Paraselene, peignoir, and the mysterious power of words

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The Boston Globe

There’s a webpage that lands in my e-mail every day. Maybe I signed up for it. I must have but I don’t remember. It’s called Word Thirst (wordthirst.com) and I love it, not only because it has nothing to do with all the bad things happening in the world, but also because some days it introduces me to words I don’t know, like paraselene, (Definition: a bright moonlike spot on a lunar halo; a mock moon). It also includes a graph, which shows when the word was most popular (in 1811, paraselene was very popular); and if it is popular still (it is not).

I also love that Word Thirst reintroduces me to words I haven’t thought of in years. Like peignoir (pronounced payn-waar). I hadn’t thought of peignoir, which was last Sunday’s word, in decades.

My mother bought me my one and only peignoir set. This was in 1967 and that’s what we called it then A set. It was a fancy, sheer, gauzy matching nightgown AND robe, designed not for sleeping, but for sashaying and swaying and strutting. And maybe seducing, but we won’t go there. She bought my set upstairs in Filene’s at South Shore Plaza where she paid full price for something neither of us knew how to spell. It was ivory with a touch of lace on the top of the nightgown and even more lace on the top of the robe. Both nightgown and robe were floor length.

I wasn’t with my mother the day she bought it. I was a senior in college and student teaching. She was probably on her lunch hour with time to kill. My mother sold hats at Sheridan’s, which was also at the South Shore Plaza. She managed the hat department there. Before Sheridan’s, she was the manager at Wethern’s in Quincy Square, another hat store.

Hats, you might guess, were our thing. We wore them every Sunday to church and some days just because. We were comfortable in cloches and whimsies and berets and pillboxes and even in wide-brimmed, fancy hats with feathers.

Peigniors, on the other hand? They were foreign to us. We saw them in old movies, which we watched on Sunday afternoons while my father worked. Hedy Lamarr wore them. Ann Sheridan wore them. But we didn’t. They made us sigh and wish and yearn. But we were comfortable in our cotton pajamas.

My mother presented me with a peignoir set at my wedding shower. It was tradition back then. At least I think it was. I was 20 years old and everything I knew of weddings and showers and peignoirs I had learned from love songs and old movies and books.

I know I wanted a peignoir set. I know I wished my mother would buy me one. I remember saying the word peignoir, not over and over the way I would say husband a few months later. My husband said. My husband likes. Have you met my husband?

But I enunciated it and I repeated it, dropping it into conversations with my mother, the word on my tongue feeling as exotic as the thing itself.

We looked at peignoirs the afternoon she took me shopping for honeymoon clothes. She bought me a short-sleeved pale yellow dress in the children’s department, which was upstairs in Filene’s. We bought most of my honeymoon clothes in the children’s department.

After, our shopping bags full, we walked past lingerie and there it was, on a rack full of white and ivory and pastel confections. I loved the ivory set. Maybe it was chiffon. Or silk. Or satin. I don’t know. What I remember is picking it up and posing with it, standing in front of a full-length mirror and seeing not my reflection, not a 20-year-old girl still playing dress-up, but Cinderella pretending to be Loretta Young, swooping in from behind closed doors all swoosh and smiles as she looked into the camera.

And then I saw the price tag.

It’s really pretty, I told my mother. Of course I like it. But it’s too fancy to sleep in. Plus the lace would itch. I don’t need it. Let’s get an ice cream and go home.

The afternoon of my wedding shower, I opened the peignoir in front of my grandmother and my future husband’s parents and friends. My mother had wrapped it in white tissue paper. I thought it was another dress. But then I saw the lace.

I held the nightgown up against me and everyone oohed and aahed. I blushed. And locked eyes with my mother. The gift was expensive and impractical but I loved it, even though I knew my mother had to sell a lot of hats to buy it and that I would not use it enough to warrant the cost.

And I didn’t. How often did I wear that peignoir set? How long did it hang forgotten in my closet before I gave it away?

And yet, here it is in memory a half a century later, not forgotten at all. The peignoir, my mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmother, so many of those relatives and friends? All gone, Filene’s and Sheridan’s gone, too.

Until a single word evoked them. And made them exist again.