Are your kid gloves blighted with ring-around-the-wrist from a night of dancing at the Junior League Ball? When you last snuffed a sniffle with a lady-like finger did it leave an unsightly stain on the mitt guard?
My friend, worry not: chauffeur your dirtied hand garments straight to the Glovatorium in Oakland, California. 2300 Market Street.
Not long ago I pulled this strange package out of an old I. Magnin’s hatbox; it contained a pair of white kid gloves with a little fringe design along the wrist. They had belonged to my grandmother Joy and manifestly hadn’t been worn since having undergone the “scientific tanner’s process” at the Glovatorium. When exactly, I wonder, did women give up on gloves? Did gloves get flung like bras and girdles in the sartorial bonfires of the sixties? Should we blame (or thank) the feminists for their extinction?
Kid gloves epitomize the elegance of the pre-casual eras and a small part of me, I’ll admit, laments their demise — or should I call it “martyrdom”? I’ve had the idea to host a literary salon wearing white, opera-length gloves; it seems to me a true hostess does not leave any fingerprints of her labor, and this holds whether she is attending to guests at a cocktail party or introducing authors and ideas. We wear gloves outdoors for protection but indoors we slip them on to dissimulate and it’s this subtle degree of subversive cache-cache that enables a woman to transcend the gravity of her everyday identity. To some extent a woman wearing gloves cannot be known; minus her hands, the stories they give away too easily, she gains an air of mystery. The gloves come off when she sits down to eat– always – but if she has taken full advantage of her three-quarter time, her entourage might well overlook her telling (and hopefully moisturized) hands as they fork the peas. I can’t help but think there’s a corollary to be made between the be-gloved woman and the author: a writer, too, creates her imaginary world with a gloved hand, for if her approach to the Real becomes too direct or unmitigated by the imagination, what is meant to take flight gets flattened and we are left not with the fullness of Mystery but with something that will never even make it to the Ball of Marvels.
The only time I’ve worn gloves was at my wedding and they were three-quarter length. I would love to wear them again, though perhaps they’ve yellowed? I suppose I can always send them to the Glovatorium – still in existence, ma foi – to be treated with their “scientific tanner’s technique.”