Life of a Bathrobe (Part 1)

Since its founding at the tail end of the Black Hawk War of 1835, East Dundee, Illinois had been a fine American town, and home to a great many different things. Though the first settlers to stop along the banks of the Fox River may have dreamt of founding a town to accompany the hopeful towers of nearby Chicago, they may have known, in the corner of their hearts, that East Dundee was destined for smaller things. With the development of a railroad north to the city, founders set out to manufacture products to aid construction and secure a purpose for their small community. By the time of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, East Dundee was producing the majority of the very bricks that would rebuild the great city, instilling in its residents an even larger sense of pride and purpose for their modest factory town. By the early 20th century, brickbuilding had expanded to include the production of teaware, and Royal Hickman Crystal glassware won high honors at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1934. By now, the few thousand residents of East Dundee knew that they were onto something. No factory could fail, it seemed, and no business would be left for dirt, as the Pottawatomie Indians had been following the founding of what was once their glorious open range. Entrepreneurs eyed Dundee like flies to a cow pie, and not until Glenn Holland erected a Kris Kringle-based theme park in 1959 named Santa’s Village would East Dundee come to understand the crustier taste of failure.

Molly Cooper was the best kind of native East Dundee-an, in that she was a dreamer, true and true. While the rest of her high school class fell into the tragic habits of the bored and overprivileged, cooking methamphetamines and disco dancing, Molly knew that she was born to produce something. That something wasn’t just children, as her elder sisters had produced, nor a firecracker bomb, as her prom date had produced on the night before the event, singeing off all hair from his face and making for an embarrassing photograph Molly’s grandmother would not soon let her forget. No, Molly felt herself magnetically drafted into the ingenuity of her forefathers, the men and women who saw the need for things, and met those needs with a little bit of good old fashioned work. After failed campaigns to be elected school treasurer every consecutive year from sixth to eleventh grade, Molly decided that politics wouldn’t be her inroad to the procession of great figures to emerge from the muddy soil on the banks of the patient Fox River.

Molly’s grandmother, while severely alcoholic and even more severely preoccupied with Jimmy Carter, had imparted a few wisdoms to her granddaughter, whom she raised from the moment her own daughter ran off with a slick Buick salesman from Poughkeepsie. One of these wisdoms was a divine knack for knitting, knitting to waste hours watching Carter’s forehead sweat over hostage crises, knitting for keeping one’s fingers from arthritic pinches. Molly inherited her grandmother’s fingers, slender and elegant like tiny, elongated balloons, blown out from the gently cupped base of her palms. As we so often do, Molly rejected her natural gift, and not until the very end of her fruitless campaign for the treasury did she allow for the notion of a career in sewing to seep in.

On that fateful day, Rudy Halberstam was sworn in as treasurer of Hickman High, and Molly cried in the driver’s seat of her Chrysler LeBaron. The gradual piling up of small disappointments felt like the earth beneath the historic brick factory she passed on her way home, grounded with the weight of those hundreds of thousands of rectangular anchors. At home, she found her grandmother at her usual post, saddled up on a barstool twelve inches from the white swiveling television, licking her lips at a visibly distressed Carter, like a lioness awaiting the sickliest caribou. Her hands moved fast between the sweating glass of Tanqueray and her latest project, a pair of socks that didn’t appear as though they would soon cover even the tiniest toes of the preterm births at the Dundee Medical Center maternity ward. Though the disappointment in her face was clear as a rainy Saturday, her grandmother was well aware that no time pitying oneself is rightly spent. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. You know and I know what you’re made of, and that’s that. Now take a shower, and come back down for some soup.”

Perhaps the extra generation between children and grandparents allows for such a dialogue to exist without dispute. Molly took a deep breath in the shower for every letter in the name of her hometown. East Dundee. Ten letters. The same number of fingers and toes she’d been given by God, all along, to create something truly special in the world. By the time she’d toweled off, it had weaseled it way into her head. That’s it. She would sew. Specifically, she would sew bathrobes. A need in the world that she saw would remain constant, long after bricks and St. Nicholas were forgotten from this world. No matter what the circumstances were on earth, until man smoked his final cigarette and called the whole of civilization off, people would need something nice to slip into after a hot shower. This would be Molly’s true calling.

With the help of her inebriated grandmother, Molly pieced together the rough draft for her first robe, the prototype that would be perfected, and most likely later preserved in a museum alongside the most famous robes throughout history. The robe worn by Jesus on the day of his crucifixion, the silk robe of Qin Shi Huangdi, first emperor of the Qin Dynasty. Molly’s prototype would sit alongside these relics. And, because it was the only thing she could get her hands on from the top of the closet that night, it would also be purple.

How is it that when we are so sure of something, we look upon its failure as a child, expecting the dead bird to reanimate with the prodding of a long, crooked stick? Molly’s first robe was no Mona Lisa. It was no Starry Night, nor a clay pot in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; it was not Neil Armstrong’s wide bootprint in the moondust. It was neither Tom Edison’s first light bulb nor the marble left buttock of the statue of David; it was not the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. Molly’s first bathrobe was not the Treaty of Versailles, but it was nonetheless debuted on the gleaming wrinkled body of Molly’s dancing grandmother at 1:09 in the morning the following night. It hung a bit low on her, purple as the bottom of a Castro flag, and appeared to be a good two inches shorter on the right arm than the left.

Regardless of its shortcomings, the robe wished above anything else to be free of the grandmother, who stank of gin and the memory of sixty odd years of Irish Spring bar soap. Though reasonably proud of herself upon its completion, Molly knew that a number of swift changes were in order to perfect the product she would one day be synonymous with, and, after taking careful measurements, she decided it should be donated to the nearby Goodwill.

From the moment the robe had been tugged on the eroded shoulders of Molly’s grandmother, it had been filled with more than the wrinkled arms of an alcoholic Carter-lover. It had been imbued with a number of wishes, and like so many of us, an even greater number of unanswered questions. Now, sinking to the bottom of the green plastic bin, it wondered why it had been abandoned, left to wilt in the company of shami cloths, mesh trucker hats, and bras with half their latches. It wondered what its place was, an orphan and an only child, hugged lovingly but tossed through the invisible particles of the East Dundee Goodwill parking lot’s afternoon sky. Still, some inexpressible vestige of the town’s great spirit clung to the very microfibers of the robe, as though Molly’s nimble fingers had imparted on them that same intangible, universal longing to truly mean something to the world.

When the robe awoke the light was bright fluorescent. All around were stacks and folds of clothes and blankets, being sifted through and tugged by fingers tough with callus and swift as beaks, pecking from the heaping pile and tossing every mad direction. Things were being given sniff tests by the wise and seasoned noses of three quick and generous volunteers. As it came to be the robe’s turn, a large, brown nostril twitched at the lingering essence of Molly’s grandmother. Into the wash pile it went. In this pile, the robe was in the company of garments that had traveled great distances and years to share the fate of all discarded things. The robe felt young in the company of faded polo shirts and stained beach towels. For the first time, it encountered another, smaller beige robe of elegant material, and even tried to reach out to it as the pile was lifted and heaved into a supreme washer. “Ni hau, ma,” the smaller robe responded back, as it began to snow detergent. “Yo soy un toalla,” a shy voice near the back whispered out. The sky went dark as the lid fell shut, and the wash cycle began.

On an octagonal rack on a clear plastic hangar, the robe waited in the company of other bath-related garments. After numerous, intimate cycles of tumble drying, it had become increasingly aware that nearly all of its peers and counterparts had been manufactured overseas, traveling vast continents and dark oceans to be sold at cheaper costs. While the robe enjoyed the sounds of the languages from the Far East, it was something like listening to rain fall on a tin roof, there was no further comprehension to be had but the gentle delight of the experience.

Time passes stiffly in such waiting rooms. It had been tried on three times in four days when the robe first began to despair. How had it come to be, when its very birth in a town of moderate historical importance once felt enough in itself to hurdle the initial doubts we all confront in recognizing ourselves as different from the rest? Two Chinese robes had been claimed and taken, and the in-store music playlist was becoming insipid and predictable. It was nearing closing on the fourth day when the robe began to consider unraveling. Perhaps it could simply reverse its formation, into a small purple pile in the shade at the base of the rack. Perhaps it could unwind itself entirely, and blow across the whole of the Midwest, like an endless dental floss, until it found a place worth settling, to consider restoration. If it could catch the right draft, it might at least reach as far north as Chicago, to tangle itself in the antennae atop the Sears Tower, where it might think things over awhile, observing the pale shoulder of the earth’s curve.

While it no longer held that ineffable quality of never having been through a turbo wash cycle, the robe still knew in its microfibers that it had the potential for new life elsewhere. The octagonal rack was a kinder type of purgatory, and there would only be a number of times that it could be tried on and put back before someone discovered it for its greater purpose.