Five Things I Love (& 5 I Can Do Without)

Gold not Silver

Five Things I Love 4

Five Things I Love, part 4. When I was thirteen, I had my colors done. All nice Baptist girls in Alabama in the eighties had their colors done. A lady came over to our house, made me sit on a stool by the window so as to be bathed in natural light, and laid fabric swatches of different colors against my shirt, holding them up to my chin. Cool colors were bad for me, she said. Warm colors were good. She declared me an Autumn with a capital A. She gave me a paint swatch strip to show me what colors were best. She said I should only wear gold jewelry, never silver. For years I walked around in orange and brown, rust and deep green. I eschewed navy and black, pinks and jewel tones. 

One day in my third year of college, when I was hostessing at Storyville in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my friend, a waiter whose name I can’t recall, said, “You look like a piece of bark!” It’s true. I was wearing a brown turtleneck from the thrift store, brown suede skirt, brown stockings, brown knee boots, brown plastic hoop earrings, brown eyeshadow, brown lipstick. He backtracked kindly if unconvincingly, “Not in a bad way.”

I thought, how can one look like a piece of bark in a good way? I figured I’d been duped by the lady with the fabric swatches. I’d given her so many good years of my youth. I began wearing other colors. By the time I met my future husband six years later in Arkansas, my wardrobe had changed: a silver quilted minidress I’d made myself, a red satin dress from the thrift store, a lime green crop sweater I’d bought at the mall in Atlanta, black pleather pants, a neon orange sweater, plastic platform shoes in icy blue. There was nothing I wouldn’t wear, really. Except Birkenstocks. I did not then and do not now wear Birkenstocks, and you can’t make me.

It has been more than 25 years since I had my colors done. The only thing I stick with, really, is the gold jewelry. I just like it better, and I keep to the French tradition of wearing just a couple of small, delicate pieces at a time, usually a gold chain with a pendant (or two initial pendants–my husband and son’s first initials, which happen to add up to OK), and a pair of small gold earrings. But whenever I wear rust my husband says, “That’s your color! You should wear it more often. It goes with your eyes and hair.”

So sometimes, to please him, I still dress like a piece of bark. Marriage is like that: a series of small, mostly painless adjustments to please the one you love.