Corduroy

A story about an 11 year old boy’s small thoughts spurred by the feeling of corduroy fabric on his skin. A feeling that kept strangely and interestingly coming back in the form of memories and dreams at the age of twenty, the almost-age of fifty and his final year of nintey-two. A story that remained with him, a fabric that persisted in his life, only because he would never be able to tell it as a corduroy couch from his childhood home could.

It was time to go to bed. He is almost 50 now and bedtime is still a thing. In fact, bedtime has always been important to him, but each year it becomes more of a thing. 

A metrosexual neurologist, who values the tightness of his skin and prizes the sustenance of magnesium levels in a body that sleeps from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., is expected to be meticulous in fluffing up, folding out and smoothing down his premium long-staple pima cotton bedding with his big manicured hands – at precisely around 9.58 p.m. 

He flung his head on the pillow. He only started enjoying this throwing-back of his head on the pillow each night to give finality to the day after a car accident 10 years before, which formed a permanent bump on his nape right by his hairline, below the area in which the pineal gland is said to be tucked. 

The impact of his head collapsing on the pillow caused a sensation from the bump all the way to the center of his temple. He liked to think that the bump and his pineal gland are connected, and this feeling was a meditative one that helped him, sooner than others his age, to effortlessly dip into the floating feeling of sleep. 

He dreamt of a memory from his childhood, one of those dreams made up of pixels that illuminate second by second until the image is fully composed. He knew those to be dreams that come when a person’s brainwaves are hovering between theta and delta. 

Those are the worst kind, he later thought to himself. Memories disguised as half-wakeful dreams have a strange air of premonition. Am I dying, or what?  

In the dream, he was 11 years old. He was caught smoking his first cigarette on the neighbor’s flat rooftop and he peeked from the edge of the roof at the same time that his father drove into the driveway, accidentally revealing the cigarette between his fingers. 

He stayed on the roof for another 30 minutes, squeezing his eyes shut and imagining sharp rays breaking from his shoulder blades through his skin, to keep any likelihood of him having to deal with being caught as far away as possible. It didn’t work. During dinner, his father told him: “I thought you were worth the world, but you are not worth a thing. You let me down.” 

Now the dream was not about what the father had said. No. Fathers and Mothers say things to traumatize a child into not doing something bad to their wellbeing again. They don’t mean for it to impact the child for life. They do it out of love, and the children forgive them almost immediately, that is, if the parents are good enough to persist on loving them. 

Loved children understand how injurious the discovery must be for parents when they find their offspring at the brink of falling from the pedestal on which they had placed them.

The dream was strangely all about the sensation of the fabric of the case covering the couch he went to lie down on after dinner, and how much it made the skin of the cheek that was squished against it redder than it was. He let the corduroy of the okra yellow couch imprint on the side of his cheek as he pressed it on its sturdy arm. 

In the memory, he remembers how he later liked to check out the printed red and white-green lines across his face when he looked at himself in the mirror. But in the dream, that part was skipped; there was no mirror, and his cheek never parted from the fabric. It felt like the corduroy was a part of his skin. 

In both the dream and the memory, he was pressing his face on the arm of the couch on that unfortunate day for one reason: the residual salt from his dried tears made his cheek itchy but he did not want to itch it. He did not want to itch it because his fingers still smelled like cigarettes and he only noticed that when it was too late, during dinner. 

And since it was anyway too late when he was eating his cheese and tomato dinner sandwich, picking on the crust nervously with his tobacco-scented fingers, he thought he would not wash his hands after dinner either. Until his cheek was already pressed on the arm of the couch and he realized that it would have been smarter if he just washed his hands so he can itch his left cheek, but by then it was for sure too late.  

It was then for sure too late because also, in both the dream and the memory, he knew that soon his mother would come to him to kiss his face. He knew it would be the itchy red pressed cheek she would kiss, because she had a way of picking his face up and kissing the side he always hid when he felt the way he was feeling then. And he didn’t want to stain his cheek with the smell of tobacco from his unwashed fingers.

He isn’t sure if the following was in the dream or a part of the memory, but he was sitting still with his chin tilted, ready for his mother to come pick his head up. Just like he did when she was about to put her hand against his forehead to check his temperature when he had a fever.   

So there he was in a memory replayed through a dream, an 11 year old with a face pressed on the arm of a corduroy couch that emitted warmth to his face and made the salty cheek itchier. (Or was it his salty cheek that emitted more heat to the arm encased in corduroy, causing it to itch due to the exchange of microbes between fabric and skin?) 

This is important because heat was the biggest factor in the dream, a lot of itchy stuffy heat. It smelled like the 70s in his dream. Particularly like the earliest years of the 70s: musky fabrics, English leather, warm photocopied papers, Aramis deodorant, card catalogs, and bright yellow Zest soap bars. 

Was it in the delta stage or the theta stage of his sleep that his mother came in through the door-less opening to that living room of his childhood home? (Later on when he is awake, he pondered on that point more than it was necessary). 

She entered his dream with rolls in her hair, wearing a yellow trench dress sunnier than the faded dull okra of the couch. She smelled like sautéed mushrooms and thyme, he also picked up on a starchy whiff of potatoes, even though they had sandwiches for dinner. She slouched down next to him, sitting on her heels. 

In his dream, his mother smoothed and folded the edges of her dress to tuck them under her knees. The inelastic stiff material of it formed gaping diamond-shaped slits between the last two big round brown buttons. Later on, when he wakes up, he couldn’t remember if that was actually what she was wearing in the memory of when he was 11, or if it was just some irrelevant detail that he fixated on from the dream. 

Regardless of what she was wearing, what she said in the dream was also what she said in the memory, “Today what happened was good. Because I know that you will never do something to cause me anxiety again, my boy.” 

And the dream ended, the pixels of sky blue, white, yellow, brown and okra shades dissembling into the solidity of the present moment in his dark room. 

He woke up ever so slowly. He didn’t jolt up from the dream. It wasn’t quiet a nightmare. His body awoke first, as his eyes remained closed by choice. And when he permitted wakefulness to graze his eyes, he then slowly opened them and looked around the dark room until he saw those tiny white specks of light particles that formed the shapes he knew to be his, around him. 

He remained lying down for a few long seconds, and then picked up his arm and reached his hand to the back of his head. With his sweaty palm, he rubbed the bump on his nape to reassure himself that he is a grown man. He then grazed the left cheek that was pressed against the corduroy couch in both the dream and the memory of when he was 11, and it stung in his wakefulness at the soon age of 50. 

He checked the time; it was 3:07 a.m. He went back to sleep and brushed away all the heavy nostalgia constricting around his pineal gland like a curled fist. 

At 6:00 a.m. his alarm went off. He made his bed and hopped into the shower. In the shower, he thought of his dream again and scrubbed his face pretty hard, especially the left cheek. He caught himself before the friction of the sea sponge scraped his face. 

He released the pressure on his cheek, gently placing the sea sponge on the ledge in the large glass shower booth, and he smiled, instead, at the memory and the dream. At how stupid smoking is. At how corduroy pulls on certain chords of his life causing him to smell certain scents even with hot water slamming from the showerhead against his shaved head, washing away the soapy bubbles of the eucalyptus shower gel on the shower tiles. 

And as he toweled his body off he continued smiling to himself. No, in fact, he chuckled. Proud of how he had always been a daring curious kid, and that maybe it’s why his favorite patients now are the adrenalized kids whose parents had a permanent wide-eyed look. 

He wished his mother had been right when she said that she knew he would never cause her anxiety again – back when he was 11 – because he didn’t stop smoking until the age of 39.  

In between that memory of when he was 11, and its reincarnation through a dream at the almost age of 50, another slight reminder of the memory occurred. 

Years after those scolding words of: “You are not worth anything, you let me down” were uttered by his father. Years after they were assumedly immediately forgiven in both his and his father’s head. Years after the corduroy case of the couch in his childhood was reupholstered with cotton twill during his teens, something in a day of this man’s life happened. 

He was reading Freud for a Sociology exam in college. The reading covered something about controlling with love or being controlled by love, and how parents mess us up. Stuff he never believed in. He was around 20 years old, in his sophomore year at college, and he was sitting on a grassy slope outside the campus library. 

The blades of the grass were pricking at his butt cheeks and the backs of his thighs through the corduroy pants he was wearing. Their color was baby blue; the style was ‘flared’. It was fall and corduroy kept him warm. (Corduroy is also back in fashion again, such a persistent fabric!) 

Anyway, as he tilted his weight on one elbow to release the spikes of the grass from one spot of his body to another, his eyes caught the way the corduroy fabric stretched on his bent knees, expanding the space between the stripes of their texture, and he thought he had a moment of enlightenment. He thought he knew exactly why he never stopped smoking. 

He slammed Freud’s book shut, and made a promise to himself to never trust anything that had to do with corduroy again, or Freud’s mind games for that matter. He changed his corduroys to jeans, and went to meet some friends for a smoke. He failed that exam. 

Funny how that day in college was recalled on the morning of the dream, and specifically as he was smoothing sunscreen on his baldhead. He reassured himself that he is now almost 50, and no one is controlling him with love or was ever permitted to do so in his years. People call each other out on this stuff nowadays. No one gets away with it. His mother held the only right to that kind of obscurity. 

He laughed at himself, he laughed at making corduroy a distasteful thing in his life back in college, and he shook his head at his obsession over the dream (or was it the memory?). He shook his head to shake away the connections the neurotransmitters in his brain fired up at the thought of corduroy.  

If his life should have a flag, it would be made of corduroy fabric with an okra yellow color. If it were to mark milestones, it would mark each and every landmark that stretched across the vastness of his life up until the age of 39. It would be raised at the highest peak in his terrain at the age of 20, when the grass stung his bum and thighs with Freud’s sick assumptions. 

And then it would stop marking the subsequent stages until the age of almost 50, on the day he had this dream. And here, his reclaim of the corduroy flag would be buried instead of dug into the earth, or so he thought. 

Two days after he had this dream, his new girlfriend was to come and stay over for a night of the weekend. (The 70s keep coming back. At all ages people have casual sex again, and very often at that. For him, the act was to keep his prostate healthy more than to make a modern-day-and-age point.)

It was a hot day and he was washing off dirt that his fingernails collected from the garden, when the doorbell rang. He forgot what time he invited his girlfriend over, but he thought it must be her for he wasn’t expecting anyone else. So he dried his hands off in haste with a dishtowel and wiped off some sweat spotting his left cheek. The friction from the teal William Sonoma dishtowel caused his left cheek to sting. 

Just to be sure, he looked through the window to see if it was she. It was she indeed, and – what were the chances? – She was wearing a yellow corduroy overall dress. He paused, frowned at his feet. And decided that today was not a day for casual sex. 

He went back to the kitchen and pretended that he was actually busy doing stuff even though no one was watching, until the bell stopped ringing. He heard the Whatsapp pings that he set on his iPhone to sound like birds chirping, and ignored them. 

He called the store and ordered a pack of Red Gauloises cigarettes and a BIC lighter (those were his favorite brand back in the day). He made a hard whiskey until the delivery guy came with his order. And for the first (and last) time since the age of 39, he sat down on the cold dark blue tile floors of his bathroom and lit 3 cigarettes in a row, he smoked them one after the other and blew the greyish smoke towards the bumpy white stucco ceiling, wondering if it contained asbestos. 

As he took the last drag from the last cigarette of his life, he thought to himself, I bet if I were 20 now, I would ace that Sociology test without even having to study. He flushed the smoked cigarette butts down the toilet bowl that he used as an ashtray, took a shower, and called his girlfriend. He apologized and told her that he forgot his phone at home when he left to the clinic for an emergency, and was ready to receive her now. 

The casualness of lovemaking took place for a day and a half, on and off, obviously. When the girlfriend left he decided to spend his Sunday reading. Before he opened his novel, he thought a thought that was brimming to pour out from his vocal chords. And he said the following words out loud to no one: 

“There is very little to be trusted in this world, very little that shows itself on a smooth surface. And we seem to want to keep it that way, which is why we bury so much. And it’s all right – it’s just okay enough to pass for a loving act.”

He was just on the border of letting in the thought of yellow corduroy overtake him and officially turn him into an obsessive psychopath. But he didn’t. Instead, that Sunday evening and the whole week after, he did a lot of research online and went through great means to find a furniture store that could reupholster his black leather lazy boy armchair with a mustard yellow corduroy. 

Little would he know, (or maybe something in him knew), that up until the age of 92, he would read on it every night except on the nights he was traveling. Little would he know that he would die on the okra yellow corduroy couch from natural causes, holding the book Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck in his hands, and smiling to the affirmation that his life could not have been fuller. 

His head would eventually fall on the armrest after his last breath would be drawn. And as you may have guessed, it would be on the left side of his cheek on which the corduroy texture would be pressed, creating lines across one side of his face when he is found very soon later by his cleaning lady, his blood still fresh, not having entirely turned blue. 

And what is even more soothing to us readers of this man and his corduroy complex, is that no one would know that his last thought would be of the diamond-shaped slits that formed between the last two large round brown buttons of his mother’s sunny yellow trench dress, as she sat on her heels beside him, to make him liable for her approval and for the sanity of her mind.  

He was right. It is quite true that there is very little that shows itself on a smooth surface. That’s why corduroy was always a comfort to him, even when he didn’t know it. 

Beisan A. Alshafei

May 16th, 2020