beau geste

G and I went to fetch S home from work early on New Year’s Eve so we could spend the afternoon together. The bus ride home shuttles for several stops between the Champs-Elysées and the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré – one of the swankier shopping streets – so we are often treated to some pretty rare plumage getting on and off the bus. That afternoon, a pair of older women got on the bus a couple of stops after we did, carrying a few tastefully muted and very expensive shopping bags.

The younger of the two women was wearing an elegant but not very interesting ensemble of camel-colored coat and tortoiseshell glasses that both matched her hair. Her older companion, however, was luxuriating in the privilege of having crossed the line from femme d’un certain age right on into grande dame, taking no prisoners along the way. She wore an ankle length black fur of curly lamb trimmed with silver fox at the collar and cuffs. Underneath were black leather boots with two-inch heels. It was an astonishing coat and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, not least because I was afraid that any minute G would dart off across the bus yelling “bear, bear!” and try to pet it. The curly lamb caught the light every time she shifted and made her whole form seem to shimmer and sparkle, like someone’s very classy fairy godmother.

The women had gotten onto the bus in the middle of an animated conversation and, taking two facing seats across from us, continued it throughout the bus ride. Mostly the younger woman talked and the older woman nodded, occasionally signaling a comment by pointing the pair of gloves she was holding in her right hand. They started arranging their parcels for departure a stop or so before the Etoile. In the moment before standing to go, the grande dame reached up and patted her hair gently with her cupped right hand, and I was filled with a sudden wave of nostalgia.

I can remember almost every older woman in my life making this same gesture at one time or another (generally not while wrapped in silver fox) – whether it was in preparation for a night out, a quick check in the mirror, or, more often, a nearly unconscious moment of reckoning between one activity and another, as if to say “There, that’s all settled.” It’s a lovely little movement, even if it has more to so with the hairstyle it is protecting than the air of restraint and elegance it suggests, and it’s a shame that it’s probably doomed to pass from our lives with the speed and inexorability of the dodo. I don’t want to start setting my hair in curlers or changing my clothes for dinner, nor do I mourn the kind of baggage that way of life could provide in spades. But seeing it here still made me smile.

I was talking to a friend last night about how it would be so much easier sometimes if we were able to wear only one of the many hats both assigned at birth and accumulated over time – daughter, mother, person-with-too-much-education, girl raised in the south, traveler. It’s not much to whine about, but the noise in the metaphysical closet is sometimes a bit too overwhelming to leave much room for grace. Next time I feel like tearing my hair out, I’ll try to remember to pat.