In 1980, when my mother co-owned an art gallery in San Francisco, she and her assistant were robbed at gunpoint by two jittery escaped convicts, who mistook the gallery for a cash business and openly discussed shooting them when the cash failed to materialize. The ordeal ended without serious harm (thanks to the miraculous arrival of a delivery man, who frightened the convicts away), but my mother never again wanted to wear the skirt she’d had on that day: a long black wraparound with a geometric pattern of magenta flowers and thick green stems. I appropriated the skirt, cut it short, took it with me to college, and wore it through my twenties. I never forgot its awful history; on the contrary, that history sharpened my pleasure in wearing it. The very act of tying the skirt around my waist felt restorative—as if, by paving over my mother’s horrific experience with ordinary life, I were repairing an imbalance.
I was near the end of my twenties before I lost someone I was close to: my mother’s mother, whose three-tiered necklace of small fake pearls I inherited. I wore that necklace constantly, even after it became clear that I would destroy it unless I put it aside. I had the same impulse when my father died, six years later, and, five years after that, my stepfather. From my father’s closet, I borrowed a navy-blue wool V-neck, from my stepfather’s a gray-and-burgundy argyle sweater. For years, on any given winter day I wore one of those two sweaters, partly for the obvious reason—wearing the garment of a person I loved was like being wrapped in a protective force field. But what drove me was also a kind of defiance. When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong—a freakish incursion—and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are. Those sweaters did more than remind me of their original owners; the sheer ordinariness of working in them, spilling on them, taking them off at the end of the day, and tossing them on the floor helped to diffuse that dour hush. Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life’s daily transactions—in other words, alive.
When my father-in-law, whom I adored, died, a year and a half ago, I began with almost unseemly speed to lobby my mother-in-law for one of his sweaters. She gave me a few to choose from, two of which I kept: a scratchy green sweater that’s too warm for everyday wear, and a vest, ginger-colored and wonderfully roomy, just as my stepfather’s argyle sweater was for years, until I accidentally put it in the dryer and it shrank to fit me exactly. I’d forgotten, in the years since my father and stepfather died, what it was like to first wear their clothing. Starting fresh with my father-in-law’s vest brought it back: the garment smelled so much like him—coffee, pepper, burning wood—that when I held it under my children’s noses and asked, “Who does this smell like?” they both cried, startled, “Grandpa!”
After a few weeks, the vest went from smelling like Grandpa to smelling like me, until the latter fact was so pronounced that I had it dry-cleaned, at which point it became, in some sense, mine. But always on loan, to such an extent that I think Joe’s vest each time I pull it from my closet, and I find the notion so heartening that I recently marvelled to my husband at his reluctance to avail himself of this obvious way to feel connected with—surrounded by—his father, whom I know he misses. “There are more sweaters!” I exhorted him. “I only took two.” My husband paused a moment before replying, disconcerted, “What can I say? I don’t have the impulse to wear them. I think about him constantly, but it’s not bound up in physical things.”
Of course, a loan from someone dead is—like any loan—temporary. It can’t be renewed, and, eventually, the physical object begins to wear down. My grandmother’s necklace broke on an East Village corner; the cheap plastic pearls went flying into the street. I gathered up as many as I could and sealed them in an envelope, which I’ve since lost track of. My father’s and stepfather’s sweaters are beginning to look threadbare, despite multiple repairs. This reminds me of how long it’s been since I saw their owners. I find it ever harder to remember how it felt to be in a room with either of those men, but I know how their sweaters feel against my skin. I plan to wear them until they unravel into shreds. ♦