His clothing arrived in a Glad trash bag, the pun enough to knock you off your feet. Say soiled smile. Say ratty relief. Even it was happy to be moving on. The previous foster parents didn’t bother to ring the bell. I found the bag when I went to check the mail. The boy, who was almost six, would come the following day; my wife and I would pick him up at the center school for kids with special needs. He was autistic and didn’t speak.
After showing him his room—new sheets on the bed, new carpeting, new puzzles and toys—we went to a clothing store. We had hung up what was in the bag, even the stuff with holes in it. We didn’t want him to think we threw anything away; he’d had enough of that. But he needed shirts and shorts that fit him better—and new underwear. (He hadn’t yet been toilet-trained.)
A fresh start—that’s what we wished for him. The fledgling English professor in me knew that “start” had the same Middle English root as “startle,” which seemed appropriate: every new beginning was a chance “to flinch or recoil in alarm.” Ours was his third foster home. He’d been savagely assaulted in his first.
At the store we showed him rack after rack of fancy children’s clothing, all of it brightly colored. He reached for nothing. It didn’t occur to me at the time, though it should have, that he had no experience making choices. All of his clothing had either been selected for him by his birth mother and foster mothers, probably from Goodwill (I had seen a tag on one of the items in the bag); or, as a donation, it had not involved any choosing at all. When life treats you as a bumper car, you simply absorb the will of others. You wait for them to make a decision.
Think of it as Newton’s First Law of Motion: “An object will remain at rest…unless acted upon by a net external force.”
I selected a number of little-guy sports shirts with matching shorts, which lent him an air of coastal well-being—we were living in Florida at the time. He looked adorable, and I was delighted with myself. How could I have known how attached he’d become to collared shirts? His devotion could only be described as priestly.
“Attached”—that word has quite a history. It takes three centuries for it to travel, as if by wagon, from the meaning of “arrest and the seizure of property” in the fifteenth century to the meaning of “affection and sympathy” in the eighteenth. Two centuries later, this meaning will have been professionally psychologized, as in “attachment theory” and “attachment disorder.” We heard a lot about the latter in the foster parent certification process. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did the word refer to a “physical connection,” as in “a horse was at-tached to the wagon.” (No doubt the horse didn’t like it.) Because children were considered their father’s property until the nineteenth century, the word seems to condense the very project of foster care.
“He’s so attached to you,” the caseworker said during her first visit (the boy was climbing on top of me).
If you’re thinking, “This guy really intellectualizes,” you’d be correct. But I was a budding English professor, as I said, and this was my first foster child. When deposited like an astronaut on another planet, I slip into Master-the-Terrain-with-Your-Mind mode. And, anyway, I really wanted to do right by him.
As the boy became more comfortable living with us, and as he learned to make choices, he grew dissatisfied with choosing just for himself. He wanted to choose for me, especially clothing. “Talk about progress!” I joked with my wife. “Talk about empowerment!” You could succinctly capture our very different proclivities by saying that he longed to dress up while I longed to dress down. After we taught him how to read and to type on a computer—by this point we had adopted him—he explained, “I need to feel respected.” It was tough enough to be out in public as a conspicuously disabled person, but to be out in public as a conspicuously poor one too, well, that made it impossible, he seemed to be saying. The staring was double. The vice-grip of pity rendered every set of passing orbs a disingenuous mechanic.
If not a man of the cloth, my son was truly a man of the collar.
I, on the other hand, preferred casual attire. Very casual attire. Who knew that the word “casual” was directly connected to “casualty,” which in Latin means a “fall or happenstance”? (Language often stares us in the face.) Casual clothing is thus “picked by chance without formality.” You might call my style freshly-showered grunge —with more than a hint of, yes, calculated irony. I walked into the classes I taught in a pair of jeans and a funky T-shirt, my ear pierced, my head shaved. Like so many academics, I wanted to wear what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” If clothes could poke holes in things, if pants could say, “Don’t sit down in your beliefs…”
There was simply no way to be subversive in a suit; I’d look too much like a banker. I’d look too much like my conservative lawyer father, who once said that I owed my ultra-liberal politics, and even my son, to him. His money had allowed me to entertain an unconventional life. My very rebellion was predicated upon all manner of opportunities that he’d provided. He had a point, and unlike my son, I never worried about respect. To the contrary, I assumed it.
Because my father was so tacky with his money, so over the top and under the taste, I was averse to things that screamed, “Fancy!” And because he never did anything with his hands but play tennis and golf—I don’t think I once saw him wield a screwdriver—I strove to undercut the stereotype of professors as similarly rarified and removed. In jeans and a T-shirt, I was more likely to be read as knowing how to build a staircase or sheetrock a room or refinish a bathroom, which I had taught myself how to do. I viewed crafting a sentence as akin to crafting the scroll terminal on a wooden banister. Oh, the receding curve of a dependent clause! Lord knows I was called arrogant by some of my colleagues—how much can one rebel against genetics?—but the goal was always to be not so much down to, but up from, earth.
Unlike my father, my mother had taste, and because she was so invested in clothes, she bought me very expensive Italian shirts—every year, one for my birthday and one for Christmas. They were exquisite, but I only felt comfortable wearing them on special occasions such as meeting the Queen or the Pope. Once, a writer friend, who was staying with me after she’d given a reading, walked into my closet and gasped. Shirt after miraculous shirt—all of them levitating, many of them never worn, some I now can’t fit into. With my mother deceased, I keep them as a kind of memorial.
As my career progressed, I relaxed my opposition to formal wear. Some positions at the college where I taught demanded a collar, if not a sportscoat. Yet in the early years I held out, and my son fought me every step of the way. He would get up earlier and earlier to choose an outfit for me; I’d get up earlier and earlier to elude him. He said he wanted me to be just like him. “Hoping very nervous dad is also autistic,” he told my wife.
Now, in retirement, I sometimes never leave my boxers, or, at best, I don a pair of sweatpants and a wifebeater. But declaring victory would be foolish, for my son has death on his side, at least with regard to fashion. Because my friends are dropping like pins at a bowling alley, I must regularly retrieve some clothing from my shrine. After all, one can’t attend a funeral in a T-shirt. When I emerge from the closet, my son appears, and his smile tells me he approves.
Two years ago, a bestie of mine unexpectedly passed, and her partner hung her favorite dresses from a wire at the wake. Whenever the heat came on, they began to move. Maybe that’s what heaven will be like: a sudden burst of air and everyone is dancing. When it’s my turn to join the great majority, my son can put me in any shirt he likes. I’ve told him myself, and I put it in the will.
If dressing can be said to resemble running, then we were both dressing from our pasts—indeed, dressing for our lives. He wanted a clean signifier, and I wanted a murky one.
What this man has overcome: abuse, hunger, loneliness I still can’t fathom. To this day, when he is anxious, he wants to shop—he signs it over and over with his hands until one of us takes him in the car. He usually doesn’t buy anything at the upscale men’s clothing store in town—he’s frugal with his money—but he likes to finger the fabric, listen to the upbeat elevator music, watch the play of light on the racks. (He knows that he could buy something if he desired.) The shirts and pants, with their fresh designs, are all gathered there, assembled like parish-ioners in pews, the intermittent wafting of cologne a kind of tantalizing incense.
Ralph James Savarese is the author of seven books, including See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor.