It's late at night when I get to the back of the closet and discover the moss-colored suit, bought years ago.
Thirty pounds had kept us apart. But here we are, friends again.
I brush off the dust and slip it on.
For a few moments it is late 1987, and I am 31. My mother's nurse has come, and I've gone clothes shopping, which is what women do when their mothers are dying. I come home with bags of cathartic spoils and manufactured glee. Mom takes her place on the couch, steadying herself with a pillow as our final fashion show begins.
There's a sweater she likes, and she asks to touch it.
A necklace. Earrings.
Then comes the moss-colored suit. Her face gleams approval. The suit reminds her of something she might have worn in her youth.
She's relishing the little things we won't have much longer.
So am I, though I don't yet realize it.
SURELY, ONLY WOMEN do this, get sentimental about clothes, impersonal threads woven by industrial machines, cold nylon zippers, buttons cast in China.
It is why we can't rid our closets of garments that no longer flatter our bodies or lives or hair colors. We push skinny things aside to make way for fat things, yet regard the former as the dearer.
I test the theory on a male friend. He remembers what his wife wore the day they met but can't recall what he was wearing.
Consignment shops report no tears shed when men drop off suits to be sold.
"Guys are more prone to buy it, and once it's done with, toss it," says Vincent Quan, instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Not women.
Our closets are scrapbooks, museums of love and loss.
At Triage, which sells consigned women's clothing, the staff knows to watch for seller's remorse.
"If they're hesitant, if they go to reach for it when they leave, or look back at it, my boss always suggests they take it back," says Dolores Stephens, a longtime sales clerk there.
"She doesn't want to take it if there's an attachment to it."
I TRY ON ANOTHER old garment, a teal-blue dress with 1980s shoulder pads thick enough to cushion a linebacker. I look in the mirror. It is happy hour at rg's downtown. We are all 16 years younger, gathered on the brick patio with drinks in hand. I've just made eye contact with an architect near the fountain.
He'll come to my house for a New Year's Eve party, where I'll wear a gold lame dress. He will disappear and the dress will become a walking Oscar statue for Guavaween. (Black shoe boxes for a pedestal base.)
The flowered sun dress, held together by rusty straight pins? Homemade but never finished, abandoned the day my dog died. The cheery, cobalt blue Ralph Lauren jacket? Job interviews, after 23 years at the same workplace. The cranberry-colored Jordache jeans? Bought with Guatemalan quetzales in the mid '90s. Worn while studying Spanish with a Mayan named Armando in the ruins of an ancient cathedral.
STEPHENS KEEPS a black tailored suit in her closet, bought seven years ago when her husband was still with her. A year later, she lost him. Now she wears it to church and thinks of him.
"They're memories of good times," says Kathy Brandt, who owns Just Men Inc., a pair of men's consignment stores in South Tampa and Brandon.
For Brandt, the soft spot is a raccoon coat, handed down by her grandmother.
"She bought it on credit in the '30s, when women did not get credit," Brandt says.
"She left that coat to me, along with every receipt for every payment she ever made."
I WORRY THAT I HAVE upset nature's balance with exercise.
Was I meant to wear these memories, again, or am I cooking with pottery from the Smithsonian?
I cannot say for sure.
Let me find my father's old bathrobe and think on it some more.
- Times news researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Tampa's Kennedy Boulevard was once called Grand Central. Now Grand Central is the name of a weekly column by Times senior editor Patty Ryan. Reach Patty Ryan at 226-3382 or pryan@sptimes.com
