How to Shop For a Coat in 10 Easy Steps
Because sometimes simple things are impossibly hard.
4 min readJun 25, 2014
- You wake up one morning and realize summer has intruded. She’s been gone exactly three months. Spring skulked away while you were looking down. You’ve lost a season. Your winter wardrobe won’t cut it anymore.
- You throw on the cargo shorts you bought in 2010 and a plaid shirt with two holes in it and tell your girlfriend you’re going shopping. She looks at you for a moment like the holes are in your head. Maybe she’s right.
- The store is full of bright people wearing bright clothes looking for even brighter clothes with no signs of wear. You don’t belong here. Then again, you don’t really feel like you belong anywhere so you keep walking into the store.
- Browse through clothes. Check the price. Find your size. Repeat. That’s what those around you are doing, so you mimic them. You grab two pairs of shorts, two summer dress shirts, two undershirts and two shoes, then bring your Noah’s Arc of summer wear to the cash register. While waiting in line to check out, you see the coat hanging on a rack nearby. It’s a jet black blazer that’s far too expensive. It doesn’t belong in the summer. Maybe that’s why you think you need to have it.
- The store doesn’t have your size in stock. It’s unclear if this store has ever seen a coat in your size before. The salesperson tells you there’s one and only one available at another location by Rockefeller Center. You visit that store and they tell you to try a store by the Empire State Building instead. You try that one and hear they’re sold out, but there is one left at a store in some Long Island town that the salesperson can’t pronounce. The salesperson assumes you’ll pass, but that town just happens to be a few miles from where your dad still lives. So they put the coat on hold for 24 hours.
- After you leave the store, you make an impromptu visit to your grandmother’s apartment, with its sweeping views of the Empire State Building and of stores that don’t carry the coat you want. She’s planted on her couch, stuck in her own winter, watching a herd of zebras on the television she’s afraid to turn off. She gets up to pour two glasses of white wine, the only beverage she keeps in her apartment anymore. Just before she sits down, a male zebra kills a baby zebra. You’re glad she didn’t see.
- The next morning you take the train out to Long Island. You see him from the train window, standing alone away from the platform like a buoy adrift in the bay. After you hug him, you mention that you need to borrow the car to run a quick errand. “It’s a long story,” you begin, “but I need to go to the mall to buy a coat.” To your surprise, your dad says, “I can take you.” He says he’d like to come. He insists on coming.
- And so it is that you find yourself driving into the fancy mall where your mom loved to shop for decades. The store names tell the story of her life: Ralph Lauren, where she bought you clothes as a child; Hirshleifers, where she shopped for herself in healthier times; Toku, where she had lunch with your dad every Friday after chemotherapy; Brunello Cucinelli, where she bought the shoes she told you to bury with her at the end. The day she died, your dad began compiling the list of places he’d never visit again: the seafood restaurant we all went to every New Year’s Eve, the park he took her to on dates and later in a wheelchair. And this mall. Yet, here you are, distracting yourself with a quest for a coat while your dad tests his limits. He says he’s okay, but he’s talking too fast. Then he almost hits a car in the parking lot.
- It turns out the store put the wrong coat on hold. It’s brown and somehow looks more summery. You start to get upset at the salesperson, telling him just how much effort you’ve gone to. Then your dad tells you he thinks the coat looks nice. That’s when you realize it’s the first time you and your dad have gone shopping together in years. You try the coat on for him and he smiles.
- That night, you look in the mirror and think this coat looks better than the one you wanted originally. But you know it would look better if only she could see it.
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