sole concession was to buy a pair of leather shoes for the winter – Timberland hiking boots, but at least they’re black, and a bit more elegant than the classic clumpy boot. I love those boots, and was looking forward to getting back into them this winter.

However, I’ve found that, while hiking boots still have their place around the stables, they aren’t good enough for downtown Lecco. This is a small town where everyone knows, or at least notes, everyone else, and I don’t want to disgrace my family. Well, unless it’s raining.

Which brings me, kicking and screaming, into the world of fashion. It’s hard in Italy to buy the simple “classic” shoe styles that I like and find comfortable; all you’ll see in the shops are this season’s trends. For the last few years, the trend has been extremely pointy. In fashion, what goes around comes around – again and again and again. At school, rooting around backstage in the costume trunks, we once found a pair of very old, very pointy shoes. We took turns clomping around in them and had a good laugh. “Cockroach stompers!” – so pointy that you could easily reach into a corner to stomp a cockroach. That’s what’s in the shop windows in Italy (and on my daughter’s feet) these days.

Fortunately, I had bought a couple of pairs of semi-respectable shoes a few years ago, when square toes were in fashion. I don’t like square toes much more than pointy ones, but at least they don’t pinch my toes together and make my feet look even longer than they already are.

I don’t wear high heels, either. I love the look, but lack the balance. My favorite shoes, and the most comfortable heels I own, are cowboy boots, which Sue and I bought after an epic six-hour search all over Dallas (Sue is the only person with whom I could have survived and actually enjoyed this). They’re dancing boots, mid-calf height, black, with fringe. They’re some comfortable that I used to travel in them, though they’re very noisy on hard flooring – people would turn around in airports to stare.

I will say for Italian shoes that they’re very well-made and comfortable. Other shoes you have to “break in,” which really means that they’re breaking you in – you first develop blisters, and then calluses, where they rub. With Italian shoes, I simply put them on and start walking, and have never gotten a blister.

The Italian Proposal

Enrico and I maintained a long-distance relationship for over two years; he was doing his PhD at Yale, I was working in Washington, DC. At first, we saw each other about once a month, then about every three weeks, then about every two weeks… Luckily, there was an airline price war on in those days, and a roundtrip NYC-DC could be had for as little as $59 (DC-NYC cost more, I suppose because more DC residents wanted to escape to New York for the weekend than vice-versa).

We took our first vacation together in the spring of 1987. Neither of us could afford much more than airfare, so we flew to Texas and stayed with my aunt Rosie, in Coupland, about an hour’s drive outside Austin. One night we were driving back from Austin, not knowing that there had been a fatal accident on the county road the night before, and the local police were jumpy. We got pulled over because Enrico, true to his Italian heritage, was speeding. Worried about the culture clash I thought likely to ensue, and how much it might cost us, I started to get out to go around the car and talk to the nice policeman.

“Get back in that car!” he yelled. The road was very dark; he was concerned about someone driving into me. He talked to Enrico for some time, then came around to my side of the car.

“Where did he say he was from?” asked the policeman.

“He’s from Italy.”

“Well, you tell him that we don’t drive that way in Texas.” And he let us go – without a ticket.

My first visit to Italy was Christmas, 1987. I don’t now remember much about it, except being intensely frustrated that Italians, when in a group with other Italians, will not speak anything EXCEPT Italian – regardless of whether that leaves someone (me) completely out of the conversation. Which did provide motivation for me to learn Italian, though this was difficult to do well, with only weekly evening classes at the US Department of Agriculture (why the Dept. of Ag. sponsors language classes is a mystery to me, but they do, and that’s how I started).

For spring break ’88, we went to California. It was either on the flight over or the flight back that Enrico finally proposed. Well, sort of. He didn’t actually say: “Will you marry me?” or anything of the kind. What he said was: “I’d like to have children with you.”

“Uh, okay, but aren’t we missing a step?”

So we agreed to get married, at some unspecified future date.

It seems that this is not an unusual way for an Italian man to propose. Another American woman married to an Italian told me that her husband “proposed” in much the same words; they now have three lovely daughters. And Enrico and I have just had our 15th anniversary. Well, one of our two anniversaries. But that’s another story.

  1. The Italian Proposal
  2. Tanzania Surprise
  3. Coca-Cola, and an Ostrich
  4. Justice of the Peace