Hello.
I’m the kind of person…
…who wears a uniform. This uniform of mine has served me well for much of my life. It consists of a white tee-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a cardigan or v-neck sweater. Sometimes, I’ll wear a gray tee-shirt, just to mix things up a bit. For the last seven years, I’ve worn the exact same style of slip-on Vans. I like them so much, I have a new pair in my closet in its box, ready for when my latest pair wears out. (I wore Converse All-Stars for years and years and years, but one day, I learned of the ease of slip-on shoes and since then, I’ve been all Vans, all of the time.)
There was a time I had a collection of t-shirts with different dumb things written on them. This was when I was in my twenties and wore Boy’s Size XL from the kids’ department. One time, on a vacation to visit a boy in Long Beach, California, we took our laundry to his aunt’s house who lived nearby. She didn’t have a dryer, so we hung up our wet things in her back yard while we went off to the horse races for the day (he was so fun!). When we came home, the clothesline was bare. Someone had stolen all of my tees, every last one. Having grown up in a house with a dryer and a sense of safety, I was shocked. It was good practice, though, for the next year when somebody stole my car. But that’s another story. That boy now lives in Portland, Oregon and we still speak now and then, but that’s also another story.
Today, as you may have guessed, we’re talking about clothes in stories. One of my very favorite stories is called “The Sock,” by Lydia Davis. You can’t find this story online, so I’ll type out how it starts:
My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward, and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to sit or stand at the right angles to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind, and this one least of all.
As you see from these few pages, so far there’s no sock. Just a wife describing her former husband and his new wife. Clearly, the ex-wife has thoughts about these two. (His head looks smaller! So funny!)
The story continues. His mother arrives. There is a dinner at a restaurant. Etc. Still no sock.
But then….
The narrator gives her former husband a sock he’s mistakenly left at her house, and thinking about that sock sends the ex-wife down a rabbit hole of nostalgia:
…and I couldn’t help thinking of all the other socks of his I had picked up, stiff with his sweat and threadbare on the sole, in all our life together from place to place, and then of his feet in those socks, how the skin shone through at the ball of the foot and the heel where the weave was worn down; how he would lie reading on his back on the bed with his feet crossed at the ankles so that his toes pointed at different corners of the room….
The story, then, is not really about a sock at all (despite the title), but about the loss of a marriage. (This story can be found in Davis’s Collected Stories which I’ve mentioned here before.)
TODAY’S PROMPT
Write a story that has a piece of clothing somewhere within it. The item of clothing should hold some meaning for someone in the story.
Name your story for that piece of clothing, as Davis did in her story “The Sock.”
The story, on the surface, is about the piece of clothing. But really, it’s about something else.
You can write about love, pain, grief, friendship, marriage, children, loneliness—any topic you choose.
If you need more help, have two characters in conflict. The piece of clothing belongs to one of them.
As always, 400 words max in the Comments section.
Special Note: Some of you may be interested in a Substack publication I came across where you can submit your work for free in weekly contests: Writers Hour Magazine. I’ve linked here to this week’s contest. Take a look!
My Slippers
The East Village had a uniform, and the West Village had a uniform. If you dressed in a crisp white shirt and pressed jeans for an evening at Waverly and Waverly on the west side, listening to the croonings of Jerry Scott at the piano, you’d never venture across town a half mile to The Bar on 2nd avenue, where the pool table gave you splinters and the bartender’s nipple rings glinted in the glow of everyone’s cigarettes. There was no middle ground. Doc Martens on the east, loafers on the west. Buzz cut east, fluff west. Sondheim west, The Clash east.
There were some who were brave enough to cross over. A few stood proud in their pristine Lacostes on the sawdust floors of the tawdry east. One or two wore their thrift-store jackets and ripped jeans and sang along lustily in the tuneful west. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!”
I, for one, frequented both sides, often and successfully, I might say. How’d I do it?
I didn’t resort to carrying a bag with a change of clothes. I didn’t grease my blown-out hair on the way east, or shine up my Docs on the way west. No, I had one simple bit of wardrobe. My smile.
I wore my smile like a beacon, like the lady in the harbor (remember her?). Come to me, you tired men, you poor masses of men. Yearn no more. Be free with me.
Was my smile always genuine? Never. It was the drugs, so many drugs. But for those few years I never walked alone. East to west, west to east, sometimes even north (and once across the river), I wore whatever I wanted, however I wanted, and every time I found men eager to bask in my smile.
That was then. Now, worn out, I smile infrequently. Never, actually. People on the street tell me I should smile. My sister asks, remember how your smile was your umbrella? But I prefer the mist now. All those years, east to west and back again I met men who saw my smile and for a moment forgot dress codes, forgot sickness, forgot death. My addiction served them but eventually, like that statue in the harbor, I felt I’d done my duty and it was time to fold my torch. At home I'm comfortable in my slippers, soles smooth as I walk back and forth on my worn carpet.
Glove
I found the glove at the end of the driveway, near the mailbox. When I told the police, they said they’d come back for it if they needed it, but they never did, so I still have it all these years later. I keep it wrapped in a bag in my closet, just in case.
My sister and I had matching pairs that our mother gave us for Christmas. They were fuzzy wool winter gloves, hers red and mine orange, with tiny white stars knitted into them. That Christmas was the last time I saw my mother, because after that visit, my father said she was too crazy to visit anymore. Delia and I cried and begged him to change his mind, but he said we’d thank him for it later on. Well, I never did, and Delia, who knows.
We wore the gloves every day, because we loved them. Mine were attached to a string that was threaded through the arms of my coat so they wouldn’t get lost, but because Delia was older, hers had no string and she stuffed them in her coat pockets when she went indoors. So it’s funny that she’s the one who lost the glove.
Though I do wonder how it came to be left behind. Did she open the car door and try to jump out before my mother turned onto the road? That would mean she changed her mind at the last minute, and was pulled back into the car. Or did she roll the window down and throw the glove out to let me know she wouldn’t forget me? Most likely, I’ll never know. My father thinks they changed their names and went to another state – I hope someplace where she doesn’t need gloves.
The other thing I wonder, always, is why my mother chose her instead of me.