Carbine: Stories

Suits

 Suits I am a man who wears three coats, although I only wear all three at the same time when it’s really cold. I have a hooded sweatshirt, a vest filled with some insulating material, and a shapeless cotton shell called, I believe, a chore coat. A chore coat they call it, as though I were a farmer, as though I spent a part of my day, say afternoon or early morning, doing chores. I sell things over the telephone for a job. I don’t know what that makes me. A salesman maybe. Maybe not. I was waiting outside the revival movie theater. My brother and sister were inside, delayed by some acquaintance of theirs. No friend of mine, that fellow. When they came out, we went to the coffee shop in my brother’s car. My brother did not see how the movie was supposed to be so great. My sister thought the movie was sad. Okay, we had seen the movie, okay, it was about poor people, and okay, it was sad. But those suits, I said, and remember this was half a world away. Or a quarter world. You know, like a quadrant or whatever the people who know call it. My sister was explaining what cafe latte was. She had taken to doing this over the last ten years or so, and frankly it was beginning to annoy me. My brother unzipped his parka. He wore a T-shirt from one cigarette company and a baseball cap from another. I noticed a duffle bag from yet another company in his car. My sister ordered ordinary coffee and poured skim milk into it until it was the color of an earthworm. My brother had some sweet foreign drink made from a viscous syrup. They do this because they know I’m sensitive. I noticed my brother’s watch had the logo of a popular menthol on it. Maybe I’ll go downtown next week, I said, and get me one of those suits. Not that I could not have had a better coat, a single coat instead of the three. I had some extra money, a bonus in fact, from selling a lot of things over the phone. I could have had a down-filled parka like my brother’s, identical, had I wanted to. I knew where he’d bought his, what he paid, what comparable brands were going for. But it seemed they did not make the coat I wanted. All the coats in the world, and I could not find the kind I like. Not that I gave it much thought, with everything at work. At work, there was a new thing. There was the team concept: We were all a team working towards the same thing, a win. We were all important. What we said, what we thought about how we could win, was important. We had to respect each other and each other’s ideas. I was not more important than you, for example. Some pom poms were fastened to the bulletin board, for example. I had forgotten all about suits, and I was putting in extra hours at work, so I did not see movies with my siblings very often. I ran into my brother at a supermarket on a Sunday morning. I had gone in early to get some juice and the paper. My brother was holding a carton of cigarettes. A free deck of cards was attached to the carton. He asked me did I remember this guy we had gone to school with. Of course, I said. Certainly I remembered this guy. This guy, my brother said, was dead. He had been doing some roofing work when he was struck by lightning. I remembered this guy like it was yesterday. Remembered how he had looked then. I hadn’t seen him in years; we all looked different now. I certainly looked different now. The orange juice carton felt slippery in my hand. We don’t, any of us, do things the way they used to. For example, I don’t throw dirt in a grave. I don’t go to the grave, for that matter, if I can avoid 0 Suits it. Or to the church. The prayers and the priest, they were nothing to me anymore. It was hard to believe they were ever anything to anybody, they seemed so small, so old...