The Clothes My Parents Wore

They paid my tuition on the eleventh of August. One day before the deadline.

And then, with the last of what they had, nineteen days later, they put me and my footlocker in the truck and drove me four hours east, and they did not buy themselves one new thing to do it in. Not a shirt. Not a pair of shoes. They had sold the clothes a person wears to look like they are doing all right, and they had chosen, on purpose, to show up at my fine new college in their worst, in the chore clothes and the housedress, because every single dollar they had was already inside that tuition payment, already spent on me, and they would not take one cent of it back out to buy themselves a nicer shirt so that a woman like Diane Mercer would shake my father’s hand.

That was the choice. I understood it finally, sitting on a stool in Glenda’s resale shop. My parents had looked poor on move in day because they had made themselves poor, for me, down to the last good thing they owned, and they had decided they would rather be mistaken for the movers than spend one dollar of my future on their own pride.

I cried in that shop until Glenda had to lock the door and turn the sign.

I want to tell you I drove home and threw my arms around them and it was a beautiful scene. It was not, not at first, because by now you know that I am a person who does the cowardly sideways thing, and what I actually did was drive home and sit in the truck in the yard for twenty minutes trying to figure out how to even walk back into that house carrying what I now knew.

I had been ashamed of them. That was the thing I could not get past. On the single day they had bankrupted themselves for me, I had stood in a parking lot and wished my own father would put down the trunk and hide in the truck. I had been relieved when a rich woman mistook him for hired help. I had let her think it. I had let him stand there with his hand out and his hand refused, and I had been glad.

I finally went in. My mother was at the stove. My father was at the table working a crossword in pen, which he does to show the crossword who is boss. And I stood in the doorway and I could not get a word out, and my mother turned around and took one look at me and knew, the way she knows everything, that someone had told me.

She set down her spoon. She said, “Oh, Nora.”

And I said the only thing there was to say, which was, “Why didn’t you tell me.”