The Clothes My Parents Wore

The house looked the same and it did not. I could not have said what was different until the next morning, in the daylight, when I was poking around the way you do when you come home to a place you grew up in, opening the fridge, looking at the photographs on the wall, and I went into my parents’ bedroom to borrow my mother’s good scissors from her sewing basket.

The closet door was open. And I stood there a long time looking into it, because something was wrong with it, and it took me a minute to understand that the wrongness was that it was half empty.

My father’s side of the closet had always held exactly one suit, a gray one, that he wore to weddings and funerals and to church on Christmas and Easter, and his good Sunday boots, the black ones, polished, kept in a box. They were gone. The suit was gone. The boots were gone. On my mother’s side, where her church dresses hung, the navy one with the white collar and a green one she wore to the better occasions and a wool coat she had owned my entire life, a good coat, a camel colored coat she babied and brushed and hung on a padded hanger: gone, gone, gone. The padded hanger was still there, empty, swinging a little in the draft from the closet.

I did not understand it. My first stupid thought was that we had been robbed, that someone had broken in and taken clothes, which makes no sense, nobody breaks into a farmhouse to steal a camel coat. My second thought, the one that started the dread, was that something was wrong, that one of them was sick, that they had sold things, and I stood in my parents’ bedroom at nineteen years old holding a pair of sewing scissors and feeling the floor tilt.

I did not ask them. I want you to understand that I was still, even then, a coward about it. I did not go into the kitchen and say Mom, where are your good clothes. I was afraid of the answer. So instead I did what cowards do, I went looking for the answer sideways, from other people, and that is how I came to learn the truth the way I did, in pieces, from the whole town, over four days.

It started at church.

We went to Zion Lutheran on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the little white church on the edge of Corliss where I was baptized and confirmed, and my mother wore the housedress with a different cardigan and my father wore his coffee colored work shirt, clean, with the tear mended, and I saw for the first time that these were not just moving day clothes. These were the only clothes they had now. They had worn their good clothes out of their own closet and they were down to the chore clothes, in the house of God, in front of everyone they knew, and nobody in that church looked at them strange, because every soul in that building already knew why.