Windmills and Tugboats

Posted on April 19, 2003 in Book of Days Childhood

Note: This is fourth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days.

Today’s topic: Write about a time you did something you didn’t want to do.

Windmills hung with sheets of thick, colorful cloth. That’s what the ladies’ skirt racks looked like to me when I grew tall enough to look down on them.

Mom always combined all the clothes shopping into one big expedition where she expected her sons to break their backs but keep the upright dignity of slave porters crossing Africa. I hated the smell of department stores once you got past the welcoming perfume counters and the place where they roasted the cashews. We often stopped at the perfume and cosmetics counters where I whiled the time that Mom spent scratching at mascaras and trying lipsticks by reading the names of the different skin tones for the blush. Mom liked to sneak up on me and spray me with one of the sample bottles. “Now you smell like a girl,” she’d sneer. And I know that she secretly feared that I’d become one.

We never stopped at the nuts counter except for maybe once or twice. She’d march me direct to the boy’s store where she’d pull the folded pants off the musty shelves and check them for suitability. I’d get a stack to try on and model for her. She’d pretend to let me make the decisions and then buy what pleased her. I didn’t know what style was all about, anyways. Straight cuff or bell bottoms? Which color? “Dark green? Choose something else” she’d moan and moan again until I picked out the baby blue checks that she liked.

I got more choices in the shirt department, though even here she’d nix my preferences. Pink or deep purple? “That’s their color,” she’d say. I never understood who they were, until I was older and learned that in her tongue “they” meant “fags”. What people thought of me was very important to her. I developed a preference for white and she wanted to know why my tastes were so plain. Red, I’d say. “Red? You want a red shirt? People will say that you’re a communist!” Black. The Nazis. Brown? I looked good in that and only my brother thought it fit to mention that that was the color of Mussolini’s fascists.

In socks, I could choose black, brown, or blue. She didn’t allow white unless they were Hang Ten, the brand with the bare feet. She figured that I could wear my dress socks for gym class. And so I walked wounded, my feet scraped up good by wearing the scratchy socks I wore the rest of the day for running and sports.

Shoes were another hell. By the time I was sixteen, I wore Size 12s. Tugboats. Mom didn’t want me to call them that. I remember once her pointing to a smaller boy who needed 13s. “See,” she said. “Look how big that boy’s feet are.” I felt for him, tried to look the other way and keep my silence as the shoe salesman brought one ugly pair after another in the exotic size for him to try. The thing I wanted to do was tell her to shut up, to leave him be, to spare him the embarassment. But there was a sacrifice that I had to make for that — a slap — and perhaps later a beating after she egged my father into a fury over my disrespect for their callousness.

So shopping combined several horrors for me: keeping my silence when I wanted to protest, buying clothes to satisfy her, and waiting while she served her own pleasures in sections that held no interest for me.

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Tomorrow’s topic: Write about meeting someone for the first time.

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