How to Buy a Suit and Tie

Take your daughter with you. Shopping is better with company.

When the salesman asks what you are looking for, tell him you need a suit for your father, and everything he has is much too big now. Navy blue, not black. You want your father to look good, but nothing designer; you can almost hear him protesting such an extravagance.

The author’s father, William Bryant, Jr (left) with his father, William Bryant, Sr in 2000.

Compare fabrics. Check the linings. Smooth the lapels. The salesman will narrow your choices to three suits. He will ask what the occasion is, hoping to be helpful.

Tell him it’s for a burial.

Don’t tell him that your father died a month after a 12-hour surgery for pancreatic cancer that he never woke from. That it was the same surgery you had just four months earlier. That you were cancer-free. That your surgery was performed by the doctor who pioneered it, but your father was too frail to travel that far. That your choices were to do nothing and watch the cancer kill him or attempt this surgery that might kill him. That you knew in any case that you would be in a department store buying your father’s last suit.

Breathe. Accept the salesman’s condolences. Choose a suit. Squeeze your daughter’s shoulder and have her select a tie. Play Earth, Wind, and Fire loudly on the car ride home.

In eighteen months, when your cancer returns and is in your lungs and liver and they tell you it is inoperable, select your own suit and tie.

-Jacqueline Bryant Campbell

Learn to Accessorize

Men are lovely adornments, Puddin’. They make life sexier, sweeter, richer sometimes. But you can have an outfit without the earrings and you can have a life without a man.

Change them like you change clothes. Let the men come and go. Swap them out like last year’s castoffs. Why make one permanent when having variety is so much more fun?

The 6’4” “yella” pseudo-thug? He isn’t going anywhere with his life and you don’t need to carry no man on your back.

The smooth talking singer with the Napoleon complex? He thinks his military service means he can treat you like a private to his General.

The one with the colored contacts? What were you thinking with that one, Pud?

The country boy with an accent that drips like melted butter? I know his grandmother was somebody special but he ain’t never seemed like much to me.

The one you married? You only needed him to bring your baby here.

There’s no man alive smart enough to tell you how to be a woman. And none worthy enough to stay with you while you figure it out, not even your husband.

I know you want to be a princess, Puddin’, but you don’t need a man to choose you.

You ain’t Cinderella. The shoe doesn’t fit. There’s better things to be than a princess and the best thing to be is – free.

The author, aged around 1, with her glamorous maternal grandmother, her “Geez”

-Toya R. Smith is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a Titi, a Black girl from West Baltimore. An Aborisha, a Blitch, a Conjurewoman. More than anything, she is a curator of joy.

How to Pierce Your Granddaughter's Ears

Ask your granddaughter to wait until she is ten.

When the time comes, seek the consent of her mother, your hard-working daughter-in-law.

Pull out the thinnest needle, cotton thread, and a lump of beeswax from your sundry box. Rub wax on the thread to make it strong and then run it through the needle’s eye. Hold the needle in the flame of a candle to sterilize it.

Sit the ten-year-old on a stool in the breeze of your table fan. Tie up her hair and dot each delicate earlobe with your ballpoint pen. Give her candy to suck on.

Place your pet parrot on the girl’s arm and teach it some tunes. Let her feed it hot peppers to sharpen its tongue.

While whistling a tune, push the needle quickly and smoothly in with your right hand, stretching the lobe with the left. Cut the thread and tie its ends while blowing on the red lobe.

“Bahadur girl. Bewaqoof parrot.” Let your roaring laughter drown the pain.

Repeat.

The author's grandfather immaculately dressed

Each month, dress up and trim your beard for going to the bank for your pension. Your granddaughters will ask you to get laddoos. 

Save ten rupees each month per girl for gold earrings—60 rupees in total.

Gold is on a rise but your life isn’t. Only two of the six have gold in their ears when you die.

You cannot fill all the holes in one lifetime.

- Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American. She was born in a middle-class family in India and will forever be indebted to her parents for educating her beyond their means. She now lives in the United States. Her life is blessed with plenitude but she is oceans away from her family. That pain makes her write and express herself. Her work has been published in Ms Magazine blog, The Same, The Aerogram, The Sidereal, Star 82 Review among others. She blogs at PunyFingers.

How To Be a Sister

When she teaches you how to be beautiful, it is a lesson in resilience. When she tells you to buy a dress, she means, “prepare.”

Together you curate wardrobes, with method and purpose in mentally categorized racks:

Obviously Made for You,

Novelty (buy on sale),

Potentially Amazing On (but questionable on the hanger),

Unflattering Even on the Mannequin, Slightly Outside the Comfort Zone/Worth a Try (rarely not horrifying), and

Basics.

Investment pieces are special, she says, simultaneously classic and unique, and almost always accidentally found. Their quality and timeless tailoring feel made just for you, and last decades.

Her style blends effortlessly with yours: her wide cuffed black trousers, your navy blue pencil skirt, cashmere crewnecks, iconic printed accessories. Your favorite is a gray suiting dress. It has a drop waist and a single inverted pleat. You wear it to an interview, New York, London, to her funeral and then your father’s and then another, to your best friend’s second wedding, the Union League, to family court. You build a wardrobe around a life that disappears. Who were you when you bought that wool crepe dress with her?

In a dressing room alone somewhere, you remind yourself of her lessons: Choose carefully and invest in clothing that lasts. You’ll need a dress for starting over, and more than once. You slip on a long silk cardigan that should have been hers and is yours now, by default, and you pray: If I am pain, may I also be grace.

Nichole Cordin is a Chicago writer and contributing editor of Dead Housekeeping. When not actively mourning, she enjoys taking photos of her geriatric Boston Terrier and can be found at @NicholeCordin.