GIFTS
On Sundays, we drove. My father and I. Miles full of silent proximity and the jabbering sports-talk personalities on WSCR-AM.
For most of my childhood, my father coached three sports at the high school. Practice and scouting every weeknight. Varsity games on Fridays. JV on Saturdays. Camps and leagues all summer. One week each year, at the end of July, all the sports ended and we could take vacation.
Sundays the only days he wasn’t pulled in a million directions for work, and even those
were filled with all the errands that piled up over the week. So I did my best to tag along.
Backseat shotgun in his beige Bonneville. To the Home Depot on Kensington and the Fuller’s Car Wash on Algonquin. To Costco or Dominick’s, where we bought groceries and shared pizza slices. And the suburban road in between, where call-ins and shock-jocks debated the Bulls, Bears, and Cubs, graciously talking so we didn’t have to.
Often our trips had shadow agendas involving surprise gifts for my mother. Jewelry,
flowers, spa certificates to Mario Tricoci. “It’s our secret,” he said with a wink, and I winked back, full of pride.
And no Sunday odyssey was complete without a stop at Woodfield Mall to tour the sports apparel stores.
My father was an athlete, but I was an artist. My colored-pencil sketches spanned yards of taped-together construction paper, rolled up in the corner of my bedroom to save space. I hadn’t played organized sports since tee-ball. His attempts at stick-figure people turned out more like fire hydrants. If not for the striking physical resemblance, you might doubt we were related. But at the sports apparel stores, somehow, our interests converged.
I obsessed over bold colors and dynamic mascots. (Badgers, mountain lions, ears of corn bristling with attitude.) The walls of caps with their stylized letterforms. Everything crisp, clean, new. I wandered around, paging through jersey racks and staring into display cases. I could spend hours in each store, just looking.
My father would even leave me there, sometimes, while he went off to resolve errands
elsewhere in the mall, usually buying things for my mother. You couldn’t do that today, leave your child alone at the mall. Probably he slipped one of the teens on the sales floor five dollars to keep an eye on me. Most times, I barely realized he was gone.
And when he was there, he gave me space to roam, lingering an aisle or two away. On
occasion he’d inject himself into the experience, interrupting my moon-eyed wonder to point out a player’s jersey he liked or a throwback style from his own childhood. I never gave much thought to these revelations, but I made sure to agree with him sometimes. “Yeah, Dad, it’s cool.” And hearing that always seemed to please him.
One time, we’d been in the first store a few minutes when he beckoned me to a display
rack.
“Hey, what do you think of these?” he said.
They were Cubs jackets. Bright blue, slick poly-fiber, striped red wool lining the cuffs,
and the team logo embroidered on the left breast. The same jackets the players wore. (No doubt the sign above the rack shouted this exact phrase.) I’d seen them often on TV.
I wasn’t an athlete, but I was a Cubs fan. My father was, too. I never questioned why.
They were there, the games always on through the summer, so I cared. That’s all it takes really.
My father pulled an extra-large off its hanger, slipped it on, and asked me how he looked. He was short, balding—no major leaguer—and seeing him in that jacket seemed uncanny, even a little wrong. But before I could say anything, he thrust a medium into my arms.
“See how it fits,” he said.
On one hand, the lining’s soft caress, and on the other its weight. Gravity seemed intent on pulling that jacket to the floor, my child’s shoulders be damned. I snapped it closed and felt the insulation working immediately. It felt like my head and torso were suddenly disconnected, split off into separate rooms.
It was sharp, bold, vivid. I didn’t need a mirror to know this, yet my father insisted I
stand before one. He was acting strangely coy. I recognized this but couldn’t see through it. I just knew he really wanted me to like the jacket.
“It’s a really nice jacket,” I said, fingering the logo stitches.
“Do you want it?” he said.
“What?”
“I want to buy it for you. An early birthday present.”
I stared at my reflection, the jacket shining beneath my chin, and knew with absolute
certainty that I would never wear it. I was terrified of owning something so nice, much less carrying it around on me. But my father’s face lit up, and I understood how much planning he’d put into this perfect gift. How he must have scouted behind my back for weeks, plotted in silence while I wandered the store. Even gone back without me to put one on layaway. The jacket was almost two hundred dollars. Who was I—what kind of ungrateful son I would be—to reject such generosity?
At the register, a female cashier used a gunlike device to remove the ink tag. She folded
the jacket to a dense cube and slid it into the checkout bag. I think she even wished me happy birthday. I let it happen. My father handing over his credit card, then presenting me with the bag. I saw it all from a distance, like it was happening to someone else.
Outside the store, I felt sick. The jacket’s impossible blue peeking above feathery tissue
paper. The flood of weekend mallgoers loud and unrelenting. I had to run, it seemed, to keep with my father’s untroubled pace. Did I call out to him or mumble vague interjections? I know I never actually said it. I didn’t have to. He could see it in my face.
“You don’t want it?”
I burst into tears. He turned swiftly to hide his reaction, but it was unmistakable. His
you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me smirk. It could’ve been my crying as much as anything, the fact that I was now making a scene. Our family’s never been good at embarrassment.
He ushered me away from the streaming foot traffic, into a little alcove between stores,
and put a hand on my shoulder. He assured me it was alright. If I didn’t want the jacket, he would return it, easy as that. He smiled down at me—and I cried even harder. My soggy, sniffling guilt. How he’d planned this perfect father-son moment, and I couldn’t give it to him.
My father went back alone to return the jacket. Doing his best to spare me further
torment, though that didn’t stop me from feeling it. I saw the whole exchange clearly in my mind: His handing the bag across the counter to the same checkout lady. Her recognition followed by confusion. The requisite questions. (No, there’s nothing wrong with it.) He trying to shrug it all off. Kids, amirite?
Decades later, I still get anxious thinking about this episode. Though, as you can imagine, that didn’t stop me from becoming my father. I had this girlfriend once. We dated long-distance, only seeing each other once a month. And we didn’t date long—for the specific reason that I was pathologically unable to stop buying her things. Small gifts mostly, but nonstop, and in bunches. Gourmet coffee grounds because she liked coffee, and Chicago-themed fridge magnets because she’d once mentioned wanting more things to put on her fridge. T-shirts and cards. Everything I saw everywhere reminded me of her, and if I didn’t pour all my yearning into something physical and giftable I might have burst. No doubt I became to her a rolling suffocating tempest, showering her with guilt. I thought it was love, but I wasn’t paying attention. That’s not what this story is about, though.
My father never brought up that jacket again. Not once. But if I asked him about it
tomorrow, I’m sure he’d remember. Twenty-five years later. He definitely remembers. And for a few more years after that, until I was old enough to roam the mall with kids my own age, we kept making those trips, those safaris into the bright and mesmerizing world of sports apparel. Sometimes, if he saw my eyes light up, he’d slip me a couple twenties.
About the Author
Jeffrey Wolf was a finalist for the Third Coast Fiction Prize and the Arkansas International Emerging Writer’s Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Bat City Review, Jewish Fiction .net and elsewhere. He has an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.