The Pants in the Family

by Deborah Williams

Lilly Pulitzer dresses. Photo by Slim Arons

When I was a teen-ager, my mother had some trousers that I hated. They were teal, with an abstract dark-blue and white dotted pattern that created the outline of leopards. Mom wore these trousers sometimes with her Topsiders, or her Tretorn sneakers, or occasionally with dark-blue wood-soled clogs.

We lived in a small city in Northern Illinois; it was the late 1970s. The mothers of my friends wore crepe-soled shoes and had frosty-tipped hair that didn’t move. When they opened the car door at high-school pickup to call for their kids, the Bee Gees came out of the car radio, not Bach. Those moms were normal.

My mother was weird. When she called my name (loudly, over the Bach), she used all the syllables of my first name—Deb-or-ah, outing me as not Debbie, the persona I was trying fervently to adopt. Sometimes I tried “Debbi,” with a big balloony heart over the “i.”  Debbi/e was the key to unlocking the social gearbox of high school, I thought; Debbi/e would fit in, know what to say to boys. Debbi/e was my attempt at leopard-spot camouflage, I guess you could say, allowing me to blend safely into my surroundings so that the predatory mean girls who prowled the halls wouldn’t notice me.

Those teal trousers were not camouflage: they were made by Lilly Pulitzer and there was no way not to notice them. Mom’s father, who could’ve been the model for Don Draper albeit with less charm, bought them for her at a store in Darien, the omphalos of preppy. In fact, Mom’s Pulitzer-Tretorn combo that so mortified me at school pickup would be made (ironically) cool, a few years later, when The Preppy Handbook was published.

Mom always talks about how she was such a conformist, always the good girl, always wanting to make everyone happy, and certainly her preppy uniform would’ve fit right in…in Darien. But in our Midwestern town, she looked fiercely original, and so maybe what I experienced as embarrassment was actually a kind of jealousy: she didn’t seem to worry about being popular or having friends; she seemed never to put a foot wrong; she could wear teal leopard trousers and not look like she was wearing clown pants.

When these trousers were a wardrobe staple, Mom was in her late thirties, and she must have wondered what the hell I thought I was doing with my “Debbi” and my voluminous hair and my nothing-comes-between-me-and-my-Calvins jeans (worn, of course, with four-inch platform sandals). Her mother had died about ten years earlier, at 57, which is exactly the age I am now, and when I’m awake with middle-aged lady insomnia, I think about what it would have been like for her, heading into her forties without her own mother to warn her about midlife’s hidden crevasses and blind turns. Even for someone who makes friends as easily she does, it must be have been lonely. As my middle-age shifts to late middle age, I am increasingly grateful that my mother is still around, that she didn’t follow her mother down the path of too much booze, too many cigarettes, and probably too much marriage to the Ur-Don Draper.

When Mom was my age, she didn’t die. Instead, she divorced my father. She announced the divorce a few months after I’d gotten married, and while we all knew that she’d been increasingly unhappy, it had seemed as if things would just stagger on, in a sort of Cheever-esque haze of booze and bitchiness. 

As an adult woman and a feminist, I applauded her announcement: 57 seemed old but not that old (it now seems very not-old), so I was all “you go girl.” But at the same time, a teary-eyed child surfaced in my psyche, bereft at the thought that mom-and-dad would no longer be a unit, like they were “supposed” to be. I remember being stunned at the realization that until the divorce, I’d never fully acknowledged that my mother might want more than what she had.

What I can see now is that while I was tottering around in my platform sandals trying to find my inner Debbie (never happened), Mom was shedding her role of dutiful daughter: she became an outspoken advocate for education reform, progressive political change, and public support of the arts. I wonder what else I missed when I was a kid: do we ever reconcile the mothers we thought we knew with what we know as adults?

Sadly those Lilly Pulitzer trousers are long gone. I’ve scoured vintage shops looking for them, but all I can find is some lesser pattern involving daisies. Along with my belated appreciation for those trousers, however, comes appreciation for other things she’s taught me: use all the syllables in your damn name and don’t depend on “dutiful” taking you where you want to go.