“The Mirror,” Mary Cassatt, 1906 (I love this, because it’s not idealized)
I love reading novels. I read classics, I read Viragos.
I was on a bicycle at the gym, reading a Virago. Suddenly I looked up. It is not something you want to do at the gym after a certain age. There are mirrors everywhere, and who wants to look in mirrors? My hair was uncombed, I wore wrinkled hospital pants, I mean REALLY wrinkled, and the illusion that I look as I did as a young woman (which is anybody’s private image) popped.
Needless to say, I felt slightly annoyed. I went home, changed my clothes, stuck a lot of pins in my hair, and put on lipstick.
My husband laughed at me. Are you wearing lipstick?
I smeared it off with a Kleenex.
That’s better.
It is rather unusual to wear lipstick at home. The thing about being married for a long time is that you you’ve seen each other scruffy, been on camping trips where you’ve forgotten your toothbrushes and had to smear toothpaste on your teeth with your fingers.
None of it fazes my husband.
I am healthy, and that is what matters.
Usually I know this.
Sometimes I have to remember how to be an American woman. And so I am reading some books by American women this weekend.
1. Jo-Ann Mapson’s Bad Girl Creek. Mapson writes beautifully, and has a smart perspective on the difficulties of women’s lives. Her heroines are strong, sometimes they are wild, and they are always independent. I have just barely begun this, and it is already fascinating. Phoebe Thomas, who is in a wheelchair, has inherited her aunt’s flower farm. According to the cover, three other displaced women join her.
2. Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. Needless to say, I read her books as a child, but have also read some of her adult books in the last few years. This is a memoir about her marriage to Hugh, an actor.
3. Deborah Crombie’s A Share in Death. Deborah Crombie is a Texan who has lived in the UK, and her mysteries are set in England. So there we have it, an American writing a series about Scotland yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid. A mystery is always distracting, but is this cheating because it’s set in England?
4. Sue Kaufman’s Falling Bodies. Kaufman wrote Diary of a Mad Housewife, one of my favorite novels, and, according to the cover flap, this is about a woman who lives in a book-filled apartment and has family problems in a rough year.
I can’t wait to read these!
mirabile dictu 
In my view husband’s don’t require makeup. I used it when I was working because it was part of the necessary image, like wearing appropriate clothes. Since I retired I have had lipstick on perhaps three times — weddings and a class reunion.
Which reminds me of my 25th high school reunion. All the women in the room were the same age — give or take a year. I looked around the room and made a quick survey. Half were coloring their hair and half had gone natural.
We are all American women, baggy pants, grey hair and all.
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Yes, we are American women! Why do they have those mirrors in gyms?
Fascinating that so many women were “natural” at your reunion. That, to me, is what the phrase “growing old gracefully” means. Now that phrase is sometimes used by women who are using a lot of makeup, etc. Very confusing!
I think I shall have to read one of those diaries by aging women!
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it never crossed my mind to dye my hair but I’m surprised that a good 50% had gone natural. I don’t shave my legs unless I’m spending the night at someone else’s home or wearing something that will show my legs. My husband is used to it. I do wear lipstick or colored balm out of the house or I look dead. It’s amazing how much makeup I used to wear compared to now.
Sue Kaufman! A name from the past. I loved L’Engle’s adult books.
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I dyed my hair for a while, but it is just too much trouble. You either spend a fortune at the hairdresser’s or end up with dye on your hands.:) Okay, I didn’t wear makeup till a few years ago. Why shave legs except in summer? Most of this stuff is absurd. So many complicated decisions to make…
The Kaufman book looks very good.
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I read Sue Kaufman once and think I liked her. I’m not American, but I am a woman and I kind of think this Persephone might say something about what it was like to be an American woman in the 20th century!
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/its-hard-to-be-hip-over-thirty.html
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Judith Viorst is supposed to be very good. I haven’t read her, but she has written these books of verse for every decade. Forever Fifty and Other Negotiations is the one for me.:)
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