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Nighties
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
At my bridal shower, someone, I don’t remember who,
gave me a pink see-through nightgown with pink satin
slippers with slender heels and feathers. The gown had
Feathers on it, too. I‘ve always hated my legs and even
then when I was still thin and in good shape, I didn’t want
to wear that nightgown or those slippers, didn’t want to
parade in front of you like some exaggerated pinup. But I
wore them all anyway all those negligees I got as shower
presents, sleazy nylon I didn’t know were tacky. When I
wore the shorty nightgowns, I’d leap into bed as quickly as
I could, not wanting you to notice how the short nightgown
revealed what I thought of then as my biggest flaw. In all
the young years of our marriage, I wore a different
nightgown every night, not that it ever stayed on for long,
and after I’d pull the nightgown back on, not wanting our
children to find me naked in our bed. I felt so sophisticated
in those nightgowns, like the ones that Doris Day wore in
movies and only years later, when my daughter bought me
a blue silk nightgown, soft and smooth and beautiful, do I
realize that the first ones I owned, were not lovely and
sophisticated but inexpensive imitations of silk ones, like
this nightgown I hold now to my cheek, and am grateful
to have been once so young, how lucky I am to have loved
you in nylon and silk and in my own incredible skin.
From All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007).