March 24, 2025: B. G. Bradley, "At the Wolfe Sewing Center"

 

At the Wolfe Sewing Center

by: B. G. Bradley

From Hawk’s Worlds of Wonder (A soon-to-be-released magic reality memoir from Benegamah Press)

         Looking back at what I’ve written so far, I see I’ve painted a pretty dismal portrait of both Key and Wuh as human beings. Yes, from my viewpoint as a five-year-old, hung up on a coat hook inside a draw string bag while bound and gagged, they did seem pretty villainous, but I should say here and now that in subsequent years, and despite the fact that they did tease and harass me on a pretty regular basis while I was growing up, they were and remain two of my best friends on Earth, and have stood up for me with brotherly love on occasions too numerous to mention. Even when I was little, and Key and Wuh were full-on committed to their campaign to keep their younger brother subservient, humble, and completely under their thumb, any harassment or abuse of their little brother by anybody outside the family, was strictly prohibited by brotherly pact.

            Springing to mind immediately from those years was the time when some bullies spotted my Catholic school friend Rubble and me wearing team colored stocking hats and coats at an away football game. Like all bullies, this crowd of twelve-year-olds from another town had spotted the always sought after easy victims and were standing about us well away from the football field’s lights hurling various insults at Rubble and me—we were ten at the time—and they were about to trip us, then apply a suitable battering, when my brother Key, who was, 20, and home from college in Minnesota on a fall break, descended, picking up two of them by the scruff of the neck and shaking them like rag dolls, while hollering towards the fleeing others, “Yeah, you better run, you punks!”

            Once Key had cleared the area of the enemy, that didn’t stop him from giving me a quick swat on the back of the head, a little smile of nostalgia for how much he missed troubling me on a daily basis and said kindly, “Stay in the light and within shouting distance of Mom and Dad when you’re out of town, Numb-nuts!”

            “Jeez,” Rubble said at the time, “your older brother is pretty nice to you.” Only younger brothers will understand that Rubble, who was also the youngest in his family, and had older brothers, and knew how cruel they could be, meant that sincerely.

            Then there was the time that I got into a Saturday afternoon scrap on the playground with the Unibrow brothers. I no longer remember specifically how the fight started, but it seems to me that the envious T. Uni, the younger of the two, said something insulting about Sassy being a weak ghost what with being so stupid as to get mowed, or plowed, or scraped by a snowplow in life. Well, nobody insulted my ghost, especially since he had no recourse when insulted other than to haunt somebody late at night, and Sassy was much too kind a personage to do such a thing. Of course, Sassy had three living older brothers and four younger brothers along with a bunch of pretty tough and tall blonde headed Finn sisters, but none of them were there at the time, so, on his behalf, and I’ll admit, largely because I rarely got someone to righteously pick on, I laid into T, taking him down with a flying tackle I’d learned from Wuh, and pummeling him with my best two handed Indian punch gleaned from watching The Wild Wild West on tv.

            I had T down and was lining up a big time wrestling haymaker when B. Uni came running from across the playground, kicked me in the side, and stole my baseball glove, which I’d dropped when the melee began. I was just about to begin my war on two fronts as Sassy looked on shaking his head and mumbling, “All this isn’t really necessary, Hawk…” when I saw B. Uni’s eyes suddenly get big. He ran for his bike and rode away still holding my glove. Though I was busy with T. Uni who was making a comeback after his brother’s intervention, the thought of my magic glove—a tale of which I’ll tell you later in this opus—being pilfered by the likes of the Unibrows was unthinkable. I almost abandoned my pummeling of T and got up in pursuit of B, but then I saw what B had seen, my brother Wuh, descending at a full run after him. In a moment, Wuh realized he could not catch B before he got within shouting distance of home which was just down the street, so Wuh, who was a three sport athlete and a fine, if skinny, one, picked up my nearby baseball, and threw it in a marvelous magical arc seventy yards across the playground. As it reached its apex the ball, I swear, caught fire, and began to give off an unearthly homing hum not unlike the sound of Crash’s spaceship spinning at full revolution.

            T and I, who would later become friends, as often happens after childhood brawls, halted our combat and watched in fascination as the ball descended and struck the rear tire of B’s stingray bike, upending both the bike and B at the playground gate. B. abandoned the glove, got clumsily to his feet and let out a wail of terror as he spotted Wuh now coming towards him at a full out and athletic run, he found his way back on to his bike and road off towards home in full sobbing cry shouting, “Mommmmmmy!”

            Pretty undignified for a thirteen-year-old.

            “And let that  be a lesson to you,” Wuh shouted. “Only family members get to beat up Hawk.”

            Fully understanding the logic of such a statement, and frankly wishing I had a younger brother so I could put the same principle in practice, I went back to pounding on T Unibrow, seeing no contradiction in finishing his extra-family pummeling.

            All that aside, the day that I first really got to know my brother Wuh as a person who actually possessed a certain amount of wisdom, and his own vulnerabilities and sensitivities, was the day that he and I jointly suffered the monotonous, monotone tortures of a morning that stretched well into the afternoon at the Wolfe Sewing Center in Iron Range City.

            Wuh, then 15, and I, 10, were certainly not seated on the wooden bench near the cash register at the Wolfe by choice. That bench was designed, I think, to be as uncomfortable as possible in order to keep husbands from hanging around in the center—a purpose it certainly succeeded at, because there were no adult men, or other boys for that matter, in sight, with one exception, which I’ll get to later in this chapter. No, the presence of Wuh and me at the Wolfe Sewing Center was the result of a pact we had made with Mom and Dad. If we wanted to go with Dad to a Detroit Tiger game the following summer, we had to go Christmas shopping, notably without him, with Mom and Zizz.

            The Wolfe Sewing Center, quite possibly the nefarious hub from which all male boredom in the universe emanated, fairly hummed that day, and I assume most days, with a numbing reverberation that commenced and continued with a female voice saying, “What do you think of this material?”

            We will return to this tableau of Chinese water torture style pre-pubescent and adolescent horror shortly, but first let’s return to the start of that day, and to a few days before when the infamous pact was actually made. Mom and Zizz had just come down from the aforementioned sewing room with smiles on their faces: always a bad sign. They confronted Dad, who was seated in his favorite pale blue leather chair, smoking his pipe, reading the paper, and ostensibly watching Gunsmoke on the black and white tv, while Wuh and I were sprawled on the couch, our jaws slack as Festus and Doc argued, in preparation for the final ten minutes of the episode during which Matt would return to town and wipe out all the bad guys with his 28 round capable six shooter, making Dodge City, once again, safe for Democracy or some such.

            When Dad’s name was called he looked up reluctantly, saw the female smiles and managed a good natured look of his own, despite his undoubted trepidations—Dad was no fool—and commented, “What’s up?”

            Mom then described the wonders of a Saturday Christmas shopping trip to Iron Range City, “fun for the whole family” she said “and great for making memories”. Dad, the lucky stiff, had the ready-made excuse of his Saturday morning hours at his dental practice. “Oh, that’s sounds great, hon, but you know I’ve got appointments Saturday morning, and I really can’t cancel on short notice.”

            Mom, ever the pragmatist had anticipated this answer, and had never expected Dad’s company. What she wanted was for Wuh and me to come along, so we could “try on some clothes” a phrase no straight man in his right mind ever heard without getting an attack of the bends. By setting up the possibility that Wuh and I would be alone in the house, a circumstance no parent in his right mind would ever want, as Wuh was barely aware of his own existence and certainly couldn’t be trusted to babysit, and I was well known for my escapades by that time and under no circumstances was I to be left unsupervised. At that point, both Sprocket and Key were away at college and thus out of the reach of female treachery. Again, the lucky stiffs.

            At this point in the conversation Dad turned to us and said, “You know what I was thinking?” Then he waited the compensatory 15 seconds for Wuh to finally notice that there was a lull in the conversation, that everybody else in the room was staring at the two of us, and further, that an answer was required of him. At last, my surprisingly brilliant and sensitive, though perpetually pre-occupied older brother said, “Wuh? What happened?”

            He said this on a fairly regular basis, thus the nickname.

            Mom then repeated the plan, Dad, embroidered it with an offer for the three of us to take in a Tiger game or two the following summer, and the trap was set. Mom, got me to quit whining and to quit contemplating which childhood disease to fake this time—I had been seriously considering spinal meningitis by complaining of a stiff neck, double vision, and a headache come Saturday or perhaps complaining of numbness in hands and feet and whispering pitifully like a sailor in the south sea adventure books I’d been reading, “I think it may be beriberi, Mom, go on without me”—by saying, “And as a special treat, we’ll go on the train!”

            Mom knew that, against her many warnings about the dangers inherent there, Crash and I often hung around the train tracks and the tiny train station just north of our little town and she figured it was because I had a yearning for train travel, certainly not that we were picking up spare parts for what would eventually be Crash’s space ship. The truth was I did have some interest in traveling by train. Crash had, in fact, suggested hopping a freight and heading off for warmer climes more than once, and told me he had actually done so a time or two, a claim that I never doubted for a moment. That was the thing about Crash, all of us at the Catholic school had already seen him do so many legendary things that any outrageous claim he made about his exploits was instantly believed. The truth was, I just wasn’t quite as brave as Crash, a fact that I was not afraid to admit, as nobody was as brave as Crash. So anyway, I fell hook line and sinker for Mom’s trap, thinking that while going on a train trip with my mommy and sister would hardly be seen as an adventure by Crash, it might well seem pretty adventurous to everybody else in my class.

            See, by that time, the late 1960’s, nobody, or very few, traveled by train any longer in our area of the north woods. The roads, which had been largely gravel, when Mom and Dad moved here in the 1950’s were finally paved, and nearly everybody finally had a car. The passenger trains were on their very last legs, but Mom had checked it out: a freight train with one passenger car departed every Saturday at 8 a.m. from our station and returned by 7 p.m. Wouldn’t that be an adventure?

            I, at last decided that it would be, and combined with the further inducement of the Tiger games the following summer, I decided it was a good deal all around. When I discussed it with Sassy, on our daily walk to the Catholic school he was instantly as excited as a teenage ghost could get, but not about the trip to Iron Range City and the shopping, “I don’t know about shopping, you’re on your own there, and the train trip might get a little long, but I’ll go with you to the station for sure. I want to introduce you to all my ghost friends!”

            Sure enough, when we arrived at the train station, a full hour before we were due to depart, due to Mom’s girlish excitement about the impending trip, which reminded her she said, of the old days when she grew up in a country town down state, and of her later frequent train trips in and around Washington D.C. when she worked as a codebreaker during WWII—more on that later in this opus—we found the little building teeming with ghosts. There were old Indian specters, including some Voyageur trappers, a younger native ghost named Billy Waters who had bristly dark hair and Connie Morning Star, his tall, lovely girlfriend, whose haunting dark eyes captivated my young dream fascinations for years afterwards. The two had been run down by a night train, when they’d fallen asleep after necking in an empty freight car, and, still groggy from sleep had jumped out on the wrong side when they’d heard the train coming—Sassy had a crush on Connie, I think, but her Billy Waters looked pretty tough for a ghost and Sassy never acted on it—a couple of steely eyed silent drunks, who had been loggers apparently, in the wilds north of town, who Sassy told me had been run over one night when they fell asleep on the tracks, after going on a bender at one of the two local brothel/dives just up the street, after finishing a long day in the woods—Sassy declined to tell me what a brothel was and referred me to Crash or my brother, Wuh for further explanations—the quite corporeal and afore-mentioned Charlie One Duck was also there among the ghosts, still and smiling as always, when he wasn’t walking the town and county’s roads. He was perched on a windowsill overlooking the tracks near the station master’s desk. The station master and he carried on a mostly one way conversation with the station master commenting on everything and Charlie coming up with a playful retort or a bit of wisdom that made the station master laugh or nod and sip at his coffee cup, every twenty minutes or so. Among the other ghosts was one Crash and I had encountered before, the ghost of an old brakeman who constantly walked the tracks in greasy coveralls, a canvas coat, and a wool poor boy’s cap, looking for cracks in the rails. Also there in the station that day, was the ghost of an engineer, a particular ghostly friend of the station master, who was lost and confused as ghosts occasionally are, looking for his train, which had stopped its route to Sault Ste. Marie and back 20 years before, and this abandonment had led to the old engineer’s demise, the station master himself would later tell us. I knew a sad story when I heard one, even at age 10, and this one made me stifle a few tears for the old ghost. The station master kept his old, spectral friend busy by telling him his train would be along any minute, and why didn’t he go out to the diner and have a cup of coffee while he waited. The diner in question was also long gone, but the old ghost didn’t know that either, and the station master said that searching for it seemed to give the old ghost an occupation of a morning, if no contentment in the face of passing time, and the end of eras.

            The station master himself, old Mr. Driggs, lived daily amidst this effluvium, this enchanted continuum of these ghosts and many more; the memories and yearnings of bygone eras right on the verge of passing away forever wafting about him. He seemed unbothered by the melancholy nature of his workaday, twilight world. He was like Santa Claus in a conductor’s outfit. Crash and I had encountered him before. He was portly and friendly with a white, close-trimmed beard, unusual in that day and age, and always had a pocket full of caramels he said his wife made. He laughed at nearly everything, including his impending retirement, which he said would coincide with the abandonment of the last passenger train car in the north, which was coming in a year’s time.

            “Yup,” he said to my family, “I’m outmoded just like passenger lines in the north. But don’t worry for me,” he added when Mom, pulled a sympathetic expression, “Bessie and I have made plans. Gonna head south and soak up some sun.”

            Mr. Driggs played it up in full for our departure that Saturday, checking the gold watch he kept on a chain in his vest pocket, then calling out an echoing and lovely “All aboard!” when the train was bound to depart, despite the fact that we were the only passengers in the station that day.

            Bud, for once, did not accompany Zizz on the train trip and subsequent shopping trip, preferring to see us off with Sassy and the station master. He was not a jealous angel, and gave over this trip to the development of Mom and Zizz’s mother-daughter relationship, not wanting to intrude, I think. Both he and Sassy, along with Mr. Driggs, waved us a fond farewell from the platform upon our departure.

            I was never privy to any conversation Bud and Sassy had, including the discussion of family foibles they no doubt conducted after our departure. Of course, I doubt it would have been carried out in words, but I trust it would have been fascinating: two guardians telepathically comparing notes on their charges. Oh, the wonders of non-corporeal life! Some day, I suppose, given all of time, I may come to understand those aspects of our universe too.

            Along the tracks towards Iron Range City, I was at first captivated, and later hypnotized by the vastness of wilderness, bogs, swamps, rolling vistas covered in fir trees and maple stands; the occasional clearings where summer camps stood along both vast and petite inland lakes, surrounded by still more stands of green and seasonally barren trees; the occasional quick stops at tiny hamlets nestled into highland ridges; and finally, as we neared Iron Range City itself; the stern, frigid, rocky shoreline of Lake Superior, a lake only in name, a true inland freshwater sea, the largest in the world.

            At last we arrived in the larger, but still humble train station, the gateway to our neck of the north’s ‘metropolis’, and soon we were off on foot down the downtown streets of Iron Range City. The downtown era was a relic of the past too, and though I spotted not a single ghost there, such sightings would have been superfluous, what with the facades of the stone and brick, iron red buildings reminding one of the hey day of iron ore in our northern region, replete with miners, miners wives and children, just now reaching its twilight, giving way to a modern tourist economy.

            Before I had a chance to take it all in, Mom ushered Wuh, Zizz, and me into Washington Shoe Store where each of us was to be outfitted with new school shoes of both the dress and sneaker variety. All three of us had been lobbying for penny loafers, the fad of the time, but Mom had in mind more sensible shoes for each of us. At this point the monotony of “trying things on” hadn’t quite set in. And the Wolfe Sewing Center was only a blip on the future screen, barely mentioned by Mom up to this point except in her whispered conversations with Zizz which I had made a habit of overhearing.

            Of most fascination for me on this first stop was the metal foot measuring apparatus, which I would much later learn, after some research in my latter days as a journalist and general ink stained wretch, was known as a Brannock device. Something was quite entrancing to me about the concept of the thing. Here on the frame of this rather intricate framework, tattooed with numbers and lines, was the identity and description of nearly every foot in the world, no matter to whom it belonged. Think of it! Every person who had ever lived, who ever would live, could have their feet measured and catalogued by this device! All walks of life were subject to the precise measurements which could be taken with this ingenious device by the meticulous, bespectacled salesman in the Washington Show Store, who I noticed smelled of cardboard shoe boxes and a lemony aftershave.

            To some extent, to my way of thinking, this fellow had potential access, in at least some sense, to knowledge of the souls of everyone in the world through the common soles of their feet.

            Wuh, cared as little as I did about picking out dress shoes, but for once he was attentive, when it came to sneakers. He was very particular about the very specific American brand of basketball shoe he needed, and I saw Mom breathe a sigh of relief when it became clear the store had them. Only a year hence, a foreign basketball shoe would be introduced that would completely turn Wuh’s head and make his, by then outmoded hoop shoes, seem particularly passé. Of course, in my hero worship of all my older brothers, but particularly Wuh, who was proficient in all things sports, I wanted an identical pair, which caused a little bit of chaos, as Wuh didn’t want to be caught dead wearing the same sneakers as his kid brother. At last, Zizz intervened and showed me the light of being unique and picking a different brand, more given to my unique nature as a renowned climber of trees, digger in clay pits, and ascender of rock hills. Zizz didn’t want a brotherly battle, and she had been witness to many as the lone female in our youthful tribe, to derail her day shopping with Mom.

            From the shoe store we moved on to Gautieu’s Clothing Shop where the monotony began to set in. There, Wuh and I were forced to try on approximately 2,913 suits. Though I frankly loved examining my heroic reflection in the mirror, the repetitiveness of moving in and out of the dressing room and being examined by my mother, not to mention having to participate in the selection of matching ties drove me around the bend. I kept trying to divert attention to the fedoras and other types of hats available in the store which would make me look like the tough guy private eyes I’d seen in old black and white movies on tv. Mom was not having it drawing a clear line of battle. 

            “Do you want everybody to be staring and pointing at you as you walk down the street?” My mother asked. “They’ll say, ‘Look at that silly little boy with the big floppy ol’ hat! Isn’t he preposterous?’” she added, as I nearly broke into a fit of tears over her unwillingness to let me have a certain tough guy hat with a tall top and a wide, wide brim, with a wide white band. I could just picture myself wearing it, the brim dipped almost to the level of my left eye, while I gnawed on a tough guy tooth pick in the right corner of my mouth and continually tossed and caught a silver dollar in my right hand, saying things like, “We’re gonna have a little talk, you and me,” and “Hey, doll face, why don’t you take a little walk with me to a place I know?” I thought of the answer to Mom’s question, ‘Do you want everybody to be staring and pointing at you as you walk down the street?’ as a given. Of course, I did!

            Zizz stepped in again, this time by slipping me a few of the caramels from the station master in our home town and promising more if I would just keep my yapper shut. For the rest of the day, whenever I saw an opportunity to make a feint at a tantrum or collapse, I would turn my eyes to Zizz and put my hand out. Until we got to the Wolfe Sewing Center, my outstretched palm was always filled with caramels.

            Finally, at 11:32 a.m. we arrived at the doors of the notorious sewing emporium, after a downtown lunch, including a roast beef sandwich and an actual chocolate malt made in a genuine steel soda canister with a big green commercial blender and poured into a tall, beveled soda glass with two straws and a spoon by a genuine soda jerk wearing a white hat, who called me ’Sport’. I was way too young and naive, too entranced by the surroundings at the soda counter, and by the process of malt preparation, not to mention the delectable, sweet, creamy taste of the malt, to see I was being set up. 

            In retrospect, it would have been only fair for the Wolfe Sewing Center’s narrow front door to be topped by a Dantean plaque that read, “Abandon all hope ye men who enter here.” Once we had entered through those nefarious doors, we, Wuh and I, were instructed in uncharacteristically icy terms by our usually upbeat and suddenly transformed mother to “Take a seat” on the wooden bench by the cash register and to remember that patience was a virtue. She and Zizz then disappeared into the labyrinth of fabrics available on the endless shelves of materials and patterns, in this haven of fashion design. They were gone approximately 15 and a half weeks somehow encompassed within the span of a few daylight hours of one day, during which time Wuh and I came to truly know each other and each other’s worths as we endured and nearly succumbed to the living hell of spools and swatches, hems, pins, and needles, that was the Wolfe Sewing Center. After a time, we became somewhat acquainted, too, with the ghost of a little boy, the only other male of any form present. He was approximately my age. He didn’t breathe a word to either of us for the longest time, but we could see the cause of his death in his unwavering stare at the enormous Roman enumerated clock on the wall above the ancient, ornate golden cash register, and in the dried tears at the corner of his ghostly eyes. These indicators did not bode well for my brother and me. Somehow,  I concluded, Wuh and I had to devise a method or methods of not succumbing to the little ghost’s dismal fate: dying of boredom.

            And we did, for a while, but in the end, both of Wuh and I nearly succumbed.

            First, we amused ourselves by trying to recall the top ten batters in the American League for the past three years, then by arguing over the greatest running backs of all time, by discussing who had the better arm, Brooks Robinson or Luis Aparichio, and whether our hero, the Tigers’ perennial all-star outfielder Al Kaline, would have made a good third baseman, what with his phenomenal arm from right field, eventually devolving into discussing which mannequin in the store was the best looking, and what girls, we knew the mannequin looked like—a kind of pre-sexual awakening for me, in the form of a glimpse into Wuh’s supposed superior insights into the fairer sex as a fifteen-year-old—we even shared in the reading of the only comic book on the rack next to the bench—a “Betty and Veronica” issue in which the lovely four color teens competed over the affections of Archie and Reggie. In other words, just like every other Betty and Veronica comic ever written. We then argued over who was the more desirable character on Gilligan’s Island, Ginger or Mary Ann. Wuh was a Ginger man. For me it was Mary Ann all the way. Later, we arrived at discussing our various exploits in life, a kind of one-upmanship battle about our supposed triumphs: “I touched the rim at the gym the other day…well almost.”

            “Oh yeah, well that’s nothin’, I carried sixteen guys on my back on the playground the other day and still crossed the goal line…well, six…actually two…well, really just Rubble, but he’s really heavy!”

            At last, things even deteriorated to whispered competitions in

what-would-you-rather do’s’ as in ‘would you rather eat a dead rat or put your mouth over the sewer drain for two hours?’ but finally the constant patter of the saleslady, as she, Mom, and Zizz, criss-crossed the endless aisles of fabrics, occasionally giving us faint hope by briefly coming into view before disappearing once more with the saleslady, a tall, broad woman with a beehive hairdo and hornrimmed kitty glasses keeping up a steady sing song patter concerning A-line dresses, accessories, according pleats, advancing colors, aida fabric, armhole dart bodices, alterations, bar tack, basketweave, baste, yoke, beading needles, ballerina necklines, blouse packets, bias cuts, hemming, illusion sleeve, horsehair grade, hard tone buttons, hip curves, herringbone patterns, hemming bobbin winders, pointelle stitches, horsehair grade, hard tone buttons, bodice, blocking, cape collars, Swiss dots, kangaroo pouch pockets, and anti-pill apex appliqués.

            After approximately four and a half weeks of this, the ghost boy turned to me and whispered in a chilling voice, “make…her…stop!” I told him that I sympathized but that I was as powerless as he was. I then told him he shouldn’t be so glum because my ghost friend had been mowed down, or plowed and then decidedly scraped by a snow plow and now was committed for a time to wander around my home town talking to people until he got things settled for good and asked him how he would he like to be in Sassy’s shoes.

            The little ghost boy just shook his head, moaned a bit and said, “I’ve been here since 1946. The lady talking right now is my mother. She came in here as a customer, got involved in a conversation with the owner about the new trend towards skirt pockets, and, in the course of it, bought the place, and hasn’t stopped talking about magyar margins and lock stitches since then. She didn’t even notice when I passed away from boredom in 1958. I’ve just been sitting here the whole time. I’d trade places with your friend, the snowplow ghost, any day.”

            I turned to Wuh to repeat the story the little boy had just whispered, but Wuh only nodded, said he’d heard it all then whined, and showed a strain of vulnerability I hadn’t known my hero big brother possessed. It really scared me! “Hawky, I think I’ve gone blind,” he said. “And I can’t feel my feet. Do I still have feet?” Something had to be done. What would Crash do? I contemplated trying to find a book of matches behind the counter so that I could set fire to the place, but that seemed a little extreme. I finally decided on faking an epileptic fit on the carpet in the center aisle, having looked up the symptoms for just such an occasion in one of Dad’s medical books, and in fact had thrown myself onto the floor to do just that when at last, Mom, Zizz and the saleslady came into view, both Mom and Zizz loaded down with fabrics of every shade. The saleslady had a leaning-tower-of-fabric stack too. Between them they had enough material to make choir robes for three Mormon Tabernacle Choirs.

            Still, they were in sight, and that meant the end was near. Or did it?

            “You know, there’s one more swatch I didn’t show you,” the saleslady said raising a waggling finger in the air, “now where is it? Let me see. It’s somewhere between the tricot lining and the accordion pleats, I think.”

            “Nooooooooooooo,” moaned the little boy bench ghost. “Not again.”

            “My hands, Hawky, now I can’t feel my hands. I need them for basketball. Hawky, do I still have hands?” Wuh whimpered.

            That tore it! I let out an ungodly screech, continued my fake seizure, even managed some foaming at the mouth, but the saleslady just stepped over me, crunching the little finger of my left hand under the heel of her stylish red pump before t disappearing with my mother and Zizz, once more into the maze of  fabric aisles.

            For three and one half days, I lay silent on the floor, occasionally looking up at the clock, which seemed to have entered a dimension minus time as its hands never moved, and even appeared to move backwards, Einstein be damned, and at last rising to sit down, once again, next to the bench ghost. Wuh had slumped into a pile of adolescent ennui only occasionally muttering, “Hawky, can you see my face? I think my face has disappeared. But I’m talking. At least I think I’m talking. Do I still have a mouth?”

            When my mother, sister and the bench ghost’s mother finally emerged from the aisles I had abandoned hope and that made enduring the concluding conversation somewhat more bearable. When you think you’ll never get out of Purgatory, the wait ceases to change in any single detail, all, pardon the pun, alteration of space disappears, and you arrive at a Zen acceptance of the great and simple experience of being ever in the now.

            “This is my life now,” I muttered to myself. “I’ll die here.” I turned to the bench ghost and said, “Well, it looks like you’ll have company from now on.”

            That’s when they reappeared, and that’s when my essence, that of an eternal optimist who always believes there are adventures ahead, glimmered into life for a second, but then the saleslady made it clear that she was still not done talking. She pulled out a single swatch of green fabric and remarked as her hand hovered over the keys of the cash register: “Would you just look at this boatneck satin stitch! Think of the storm flap or the sailor’s collar you could make out of this! Would you just look at the mitered corners? The lock stitch, the muslin kirta sleeve here! Think what it would look like with some hard tone buttons, and maybe even a sexy hip curve, hey sweety?” She winked at Zizz, and Mom looked mildly appalled for a moment but then laughed and said, “You know, it would Zizz? It really would!” And Zizz gasped, and said, like a silly school girl that I had never seen before, “Oh, would you make it that way for me, Mom? Would you really?”

            What was happening? The saleslady seemed to have broken my sensible, pragmatic, mother and my transcendent sister!

            The women had reached a truly incomprehensible dress shop crescendo at this point, concerning what exactly, I had no idea. And still the saleslady continued, “You could really whip up some rosettes here and the the ply and pocket stays, oh mercy! You just get your bobbin winder twisting on that salvage and you’ll be creating some rosette stitches in no time, maybe even some ric-rac and reverse appliqués! Think of it!” At that point in the sartorial dialogue, she absently glanced at me and Wuh, and her face reflected concern for our welfares for a fleeting moment, “Oh…my…your boys seem…tired. Have they been ill? By the way have you seen my little boy around here? Now, where has he gotten to? Little boys are always up to such mischief!”

            I turned to the bench ghost and whispered, “She can’t see you?”

            “She lost track of me in 1946 when she went into a frenzy over a beading needle the previous owner, Mrs. Wolfe, showed her. Like I said, right after that she bought this horrible place.”

            “What’s a beading needle?” I asked.

            The bench ghost looked at me with an expression of exasperated amazement, “What in this  god-forsaken world would make you think that I would have any idea?”

            “Sorry I asked,” I said, and at a loss as to a manly way to comfort him, I patted his ghostly hand.

            “Oh, I could tell you stories!” my mother said nodding, to the saleslady/owner’s quip about boys and their mischief, and then preceded to do so, revealing every single escapade, episode, tangent, talent, toothache, tidily wink competition, spelling bee, pratfall, snowfall, downfall, fall into love, fall into trouble, fall into quicksand, perspiration, inspiration, spiral armed  backpedal, case of frostbite, fistfight, report card, draft card, scorecard, unitard, ill regard, remainder, surrender, sashay,  spittle, flu attack, common cold, used car sold, pot of gold, pot of piss, first kiss, near miss, full on collision, case of derision, television appearance, room clearance, worst appearance, first word, first curse—In Sprocket’s case those were synonymous. According to family legend my oldest brother’s first words were ‘Gimme dat fuckin’ wrench dhere, Daddy’ when Dad had brought the tool box up from the basement to fix the leg on a couch—towel flicking, bootlicking, bowel movement, and/or inuendo, concerning all of the above, in the lives of Sprocket, Key, Wuh and Me. When, seven and three quarters days later, she had finished, giving a heavy sigh at the end mixed with smiles, tears and a hug from Zizz, I thought we might finally be near the ringing-up-the- merchandise stage, but the saleslady was still at it.

            “Your sons, really do not look well, I may have some aspirin behind the counter here…”

            “Oh, don’t worry,” my mother said, adding a wry smile I’d rarely seen from her and leaning over the counter to confide in the saleslady, “they’re simply having an a attack of ‘testosterone’.”

            The saleslady laughed an ungodly cackle, which frightened me out of my lethargy with visions of the wicked witches I’d read about, and the bench ghost clapped his hands over his ears, muttering “I can’t stand it!” And the normally staid, at most witty and bemused, Zizz actually guffawed, literally slapping her bare knee. I’d never seen her look so…out of control. In retrospect, I guess, and it’s only a guess, that having lived almost exclusively among men her whole life, she was basking in this isolated oasis of feminine reassurance, and estrogen, feeling vindicated in her emerging jaundiced view of the male sex in general, which she had suddenly realized was shared by nearly every other woman on Earth.

            “Well, ladies,” the saleslady said with a reluctant sigh, “I think that about does it for you.”

            Could it be?

            “Unless you’d like to take a look at some of my abutted darts. Oh, they have such accents!”

            Nope.

            And once more the ladies disappeared into the aisles, at last emerging two weeks later with another pile of swatches even bigger than the first.

             On the train ride home, in the darkness of early evening in the north woods, I watched the sun set over Lake Superior and thought I heard some wolf howls over the clacking of the train as we crossed the Seney Plains. Those innocent carnivores had no connection to the infamous and perhaps ironically named center, to my knowledge. Perhaps naming such a place after our lupine fellow mortals, was another trap to lull male visitors to enter. I’m not sure on that point. Anyway, when we arrived, back at our home town train station, my father, who was waiting there with the Station Master, Sassy, Bud, and our dog Tawny, took one look at the mound of bags from the Wolfe Sewing Center and elsewhere and loudly theorized to the kindly Mr. Driggs that Mom and Zizz were going to be creating ensembles for the Metropolitan Opera and the revival of Oklahoma now on Broadway, my Mom kissed him on the cheek and said, “Oh you big teaser you!”

            As for Wuh and me, well, I’ve heard that some men spend an afternoon in the Wolfe Sewing Center and go on to live normal lives, but I’ve never met one. To this day I get a twitch in my right eye whenever someone mentions the phrase ‘cross stitch’. Looking back on that day I came to understand completely why Dad had opted out. Other than the occasional old bachelor recluse, the rare sewing hobbiest, a sailor here and there intent on mending his own sails, and men who work in the garment or textile industry, no sane, straight male, who has ever been inside the infernal doors of the Wolfe Sewing Center has ever returned unscathed. My college roommates told me I sometimes woke in the middle of the night screaming, “Ring them up! Ring them up! For pity’s sake, lady, ring them up!” I’m sure that’s true.

             The Wolfe Sewing Center no longer exists, by the way, but I’m sure the universal hub of straight male boredom has shifted to some other nefarious and decidedly feminine place. Zizz says the end came for the center in late 1986 when the saleslady/owner, whose name Zizz relates was, of course, Mrs. Stitchner, passed on. Zizz had gone there to buy a new bobbin or some such, and saw a memorial note posted on the door. She and numerous other women from around our area, and I believe, the world, attended the funeral, and I get the feeling it was more a show of feminine strength than a memorial, but I don’t know for certain, as I wouldn’t have dared to attend, at the risk of once again falling under the spell. 

            A few years after the center’s demise, a knock sounded at the door of the cottage my then new wife, Sylvie, and I were occupying along the Autrain River. Sylvie was away at work, and I was writing from home that day, so I got up from my typewriter— I was still using a typewriter then, an Olivetti—to answer the knock, and my visitor was, believe it or not, the Wolfe Sewing Center’s bench ghost, Wally Stitchner. I didn’t recognize the poor fellow at first, because time had actually begun for him again, and he had returned to his corporeal form. He looked great, with rosey cheeks, bright eyes, and a wide smile. He was not nattily dressed, I think by choice. He wore an old Tigers ball cap, a ragged, stained, blue t-shirt under a rough flannel checked trapper’s jacket, faded jeans and sneakers. He was about twenty-seven, not counting his years in that infamous sewing purgatory, and he said, that once he found himself back among the living, he had spent a good part of his inheritance, from the center, traveling the world a dozen times. He related that he had deliberately gone on a mission to watch every sporting event he could think to watch, then had  gone on Safari a time or two, and subsequently paced out the Civil War battlefields to boot, but abandoned that pursuit one day when he was forced to run screaming from one historical marker which related how the foot soldiers in that epic conflict carried sewing kits so that they could darn their own socks. On the day of his visit with me, he was en route to go out fishing at a nearby, inland lake, and had heard my name mentioned in the general store. His wide smile remained in place as he related his post ghost day adventures, speaking from around an enormous cigar. “Well,” he said, “it’s been great to see you again, Hawk! Glad to see you’ve recovered from your sewing center ordeal too.”

            “Well,” I responded, “you don’t really recover from a stay at the Wolfe Sewing Center.”

            He winced at the mention of the name, then chuckled, “Okay, you’re ‘recovering’ then.”

            “Yes,” I agreed. “Recovering, with a blanket stitch.”

            We both laughed for a long long time about that. Though neither of us, to this day, and perhaps by design, has any idea exactly what a blanket stitch might be.  

B.G. Bradley is an old novelist, poet, playwright, teacher, and journalist, who resides with Debbie, his wife of 41 years, and their Labrador retriever,  Samwise, in the hills of Diorite Michigan. He is the author of The Hunter Lake Book Series and co-host of Peter White Public Library’s very own variety show, North Words and Music.  He is a Yooper.