WHAT I WANTED, WHAT I GOT

Lifelong lessons in yearning and style.

- RACHEL KUSHNER

My mother recently confessed to me that, when I was a child, my paternal grandmother periodically sent me new clothes from a department store in New York City, outfits that I never saw. My mother regularly intercepted the packages, returned the items, and used the money to buy food for our family. So many decades after the fact, we both laughed. My mother had guessed correctly that, rather than feeling betrayed, I’d be amused to learn belatedly of yet another example of her resourcefulness—along with the plywood furniture she built for us, the inventive meals she made for us using government cheese, the cookware she acquired by saving up Green Stamps—in the years when she and my father were just barely getting by.

Not all my grandmother’s packages were intercepted, so I know that I would have wanted what she sent, would have revelled in the novelty of receiving matching items with the tags still on, perhaps from Danskin, her preferred brand, layered in tissue paper and giving off that special new-clothes smell (on account of formaldehyde, they now tell us). But the story of my mother exchanging those gifts for cash is itself special. Deprivations of various kinds were my sentimental education, or so I’ve come to believe. As a child, I almost never got any clothes I wanted. I took pleasure in clothes all the same. My relationship to them was built on yearning, on a sort of not-yet reverie that mere possession, simply having things, could never have offered me.