His shirt says, “I’m excited about my future.”
I can’t read the rest, hidden between the folds of his tummy, the folds made visible by the curve of his spine, the slump over the same black coffee he ordered here yesterday. I don’t know that to be true, but how could I not? From the slump, and the way he had said hello to the man who had poured the coffee without offering any milk to counter the bitter hit. Knowing without saying. Saying without saying anything at all.
“I’m excited about my future.”
From what? I wonder. And where? Was it given to this man when he was a child, oversized so it might last, or when he was a man, or had it been his to give away? Or: had he decided later to keep this one, one that had been left behind?
Like that shirt, I think, that the librarian handed you at the start of the Yonkers Public Library Summer
Read-a-thon when you were six. When you were eight. When you were 10. When the challenge for you lie not in mustering the motivation to get through enough books to earn those 12 silver stars, one nestled into each of 12 columns across that flimsy trifold that said, “Yonkers Public Library Summer Read-a-thon” in comic sans on the front, the words stacked just as awkwardly as the illustrated hardbacks that sat to the right and just underneath the words: the best Clip Art ever had to give. It might have looked better printed in black and white than this color, which looked worn even when it was fresh, though even then there would have been something off, something mocking about it, something the adults that surrounded you had to have seen.
No, the challenge then was not in reading the books but in choosing the books; in how many books you could wrap your arms around, how many you could stack tall then carry forward—without dropping a single one—up to the counter, to that librarian whose name you don’t know even though she had to know yours by heart; to that stack of index cards in that little metal tin; to that stamp and that pad of ink, open and ready; to the deep and glistening black ink on each book’s card, a sign to the ready six-, eight-, ten-year-old you: go.
Once, during a summer when you were suddenly too old to participate in the Read-a-thon, you had said you’d read every book in the library starting then, every single book, by the time you were old old. Once, after reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Once, you decided fiction was the place to start. No, young adult. No, biography, you said once, picking up Adams, Abigail, the smell of time jumping from its spine to your nose to your hand. Adams, Abigail, you thought, that’s a good place to start.
Once, during that same summer, or the next, you decided you’d sleep on it. To plan the whole thing better: this kind of challenge, you know, was not something to just decide and then just start, you know, you can’t just decide and then go with this kind of big kind of thing.
Then again, it could be like that shirt you got when you arrived at “Girls’ State Leadership Camp” the summer going into 10th grade, when each girl to arrive was assigned a group, and each group, a different color shirt. Each group with its color, a different county. All in all, a state, with elections to be held, democracy to be tested, races to be run and lost.
It could be like that shirt, the shirt you were wearing when you ran down the hall to the office, knocked on the door and cried to the women in charge. I made a mistake. I do want to run. It’s only 10 minutes after the deadline to submit your name. Crying: Please. And: Don’t you understand?
The shirt you were wearing when the women in charge said, No. When they reminded you what real life is, and what real life will never be.
You wore that shirt the rest of that day, when you spent the rest of the day helping one of the girls who had submitted her name on time write her speech, the one she would later give to rally the other girls behind her, like each of the speeches each of the girls who decided to run—and ran—would give. You wore that shirt as you read the other girl’s speech—your words—aloud to yourself in the corner of the dormitory common room, telling yourself this could win. Reminding yourself you had to hand it over: it wasn’t yours to keep.
Maybe it’s that shirt that you saved for too long, well beyond its prime.
Or maybe it’s like that shirt the librarian who handed you the trifold was handed from someone more powerful than her, or her stamp, or her ink. The one she was made to wear, even though there was something silly about an adult in this kind of shirt, to excite all the little readers about what was to come. Or the shirt the women in charge were given before day one of camp, told to wear by someone else modeling a behavior for them, someone above them, sitting in a different office, an office where someone else taught another someone that real life doesn’t care if you gave it a second thought. There, once, someone else must have nodded at someone else, then looked down, slumping over a stack of papers and a cup of lukewarm coffee, the knowing communicated without words: someone to someone, we all learned this lesson years ago.
Yes, maybe it’s a shirt some someones like them were made to wear once, after the excitement had already worn off, because they’re living it, the future, now. Now that they’re drinking their coffee black because life doesn’t always have cream and sugar to give. Now, when shirts like that are better suited for sleep. Now—though I can’t know this to be true—that now is not exactly what they thought it would be.
His shirt says, “I’m excited about the future.”
He takes a sip, straightens himself in his chair, tugs on the bottom of his shirt until it’s smooth, and I see steam: proof that his coffee is still hot; I’m jealous that, for him, the shirt still seems to fit.