Sibbie O’Sullivan

Death of a Sweater

I remember the day I bought it almost twenty years ago at my local Marshall’s, my first time shopping there. I was bored and decided to get a workout by pushing and pulling my way along the many racks laden with clothing. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular when I found it: a lightweight, full-sleeved, open-front, slightly-flared, below-the-hip cashmere sweater. Soft, feminine– it was the color of a baby’s skin, pearly pink. Price: fifteen bucks.

Growing up in the l950s and early ‘60s, I learned that a cashmere sweater had status and required specific care like tissue paper and cloth bags for proper storage. Cashmere was for the rich. Well-behaved ladies wore cashmere. Middle-class daughters might be given it as a gift, marking a certain age or accomplishment. As I grew older, cashmere meant college, especially the ones I would never go to. Cashmere was Plath and pearls, the soft, touchable circle around Grace Kelly’s lovely collar bones.

In my house, my sister and I wore Orlon twin sets, along with a few wool cardigans and pullovers. Orlon is a polymerized acrylonitrile that resists wrinkles, insects, mildew and moisture; it was created by Dupont. Back then, artificial clothing was becoming popular. Cashmere comes from the undersides of special goats and used to be considered a luxury item. I remember reading that Cary Grant wore only yellow cashmere socks.

The baby pink wasn’t my first cashmere. The first was a beige V-neck Jones of New York number I bought at Lord & Taylor during one of its end-of-season sales. Buying that sweater, which I still have, started an annual ritual. I’d wait for the after-Christmas sales, cut out the coupons in the newspaper, then drive to the mall and try not to go crazy thumbing all the different colors and styles of sweaters. The coupons frequently lowered the sale price of a sweater to a third or more of its original price. Math justified what came to be known in my household as My Christmas Cashmere.

I cultivated this ritual, seldom missed a year, and stopped only when Lord and Taylor closed its doors. The last cashmere I bought there was a two-ply logan green turtleneck that, according to my daughter, I’d promised was hers, but this strikes me as the kind of promise I’d never make. She will, however, get the green turtleneck sweater, and many more, when I die. But I’m afraid my baby pink won’t be among them.

It’s not just fluffy things that enact their presence on me. Books are accusing, guilt-provoking objects difficult to get rid of. Pull a book off the shelf, weigh its worth according to any metric—shelf space, crumbling binding, you’ve outgrown it– and you pause because some voice close to you has begun to whisper Don’t blame me for all the dust. Once you couldn’t leave me alone and now you want to get rid of me! Not so fast, buster, and you put the book back. You do this because books can haunt you. For years I’ve looked for my first edition of John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it’s gone. However, it still hovers; I sense its accusations and desolation, and every few years I tear the house apart trying to find it.

Cars know our hands and backsides, but reason tends to prevail when their time comes, possibly because cars are large. I had a difficult time letting go of my orange l972 Super Beetle, which I had for 13 years, but after four brake jobs and no money for a head gasket, I said farewell. Shoes, depending on their style, have a half-life and then, especially if bought on a whim, are discarded, usually put out by the stop sign in front of my house. Someone always picks them up, though I’m sure that getting rid of personal items in such a public manner may dismay some neighbors. Some of my shoes, however, have been with me for decades, thrown together in a wire bin; I’m waiting to see if they’ll come back into style. Keeping them in this limbo is easier than admitting that my eroding body can no longer tolerate wearing them. Eventually I will harden to the task and they, too, will end up by the stop sign.

But sweaters? Until now, I never thought twice about getting rid of them. Throughout the years, I’ve sent many to Goodwill. But my pink cashmere is a particular case. I love it dearly, but I’ve treated it very badly. Sometimes it’s a lump on the seat of a chair, sometimes it’s draped over the banister like an old drunk, unnoticed for weeks. Sometimes it’s balled up at the foot of the bed wearing the wounds of that morning’s breakfast.

My sweater is a refugee from a run-amok sales rack at a discount store. I brought it home to a better environment where it could be of use and appreciated, and for years it seemed happy regardless of how I tossed it about. Then I found a small hole high up the sweater’s back, where it rested on my first vertebrae. God knows how long it had been there; who cares about the back of a sweater’s neck?

Then came a separation in the left shoulder seam, probably from my yanking the sweater off and on all these years. But the seam that separated was in the underarm area, a place I seldom saw, and by the time I did, the seam had grown and now gapes irregularly.

Another hole, then another, despite the tiny sticky pyramids I placed around the house to catch clandestine moths. These traps remained vacant, accumulating only dust and an occasional gnat.

I sewed up the holes, some more than once, paying no mind to the asymmetrical thread-heavy knots my clumsy needle made. By this time, the sweater was no longer my going-out-to-dinner sweater but my stay-home-be-warm sweater.

Then its elbows began to fray in long gashes, especially the right elbow. I always push my right elbow into the armrest of my recliner to get some leverage as the chair moves into its preferred position. Of course I wasn’t thinking what this pressure might do to pink, lightweight cashmere when repeatedly pressed against black leather. Nor was I thinking of the impact this habit might have on leather, but recently I’ve noticed an elbow dent one inch across in the chair’s right armrest; I’ve been keeping an eye on it. 

I never gave my baby pink sweater a name. After it lost its original beauty, I suppose it became ordinary, essential, the thing itself: goat sheddings. It probably deserves a name considering it occupies such an unexplainable place in my psyche, but I’m reluctant to name something I might soon dispose of, as that seems willfully inhumane to me.

My partner and I named the big, fat, black-and-yellow bumble bee that appears every spring in our yard Hindy, as he reminds us of the Hindenburg air ship, slow and bullet shaped. We have gendered this bee and also consider it immortal. Our Hindy returns each year, as though he were returning from his annual vacation to his actual home. He’s done this for decades. He likes us and demonstrates his affection by suddenly swooping between the nandina and the porch rails before relaxing into a friendly hover. Hindy’s back declares whoever sees him first. None of this seems strange to us, as Hindy’s part of our private ecology.  

I call cantaloupes ca-nell-a-pees, a strange combination of Calliope and Penelope. Do I associate one of my favorite fruits with Greek myth and history, or do I simply like the lilting quality of the extra vowels? Either way, my partner no longer asks what I’m talking about when I yell out to him pick up a canellapee at the Safeway please.

I do not give names to my furniture or appliances, but I recently settled on a suitable name for the first orchid I managed not to kill and is currently on the verge of re-blooming: Orlando. I wanted an O name in keeping with the O in orchid, but Orville, Oscar, and Otis seemed too rough, too masculine, despite not knowing if my orchid is male or female, or if orchids even have gender. Ophelia was too obvious. Then the name Orlando came into my head, and I chose that, partly for its sound but also to honor Virginia Woolf’s character, the ever surviving, gender-bending Orlando of her novel. And now I can say to my partner in a cool, assessing voice, I think Orlando’s about to pop, I see buds. When he/she does pop, I will take a photograph of the first orchid I didn’t kill.

Other items don’t get named but can have a strange hold over me. I have a cooking pan, a cheap, shiny stainless steel one that heats unevenly and frequently ruins whatever I cook in it. But I haven’t replaced it, partly because my lousy cooking doesn’t justify paying for an upgrade, and partly because I hold on to the radical hope that one day this pan will change its nature and act like my larger, duller, more expensive heavy aluminum clad pan that cooks just fine.

My narrow garden trowel is more complex. Its blade is metal, like my pans, but the handle is wood. Frequently the handle escapes from the blade, despite my having rejoined the two with duct tape. More than once, after digging out a weed, I’ve stood up with only the wooden handle in my hand and had to backtrack through the garden to find the blade sticking out of the soil like an Iron Age artifact. Does the handle want a separation, or does the blade? Neither is much good without the other. My mistake was thinking that duct tape could save this marriage.

My sweater, however shredded, limp and abused, came from the living world, a bunch of goats whose ancestors more than likely gnawed the grass of Mongolia and withstood its soul-blasting winds. I know that no pan could ever reach this level of admiration. In my cooler moments, I acknowledge that there are multiple Hindys and that none of them cares a fig about what I or my partner call it. The garden trowel? If you must know, I have five, all younger, all of a piece, with hard plastic or rubber ergonomic handles which supposedly will fit comfortably in all hands. We’ll see about that.

When the time comes, and that will probably be when the left elbow of my baby pink sweater begins to tear and gap, (which could take a while because the precise way I wiggle into my recliner is so habitual it’s become instinctive, and instinct is difficult to reconfigure), I will put it to rest, not in a Goodwill bag, as it’s beyond use or repair, but in the trash. It’s too far gone for any ceremony or forethought. I’ll just drag it from where I last neglected it (ballet bar, top of the stereo?), and plop it in the bin with the orange rinds and other gooey stuff. Of course I’ll search for another cashmere, hopefully pale pink, but I’ll never find one for fifteen dollars. Those days are gone forever.       

We are told we have too many things. In one way or another, someone’s been telling us this for millennia. It’s why we meditate, why we de-clutter. Generally, I’m all for this, but at my age my body has come in contact with too many things of this world for me to enact a really big heave-ho. I think my reluctance to give up my sweater, my bad pan, my penchant for naming, has to do with holding on to what I can in this rapidly accelerating world. If I’ve touched these things, they’ve touched me in return, touched my body, and I want to hold on to my body, though I know I will fail at this. Until then, I will enjoy language, accept the bee’s visit, and try to stay warm while imagining the goats placidly munching away at the grass.

Sibbie O’Sullivan enjoys writing in multiple genres, including poetry, fiction and drama. Her poems have appeared in many publications, among them West Branch, The Laurel Review, Nimrod, Gargoyle, Sou’Wester, and Zone 3. She received the ArtScape Literary Arts Award for Fiction from the City of Baltimore and is the recipient of major grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her memoir My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed was published by Mad Creek Books as part of their 21st Century Essays Series. She was a book reviewer for The Washington Post. She taught in The Honors College of the University of Maryland, College Park for over 30 years. She lives in Wheaton, MD.