Op-Ed: What happens when Beauty’s daughter has no will to beguile?

My mother, known to her friends as Joanne Carol Schieble, then Joanne Jandali, then Joanne Simpson, was born in 1931 in Milwaukee. She was an imp and a beauty, the first in her family to attend college, her father’s favorite, the child of his prosperity, who looked great in dresses.

But Joanne wasn’t even her given name.

I hadn’t ever known this. I found the official document, registering her change of name to Joanne, as I was dismantling her apartment. She was still alive but no longer able to answer questions about the past.

The document was dated, so I could see that she’d changed her name when she was in her 20s.

During my 20s, my mother was unhappy with my hair. “Why won’t she wash her hair?” she asked my best friend. My long straight hair wasn’t dirty, exactly, but it didn’t have the fluff of the just-shampooed, and my mother was taking us out to dinner in San Francisco. I was unmarried. Undating. 23. She beseeched my friend to explain why I dressed the way I did. My friend, a Parisian, had put on lipstick and a black cashmere coat. She said that she could see what my mother meant.

It occurs to me now that for the entire long decade of my 20s, my mother and I argued about my appearance.

“Doesn’t she need pantyhose?” her boyfriend once asked, noticing my New York white winter legs sticking out of a dress, when I came home for vacation.

“Wear pantyhose with everything,” my mother hissed, with too much emphasis.

The deficiencies didn’t end with my clothes; they extended to my apartment. But that had a different feeling; my mother understood that she had a gift for design, and she didn’t blame me for my only average talent.

My best memory of us in those years is of the weekend she came to whip my New York apartment into shape. We bought and assembled bookshelves, for which we had to purchase a drill. We stalked the flea market and found good enamel pots, which we hung up over the stove in the kitchen/hallway. We found a set of cottonwood dishes I still love. We worked 16-hour days, making endless excursions to Better Home.

Why hadn’t she realized that personal style also required work, talent and inborn flair? She’d always been beautiful. That her daughter could be so stubbornly lacking in the will to beguile was maddening to her.

A young man told me once, at the end of a dinner party, that my problem was that I didn’t show the feather.

“What feather?” I said.

He shook his head. He was trying to explain why I didn’t have a boyfriend. “It’s a dance,” he said. “You know how female ducks have a spot of purple? It’s for mating.”

That’s when it hit me: This was why my mother had wanted me to wash my hair and open a few more buttons on my blouse.

Eventually, I learned to show feathers and to wash my hair before evenings out. And it’s now my mother whose appearance concerns. She is past the long era of fretting over her clothes. When the woman comes to give her a manicure or a haircut, she accedes or hits her, depending on the day.

Most of her clothes were ruined during the first month in the care facility where she now lives. Every time I saw her in the beginning, she was wearing someone else’s ill-fitting pastel clothes, colors she would have never abided as her full self.

I thought about letting go of the endless details involved in maintaining her beauty; the curatorial aspect of wardrobe, the many people involved for haircuts, manicures, mole removal.

After all, she doesn’t notice. And she’s happy.

But I couldn’t do it. First, I took over the laundry and threw out the garments that weren’t hers. Then I bought new track suits and K-Swiss sneakers, all in neutral colors. Those too disappeared in the institutional laundry. Now I’ve moved on to cashmere sweats, with her name sewn into each with camp labels I sent away for.

Long after it could have pleased her, I’ve come to understand. What I once thought of as silly, wasteful fripperies now seem complex middle-age pleasures; the feeling of moving in well-cut clothes, the way hair swings after the right cut. These things register in the same tenor as a great pour-over.

When she still could — only a few years ago — my mother came with her friend Jim to every one of my children’s baseball practices in stylish pantsuits, high wedge espadrilles, sunglasses and a matching hat. What I’d once seen as vanity was generous hard work, not easily maintained. My children were never frightened of her or embarrassed. They were proud of their beautiful grandmother and oblivious of what it took to stand there at the fence smiling, happy to be still in the game.

Novelist Mona Simpson’s latest book is “Casebook: A Novel.”