My mother bought clothes to make herself feel good. She imagined herself being invited to a dinner party at a house with vanilla-scented candles and a chandelier (or at least a fancy light fixture) and swept into a drawing room covered in white (not old, not brown) carpet where adults stood near the hors d’oeuvres tables cupping quiche in their palms and drinking sweet tea out of wine glasses. Inevitably the conversation would lead to my mother’s new wardrobe. Knowingly, she would squeeze a black curl and flash teeth as she protested, “Oh, this old thing?”
I was ten when my mother began sharing these fantasies with me. Most nights, she waited until midnight to change out of her blood-red nightgown into new clothes, after which she stared into her bedroom’s full-length mirror, then wandered into my baby brother’s room to patter the little man with babble, lifting him from the crib, swinging him around, upsetting his sleep. Next, she crept into my father’s sleeping quarters (the living room) and woke him to stoke compliments he wouldn’t give, then she tiptoed to my room, seated herself on the arm of my sofa (my bed), and asked me if she looked beautiful. I always said she did, but my mother’s mien was sadly clownish: her powdered face too white, blush and lipstick too loud, and besides she often sported a tracksuit, one of many she bought in bulk (plastic-patched in eye-aching neon), hardly an outfit worthy of praise. When I lauded, she thanked me, kissed my cheek, and waved goodbye at my doorway, sour perfume lingering in her leave.
My mother wanted a kind of love no one in the home could provide, least of all my father in his fallow epoch, his existence a drowsy shadow. Like my mother, he was hooked on Lortab, and equally as depressed as she about having no job, both of them doubly dejected because shamed by the world, and pointedly, too, he by her— “All we do, Bruce, is sit around and stare at four walls.” My mother wanted changes, and by my fifth-grade year, she became increasingly vocal about it. My parents had no money, nothing to do, they were in constant pain— and so my mother’s sole source of pleasure was shopping for clothes.
I see delight in my mother’s eyes, affixed to the TV screen, my father asleep on the living room sofa as she, seated in the recliner, picks up the yellow phone receiver from its cradle (Mickey Mouse’s gloved right hand, his left arm over his heart in eternal pledge) and orders the item of clothing she sees advertised on our boxy black set. If my father is aware she is ordering, he doesn’t let on. His eyes might open, but he’s right back to sleep.
~
1995, Year of the Washer and Dryer, not long before school’s winter break, morning. I rose to my mother’s summons and showered. Damp towel around me, chattering teeth, I walked wet-footed across the matted brown hallway to the utility room where the dryer tumbled cotton and denim. I dug my hand into the garment pile that blocked both washer and dryer (a heap as tall as I, at ten, going on eleven), grabbing randomly at a shirt, blue jeans, and underwear. I threw off the towel and changed where I stood. In the living room, I dozed in the recliner until the school bus rumbled by, my queue to step into December frost and wait for the driver to turn around in the Quail Run subdivision and pick me up last. Before leaving, I didn’t turn toward the sofa to face my father, who was fast asleep, as was my mother in her bedroom.
My body bowed with hunger pains the first half of the school day, a disadvantage for concentration in homeroom pre-Algebra, my least favorite subject. At noon, I appeased my aching stomach with the free lunch offering, rectangular pizza, cardboardy with a marina smear (best of the fare), before moving on to Language Arts. There I enjoyed Mrs. Turner’s imaginative writing exercises, which let me make my English pliant. But the final hour, Music, was the class I cherished most, because I had a crush on Miss Barrett.
That day, Miss Barrett played “Martin Luther King Was a Great Man.” From the front row, seated in my hard chair, orange as a caution sign, the polyethylene plastic patterned like pebbles from back to bottom, I swung my feet to the rhythm, energized by the song’s sentiment. Welling with excitement, my right sneaker scraped ever faster along the thick-tufted carpet. Miss Barrett spotted my display of enthusiasm and smiled at me. I still recall her cherry lips, the symmetry and smoothness of her perfect Cupid’s bow, her Pixie bob and heart-shaped face, and her smallness, from height to hands. Clutching a marker, her petite, sinistral grip wobbled like a bee spiral as she turned and jotted lyrics beneath musical notes on the whiteboard, every word containing an “i” or “j” an excuse to substitute a heart for a point. I wanted to marry her. I looked around the room for someone who shared my enthusiasm and accidentally locked eyes with Lesley, who scowled.
Lesley was a wealthy girl with straight bangs, a bowl cut, and a dusting of freckles across her shiny cheeks. At the beginning of the school year, in pre-Algebra, while Mrs. Pittman was explaining division to us and I struggled to understand how a number with a one-walled, flat-roofed house (the radical, it was called) could magically split, Lesley from two round tables away had blurted out, “I don’t like people on welfare.” I don’t know where this came from. I think neither did she. It was just a feeling that had welled up inside her. To my surprise, Mrs. Pittman whipped around from her chalkboard and said, “You know what? I don’t either.” If I were familiar with the word surreal, it would have been an apt descriptor, as Lesley, encouraged, proceeded to pontificate for seven minutes about the laziness of the poor. I don’t recall her exact words, but I can distil their essence: the poor are poor because they’re lazy.
Her speech caused sweat to drip down the side of my neck and waves of shame to pulsate through my body. I had felt called out. While other parents held jobs, my parents didn’t, and several times throughout my life, I had wanted to blame them for this, for giving up, but I knew they were caught in a cycle. They’d tried and tried and failed and unable to reconcile America’s dream with their waking nightmare they had shut down, reluctant to try anything, suffocated under heavy shame.
Lesley finished her tirade, and Mrs. Pittman leaned forward in her springy chair and clapped, her brown permanent nodding vigorously, saying “I’m with you, sister. I can’t stand welfare cases. Everybody has to work. Why shouldn’t they? If you ask me, they should get what they give: nada.” She promised us a Republican president would make the country respectable again. Little did she know, that year, 1995, the red-faced Democratic president from Little Rock had already reduced funds to state welfare programs, which led needy families to switch to disability-covered social security as an option of last resort. Which is what happened in my parents’ case. My family almost perished.
Emblematic of my mid-1990s are these recurrent slides: returning home from school, disembarking from the bus, going to the metal mailbox, opening the box’s hot, sun-soaked lip, scooping up the contents, and shuffling through the beige and white paper jackets in search of two important checks. My mother said to be on the lookout every first Wednesday of every month for government envelopes. On the back of each, stamped on the sealed flap, a blue bald eagle holds thirteen arrows and an olive branch. On the front, the filmy window showcases my father or mother’s name in bold. While my parents sleep through the afternoon, I carry these to the front door and pick up, from our three-step porch, any boxes my mother may have ordered—clothes, presents to herself.
Poverty sucks and asking for help is already difficult. After Lesley’s and Mrs. Pittman’s discourse on the gritlessness of the poor, I didn’t bother to give my mother the pink form Mrs. Pittman had distributed that guaranteed free school supplies to needy families. When a couple days went by and my mother found the form accordioned in the bottom of my bookbag, only then did I explain my embarrassment. My mother called Mrs. Pittman’s home phone. The woman apologized. Next day in class, she hugged me, said sorry. But when it was time to sit at our round tables and divide, when I had gone to my bookbag on the hanger along the wall to fetch another pencil because my lead broke, Mrs. Pittman hustled over, tugged me by the collar, and slurred “Sit,” shoving me down into my seat. Why one way and then the other? I don’t know. She must have hated me.
~
In Miss Barrett’s Music class, I watched her pretend to fly, waving her arms, occasionally leaping, circling our compact rows and cooing “Good, good” as we sang. I swung my feet excitedly, always one foot scraping against the thick-tufted carpet, dragging it like I would drag it on the playground swing to brace my forward motion. Miss Barrett had moved somewhere behind me. The next moment, I left my right jean leg suspended in midair, straight out, stiff as a branch, because I saw that something had flopped up on my foot. On the toe of my sneaker was a pair of white underwear. I snorted. Next to me, my friend Jason pointed. “Hey, what’s that?”
“A pair of underwear,” I said, bending my leg toward me and removing it. I snorted again. “Some moron must have left his underwear under my chair.” I checked between my legs beneath the seat for other bits of clothing. Nada.
The tape deck clicked. The music stopped. Miss Barrett went to the front of the room to prepare the next song. I went to her to show what I’d found. “Miss Barrett?” She turned to face me. “I think someone left their underwear under my chair.” I fanned out the pair. “I was kicking my feet and kicked this up from the floor. It landed on my shoe.” I turned the underwear around so the backside was facing me. Against the white cotton fabric, I spotted a familiar brown stain. My lungs caught on a painful cough. My drying mouth tasted like metal. I recognized now the worn elastic band (Fruit of the Loom) above that askew brown rectangle in the seat. Miss Barrett looked at me and bit her lip.
She bent, ticklishly whispering in my ear, “Would you like to go put those in your bookbag?” I nodded. “Get Jason to go with you.” I balled up the underwear to cover the stain.
Walking back to my seat, I spotted Lesley in her yellow chair in the third row. She couldn’t see what I held, but she eyed me. I stared too long. She blushed beneath her bangs. Fresh freckles popped out across her cheeks. I turned my head. She may have had a crush, I may have too, but if either did, neither ever acknowledged it, up through middle school, high school, college years, though we always rotated in concentric cliques.
Students couldn’t be in the hallway unaccompanied, so Jason had to walk with me to homeroom, where our bookbags were. “I have to put these away,” I said, holding up the balled-up underwear. “They’re mine.”
I’d never seen a person guffaw before, but Jason did, his big laugh accentuated by the fact that he had wide front teeth and a slight overbite. He yuck-yucked like Goofy, the lanky Disney dog, and patted me on the shoulder as he guided me out of the classroom, saying “I can’t believe your underwear came off you like that.” Later in the day, I would, at home, investigate the big pile of clothes in the utility room and discover the pesky habit of some undergarments to stick to the inside of pant cuffs (static cling).
As Jason and I entered homeroom, I was immediately startled at the sight of Mrs. Pittman sitting behind her desk. She seemed out of place in a studentless room. Mentally, I prepared an explanation for why I had come, but she just continued to sit there in the empty classroom reading the newspaper she had spread out in front of her, acting like Jason and I didn’t exist.
I walked to the bookbags hung along the walls. Jason, at my back, mimicked a man standing guard. I looked inside the open mouth of my already unzipped bag and was about to drop the underwear inside. A few bags down was Lesley’s pink one, its slick face a spotless white horse jumping over a rainbow. Lesley had bragged at the beginning of the year in homeroom that her most recent summer involved a trip abroad. She and her parents had done an Asian tour. She liked Singapore best, she said, because the people there didn’t like anything filthy. Impulsively, I unzipped the mouth of Lesley’s bag and stuffed the underwear inside. She wouldn’t know it was I who had done this until the following year, and by then she wouldn’t care.
~
The following year, sixth grade, I entered an essay contest advertised on a flier handed out by my English teacher Mrs. McCallon. The county’s students were invited to submit to the Murray Ledger & Time to share a memorable experience. The prize: a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the clothing store JC Penney. Mrs. McCallon wanted one of her students to win. She made a day out of us writing the essay in class. She would send them off to the paper herself. I wrote about the underwear incident, sans all the stuff about poverty and crushes and shame, keeping matters strictly to what occurred in the Music classroom.
I won the contest. The Ledger & Times published the essay. Mrs. McCallon was more excited than I was. Leaning back in her chair, her blue heels propped on her desk crosswise to us students, her thumbs caressing inky newsprint, she read my words aloud to the class, interrupting herself to laugh, the chair’s spring squeaking with her.
As for my mother, she was happy I’d won, but she was more excited about the gift certificate. When at home I handed her the gilded-lettered slip of paper, she smiled and readied herself in a haste I had never seen before and hurried us out the door. At JC Penney, she folded pairs of pants over her arm and draped shirts and tops across my outstretched palms. I was proud she was buying more than tracksuits and happy to see her doing something she usually didn’t do (go out) but clearly enjoyed. For two hours, I followed her everywhere around the store, my palms out like an attendant waiting on his sovereign. At the counter, the price rang up to $283.43. My mother handed the cashier the gift certificate and wrote a check for the rest.
For most of my tenth year, my father had been a nonentity, a knob on the sofa, knot on a log, but when my mother and I stepped in the door that evening, he woke, rose, pointed at the glossy white bags on our wrists, and asked why in God’s name we—my mother and I—had purchased clothes when we—as a family—had no money. “He won money in a writing contest,” my mother protested, her hand on the center of my back. Of course, she neglected to mention the additional check she had written for the difference, a check for which there was not enough cash in their account to cover. But this was no concern for the moment and mentioning it would only hurt my mother’s case. Besides, my father would find out eventually. The smell of the house suddenly nauseated me. Before we had gone shopping, my mother had left a butterscotch rum candle burning on the coffee table, the scent akin to Vick’s VapoRub.
That day, my mother modified her shopping habits. On the way home, she had transformed into a different, more animated person as she gazed at the world through the windshield, a dreamy look on her face, a nitrous grin, her cherub cheeks pulled up like a snug pair of pants, her perfume cotton-candy sweet. She told me she’d gotten a thrill seeing all the clothes in the store’s air-conditioned space and trying on different things, sniffing the fabrics, looking at herself in the mirrors. Over the past few years, she had forgotten she could do these things. She hadn’t felt like she deserved to be able to.
My mother would continue to do home-shopping, but from then on, she would also go out for clothes, which meant more cold checks, new screaming matches between my mother and father over money, and double the clothes piled in the utility room in front of the washer and dryer. Those machines would have another year of overtime and then another and another. There would always be something to unbox, unwrap, undirty.
Arriving to the planet a little later than I, my now-grown brother, a factory worker predisposed to optimism, grins at me over Zoom with his mother-shaped mouth (thin upper lip, heavy lower) as he fondly recalls these days, how funny it was that our parents slept until the afternoon and woke to fight about clothes. Age and perspective separate us. He thinks it was funny, I think it was miserable, and I blame myself for doubling the heap.
*
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(Photo: Scott Beale/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Dirty Laundry by Billie Pritchett - April 17, 2025