The Bottom of the Drawer

Bureau drawers are the most sentimental home furnishings. Each is a portal to the past, memories smelling of detergent folded neatly and tucked in their little beds. The experience is every bit as magical as that offered by Lewis’s Wardrobe. But magic is amoral, and what it offers we may embrace or struggle to even look upon the past, that thing which “grows and grows at the expense of the future” (Tennessee Williams).

My t-shirts stretch back nearly to childhood. Many I wore in high school. One bears the insignia “Surf Ohio Championship 1993”; it was my father’s before it stopped fitting him or he it. Wearing the father’s shirt is comforting, if darkly so. The same gesture connotes doom in Sam Shepard’s play “The Curse of the Starving Class.” But the most significant face of the past in this drawer lies not in one shirt or another, but in a pattern between them.

My father, being a practical man, ordinarily buys gifts at electronics shops. These well-researched items are sure to please and also within his shopping comfort zone. However, this led to a serious discrepancy between the size clothes I wore and those he bought. Dad was buying me size adult large t-shirts as early as middle school, when I weighed in at a dainty 91 pounds. I was familiar with the term 98-pound weakling, but it puzzled me, as it described a guy I wouldn’t mess with. Dad’s shirt size misestimate proceeded with such regularity that I wearily accepted my fate, wearing the shirts, which were often styles I very much liked… just at least a size too big.

I swam in those shirts. They looked somewhat like a monk’s cassock as the sleeves swooped around my pointy elbows and my shorts disappeared beneath the billowing cotton. To discover the true shape of my torso one had to wait for a strong gust of wind. When I ran, the shirt flapped behind me like a cape or an impractical parachute. The only thing that can make a diminutive person look smaller is excessively large clothing. The only guy I knew at that time who was unquestionably skinnier was Jay Rammahan, a good and more appropriately dressed friend. I couldn’t even pass these shirts off as hand-me-downs; I was the oldest.

I no longer wear them, even the “US Soccer” shirt with its imagistic unfurling red streak-effect stripes that I had once treasured. It is a sad thing to wear clothes that don’t fit you. What I see now was an innocent mistake seemed portentous at the time. I was in conflict with outward appearances. I was small but needed to become somehow big. My insecurities couldn’t have been better exposed had I been naked.