"Read This" Book Club's "Dress Codes"

Nov. 21, 2002 -- The "Wine, Women, and Jeffrey," book club read The Secret Life of Bees for last month's installment of Good Morning America's "Read This!" book club series. Today, they're passing on the book club baton to the "Jazzy Page Turners" of Knoxville, Tenn.

The "Jazzy Page Turners," are group of eight women, most of them retired, who met in a jazzercise class.

They've been assigned, by "Wine, Women and Jeffrey," to read the Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine.

The poignant and tender memoir, by Noelle Howey, explores the author's coming of age as a young woman, at the same time her father was "coming of age" as a transsexual, and her mother was finding her independence.

Read chapter one of Howey's Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine, below.

Coming Out, 1986

My mother's hatchback was parked in Section B, Aisle 12, between a small pile of beer cans and a battered Plymouth that looked as though it belonged on cement blocks. We were quiet.

I don't remember whether we left the house in the late morning or the early afternoon; I don't know if it was a Saturday or a Sunday. I can't say what we discussed in the car on the way to the mall, or whether we simply drove in silence. I didn't ask why we were going shopping all of a sudden, though I assumed we were trying to get out of my father's way. He looked pretty tired.

I watched the raindrops meander, forging crooked, loosely braided paths up the windshield. I had always been mesmerized and perplexed by the way rain crawls up car windows.

"Honey, are you listening? Do you understand what I'm saying?" my mother asked.

It was cold, even for late autumn, even for Cleveland.

"Yes, of course," I scoffed, buttoning my jacket.

My mother twisted in her bucket seat to face me as head-on as possible. That couldn't have been comfortable.

"I think you're not quite taking this in," she said.

Today, out of nowhere, right after our usual bowls of cornflakes, my mother decided that I needed socks, underwear, scrunchies--immediately. She hustled me into the car. "We're going to Penney's over at Randall," she said. "I'm not spending ten dollars so you can tell Debbie that you have socks from the Gap."

Randall Park was a strip mall behemoth with mud-streaked red carpeting, dry fountains, and third-tier retail establishments: Spencer Gifts instead of Papyrus, Frederick's of Hollywood instead of Victoria's Secret. I usually went elsewhere; thanks to purported gang activity, kids under sixteen weren't supposed to loiter in Randall without a chaperone. Anyway, I preferred the mall in Beachwood, or Bitchwood, as everyone called it, which had gleaming tile floors, perfectly squeegied skylights, a food court teeming with exotic boys from neighboring high schools.

We bought a whole armload of socks, and a plastic tube stuffed with panties in various pastel shades--a distant second choice after my mother rejected the thongs. She seemed anxious, fiddling with her keys, clucking her tongue.

While the clerk wrapped my panties in tissue paper, she asked my mother, "Honey, how's the weather out there? You know I hate not being able to see the outside from this place. It could be snowing for all I'd know!" My mother normally would've chuckled, "Oh boy, I just love windows, too. Well, it's raining right now..." And three minutes later, she and the cashier--named Wanda, apparently, originally from Kentucky--would be laughing and patting each other's hands like long-lost childhood friends. My mother, the former speech therapist, would have instinctively started mimicking Wanda's phrases, her pauses, the places where her sentences would drift off. But today the clerk got no response. My mom simply smiled, weakly, and handed over her credit card.

Before we left the store, I ran over to the Misses section to ogle a pair of size zero side-zipper Guess jeans. My mother lingered in the aisle watching me, warily. "Well, we bought cheap so-ocks," I pleaded, elongating my syllables preciously. This poor-me-buy-me-expensive-clothes bit never worked, but I always gave it a shot.

My mother didn't even blink. "Okay, okay," she sighed. "Get whatever you want."

Mom walked slowly back to the car in the rain. I practically skipped ahead, clutching my bag of jeans to my heart like found treasure. Debbie will die, I thought gleefully.

"Come on," I yelled. "You're getting wet."

She tossed the remaining bags in the hatchback between the lawn fertilizer and her golf clubs. We got back in the car, and I flipped on the radio. "...easy lover, she'll take your heart but you won't feel it."

"Um, can I change it?" I asked tentatively, realizing that having been gifted with designer loot, I should probably tread lightly with my requests.

"Actually, can you turn it off?" Mom said.

She stared straight out the windshield, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. Uh. It's work. She's been fired. Suddenly my heart lifted. It's Dad. Maybe he's dying! No, that's terrible. I take it back. I'm sorry, God. Or whoever. I take it back. Make him just sick. Maybe they're getting divorced. Or he's moving. Far, far away.

"It's Dad. There's something I need to tell you."

My mother said one of the following things:

a) "Your dad likes to wear women's clothes."

b) "Noelle, your dad is different from other dads in that he likes to wear girls' clothes, and he wants to do it all the time."

c) "You know how you like fuzzy sweaters? Your dad likes them, too. Girl sweaters, I mean."

My mom doesn't know what she said either.

In truth, it doesn't matter. I remember exactly what I thought: You have got to be kidding me. There's no news like hearing irrefutable proof that you're not the sole cause of your parents' woes, your father's drinking, your unshakable feeling that you're not put together quite right and finding out the problem all along was your father's unrequited yearning for angora .

My mother was looking at me very intently and quizzically. "You understand, Dad has been doing this for many, many years. And he doesn't want to have to hide it from you anymore."

"It's a big secret that he likes to wear girls' sweaters?" I retorted, trying to keep my voice steady and fierce.

"Well"— my mother sighed — "yes. And we wanted you to know." I supposed I was scripted to weep, to riddle my mother with questions. Tough . I was not going to be upset about this. I had decided not to care about my father years ago. With that resolution firmly in mind, I immediately burst into tears.

"So, it's not my fault? That he's so...like the way he is? He doesn't hate me?" I sobbed. "It's not my fault?" My mother says I repeated that same sentence twenty times. Despite my resolve not to crack, not to betray the fact that I actually, maybe, loved my father, once I started crying I couldn't stop. Nor could I stop feeling an overpowering sense of relief engulf my entire body, causing an almost anesthetizing effect. I blew my nose and wiped my face with my mother's sleeve.

"We're trusting you with this really important information, okay? You need to not tell anyone about this. You can talk about it with me, or your dad, or the therapist we've been seeing, if you want. She's really nice. But don't tell anyone about your dad. That means Debbie, too, okay? Dad could lose his job, we could lose the house, you could get teased at school. We need you to be an adult here, and keep this a secret."

My mother forced a grim smile. Her eyes were shot, her freckled face sunken and pallid, almost the color of jellyfish. For the first time, I realized my father wasn't coming out to me himself. My mother--kisser of paper cuts, attendee of parent-teacher functions, purchaser of produce--was on cleanup duty again. Of all the tasks not to push off on your wife, one might imagine coming out would be right up there.

"Sweetie," my mother said, registering surprise, "I told you your dad loved you. I always told you that."

"I know," I said, still exhaling. " You told me."

Had my mother or father told me the truth when I was sixteen, or twenty-five, I might have been beyond tears, and even beyond caring whether I was to blame for his obvious unhappiness. My father came out just in time.

© Noelle Howey, reprinted with permission from Picador USA