"Selvedge" by Gabriel Mae
This is a selection from our Summer 2023 issue, “Stay,” currently available in print and digital versions.
My dad gives me his navy jacket on an unspecified spring day in a year past. It is suspended by the minimal framework of a wire hanger painted white, and when he hands it to me, our fingers do not touch. He holds the hook, I take it by the collar, and the wire hanger slips through the torso. The shape of the jacket collapses in on itself. The starched collar bends, the ironed seam in the arm bends. Then my dad bends to pick up the hanger before I can, and for a moment he bows to me while I hold his offering of peace.
I’ve seen it in his closet like a stowed banner – and in other memories that refuse to be recalled too easily. Navy work wear with a brass zipper. An automotive cut. The cuffs have dark purple buttons, and the interior lining is nacreous violet, like the inside of a clamshell too edgy for its usual pink.
It has good utility. The sort of deep pockets you only see in men’s clothing. An open square on the breast in case one needs a little extra protection for their heart. There is also a pocket on the left bicep shaped for bifold wallets, Marlboro blacks, or Winston golds, a winnowed carpenter’s pencil, the loose phone number of a new stranger, maybe an empty shooter.
Each pocket is empty, and when I throw it over my shoulders, it smells of nothing. Laundered of its history. It doesn’t fit, not like it would on an adult. I shrug into its long sleeves like I’m not sure of anything. He laughs in that rough and bittersweet way he always does.
“Think you’ll wear it?”
I blink, nod yes, and pull the zipper up to my throat. His hand goes to his shoulder. Nervous habits.
“I know I wasn’t always the best dad, but—”
The plane of the fabric that is not meant to be visible is colloquially known as the wrong side. This is not necessarily the part that faces in toward the body. In a garment with an outer layer and a lining, the two wrong sides face each other.
On the Sunday mornings of my childhood, my dad spends the first hours of diagonal daylight tuning his drums. If we didn’t fight the evening before, if he didn’t drink, if he didn’t let his father’s calls go to voicemail, if he didn’t get scared by the sound of a distant police siren, I have enough courage to go downstairs, where an at-home studio is nestled into the concrete corners of our basement.
Everything is a raw edge. A drum platform tessellated in untreated lumber. Splinters. A rat-king knot of cables lies tucked away beneath the audio mixers. A pawn-shop guitar, debatably mine, rests in its black clamshell case against the wall. My dad, perpetually uptight, does his best to protect the surface tension of the drumhead from damaging itself, half a rotation of the drum key at a time.
I pretend to tune my maroon guitar while my dad runs metal brushes across the rings of his brassy cymbal.
A good drum kit is like a garment, each of its pieces part of the overall pattern. A guitar is inconsequential to the metaphor. I tune with no true scale destination in mind. Pegs turn. The strings droop and curl like loose threads. I warp my weft.
The beat terminates. When I look up from a poor approximation of D/A/D/F#/A/D, my father is resting his hand on the face of his snare.
“I’m not in the pocket today,” he says. The sticks remain on the drum when his palm goes to his lap.
‘In the pocket’. It’s an idea he’s espoused to me with Miller Light breath and a cigarette in hand. The equilibrium of timing, groove, and humility. A smart drummer serves the band’s purpose, not his own ego. It’s a dutiful awareness and appreciation of one’s ultimate utility. Like a jacket.
To sew a jacket, one must first imagine it fragmented. The pattern is born deconstructed, and only in being sewn together does it take shape.
Whenever I wear the jacket, I am told that I look like my dad.
It’s the way I stand, curved at the neck and straight in the lower back. It’s the weight of that navy canvas, the collar falling open like a dark pansy, the enduring zipper, its deep pockets.
What these distant relatives and family friends don’t know is I wear the jacket like my dad does. They haven’t seen him unbutton the cuffs until his wrists chafe, let loose a desolate sound of dissatisfaction, and exchange it for his reliable black coat. They haven’t heard him raise his voice, not since he was a child. He hasn’t openly stormed in years.
They don’t see his pattern draped over me.
Notions are the minute accouterments and objects that accompany the composition of a garment. This can include buttons, ribbons, fasteners, and other elements that end up on the final iteration of the piece; it can also serve as a category for tools used during the sewing process, like pincushions, rotary cutters, and tape measures.
It is the accumulation of these small and highly specialized motifs that makes complicated sewing possible.
I get better at it over the years.
I learn to defuse him when he’s enraged, to distract him when he’s overstimulated, to hold him when drunk, to latch onto his back when he wants to feel like a father, to touch the hem of his sleeve when he returns to emotional infancy, to stand between him and my mother, to lock the door when he leaves, to unlock it when he returns, to confirm his anxieties, to deny his anxieties, to describe his dad to him, to remind him of his mother, to rub his head when he makes a difficult phone call, to wash his dishes, to crush his recycling, to pick up his broken bottles, to play his guitar, to hit his drums, to let him lie on my shoulder when he tries to not cry, to show him that out of all the broken objects he surrounds himself with, he would never tear me apart at my seams.
I am a jacket for every occasion, protecting him from the environment of himself. Sometimes, when I need the extra coverage, I am even a jacket wearing a jacket.
There is a summer that I attempt to learn the drums. There are several, in fact. I cannot play in long sleeves, let alone practice. I need a t-shirt, hem raw at the shoulders, to be alone, to
have a glass of water nearby. I need to be coming apart at the seams if I wish to reach the point of striking something.
I never quite learn. I never find the pocket. I slip through it, away from it, avoid it. Rhythm is difficult, I say. I can’t get my hands and feet to work together. Discombobulated, no limb independence.
It’s one thing to know the pattern, and another thing to watch yourself execute it.
If one wishes to replicate a garment, simple pieces can typically be laid out flat on the desired fabric and traced with a chalk pencil. Taking care to not cut the original garment, use sharpened fabric scissors to produce the new planes for the second piece.
In the case of more complicated patterns, the original item may have to be taken apart at the seams and traced panel by panel. Then both pieces can be reassembled simultaneously.
Some of my earliest memories are of a flash of violet lining, cotton catching dusty sun, reflecting, disappearing, coming to a hanging standstill. My dad’s shoulders settling in their sockets.
I learned to tailor and edit myself to his needs before I could put my arms all the way through sleeves by myself.
The navy jacket hangs in his closet, motionless as a rejected ghost, for well over a decade before he gives it to me.
When he hands it down on that unspecified spring day, before he repents, I ask him if he remembers the last time he wore it at all, and his answer is “no.”
Forgetting things is a skill. It’s like putting something in a pocket that you know has a hole in it.
While I was studying the shapes of his mood with a limp pillow in my lap, time was passing through him, falling through gaps in the linings of garments and fractured drywall.
The things I know about my dad and the things he knows about himself are two circles in a Venn diagram, the sliver shared between them as precarious as a seam allowance.
Selvedge is the tightly woven edge of a fabric, often described as ‘self-finished,’ that is, produced in the original manufacturing of the product. It is neither cast on nor bound off and prevents the boundary of the material from fraying.
This component of the yardage is considered most durable in its composition.
When I reach inside to handle the lining of my jacket, I mistake the exposed fabric of the regular pockets for an interior one. I place a handful of paper clips inside and they promptly fall out and scatter. As I bend over to gather the loose wires, I bow to nobody in particular.
There are things I know about my dad’s pattern I will never tell anybody, not even him.
I discover that I don’t need the arm pocket, nor do I require the breast pocket either. Only two: one for my left hand, the other for my right.
I keep my wallet in a purse, and later in the back pocket of my pants.
Eventually, I unearth a seam ripper out from a box of instrument cables and aux cords, likely left there from a time I needed to separate the filaments in a length of speaker wire. The pockets rip clean like they’d been looking for an excuse to leave all night.
The loose fabric is surprisingly light in my hand.
I blink and time goes on in a single continuous stitch.
I stop by my parent’s house on an unspecified day in spring this year. My dad is in the living room, smelling like a fresh pot of coffee, and beneath that, a nightcap. We exchange updates about work, discuss the outdated equipment in the boxes downstairs, the impending basement renovations, accidentally speak over each other, smooth over a few misunderstandings. I play him a song I’ve been writing and he watches my hands. He could never pick strings, he’s always told me, just like I could never keep a beat.
I put the guitar in its case, the one with plush velvet lining, and stand near the door. He scratches at the crown of his head.
“I know I wasn’t always the best dad, but—”
And I interrupt him the same way fabric interrupts itself at the seam.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It really is.” And that’s the end of it.
When I leave, he comes out with me to sit on the concrete stoop, the grand entrance to my childhood home.
It’s the perfect weather for two layers, one to touch the skin and one to touch the atmosphere. Silky violet lining slips against my t-shirt while I walk away. I put my hands in their pockets and the right one falls through a gap in the mending. I make contact with myself.
The world goes on in its bruised palette. Blue as pansies. Coal-colored replacement coats. Nights navy and moonless and cold. Gray roads interpolated with black tar. Brass tacks and broken zippers. Anvil gray clouds pressing their bellies into the horizon. Funeral palettes. The rainbows in anemic fingernail beds.
When I look up, the air is dull and overcast, even with the sun behind it. Pale and vacant as muslin cloth, as overused drumsticks, as broken drywall, as a missed stitch, as a beat of rest.
Gabriel Mae is a fiction and essay writer based in the American Midwest, where he perennially attempts--and fails--to maintain a garden. His work has been featured in journals stashed under his bed, spare pieces of receipt paper, and in his media and culture podcast, The Navel Gaze.
