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  • The Language of Clothes
  • Nicole Cooley (bio)

purple wool coat

I keep her obituary folded in the pocket of her winter coat.

Throughout the ride from New York City to Worcester, I wear the coat—though the train is overheated—and I hold the small square from the Detroit Free Press. Folded up, it’s the size of a locket, a ring box, or a button from a piece of the 1940s clothes I love. When I first saw my grandmother’s death notice, I couldn’t believe how tiny it was: three lines of description; it said nothing about Gaga as I knew her. Two weeks after her death, I am traveling to New England to research my new book. I watch the frozen, rocky horizon as the train enters Massachusetts. Two weeks after her death, this landscape speaks of grief: the rivers iced over and etched with scratches, the mill towns with their boarded-up stores and rusted cars, the blankness of the fields in between.

I think of it as my grandmother’s coat, though it is mine.

It’s the winter coat Gaga chose for me when I was in graduate school, at an Ann Taylor store in Detroit. The last time I saw her, when I visited weeks before her death, I stood close to show her. “You still have that coat? I don’t believe it!” Her voice was full of happiness even as she pretended disbelief. We both acted as if we thought that my still having the coat was both funny and strange.

Nearly blind from macular degeneration, she leaned in to see the color, pressing her face to the wool. I knew she couldn’t see that the coat’s buttonholes are stretched so the buttons slip through or that its pockets are shredded. She couldn’t notice that the silk lining’s ragged edges are visible through the cuffs.

Now, a month later, my coat is even more badly in need of repair. It is probably beyond repair, but since Gaga died, I can’t let go of it. I have always done this: resurrect the women I love through clothes. My other winter coat belongs to my husband’s grandmother, dead now for three years, and I wear it not for its red velvet buttons and round collar but for the cigarette burn near the left pocket, her small signature.

On the train, I wrap my grandmother’s coat tighter around my body. [End Page 110]

green silk baby dress

My grandmother loved fashion. As a child, though my family lived on my father’s graduate student stipend, I wore the baby dresses she bought me in Paris and London. I swear I remember these outfits, just as I believe I remember all my clothes.

And I have saved all of Gaga’s gifted baby outfits, packed in a box. The yellow coat with gold buttons and matching hat. The green silk dress edged in lace. “You look like a little French schoolgirl,” my grandmother said with approval as I turned slowly in front of her, modeling that dress. I was in nursery school.

My mother likes to tell how, when I was three months old, a box arrived from my grandmother, full of clothes for me: stiff taffeta dresses, skirts and blouses with hooks and clasps, everything a tiny replica of a grown-up outfit Gaga herself might wear. Completely inappropriate for a baby. “Buy her toys,” my mother would suggest to my grandmother at Christmastime and before birthdays, but for the rest of her life, Gaga never gave me anything but clothes.

Throughout my New Orleans childhood, Gaga wrote to me from Detroit. My mother saved all her letters and postcards, many of them written to me before I knew how to read. In almost all, the focus is on clothes, hers or mine.

A letter written to me in 1968, when I was two: “Gaga wants to buy you some pretties. What color dress would you like to go with your coat? Do want it frilly or plain? How about a slip? Ask Mama to write and tell me the things you need for spring. I...

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