Well Suited

Actors on The Young and the Restless wore them while embracing Bianca, Bailey, or Bambi, and then convincing the ladies to sneak off and make love in the janitor’s closet. Older cousins wore them to weddings, with girlfriends attached to their arms like weights at the gym. As a scrawny, suburban Ohioan pre-teen who couldn’t throw a football, I was convinced that a suit was a passport to that mythic island of manhood.
As seniors in high school, my male classmates were buying their first suits for senior pictures. Sitting behind Kevin at my desk in calculus, envying how his neck sloped like an Italian vista into wide, sweeping shoulders (I mean, I liked his jacket), I became convinced that wearing a suit would change everything. I would barely notice that my sideburns wouldn’t grow like lush grass the way Eric’s and Jason’s did. If I were in a suit, I’d no longer be bothered by the way my classmates’ pecs pushed through their shirts, whereas mine wouldn’t push through my skin. In a suit, a wind would pick up, fill my sails, and blow me away to the island of manhood, where Eric and Jason wrestled Kevin, and the three competed to see whose pee could put out the campfire. In a suit, I would cheer them on.
As my mom drove me to Kaufmann’s department store to try on suits, my passport to Manhood, I envisioned stepping out of the boat, pulling it safely to shore, and lugging it onto the sand. But when we got there, the salesman, not much older than myself, took one look at me and chortled, “A suit? You’re going to have to start lifting weights, dude, if you want to fit into one of those.”
Three years later, I was twenty years old, a junior in college studying abroad in Hamburg, Germany. Walking through Die Esplanade, a popular shopping district, I spotted a cluster of suit jackets hanging in the middle of H&M like forbidden fruit. It was better, I thought, just to stay away. Somehow I convinced myself that if I stopped to admire the suits, other shoppers would point and laugh at me, the pint-sized American dwarfed by my L.L. Bean backpack, as if I were a monkey, a silly creature about to do something preposterous. So, passing the rack, I pretended not to notice the jackets—just like I did with those half-naked men on the Hanes underwear packets at the Kaufmann’s back home.
But I was in a new country, gosh darn it. No one wore deodorant. Shampoo smelled weird. Cars were smaller than American closets. I looked the jackets over. They hung heavy there, like ripe berries.
Just then, a wind picked up; my sails began to billow. I drifted toward the jackets. They came in various shades of gray and sported four buttons up the front, creating a long, lean look. I lifted a dark one off the rack and double-checked that it was the smallest available size. I pulled it off the hanger. I slid one arm through a sleeve. Then the other. The jacket rolled down my back, carpet smoothing against a floor. Would the carpet warp—too big for the room? I panicked and looked around the store, convinced I had heard monkey noises. But after shifting my sleeve this way and my collar that, the carpet fell into place.
I darted for the mirror. Who was that guy standing in front of me? I hesitated. Had I landed? Had my boat finally struck solid ground? I jumped out, my feet sloshing in the water along the shore. I turned in the mirror, studied my profile, lifted sand from the beach. I looked handsome. And I hadn’t even worked out. Standing in Hamburg’s H&M, with the suit’s price tag scratching my neck, I felt, for the first time in my life, that I actually might be a man.
The jacket still hangs in my closet to this very day, along with all of the boxes of letters and postcards that mark my year abroad. But I rarely, if ever, take these things out. When I’m at the Mall of America, however, I can’t help but cast an admiring glance over at H&M, as if it were a three-dimensional postcard waiting to be read anew. Although the store’s style no longer jibes with mine, I still quietly pay my respects to the place that offered me that very first suit in my size. —