Email Spotting

By Bret Anthony Johnston 

What my father wore embarrassed me as a young  man. I wanted him to dress like a doctor or lawyer, but on those muggy  mornings when he rose before dawn to fry eggs for my mother and me, he  always dressed like my father. 

We lived in south Texas,  and my father wore tattered jeans with the imprint of his pocketknife on the  seat. He liked shirts that snapped more than those that buttoned and   kept his pencils, cigars, glasses, wrenches and 

screwdrivers in his  breast pocket. My father’s boots were government-issues with steel toes that  made them difficult to pull off his feet, which I sometimes did when he returned from repairing air conditioners, his job that also shamed  me.   

But, as a child, I’d  crept into his closet and modeled his wardrobe in front of the mirror. My  imagination transformed his shirts into the robes of kings and his belts  into soldiers’ holsters. I slept in his undershirts 

and relied on the scent  of his collars to calm my fear of the dark. Within a few years, though, I  started wishing my father would trade his denim for khaki and retire his  boots for loafers. I stopped sleeping in his clothes and eventually  began dreaming of another father. 

I blamed the way he  dressed for my social failures. When boys bullied me, I thought they’d seen  my father wearing his cowboy hat but no shirt while walking our dog.    I felt that girls snickered at me because they’d glimpsed him mowing the  grass in cut-offs and black boots. The girls’ families paid men (and I  believed better-dressed ones) to landscape their lawns, while their fathers  yachted in the bay wearing lemon-yellow sweaters and expensive sandals. 

My father only bought  two suits in his life. He preferred clothes that allowed him the freedom to  shimmy under cars and squeeze behind broken Maytags, where he felt most content. But the day before my parents’ twentieth anniversary, he and I went  to Sears, and he tried on suits all afternoon. With each one, he stepped to  the mirror, smiled and nodded, then asked about the price and reached for another. He probably tried ten suits before we drove to a discount  store and bought one without so much as approaching a fitting room. That  night my mother said she’d never seen a more handsome man. 

Later, though, he donned  the same suit for my eighth- grade awards banquet, and I wished he’d stayed  home. After the ceremony (I’d been voted Mr. Citizenship, of all   things), he lauded my award and my character while changing into a faded  red sweatsuit. He was stepping into the garage to wash a load of laundry  when I asked what even at age fourteen struck me as cruel and wrong. “Why,”  I asked, “don’t you dress ‘nice,’ like my friends’  fathers?” 

He held me with his sad,  shocked eyes, and searched for an answer. Then before he disappeared into  the garage and closed the door between us, my father said, “I like my clothes.” An hour later my mother stormed into my room, slapped me hard  across the face and called me an “ungrateful little twerp,” a phrase that  echoed in my head until they resumed speaking to me. 

In time they forgave me,  and as I matured I realized that girls avoided me not because of my father  but because of his son. I realized that my mother had slapped me because  my father could not, and it soon became clear that 

what he had really said  that night was that there are things more important than clothes. He’d said  he couldn’t spend a nickel on himself because there were things I wanted.  That night, without another word, my father had said,  ”You’re my son, and I sacrifice so your life will be better than  mine.” 

For my high-school  graduation, my father arrived in a suit he and my mother had purchased  earlier that day. Somehow he seemed taller, more handsome and imposing, and when he passed the other fathers they stepped out of his way. It wasn’t  the suit, of course, but the man. The doctors and lawyers recognized the confidence in his swagger, the pride in his eyes, and when they approached him, they did so with courtesy and respect. After we returned home, my  father replaced the suit in the flimsy Sears garment bag, and I didn’t see  it again until his funeral.   

I don’t know what he was  wearing when he died, but he was working, so he was in clothes he liked, and  that comforts me. My mother thought of burying him in the suit from  Sears, but I convinced her otherwise and soon delivered a pair of old jeans,  a flannel shirt and his boots to the funeral home. 

On the morning of the  services, I used his pocketknife to carve another hole in his belt so it  wouldn’t droop around my waist. Then I took the suit from Sears out of his closet and changed into it. Eventually, I mustered the courage to study  myself in his mirror where, with the exception of the suit, I appeared small  and insignificant. 

Again, as in childhood, the clothes draped over my  scrawny frame. My father’s scent wafted up and caressed my face, but it  failed to console me. I was uncertain: not about my father’s stature – I’d  stopped being an ungrateful little twerp years before. No, I was uncertain  about myself, my own stature. And I stood there for some time, facing myself in my father’s mirror, weeping and trying to imagine – as I will for the  rest of my life – the day I’ll grow into my father’s  clothes. 

“Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness”

- from The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason