The Frock Shop

The Houndstooth Suit

THE

HOUNDSTOOTH SUIT

She noticed its black-and-white pattern as she walked through the department store on Elizabeth Street in the centre of Sydney.

The grand old building was where her mother used to bring her when she was a child, then a teenager, whenever there was an occasion that needed a dress.

Her father would say, ‘Buy her whatever she likes,’ as if it was nothing.

Over the years, though, she came to know how much not-nothing it was.

They weren’t wealthy. Far from it. Her mother was an expert at scrimping and saving, her father a hard worker who was gone from early in the morning, running his greengrocer shop. The family had four children then three, after one died falling from a horse. Their lives were hard but full of love.

She was the only daughter. That’s why her father wanted her to have whatever she liked. He spoiled her, everyone said. Everyone but her mother. Her mother thought she deserved the world. So there were pretty dresses for special occasions. She has them still.

When she saw the houndstooth suit she knew it would make her look smart at her secretarial job in the city. Having learnt well from her mother, she scrimped and saved to pay for it, knowing its high quality meant it would last for years.

Except she didn’t need it for years. A few months after she bought it she met the man who would become her husband. Once they married, she left her job and became pregnant with the first of her three children.

She missed working outside the home. Her old life – that structure of arriving at work at a certain time, performing tasks, leaving at a certain time – was a romantic memory and she longed to make it manifest in her present.

Ten years after she married, though, with her children needing her to run them to school and make lunches and mend clothes, and her husband saying she didn’t have to work, that he would take care of everything, she abandoned the dream. And the suit.

She dropped it off at her local St Vincent de Paul shop, and felt as though a piece of her heart had been dropped there with it. Yet holding on to it was causing her pain, because it reminded her of something she couldn’t ever have again. Not in the same way.

So the suit wasn’t there when her husband left her the following year, saying he was overburdened by all his responsibilities and wanted to be free again.

It wasn’t there when she needed to return to work as a secretary in an office in the city to support herself and her children.

It didn’t know how much she regretted giving it up and that she searched for it in charity shops whenever she could.

For the suit was more than just a jacket and a skirt to her. It held her sense of self. Her belief that she could do anything she set her mind to. It was her armour and her disguise.

Instead of finding its way back to her, the suit found a new owner who appreciated its quality, who wore it until she didn’t need it any more, then donated it to another charity shop. And so it goes.