Raincoats

A Story by Siobhan Welch

They are all there is to know about me (and my brother, also).

As for my brother:

It was 1956. He was 5 years old, starting first grade. We both started kindergarten at the age of 4 due to our November and December birthdays and the ability to pass some sort of test. Anyway....

My father was determined to make a man out of my brother, come hell or high water. He made him a homemade baseball bat out of a good, solid piece of hickory, plucked from the hollers of Blue Summit, Missouri. Later on, when his 3/2 baseball team didn't do so well, on account of him, that piece of hickory was used for other things. Anyway........

When my brother was in kindergarten, every male child had a bright yellow, heavy-duty vinyl raincoat. I think they were supposed to resemble miniature firemen, and yeah, they actually did look like that. My brother didn't have one. He was kind of puny for his age, and the kids made fun of him for not falling in step with them and wearing the proper rain gear.

My father was not the kind of man to be trifled with, particularly when it came to my brother. He dealt with his peer's slings and arrows about his lack of a yellow raincoat like a true man, although my father was never aware of any of those goings on until later. A year later.

During the late summer months between first and second grade, with school approaching, he went to my mother and humbly begged for the possibility of owning a yellow vinyl raincoat. My father had to be consulted for everything involving money, since it was HIS money that he merely shared with us. My mother approached him in some persuasive manner, and a yellow vinyl raincoat was procured.

School started, and shortly thereafter, the rains came. My brother put on his raincoat and stepped out to join the parade of other kids passing our house on the way to school. Only something absolutely unthinkable and unpredictable, like a ghastly joke passed around secret boy scout campfires, had happened during the summer. The yellow firemen raincoats had been replaced by ones made of a thick, vinyl olive-drab. My brother was stunned. He couldn't move. He started to feel sick to his stomach. My mom checked his forehead for a fever. In his bright yellow raincoat, he would stick out like a sore thumb. The world had once again plotted against him in an unholy effort to mark him as an outsider, an outcast, and most definitely not a man.

My father was not fooled. He was a man forced to survive on dandelion greens and noodled catfish as a child, moving from shanty to shanty in the holler, waiting to be kicked out by one landlord after another. The entire issue of fitting in and even owning a raincoat was nothing but trivial, sissy-fied bullshit to him. In one swift motion, he picked up my brother in his yellow vinyl raincoat and carried him the three blocks to school, while the other boys in their olive-drabs looked on, some in horror, and others uproariously laughing.

I believe that was the year my brother started writing poetry, and hiding himself and all his thoughts behind a towering wall that never faltered.

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As for me:

It was 1963. I was 6 years old and going into second grade. Up to that point, my mother had made all my clothes, and even though I was an orange-haired monstrosity with an eye-patch, inch-thick glasses and a constant, hacking cough, I knew those clothes were something very special. She had decided to further hone her sewing skills and made me a beautiful khaki trench coat. It was right out of Vogue. Thomas Burberry himself could not have done a better job. It was a true work of art.

Unfortunately, I had not quite grown as expected over the summer, and rather than falling at around the knee level, it reached somewhere between mid-shin and ankle. I watched the other girls - my constant tormentors - parading down the street in their far inferior coats, but they were, nontheless, knee-length. I hit a panic. I brought my mother to the living room window and showed her and cried. "They'll all make fun of me and laugh at me! (Which, of course, would have just been another day in my life at that time, but still!) My mother hurriedly picked up needle and thread and took up the hem, right there on the spot, overlapping the new hem over the old one. OK - so now the length was about right, but the double layers of thick, heavy-duty cotton gabardine stuck out like a demented non-ruffle, with large stiches showing due to her haste. Again, I cried. It was even worse than before!

By now, my mother was also in a panic. She decided to rip out the new hem and press the old one, feeling that the longer length was not as bad as the alternative heavy bunched up mass of cloth. She performed all these functions at warped speed time so I wouldn't be late for school, but hoping that I would miss the parade of mean girls so that my coat would never actually be seen. However much she tried, the timing was still not right, and between her panic mode and my own, I decided to just go without a coat and walk in the rain. Looking crazy seemed the better option - it fit with the one my peers already had of me.

That was the year I stopped being able to make a decision about anything. Vascillating back and forth, adding up the pros and cons, tossing a coin but never trusting it, and turning it all over to a god I never really believed would help me with anything. I became willing to turn all my decision-making over to anyone who was willing to do it, because I believed that every other human being on the planet could make a better decision than I.