Written piece
Threadbare
Frances Itani
Canada
About this piece
"Threadbare" is about how we can sometimes keep the past alive through actual threads, threads of cloth that bind us to memories and carry our stories forward through family and generations.
Threadbare
When the onerous task of dusting must be done, I dust to music – Jazz – while using a soft beige shirt with red and navy stripes. Thin from being laundered, the shirt is faded, threadbare and filled with tiny holes.
I can’t throw it out because it belonged to my only sister and was worn by her the year she died. Her illness lasted three months, from diagnosis of brain tumor to death. After the funeral, I folded the shirt and set it aside while sorting through her clothes. This is the only item of hers I now own.
I pick up the bedside phone. Call my sister before my writing day begins. We enter old territory, call up stories of our past. Descendants of a long line of storytelling women, we match versions while we hoot and holler and complain.
As children, we fought over chores, went to Sunday School, attended movie matinees where we sat in the balcony under a grand chandelier. I was three years younger. We sang together, learned to dance together, shared a double bed. We fought, and drew uncrossable lines down the centre of our mattress. We shared an interior life, blending yet separating, through happiness and outrage, humiliation and despair. We were entirely different, I tell myself while I dust furiously. But in our teens, we saw the possibility of a permanent, lifelong friendship. We were learning to fall back on our intimacy, our blood.
Sometimes I catch myself watching sisters. What do they say to each other in little asides? The phone rings and I look down at a new hole in my dusting shirt. The caller asks what I’m doing, and I hear myself through years of grief, bewilderment and hopeless yearning. I’ve been thinking about sisters, I say fiercely.
I want one.