The Jacket




The jacket was old, she didn’t quite know how old, but it was very worn, and this fact made her feel more affectionate toward it. It was a little loose on her, of course, but this reminded her and everyone who saw her wearing the jacket that the person whom the coat fit perfectly had bestowed it on her. She looked at it as a sign and a symbol, and in the tattered black corduroy she felt like a child and a woman all at once. It was lined with ripped white silk, and she would shrug her shoulders in circles just to feel the cloth moving. This touch was almost more magical than the touch of the boy himself.

She only wore the jacket for two weeks in the fall of one year, but she would often think about it years later, as if that period of her life had lasted much longer, or for some reason had incredible significance; and the constant thoughts she had of it were like air into a balloon that hovered in the back of her mind and grew fuller and fuller.

The blackness of the material, in her memory, was linked with the slick darkness of the driveway they would walk along, in the light rain; with arms or hands joined, and hypnotized by one another’s breathing. There was a swing, too—sometimes it was dark by the swing—with a wide wooden board, and when he would push her she might close her eyes very tight in order to capture the rhythm without distraction, or she might look at the stars overhead; but since it was a rainy fall, the sky was usually clouded.

She remembered this as the most uncomplicated experience she had ever had. They had been as playful as two kittens. He would lean his soft face against her face; she would run her fingers along his ribs. They walked and laughed, but hardly ever spoke. It was romantic, she was floating with the romance of it all, but there was a total absence of passion and its associated pain. Maybe that was why she looked back with such nostalgia.

The boy had a round face and looked younger than eighteen; he was raising rabbits for a school project. He showed her the whole family once, stationed in a hutch inside the barn. And truly, he was like one of them, she thought; soft, quick-eyed, and given to leaping playfully on the lawn and landing with hard thumps of his sneakers on the September grass. He was also as incapable of communication; or maybe she had been the one who had curled up deep inside herself and refused to share her soul. But in any case the two weeks passed and frost fell on the leaves and the ground, and she got cold knuckles walking outside without any gloves; he must have felt the cold also, because he asked for his jacket back, and she gave it up with no hesitation but with a disturbing feeling in the pit of her stomach. And that was that…

It was a long time ago now, but she had never felt anything that felt like that jacket, with the cool white silk, and the slight heaviness of the corduroy on her shoulders, and the loose fit so that she could sway from side to side with ease or take the deepest, most expansive breaths. It was a comfort that she experienced purely, with no need for verbalizing or explaining; at least that was how she looked at it now. And the more she did think of it, the more comfort and magic the corduroy jacket acquired.