I don’t mean to mislead by my title: there’s no murder with a nightgown at the center of intrigue, not even a juicy romp between women. The gown’s previous sleeper was unknown, her origin out of state. She was offered to the highest bidder on ebay and I was the fortunate recipient of the soft package that left a perfumed detergent fragrance in my mailbox. Nestled in lavender tissue lay a long gown, true to the describption, ‘condition gently worn’, a bit nubbly textured light pink flannel with darker pink rosebuds. Before dark when I would try her on, I imagined a character in a film, an older woman from an earlier time wandering on a landing, her grey hair loosened from its braid. Not exactly virginal but it didn’t say ‘sex”. I named the gown Jane.
I’ve always loved clothes but was not easy to fit. My mother, short and stocky, encouraged me to forget my figure, also short and stocky, and enjoy what I dressed it up with. She’d been an excellent athlete but despite her protestations that her sturdy legs had served her well and I should be happy with how I was made, she confessed that whenever short skirts came back, she groaned. She admitted to positioning herself behind furniture in photos to hide her legs. Growing up in the fifties, I was influenced by cultural images of beauty and spent decades before elongating mirrors hoping I actually looked longer and thinner in black pants. Then I moved to west Sonoma County, where older hippies, artists, eccentrics dressed in rainbow colors and natural fabrics that fit loosely around tall, short, skinny, ample women..
I haven’t bought retail or anything new except underpants for most of the time I’ve lived in the county. Sartorially, I’ve been liberated by from department stores by t thrift stores, used clothing shops, artisan wear and especially clothing swaps where I’ve found recycled treasures of loved garments that are unique and interesting in the way the mass-produced clothes seldom are. I have a friend who grew up wealthy with a great wardrobe decided her dominating mother. Mother insisted her daughter never wear another’s clothes, and never give hers away where she might meet it on another woman. Perhaps superstition or simply a sense of privilege, my friend’s mother would have turned over in her grave before sleeping in a gown that had warmed another’s body. I’ve felt just the opposite: when I give up clothes I’ve loved but am not wearing, when I put on a friend’s garment from a clothing swap, a gift exchange has occurred. Even ebay celebrates the gifting feeling despite being in the money economy.
I slept in Jane every night for a week, the sweetsy detergent fragrance giving way to by my own body oils, the nubbly texture becoming softer until she was truly mine. When a big October storm with heavy rain and high winds downed trees all over the county and left us without light and heat, I stayed in bed almost all day reading on my kindle. Even more than at night, on this long grey day, I felt that Jane had once wrapped around a reader as she was doing now, and today we were going to finish Howard’s End before the lights came back on to television and bad news.
The world around my cocoon trembled with turbulence and the sky was dark, the storm, the darkness and instability of the barometer extending way beyond our windows to every part of the planet. We trembled before the unknown, human to human, nature to human, and I imagined the woman who slept in Jane before she came to me was well out of the turmoil of this second decade of the second millennium. Being of a vintage ready to fall, I contemplated this flannel comfort as my winding sheet. But before those choices, the first intoxication of love came to an end; two beings as one began to seem confining, Jane feeling clingy to the touch, smells no longer pleasantly familiar, verging on stale. We were ready to separate. I sent Jane to the washing machine while I, aninconstant lover, awaited a pair of panda-printed pajamas from the post box.