A letter from a reader

At 63, looking presentable still cost me every Sunday evening at the ironing board

I had better own up to two things before we begin. I have never written anything like this in my life, and I am no writer, as you are about to find out. And telling other women what they ought to wear has never once been my business.

But three different women asked me about a sweater in the post office line on Thursday morning, and by the time I reached the counter I had explained it so many times that it seemed simpler to sit down and write the whole thing out properly.

It started on a Sunday evening last month. I was setting up the ironing board in front of the television, as I have done on Sunday evenings for as long as I can remember, with the week’s blouses over the back of the chair. My daughter was visiting, and she watched me test the iron the way my mother taught me, and then she asked, quite gently,

Mom, who are you ironing all of these for?

I did not have a good answer. For the post office line, I suppose. For the checkout at the grocery store and the doctor’s waiting room and whoever might ring the doorbell. I pressed five blouses that evening while she watched, and somewhere around the fourth one I realized that looking presentable had been costing me my Sunday evenings for forty odd years, and I had never once questioned the bill.

How it happens

Nobody decides to spend her life ironing. It happens quietly.

Somewhere along the way you learn what presentable means. A collar. A neat neckline. Something with a bit of structure to it that says you have made an effort. And everything that had those things came with upkeep attached. The blouses wanted pressing, the dressy tops wanted hanging just so, and half of them wanted checking in the mirror before you dared answer the door. Meanwhile the things that needed nothing, the soft easy things, looked exactly like what they were. Comfortable. Which is the kind word people use for a woman who has stopped trying.

So you strike a bargain without ever putting it into words. Effort in, respectability out. You press the collars because the collars are what people see, and you give up your Sunday evenings to it, and after enough years it stops feeling like a choice at all.

What I had wrong

I always assumed the effort was the point. That a collar only counted if somebody had pressed it, and that anything you could simply pull over your head would always look like exactly that.

But what actually makes a woman look put together is a handful of small signals. A collar sitting properly at the neck. A tidy neckline. A texture that looks deliberate rather than accidental. And here is the part it took me until 63 to work out. None of those signals cares whether they cost you twenty minutes at the board or twenty seconds at the drawer. Somebody just has to build them into something that needs no upkeep at all, and apparently somebody finally has.

The sweater is called the Harriet

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now. My daughter found the page, which she considers her contribution to the household ironing.

It is a soft pink sweater, a gentle dusty sort of pink rather than anything sugary, covered in fine ribbed lines that give it a neat, deliberate texture. At the neck there is a proper little collar that sits up and folds over the way a blouse collar does, with a short zipper down the front, so you can wear it open at the neck or closed to the chin depending on the weather and your mood. The sleeves are generous and finish in deep neat cuffs, and it sits easily over jeans or pants without clinging anywhere. They do it in six colors, but it was the pink that came up the driveway first.

And the whole trick of it is this. Every signal your eye reads says made an effort. The collar, the neat zipper, the tidy ribbed texture, the way it holds its shape. But there is no effort anywhere in it. Nothing to press, nothing to tuck in, nothing to check twice in the hall mirror. It comes out of the drawer looking exactly the way it went in, every single time, and you are out the door in the time it takes to pull it over your head.

What happened in the post office line

I wore it into town on Thursday morning with my jeans, to mail a package to my sister Sue, and I had done nothing to myself beyond the usual. That is rather the point of it.

Three women asked me about it before I reached the counter. The lady ahead of me with her arms full of boxes asked whether I was on my way somewhere nice, and seemed genuinely surprised when I said I was only there for stamps and Sue’s package. A younger woman touched the sleeve, asked where it was from, and wanted to know whether it was as soft as it looked. And a woman I half know from the flower committee at church said she had been meaning to say how well I was looking, which from her covers a multitude of things.

I have stood in that line most weeks for more years than I will admit to, pressed blouse and all, and in all that time nobody has once remarked on anything I was wearing. I walked out feeling quietly delighted with myself, and the neighbor’s cat I am minding this week, who remarks on nothing, was no less pleased to see me for it when I got home.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from an S to a 2XL, and it is the same relaxed, easy shape the whole way through, not a different garment once you pass a certain letter. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. The collar earns its keep. Zipped up on a cool morning it is as good as a scarf, open at the neck indoors it frames your face the way a blouse used to, and either way whatever you have on underneath stops mattering. I have worn it over a plain white tee more times than I can count and been treated like a woman with plans.

Three. Effort and looking presentable are two different things. I spent forty years believing they were the same one, and I gave up a great many Sunday evenings to that belief. I do not miss them.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me hesitate.

The Harriet is $47.95. It was $96.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because anything that looked this deliberate would cost you a good deal more at the mall, and it would want dry cleaning or pressing into the bargain. There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they run the sale to move the season’s stock while the cooler mornings are still in front of us.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman up in Waxahachie had written, “I have not had the ironing board out since it arrived. It looks sharper than half the blouses I used to press for twenty minutes apiece.” That was the one that decided it for me.

My daughter, who started all of this at the ironing board, has claimed the dark blue one for herself, which I am told is what daughters are for.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on the porch with a pot of coffee and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Add up what looking presentable actually costs you in a week. The pressing, the checking, the changing before the door. If the answer is next to nothing, wonderful, you need no advice from me. But if you find, as I did, that your sharpest things are the ones that make the most work, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to look at this sweater. Not because a sweater will change your life. It will not. But my daughter was right at the ironing board. Nobody was making me do any of it, and it turns out nobody ever was.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the boutique told me plainly that once this stock is gone, it is gone, so the middle sizes will disappear first. And if you go back and forth over the colors, there is a dark blue and a burgundy for quieter tastes, but the pink is the one I have and the one that gets asked about.

I have stopped paying for presentable with my Sunday evenings.

Peggy