Catherine Palmer

Proverbs

I was stuck. The more I struggled, the tighter the teeth clenched. I yanked on the red metal tongue only to have it come off in my hand. Twisted incisors bit into the fabric. Below the snarl, the zipper of my favorite jacket—the J.Crew barn coat I’d had for thirty years—dangled in two pieces like a jaw agape. I was determined to keep fighting, but the coat spoke of surrender.

I found the jacket on a hot July day after meeting with my divorce lawyer. My sister, mother, and I were at the Kittery, Maine outlet stores for some retail therapy. What better way to heal fresh wounds than to bandage them with pretty new things?

As soon as we entered the factory store, I spotted it—a single bright sleeve on a clearance rack of liver-colored barn coats. I dropped my purse and pushed aside the jaundiced versions to have a better look. I fingered the tags and squinted to read the description—squall jacket, weather-tight zip, machine-washable, color: chili pepper red, size: men’s medium. My thumb traced the gold stitching of the company’s name on the spruce green label inside the collar.

Back in the 80s, when I was in college, the barn coat was pivotal to the preppy girl’s wardrobe—equally suited for crisp autumn days in football stands or puking behind frat house dumpsters. I coveted the ones my friends had in their closets, next to stacks of Fair Isle sweaters, rainbow assortments of Izod polos, and Ralph Lauren oxford shirts. Embroidered green alligators and mallet-swinging equestrians broadcast their good families and good fortune. My closet was a cheaper imitation—a no-name ski jacket I got for Christmas, polyester blouses, and rayon sweaters from the mall.

I borrowed clothes from a friend when we visited her family for the weekend. I remember how the orange-red maple leaves collected on the tennis court next to their three-car garage. While the family mixed gin and tonics in their wall-papered den, I flipped through back issues of Town & Country magazine. I pictured myself owning one of the magazine’s fancy houses or sitting in the passenger seat of an advertised Volvo. I couldn’t count how many times I iterated on those scenes. In one, I see an antique desk bought at auction strapped to the car’s roof. In another, I am pulling into a long driveway, my fingertips caressing the driver’s well-groomed neck just above his Brooks Brothers starched collar. The red barn jacket would be perfect for such a life.

I pulled the coat from the rack and pushed my arms into the sleeves. It didn’t fit. The chest was too broad, the sleeves too long—my still-slim figure obscured from view. I pawed through the round display, thinking maybe a smaller size had fallen from a hanger and was waiting for me to find it.

“Excuse me, do you have these jackets in women’s sizes?” I asked a store clerk.

“Everything we have is right here,” she said, putting her fingertips to her heart in silent apology.

I slipped my hands inside the chest-high hand-warmer pockets. The soft grey fleece brushed against my skin as I traced my ribs to my solar plexus, that pulsing bundle of nerves and ganglia below my heart. My breath snagged when I saw myself in the mirror. This jacket was what I meant when I’d told my soon-to-be ex-husband I wanted more.

My sister said the jacket made me look fat, and my mother couldn’t imagine why I wanted it. It was ill-fitting, unflattering. I had to have it. The jacket meant walking a dog on the beach, surrounded by happy, good-looking people. It promised a slope-side condo, a country farmhouse. It was everything my dormmates’ closets and the J.Crew catalog had told me I should aspire to.

“It’s 70% off,” I squealed, looking over my shoulder to see if it looked any better from the back.

“Well, at that price, you can’t go wrong,” Mom shrugged.

I brought the coat to the cashier and handed over my Visa. While we listened to the squeal and hum of the dial-up credit card machine, I thumbed through the catalog on the counter. I willed my expression to say, “Ho-hum, today I’m just looking, and this jacket was such a bargain. Well, I really couldn’t go wrong, could I?”  I exhaled when the tiny printer coughed out an affirmative response. Even at $50, the purchase was a risk, the equivalent of a week’s groceries. I’d already charged new clothes for the kids, a tank of gas, and our lunch—I would use the cash my mother and sister chipped in for their shares to pay the babysitter.

I’d maxed out the only other credit card in my wallet the day I opened it to buy a home computer. The machine sat like an engine block on one end of our kitchen table. My son and daughter played educational games like The Oregon Trail, and when they went to bed, I typed furiously toward the college degree I’d abandoned in favor of marrying their father. Unlike the vows I’d taken nine years before, I was committed to finishing school, to getting ahead.

I hung the red jacket in the hall closet of the single-story duplex we’d moved into as a family and carefully folded the brown paper shopping bag. It would be months before it was cold enough to wear my new coat, and yet, as I walked down the hall, the kid’s empty bedrooms pulled the summer warmth from my body. They were with their dad for the weekend. I’d asked them to tidy up before they left, but Ryan had only shoved his dirty little league uniform under his bed, using the laundry to bulldoze Legos and mutant turtles. I lay on Jen’s bed in the next room and gazed at the self-portrait she’d taped to the wall. When she’d brought the artwork home from day camp, I told her the colors were perfect—cornflower eyes and canary hair.

It had been six months since I asked my husband to leave, and I was still getting used to being alone every other weekend. I hadn’t counted on being lonely or the hiss of failure that charged the empty space. At least I could smoke. I grabbed the pack of Virginia Slims I kept hidden above the refrigerator and headed outside.

A quick flick of thumb on metal made fire—I pulled in the smoke. The first drag from a cigarette always tasted like independence, sweet, and only faintly risky. Exhaling was a decisive and controlled action. In this way, cigarettes were my form of meditation. I watched the smoke twine around the porch rail to the shadowy yard and the black beyond, and I wished on stars that no longer existed. With every inhale, I choked out my paycheck-to-paycheck life for an imaginary one.

It wasn’t long before I had everything I’d wished for—be careful, they say—a locally prominent new husband, gold-foiled credit cards, and a catalog-worthy wardrobe. We smoked together on our fancy house’s porch—he would light my cigarettes and steal that first sweet drag. In the darkness, we talked about his feelings, his opinions, and his ideas. I doubt he noticed the stars—or me.

“Love keeps no record of wrongs,” went the reading at our wedding—where the groomsmen had worn matching J.Crew ties and jackets. But when an IRS letter informed me that our taxes hadn’t been paid two years later, I wondered. How high a price would I pay for fantasy—for the right house, the right car, the right coat? Selling my soul to the devil feels only slightly hyperbolic. Cliché, my writing group will tell me. And yet, how else to describe my complicity?

The night I left him, I threw clothes in a bag, not caring which ones, and pulled the red jacket over my pajamas like a life preserver. I remember the sound of tearing fabric, slamming doors, and how the car wheels spun in the snow of our long driveway. I remember seeing my second husband, perhaps fully for the first time, backlit in the frame of our heated garage, small and diminishing in the rearview mirror. Sometimes, still, I catch myself fingering the frayed edges of my jacket pocket and smile, grateful for its rescue.

I’ve worn the red jacket every winter since. I hauled it from rental to rental and to a friend’s house, where I slept on the pull-out couch until I had a down payment on a place my kids could call home. Three decades later, the once-coveted coat—and what I’d believed was its promise—shows its age. The seams and cuffs are blackened from wear, the red fabric grease-stained from fast food eaten in a rush to get to work, night school, soccer games, and band concerts. There is a faint stink of cigarettes, but it fits better now, hugging my body closely.

Every spring and fall, I clean out my closet and consider the cost of my misplaced aspirations. How much for the wool-gaberdine suit I bought in a panic before a business trip, as if Ann Taylor might have had confidence on sale? Or the too-tight jeans I thought would inspire me to lose weight? How much have I spent over the years to feel confident, feel young, feel sexy, or look powerful, chic, or thin? How many bags have I carried to Goodwill? I’ve given away more than I’ve kept. Still, the red jacket remains.

I brought the jacket and its shredded zipper to a local seamstress who welcomed me into her home. The front room smelled of yeast and fried fish. Whether the odor was coming from the kitchen or the spongy green carpet, I couldn’t say, but I found it more comforting than offensive.

“Can you fix it?” I asked. “It’s seen better days.”

“And worse, by the looks of it,” she said, scratching her thumb against several ashy holes on the left shoulder. “Don’t worry. Everything can be fixed.”

We selected a new zipper from a paper catalog, and she said I could pay her when she’d finished the repair. “It will last you another twenty years,” she promised, though it no longer mattered.  

A tray by the door held a stack of business cards. “Lorrie Brown, Custom Sewing and Alternations,” printed on a wheat-colored background. A clip-art illustration of grapes and a caption, “The Fruit of Her Hands,” seemed unusual advertising for a seamstress. More appropriate for wine-making, I thought, before reading the fine print—“Proverbs 31:31.” She was quoting the Bible; I looked it up when I got home. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

I’d bought an old Vermont farmhouse close to the road a few years before. Since then, the red jacket has found a new purpose. The coat protects my arms from splinters and spiders when I stack wood, and the fleece lining warms me when I shovel the driveway. I wear it to walk the dog and wave to my octogenarian neighbor when I pass by his meadow. He once told me how he gets a kick from seeing me in the red jacket. “You look like you’ve always been here,” he said. 

That night from my front porch, I watched my warm breath rise in the cold clear sky and remembered, hands to my heart. Everything I have is right here.

Catherine Palmer left a three-decade business career to test the theory “it’s never too late to be what you might have been,” and is writing a memoir about her midlife career reinvention, titled Typing Lessons. Catherine holds an MA in marketing communications and recently earned an MFA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Multiciplicty Magazine and Stonecoast Review. Catherine writes for AARP’s online magazine, The Ethel, and also publishes a monthly newsletter, The Reinspired Life.