My mother was never much of a clotheshorse.

She had a serviceable wardrobe and, aside from the lovely purple dress she sewed for herself sometime in the 1950s, she eschewed anything too fancy.

If anyone was fashion-forward it was my father.

He always had suits in the latest styles—whether thin lapel, wide lapel, double-breasted, plaid, or tweed—he was dapper.

Buying him a tie for Christmas or his birthday was always a safe bet, and his closet bore the evidence.

He even had an assortment of tie pins and cufflinks. For a serious man, he certainly took delight in the cut of his clothes and the style of his cars.

Mother’s side of the closet told a different story.

She could never understand why I was so focused on what I wore.

The girls in my school all had clothes from the most expensive shops in Raleigh’s Cameron Village: Pappagalo shoes with bows and buckles and Villager blouses with capped sleeves and covered buttons. The kinds you can only find on vintage clothing sites now.

Mother refused to spend that kind of money.

“You know, when I was young I never had more than two dresses at a time,” Mother often told me as she eyed my closet crammed full of clothes I rarely wore.

“And those I had to share with my sisters.”

Mother grew up during the Depression. Clothes were necessary but hardly extravagant.

As a teenager, I always resented Mother for her lack of fashion savvy.

Mini-skirts and geometrical designs ruled the Go-Go Sixties. Colleen Colby in Seventeen and Twiggy in Vogue, were the women to follow with their wide headbands and doe-like eyes.

By the Seventies I was in bell bottoms and peasant blouses, rocking the “hippie look.”

And there was Mother in her modest a-line skirts and boring shifts.

She wasn’t without her own fashionable role models, though.

Her younger sister, my Aunt Winnie, always wore bright, pretty dresses fresh off the rack.

Both she and Mother had experienced the same Depression, the same meager closet of shared dresses, but for my Aunt Winnie, the experience led to an enjoyment of shopping. Not that Aunt Winnie was a spendthrift. She never went that far. She was just always concerned with looking nice, and for her, that meant wearing pretty dresses.

When she died, my mother inherited some of her clothes. They fit her perfectly, but she only took Aunt Winnie’s denim jumper, embroidered tee-shirts, and machine-washable leisure clothes. The serviceable ones.

“Oh, I have no place to wear her fancy dresses!” Mother would tell me.

Her closet backed up her claim. She had the clothes she wore around the house—shifts that had lost their shape (if they’d ever had any)—and the clothes she wore to church—modest suits and long-sleeved dresses.

A bright silk scarf or pretty pearl brooch were her only gestures towards whimsy.

After she started back to university for a graduate degree, attending the School of Social Work at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she added some collegiate skirts and sweaters to her wardrobe, but for the most part she made do with two or three church-appropriate garments, and one or two “house dresses.”

She didn’t want expensive fabrics that would require dry cleaning or pressing. She was wash-and-go whenever possible.

Even so, she was beautiful in a natural, understated way.

Her brown eyes pooled with compassion. Her dewy, fair cheeks offset her dark brows, which knitted with expression. She colored her lips lightly, but for the most part, she wore little makeup. Her beauty routine consisted of Ivory soap and Pond’s cold cream.

Mother sewed many of her own clothes.

She taught my sisters and me how to sew as well or tried to. I was always too impatient, too snip happy.

I hated ironing seams before stitching or pinning patterns to the material. I just cut recklessly.

Once, I wanted to make a batman cape for my brother, Luke.

We enjoyed the Batman series on TV and delighted in acting out the roles on our own. Bam, Pow, Zap.

I rummaged through our linen closet and found an old sheet.

It would do for the cape, but only if I could finesse a bat image.

A little further back in the closet—beyond the stacks of towels and face cloths—I found a bolt of yellow-green material. The color wasn’t exactly right—to be honest it was pretty ugly—but it would do in a pinch. Besides, there really wasn’t anything else available. And I was eager to get my project underway.

I unfolded the material right there in the hallway, traced the image of a bat in the middle of the bolt and cut.

No need for pins or patterns.

Next, I sewed the yellow-green bat onto the old sheet, extremely proud of my handiwork.

Luke couldn’t wait to toss the cape over his shoulders.

He raced through our cramped split-level brick house doing Batman things.

And then I heard my mother scream.

“Becky, what have you done!?”

Her voice was high-pitched and riddled with agony.

I couldn’t imagine my transgression. Had I forgotten to put away the scissors?

“You cut my silk material?”

I didn’t know it was silk. What difference did that make?

“Your father bought this material for me in Paris!” Mother’s voice trembled, she was fighting the tears. I had never seen her so upset.

“I’m sorry, Mother. It’s kind of ugly. How was I to know it was special material. I just wanted to make a batman cape.”

“Did you have to cut right in the center? You’ve completely ruined the fabric. Now I don’t know what I can make with it.”
“Well, what were you going to make?”

Apparently, she had planned to make an evening dress out of the fabric, but I don’t know when exactly. That bolt had been in the closet for years.

She must have been holding onto it, waiting for the right occasion.

“If it was so important, you should have made the dress already!”

I argued, feeling hurt by Mother’s sharp anger. Mostly, I was mortified that I had done something so stupid, so selfish. Mother was right, I should have asked her permission first. I had behaved impulsively. I often did.

Thinking back on the incident now, so many years later—as I set to clean out my own closets—I wonder about that fabric.

Was it really as ugly as I had thought at the time?

It had been precious to my mother.

Had it not been, she wouldn’t have kept it—much as I have kept the things in my closet—unused but not un-valued.

My father had brought it back to her from one of his trips. He traveled a lot, and he always returned with some kind of gift: Cadbury chocolates or a small trinket.

This gift was different, though. It was just for Mother.

Did he dream her in a lovely silk evening dress?

Yellow green would have been pretty with her dark chestnut hair.

He probably still saw her as a chestnut beauty, even long after her hair had turned to salt and pepper.

Why had she waited to sew the dress?

Was she hoping for an occasion worthy of Parisienne silk?

Did she find the wait, the imagining, the party-yet to-come more enticing than the actual dress?

I took that from her, didn’t I?

With my childish certainty I had turned her party dress into a batman cape.

And that was that.

I don’t know what happened to the remnant of the material afterwards.

Mother certainly did not throw it away. That would have been wasteful, and my mother was anything but wasteful.

The material probably found its way into pillow covers or doll dresses or something practical, something of service to someone else.

And Luke’s batman cape disappeared, too, our childhood dreams slipping away in the dark of the night like the Prince of Vengeance himself.

What remained, though, was a lesson learned through a mistake: be considerate, be patient, and ask before cutting into the very center of a piece of material, no matter how ugly you may think it is.