In 1957 in Los Angeles, when Auguste Ricener was designing his Long Plaid Brown cloth, he was not aware of the 2006 study that measured brain activity and retinal perception cross-referenced with presumption. He intended two things: to bend the appearance of the women who would— someday and somewhere— wear his poplin garments, and to shape the experience of those who looked upon her.
Auguste striped fairly regular beams the width of a carrot. He divided each horizontal stripe into a cycle of offset autumn colors— but no red— forming lines that hinted at a conventional plaid. The browns and golds were elegant, smudged here and there with a bright green. However, the flittery Monarch Clothery Co. produced only a half-batch of Long Plaid Brown, due to both doubts of sell-ability from the marketing dåepartment and to the headache of the manager of the design department, who nonetheless took a piece of the cloth home to his daughter. She used the piece for many years: doll blanket and end table cover, and wishes for more as it aged so well.
In 1963, the Kress Department Store on a big town main street had 3 bolts in stock. One day, Kay Lynn Oren walked inside. She sewed her own clothing, and wanted something new for the school year, her senior year of high school. She was happy with that 20th Century cycle, each season with its reason and maypole and equinox. Kay Lynn bought 6 yards— Long Plaid Brown was on sale.
Kay Lynn constructed a beautiful skirt in Long Plaid Brown, perfectly suited to her figure. The waist was as small as a bird’s nest (a falcon’s perhaps) and the drape of the poplin fabric was perfect, falling below her knees (dimpled.) The deep pleats rolled across the horizons of a thousand alternate realities of the autumn stripes chosen by Auguste. She wore it to the first football game of the year— and, in the last year she fit it, to the grocery store. She looked as the designer intended: a woman who enjoys whatever she is doing because she is outfitted.
She drew Arthur Canning’s attention away from his careful selection at the bananamound. When Kay Lynn herself looked down, past the green bell pepper in her hand, she saw the comely drape and felt the tightening waistband— like hatchlings pecking at her— and she saw her childhood, her virginity, her old best friend Cary Dola to whom she didn’t speak, and her hopes of being an engineer like her dad instead of a third grade teacher. Things she no longer had and to which she couldn’t go back.
Peppers chopped, dishes cleared, and thinking about the man who introduced himself at the grocery store, Kay Lynn prepared for a visit back home, a long afternoon drive away that rolled through rural scenery that made her feel ten years old again. She packed items for her younger sisters, and in went the skirt, trimmed with a few of her presumptions and expectations.
It suited none of them. This surprised no one who knew the quarrelsome sisters, which meant that the skirt was folded and placed, by Kay Lynn’s mother, in the rag basket. When some old china (no fewer than 5 sets were in that home, due to constricting lines of inheritance) was packed up for the attic, the skirt provided wonderful padding, and there it sat, hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.
— autumn-striped cotton can be seen in an attic, more so than a tree heard falling in a forest—
Until a smoggy day in the first decade of the new millenium. Auguste was dead, working a heavenly Sea Island cotton field, his hands still seeking the luxury of fine cottons and the muscles in his arms still yearning for the labor of raw material. Kay Lynn was retired, her eyeballs faded out to legally blind; her mother’s attic was cleaned out, to the benefit of a local thrift shop and an eagle-eyed, egret-waisted young woman: Daphne. She had expansive retinal channels leading to a limber visual cortex.
When Daphne walked through the red door of the thrift shop, she saw Long Plaid Brown, all the way across the room (a former grocery store, the size previous to supermarkets.) Auguste’s and Kay Lynn Oren Canning’s skirt was in a tight, be-hangered formation of skirts from The Limited and Talbots and Target and Liz Claiborne. The browns and golds and greens were elegant, backlit by the warmth of her thighs. She wore it that weekend to a gala, a charity event for literacy, dressed up with a heavy gold necklace and a black mohair sweater (cap sleeves.) The short stranded fuzz radiated in the same magnitude as the green in the skirt, constellations for an autumn outfit. Plastic champagne flutes were hoisted, but when Daphne exited (the doorway was that grand) she took the bubbles with her.
