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amy wilensky

Essay by Amy Wilensky

When I was growing up my father kept all of his many sweaters in individual plastic Byford bags. Byford was the name of the company he had worked for right after graduating from the University of Connecticut with a degree in history, a dismal experience with the LSATs and a father who had been incapacitated two years before by a debilitating stroke. "The money's in retail, Joel," I can imagine his shark-suited cousin Raymond-a man who has married four times and made and lost more money than I can conceive of-announcing imperiously, leaving no doubt. And my dad, wanting, I imagine, to get the hell out of Waterbury, Connecticut, away from his unrecognizable father, his domineering mother-who kept not only clothing but also sofas, chairs and even lamps under heavy layers of plastic-turned over his life temporarily to sweaters and socks.

For a few years, those pre-driver's license housebound years, when my sister and I were at a total loss for ways to entertain ourselves, we would go into my parents' room to look at my father's sweaters. There was a special closet for them, arranged not by color-the way I would have done it had they been mine, and did once, when my parents were away, just to see what it would look like-but by material. Cotton stacked high on the left, then several piles of basic wool, then two of cashmere (which I learned at probably an earlier age than most children was the most expensive knit), then miscellaneous: a tennis sweater with a thick navy and maroon striped V, a heavy cardigan my mother's mother, his mother-in-law, had made for him and which he rarely wore, and his all-time favorite, an olive-green Shetland wool crewneck with black leather patches on the elbows, a nod to some quirky sixties trend.

My father was not a Byford salesman for very long, although he did decide to pursue a career in retail, motivated more, I like to think, by a then still untapped business acumen than by his wayward cousin Raymond. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine how he amassed so many sweaters in such a short time. When I was a toddler he opened his own business, an executive search firm, making it nearly impossible-until I grew old enough to understand the powerful visual image of the word "headhunter"-for us to describe what he did for a living. Owning his own company, however, meant that my father could wear whatever he pleased to the office. This, of course, meant sweaters. My father, I remember realizing, could wear a different sweater maybe every day of the year without a single repetition if he so chose, factoring in a New England summer, where sweaters were rendered unnecessary for at least the hottest months. It was not until I hit high school though, and it suddenly, with no warning, became the fashion to wear only clothing that had been manufactured before you were born, that I saw what a gold mine I personally had in my father's well-stocked sweater closet.

Quickly, I had a dream: to become the flat-chested eighties version of the forties sweater girl, the envy-at least in one distinct aspect-of all my peers. Sweaters not half as nice as my dad's (having not been stored in plastic all those years) sold at thrift stores and secondhand clothing shops in Harvard Square for as much as fifty dollars, even with moth holes and stains. There was only a single glitch in my plan to become my high school's reigning sweater queen, and it was a zinger: While I thought it only decent that my father lend the occasional sweater to his own flesh and blood, my father-pointing to such irrelevancies as my habit of storing my own meager sweater gallery in six foot heaps on my bedroom floor where they served as handy resting spots for empty pizza boxes-was not about to surrender his precious relics to a widely-known, inveterate slob. The few times I persuaded him to lend me a sweater early on (cotton or wool, never cashmere), it was taken to the dry cleaners the very next day, only to reappear in its original place, folded neatly in its plastic bag, the following afternoon.

I was not a rebellious adolescent; my father was hardly a harsh disciplinarian. Our debates over the boundaries of sweater sharing were among our most serious issues throughout my teenage years. But all through high school we waged war. I preferred the sneak attack, under the "all's fair in love and fashion" approach, i.e. take the desired sweater after my father had left for work and try to recreate its folding and placement in the closet before his return home. Although successful more often than you would think-there were simply too many sweaters for him to track them as meticulously as he would have liked-this strategy backfired several times, when I either forgot to remove the sweater or came home later than planned and was caught either way red-handed in the act of wearing the evidence. As persistence is one of my more pronounced qualities, for better and for worse, after some time I wore down his resistance. As persistence may be the single trait I inherited most directly from my dad, I never wore it down to quite the extent I had hoped. The borrowing of clothing, and of sweaters in particular, is a sore spot in my family to this day.

On my twenty-first birthday, which I imagine felt quite significant to me and my father for a number of reasons, I noticed my dad watching me intently as I prepared to open a particular package. As his silence was so out of character-he is prone to exaggerated oohs and ahhs as each gift is unwrapped-I knew something was up. Also uncharacteristically, I ripped the paper off-I am of the school that prefers to savor a present for so long that everyone else has long lost interest before I have so much as removed the ribbon-and looked up at my dad. Folded neatly, in its familiar plastic Byford bag, taped shut on the open end and smelling strongly of cedar and faintly of must, was my father's favorite sweater. I had been permitted to borrow it only once before and remembered distinctly the comment my favorite history teacher had made: Ah that's a beauty. I recall when those were all the rage. I had felt particularly cool in that sweater, jaunty yet casual in what I imagined was a James Dean kind of way, but mostly I felt connected to my dad. He didn't wear that sweater much himself in my day, but he had once worn it often, and that was enough for me.

. . .

As I am getting dressed one day this week I decide, as I decide every morning, to wear something different, to break out of my one-outfit rut and discover a neglected item of clothing single-handedly capable of transforming me into whatever it is I am feeling especially not. But this one morning I do not fail, I do not settle for a variation on yesterday's ensemble, no longer in a heap a la high school but thrown carelessly over the arm of a chair. I unearth my father's favorite sweater from the shelf at the top of my closet. Standing on my toes I tug it down, paying no heed to the sweaters on top of it that fall and become groundcover on my dusty floor. The label, worn but legible, reads, "Minucci's, Waterbury, Connecticut."

I realize I do not know if this is a sweater my father obtained as a Byford salesman or a sweater he bought in high school while he was still honing the fashion foresight that would eventually make him a standout in his chosen profession. I realize I do not know if the leather patches were sewn on by my grandmother in a rare fit of maternal domesticity because the elbows had worn thin or if the sweater came that way, in celebration of a now archaic style. I remember that I had promised almost a decade earlier to keep this sweater in a forty-year-old plastic bag, a promise I knew as I made it would be hard to keep, but I have kept it. Time flies, old clothes get pushed to the back of the closet, but good wool-I learned early-among other quality raw materials, can last forever if treated with care.