An aside—in my childhood I marveled at how churches were left unlocked all day. Some, all day and night. Our church, St. Patrick’s, had no lock on the front door until I was a teenager. You could go inside and feel safe and collect your thoughts. Now only shops keep such hours so it’s no surprise that shopping has become our comforting pastime. The twenty-four-hour supermarket has replaced the twenty-four-hour sanctuary.
The alterations would be done in a week, he said, and carefully slipped the jacket, bristling with pins, off my back. When I went to collect it, I bought a pair of slacks. They, too, needed to be pinned and chalked. The tailor was just walking in, apparently, undoing a chinstrap and taking off a black motorcycle helmet. I stood on the platform and he knelt to pinch and chalk. My analyst wanted to move our sessions to Wednesday morning, but I said I couldn’t make Wednesdays. My therapy, such as it was, had ended. I wasn’t cured, but I was free.
The next Thursday I bought another jacket, this one gray with a faint blue plaid. It was the one that fit the worst. Requiring three return trips for letting out and taking in. That early in the morning I was the only customer. The tailor would arrive in his helmet. Sometimes I’d see him shucking a black leather motorcycle jacket. He’d assess the new issue: the vent in back hung wrong, or the lapels wouldn’t lie exactly flat against my chest. It was always something. And when it wasn’t, and the jacket fit…then I bought another jacket that didn’t fit.
My body knew something my mind didn’t, and I wanted to understand its secret. Why did these straight pins, this greasy smell of tailor’s chalk, and the sort-of yoga of standing stock-still, why did it flood me with this bona fide, genuine bliss?
Not then, but years later I’d be in Milan. My dentist had sold me on this ultrasonic toothbrush, saying it would be as good as the flossing I refused to do. Every thirty seconds the brush beeped to prompt me to move it to a new area of my mouth, and after two minutes it automatically shut off. Taking an electrical anything to Europe is a pain so I took my old toothbrush to Italy. There, the first morning I started to brush and brush, brush and brush. My mouth foamed red and I continued to brush. Rubbed raw, my gums bled. Still the toothbrush would not shut off. I took it from my mouth and looked at this, my old-school manual toothbrush, just a plastic stick with bristles at one end, and I told myself, “This thing must be broken!”
More recently I put my fingertip to a paper page of student work. I slid my finger down the margin thinking, Why won’t this scroll?
Because it’s paper! Because my electric toothbrush was back home! This is the autopilot manner in which we live our lives. Another time, a darker time, friends had rented a beach house, and we shared it for a weekend. Drinking, playing board games. During Trivial Pursuit, the wife half of a husband-and-wife team ventured a wrong answer and her spouse jumped to his feet, shouting, “Damn you! This is just like you, Cindi!”
The young couple flew at each other, cursing. Faces red, teeth bared. Recounting every past injury or mistake. The rest of the players froze and shrank into themselves, avoiding eye contact with each other as the storm raged across the table.
As the shouts subsided, I found I’d risen from my chair. I’d leaned into the fracas. Not to argue or participate, but to…bask. It felt as if this fight were a blazing yuletide hearth or a Thomas Kinkade “Painter of Light” comfort-porn landscape of some perfect thatched cottage in a twilight rose garden. My body responded, yearning, drawn forward by some dark nostalgia that the rest of me had forgotten.
The shouting, the curses. This fight wasn’t one of my parents’ many fights, but my body didn’t know that.
That weekend I knew I had to explore my fear of and attraction to conflict. The vacation house hadn’t enough beds so I’d been sleeping in the back of someone’s car. And it was there, that weekend, I began to write Fight Club.
Do you see what I’ve done here?
If you were my student, I’d push you to create an epiphany. You’d have to dredge up or dream up the moment I realized why the tailor at Brooks Brothers had provided me with more comfort than a fortune spent on Jungian analysis. Me, I can’t recall just one revelation so I’ve redirected you to other examples of physical memory. The toothbrush. The paper page that wouldn’t scroll.
Did I tell you that my mother sewed our family’s clothes? I’d forgotten that. But if my mind had forgotten it, my body had remembered.
Throughout my early childhood my mother had sewn clothes for my two sisters, my brother, and me. Every evening she’d call one of us upstairs from the basement television so she could measure and pin. First with the tissue-paper pattern pieces, then with the cut cloth. The standing still seemed to take forever, making each of us miss some ABC Movie of the Week (Killdozer! starring Clint Walker) or McMillan & Wife, Columbo starring Peter Falk, Starsky & Hutch starring David Soul, or The Wonderful World of Disney.
Her lips clamped tight around a bunch of pins, she’d stretch one corner of her pincushion mouth to say, “Hold still!”
My skin recognized the quick blunt slash of tailor’s chalk. The peril of sharp pins. This Russian tailor with his motorcycle and black leather gear, he wasn’t my mother, but my body didn’t know the difference.
By then, by then clothes stuffed my closet. I had one cream-colored
