The first time I met my middle-aged self was mesmerizing. I plopped down on the bed across from a full-length mirror, and began staring long and hard to find traces of myself. Who was I now? The physical image looked familiar, but this jolting out-of-my-once-young-body experience had transformed me into someone else…a confused woman dressed in a mind-numbingly awful green negligee.
This verdigris nightmare was part of a robe-nightgown set my husband proudly presented me one Christmas morning. He was exceedingly happy about the gift that came in a big, square package professionally wrapped and topped with a flouncing fuchsia ribbon. He usually bought me kitchen gadgets or socks – always a variety box of socks. However, I never received anything like the floor-length gown coiled and ready to spring from the hot pink and black container.
Finally, something for me, I naively thought.
I examined it closely. The forest polyester fabric had alternating sheer and opaque little squares. The material showed just enough skin, but not enough to bare it all. Oh, I got it. Worn as an ensemble, the tiny squares crisscrossed each other in such a clever, teasing way, it was hardly revealing. It was chic, but still deeply, darkly green.
The negligee felt smooth as polyester silk could against my skin. The spaghetti straps showed off my not-too-bad shoulders. The generous diagonal cut of the negligee and the flowing robe covered a multitude of sinful rolls and ripples I earned during fifteen years of marriage. Wearing it convinced me that with all my middle-aged baggage safely tucked out of sight, it was out of my husband’s mind as well. I relished the way he rolled his eyes and nodded his approval every time I pranced around the house in it.
To him, wearing the negligee meant I was in the mood. Putting it on, after I had first buffed and creamed every inch of my body, was like Morse code for Sex Right Now. It was part of a drill. After tousling my hair and gliding through a Chanel No. 22 mist, I would make my not-so-grand entrance into the living room. The robe was left open just enough so that it created a floating-like-a-green-cloud, “come hither” effect.
It worked every time. He would smile that irresistible pirate smile, and I knew it was going to happen. Until that day when it did not work anymore.
Apparently, the novelty rubbed off the green negligee (like breeding mold), and all that remained was our naked, real relationship. There it was baring its teeth at me in Mr. Mirror’s taunting face. Even the color had faded to a nauseatingly mossy hue. I wanted to rip it off -- up over my head as fast as I could -- and throw it away. I imagined it shimmering and scaly, like some snake making its home in our garbage can instead of a basket in the Far East. However, there would be consequences for taking it off. More than explaining my ungratefulness to my husband, not wearing it meant playtime was unlikely to happen.
I suddenly recalled the cadre of boxes stacked under the tree the previous Christmas, all neon pink and velvet black. Each un-lidded box revealed a different shiny reptilian fabric oozing forth into a rainbow of lingerie gifts. I had cooed “thank you” like a fallen dove to every tawdry gift I opened. Then I felt it was my wifely duty to wear the gifts to show my appreciation. None of the sexy sleepwear was particularly comfortable, so that I would actually want to wear it. Some, trimmed in stiff lace, inconveniently gathered in places where nasty sand granules accumulated when I wore a bathing suit and swam in the ocean.
Feeling just as uncomfortable in my own skin as in the negligee on that barefaced night, I had to ask myself, “What are you trying to prove anyway? You’ll be twenty forever?” The bright overhead light cast a sallow hue on my skin next to the garish green, reminding me why I didn’t usually wear that murky shade. It turned my skin the same disgusting pallor as when I was ready to hurl. To think, I’d sashayed about in that deceitful nightie for six months without ever seeing its real color – shades of forest tunnels and ocean depths, of things hidden and unsavory.
The negligee’s sexily tailored, one-size-fits-all style still smoothed my curves as I turned for a profile in the mirror-face. What was underneath the kelp sheath was not so sexy in its design anymore. I was not ashamed of my body. No. Decidedly, that was the issue. (I turned this way and that to view every angle.) I resented covering up what I thought looked good for my late-thirty-something age.
Sexuality had somehow become a matter of packaging. Without my shiny green wrapper, I was unpalatable to my husband, and I could not connect with my own prowess anymore. Staring into the judgmental mirror, my hazel eyes questioned how I had let it happen. I used to enjoy being touched. Opening myself up to intimacy meant sharing everything, even our secret places and naughty desires. What happened to lovemaking done solely for making each other feel better? I desperately wanted to feel into it again.
Wearing my nightly costume was akin to putting on a uniform. I had to wear it when performing my job.
Only the mirror saw my helplessness. I could only stand there under its scrutiny, watching as my hope for marital bliss and everlasting joy became a lie or memory, a distant thrill dredged up with smoke, mirrors, and negligees.
I’m not sure how long I sat there in a stupor, occasionally glancing at my visage in that ghastly green get-up. It must have been some time, though, because my increasingly annoyed husband, anxious to see how I cleaned up, called from the other room. But I couldn’t face him just then. It took a few minutes to get into the role. Then I played it with Academy Award-winning persuasion and passion. I’m positive he never knew how little I wanted to do what we did.
That was the last night in the green negligee. The mirror’s reflection had put into sharp relief an unmanageable amount of marital problems and unhappiness, and our failed marriage soon was lumped in with those national divorce statistics that television reporters dispassionately spew between corncob teeth. We lost our fifty-fifty chance at marital success. Oddly, it was a decision that didn’t surprise, shock or even move us. We both agreed to move on.
“You should have known,” my mother said one day as she and I discussed my pending divorce over lunch. “When you have to start doing all that stuff (like wearing the negligee), it’s pretty much over.”
