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

Brothers and Barrettes

Show up. Like, just knock on the door. She’s your sister. She has to feed you, so she does. Butter noodles. Her apartment is gross and you say so. Little one, you’re no better than me. She’s surprised to see you, and sad. Not for you, but in general. She hasn’t talked to dad.

The author with her brother in the pool in a moment of joy

You bring her barrettes you beaded in rehab. They’re delicate, the cheap thread that holds the beads together tenuous like your sibling bond. You sit on opposite sides of the futon while she nudges one into her coarse hair. It looks stupid. You say so. That looks stupid. You should do it like this. You scoot over, your crooked fingers, broken and rebroken and healed without care, braid a fat plait on the side of her face, but it still looks bad, and they won’t last, anyway. Sorry.

You go before she wakes up, and don’t leave a note. You take some things: her driver’s license and a jar of peanut butter. She’s using dad’s old munitions trunk as a coffee table. Sweep it clear of the school books and papers with one broad stroke of your arm and leave the barrettes alone on the top in a neat equal sign.

-Stefanie Le Jeunesse

Wax

Who cleans the wax out of your ears? My mom used to. She would make me lie next to her on the couch, head in her lap, one ear facing up, while she used the head of a safety pin to scrape the inside walls of my ear. Then she would pull out the pin with its clump of yellowish goo and drag it across the top of my hand, leaving the small spot of wax to rest there, intact. 

She would repeat this until my hand hosted a constellation of little clumps. Then it was time for my next ear. In the end, we had visual proof of how much she had taken out. It satisfied us both, the whole process. It is one of the greatest forms of intimacy I have ever known, and every time I do what I know doctors have been telling us not to do for eons, every time I stick something like a pin or a bobby pin or a q-tip in my ear I feel the absence of my mother, the absolute safety of having someone else in charge.

image provided by the author

- Caroline Allen has been a lecturer at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara for over 25 years. Her work has appeared in Solo Novo, Lumina, Mary, Spectrum, Into the Teeth of the Wind, and The Santa Barbara Independent, among others. She has work forthcoming in Juxtaprose and Forge. She is also a painter. Her website is carolineallenstudio.com.