Chapter 3 - The Sweater They Chose For Me
I sat on the edge of my bed with the block pressed against my chest and listened to them downstairs.
Their voices came up through the floorboards, low and muffled. I couldn't make out the words, just the shape of them. My father's voice was steady and flat. My mother's was thinner, like she was trying to keep it small. Every few seconds one of them would stop and the other would start again. I held my breath without meaning to and counted the pauses. My sweater itched at the neck and I didn't move to fix it.
When the front door clicked shut downstairs, I finally let my shoulders drop. The house went quiet except for the chandelier humming faintly two floors below.
I slid off the bed and went to my closet. I hadn't ever really looked at it before, not like that. I just wore what was there. But that night I opened both doors wide and stared.
It was all the same. Three cream sweaters, all cable-knit, all folded the same way. Four pairs of brown pants hanging on little wooden hangers. Brown shoes lined up underneath, scuffed at the toes. No color. No patterns. I ran my hand across the sleeves. They were soft, but they all felt the same under my fingers. I pulled one sweater out and held it up against me and looked in the mirror on the closet door.
The cable stitch made thick lines down the front. I touched the bottom hem where it hit my waist. I'd always thought this was just what I wore because it was what I had. That night I realized someone had chosen it. Someone had gone to a store and picked this exact sweater, this exact brown, more than once, and decided this was what I would look like.
Across the room, my mother's gold dress was hanging on the back of her bedroom door where she'd left it after coming upstairs. I could see it through the cracked door between our rooms. It caught the light from the hall even in the dark. It shimmered. It was sleeveless and cut to move. I looked from that dress back to the sweater in my hands and the difference felt heavy, like a fact I wasn't supposed to notice.
I put the sweater back, folding it exactly how I'd found it, and slipped out into the upstairs hall.
The hall was long with cream walls and white trim, and the floor was dark wood that creaked in one spot by the stairs. The large framed painting hung at the end, the one people saw when they came up the marble staircase. I'd walked past it a thousand times. That night I stopped and really looked.
It was us. My mother in the gold dress, my father in his black suit, his hand resting on my shoulder. And me in front, in the same cream sweater and brown pants, holding nothing. The photographer had told me to put my hands at my sides. I remembered the flash. I remembered my mother fixing my collar three times before they let me sit. In the picture my hair was combed flat. My mouth was closed. I looked like the boy they wanted in the frame.
I stood there a long time. The hall was cold and my socks made no sound. I reached out and touched the glass over my own face. My fingertip left a small mark. Behind me, I heard a door open softly down the hall and my mother's shape passed in the doorway of her dressing room, still in her robe, not the gold dress. She didn't see me. She was holding her phone to her ear and she said something quiet like "we'll handle it" and then she was gone. The way she moved was careful, like she didn't want to make noise either.
I took my hand off the portrait and walked back toward my room.
My block wasn't in my hands anymore. I stopped in the middle of the hall and felt a quick drop in my stomach. I looked down, checked my pockets, then turned and scanned the floorboards behind me. It was gone. I must have set it down when I touched the picture. I hurried back, my breath getting short, and knelt to look under the edge of the painting where the shadow was deepest.
The door to my bedroom eased open before I found it.
The maid slipped in, not through the main hall but through the narrow side door that connected to the linen closet. She moved fast and quiet. She had the block in both hands, holding it out toward me the way you'd hold something that belonged to someone else.
"You left this," she whispered. She didn't say my name. Her eyes flicked toward the open hall door, listening.
I nodded and took it from her. The wood was warm from her hands. She knelt just enough so we were at the same height and squeezed my shoulder once, firm and quick. Her fingers pressed through the cable of my sweater. She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. Her face did it — a small, tight smile that said I know and we can't say it here. Then she let go, stood, and was gone the way she came, pulling the side door shut without a click.
I stood alone in my room with the block back against my chest. I listened to make sure her steps had faded. Then I didn't put the block back on my pillow where I always kept it.
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I went to my dresser, opened the bottom drawer where my folded sweaters were, and pushed the stack aside. I made a little space at the back, against the wood, and laid the block there. I covered it again with the cream knit so it disappeared. It wasn't hiding because I was ashamed of it. It was hiding because it was the one thing they'd never picked out for me. I remembered how I'd gotten it — not from a store trip with my mother, but from a basket of spare toys the maid had brought up months ago — and how no one had ever told me to put it down.
I closed the drawer and sat back on my bed. My closet was still open, full of the same sweaters and brown pants, all chosen for me. But now I knew they'd been chosen. That was the difference. And the block was underneath them, safe, where only I knew it was.
