Bed Jacket

 

Marilyn Horan

Bed Jacket

            I have never personally known anyone who owned a bed jacket. They are anachronisms.  Years ago, at least in the movies, wealthy, glamorous women of leisure wore them during long periods of convalescence.  New, young mothers wore them in real life during their extended stays in the hospital after giving birth. Besides making breast-feeding easier, they created an aura of prettiness and daintiness, making visiting hours more cheerful.

            I bought my mother one of these bed jackets.  It was a feminine item:  pale mint green of a fuzzy-lamb-like fabric, with appliquéd flowers on each flared sleeve, edged all around in satin and fastened with one smooth white pearlized button.  Mom had been in Lutheran Hospital for the second time in two months.  The cause was a stroke that paralyzed her right side.  Her frailty was touchingly obvious.  Her shoulders, always rather small, seemed tiny, bony, curved and vulnerable.  Her broken and poorly mended collar bone, the result of a car accident four years earlier, stuck out jaggedly under the freckled and thin skin.  The flimsy hospital gowns that were put on her looked institutional and depressing.

            Some housecoats, really lightweight cotton dress robes that my mother had brought from home, were dilapidated, although a couple were those she retrieved from a bag of my recently deceased aunt’s clothing meant for the Salvation Army.  One of these wrappers was faded orange color and the other was a harshly stiff, unrelentingly cheerful red and white check fabric with a large clown-like collar and big patch pockets that even my aunt thought better of wearing, as the still attached price tag proved.  My mother’s keeping them attested to her self-effacing, infuriatingly modest attitude.  She rarely bought anything for herself and when she did, it was always the price rather than the quality that determined her purchase.  Her frugality and thrift, also characterized by me as miserliness and cheapness in my less charitable moods, colored everything she did. A victim of the Great Depression and penniless immigrant parents with six children, all of who were out of school and working by the time they were twelve, my mother’s attitude toward money was intense and unchangeable.  Unfortunately, those same circumstances that made her acutely aware of the value of a dollar also made her feel unworthy of anything but the barest minimum, an attitude that angered me and made me feel responsible.  I tried to counter her self-abnegation, and maybe my own, with no success.

                 The hospital robes and the inherited ones she wore in the hospital made me, above all, feel guilty.  How could I let my mother, sick and pathetic, shocked by her own limited ability to move or talk lie in a hospital bed in castoffs?  So, I went to the lingerie department at Macy’s to get her a presentable, new robe.  There in a corner of the department hung bed jackets.  At first glance they looked ridiculous—short and girly.  But the idea began to grow on me.  They were practical; they did not bunch up in bed the way a longer robe would have.  They were light and unemcumbering, yet warm and cute.  I bought one.

            Consciously or not, I knew from the minute I bought it that my mom would not want it and that I would wind up with it.  That’s why I got the large rather that the medium.  I knew her policy of self-denial, her refusal to have or wear anything not essential or too expensive.  Once before I had bought her a lovely nightgown and matching outer garment and she had kept it in her drawer wrapped in tissue paper for years, telling me that she was saving it for a special occasion.  It was only when I became exasperated and told her to renounce her crown of thorns that she relented, to please me, and wore it the next time she stayed at my house.  She looked uncomfortable in it, stilted, afraid to ruin it with coffee or wrinkles.  She kept looking at me for reaction and complimented me several times on my good taste.  I felt regretful, not only that I had bought such a “nice” thing for her, but that I had used accusations of martyr to shame her into wearing it.  Guilt works, though.  When she discovered that she had a recurrence of cancer a few months later, she took out a set of earrings and a bracelet that I had bought her about twenty-five years earlier and about which I had forgotten.  When she did put the bracelet on, the clasp broke—brittle from age—and the jewelry fell and shattered across her linoleum floor.

      This time though, I thought, she, weakened by illness and worn down from weeks in the hospital, would give in and wear the charming item.  She would not.  Her roommate, whose shaved and stitched and lumpy skull, the result of brain surgery, remarked to my mother that maybe she was pregnant and should go to the maternity ward where bed jackets are, or were, the accepted costume, certainly not here in the ward of dying old men and women. They both laughed heartily and I felt ridiculed.  My mother said nothing about the garment and I mentioned it when I visited her, but it just hung, tags attached, in the narrow hospital closet. Perhaps it was too fancy for her, an object whose main purpose was decorative and therefore frivolous.  Maybe she wanted to maintain her humble look and the accompanying pity it aroused in visitors. It could have been she just thought the jacket was stupid or inappropriate, although she kept telling me how beautiful it was when I referred to it, and how I should take it home and wear it myself.

     So I took the jacket, stagnant after weeks of absorbing food odors and the stench of bodily functions in the sealed-window hospital, and made it my own.  I wore it to bed for a few nights, thinking I could read in comfort, not having to tuck the blankets under my chin to ward off the cool drafts that arise after the heat goes off.

     But the bed jacket was less than satisfying to me.  The first time I wore it, it felt dirty and reeking of hospital smells despite the washing I had given it.  I felt sullied.  My husband looked at it askance, but said nothing the first time I had it on.  By the third wearing, he laughed at it, at me, and said I looked silly.  Besides, he went to bed much earlier than I did, so I could not read in bed at night anyway.  All of this made the bed jacket superfluous, frivolous, and foolish.  My mother did not want it, my husband did not like it, and even though I thought it would make my mother, and then me, feel pampered and elegant, it just made me sad.