the peacock skirt

In 1975, I bought a skirt at Carnaby Street on lower Yates Street in Victoria. I was a university student, I had a tiny income working part time (on weekends), and I couldn’t afford $50, which was the price of the skirt. I loved it though, the fullness of it, the peacocks appliqued along the bottom, between bands of pink, red, and deep burgundy. And, I reasoned, I could simply just eat macaroni for a couple of weeks, because I couldn’t afford the skirt and food. I was not a thin young woman. The two close friends I had then kept reminding me. But when I wore the skirt, I felt beautiful.

I wore the skirt a lot. I felt like my best self with its wide generous hem swirling around my ankles. I wore it the first time I met the painter who is the subject of my memoir, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. It was the opening reception for a show of the Limners, a group of Victoria artists — painters, sculptors, print-makers, potters — and I remember I asked a friend to go with me. We drove out to Utley’s Gallery near Saanichton, two years after I’d bought the skirt.

I wore my black skirt with peacocks appliquéd around the hem, a black leotard, and my brother’s faded Levi’s jacket. I was finishing my degree at the University of Victoria and I was planning to travel to Ireland once classes finished.
When we entered the gallery, a ramshackle building with rooms on two levels, the first person I encountered was Sylvia Skelton. She took my hand and said, “You must come and see your portrait!” My portrait? No Limner had painted me, not that I knew of, but Sylvia had my hand and was leading me down some stairs to a room hung with many paintings and drawings by Myfanwy Pavelic of an elegant young woman, long-limbed, both naked and clothed; I knew that wasn’t me. For a time I’d lived on Ardmore Drive, sharing a friend’s family summer home, and at night we’d walk by Myfanwy’s studio, lit up, and we knew she was working. Tall trees surrounded her house and studio, making things even darker; the glow from her windows in the night sky was entrancing. An artist at work! Maybe she was working on these, which were beautiful. (Her iconic portrait of Pierre Trudeau was still in the future.) “There,” said Sylvia, “there you are.” And on the wall was a small painting of a girl in a hat. In my memory the hat was green. Or maybe it was red. It wasn’t me and yet it was, in a way; it was my head, my hair, my face. Someone gave me a glass of wine and I stood close to the painting, looking at it in wonder. “Meet the painter,” Sylvia was saying, and I turned to see Jack.

Let me go back a paragraph. When I say the painter is the subject of my memoir, does that make me the object? For a time I certainly was just that: the object of his affections, of his work, of his deepening and honestly quite disturbing obsession. So he was the subject in the sense that he was performing the action(s) of a verb, I suppose you’d say. And me, I was the person, place, or thing impacted by his actions. I was young, 23 when I met him, and although I’d had some experience of the world, travelling on my own to Europe, having an relationship with an Greek man named Agamemnon, working in London to keep myself in that city for a few months, I was not what you’d call worldly. And the memoir explores what it is to be objectified, to be painted, to be fixed in time by a fierce possessive gaze. And it also explores what it is to begin to understand agency, consent.

The skirt has been folded up in a bag in the pine trunk where I keep my sweaters and special blankets and linens. I haven’t been able to fasten the waist closure for years, not since the birth of my 3rd child. My body changed. And it never occurred to me that I could adjust the skirt to make it fit. But now that my book is coming out and I am reminded (on the first page!) of that evening when I dressed up in that treasured skirt, peacocks appliqued all around the bottom, I’ve decided to have it altered. I have an appointment on Friday afternoon with a woman who can do the kind of dressmaking and alteration that I can’t do myself. Yes, I can sew, I can quilt, and I can make small repairs, but I am too careless to trust myself to shape my beloved skirt to my body, 51 years older than when I saw it on a rack in Carnaby Street on Lower Yates Street. And here’s a surprise: I thought of myself as so large and ungainly in those years but the waistband is actually quite narrow.

Some events are beginning to be organized to celebrate the publication of The Art of Looking Back. If you come to one of them, don’t be surprised if I’m wearing my peacock skirt, adjusted for what life’s experience does to a woman’s body.