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Wanted: Lost T-Shirt, Perfect Green
Heidi Fettig Parton
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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I don’t miss P. I’ve never missed P. Not even the day after I broke up with him on the way home from a dinner party hosted by his friends, not mine. He couldn’t stop critiquing the host’s wine and cheese selections. His condescension reminded me of how he’d stood in my living room the prior weekend in tight-fitting, rust-colored corduroys. He stood in the glorious morning sunlight and pronounced my coffee “Absolute fucking shit.”
I wasn’t planning on breaking up with him that night of the party, but I guess I’d hit a tipping point.
After I told him I was done, after P informed me that I owed him $300 for the espresso machine, the remaining few miles to my home passed in silence. Once home, I told him he could have his espresso machine. Not inviting him in, I ran inside to get it and then back out to his car, shoving it into the back seat of his Volvo. I would not miss P.
I don’t miss the B either. He was the only guy I dated in the early aughts who didn’t buy me some sort of kitchen gadget, aside from the guy who looked like a Viking—as in long-red-hair Norse, not football. He gave me eight pounds of dried lentils from the Y2K stockpile he didn’t end up needing. The Viking and I had been chatting on Match.com before our one date, and I guess I’d mentioned I often cooked up huge batches of lentil soup to keep my grocery bill down. Still, one date doesn’t count as “dating,” so B keeps his status as the only non-kitchen-gadget giver I dated post-divorce.
Instead of a kitchen appliance, B created a creepy website homage to our three-week relationship after I ended things. Honestly, I would have preferred an appliance.
When I divorced at 31, my ex-husband requested our portable culinary appliances, and I negotiated our entire CD collection in return, except for Depeche Mode and Fine Young Cannibals, two bands I’d never really cared for. Depeche Mode’s synth beat is too obvious or something. Plus, their tunes lack the floaty, layered melodies that redeem The Cure’s sometimes overly synthy sounds. I could’ve seen keeping FYC around simply to dance, but their tunes lacked the nuanced lyrics of a band like The Psychedelic Furs. If I was gonna dance alone in my living room post-divorce, it was gonna be to The Furs. I could leave DM and FYC back in the late 80s, along with my permed hair and high-teased bangs.
I made do with the piecemeal sets of dishes and utensils that remained after he’d packed his boxes. It wasn’t much. Not even a spaghetti spork in the mix.
The assortment of men I dated as a new divorcee seemed determined to remedy my kitchen-gadget-less life.
When I dated T, three years after P, he let me keep the hand-propelled salad spinner he’d given me. Now this was a gadget I could embrace (and still use today). T didn’t charge me for the spinner either, even though we’d been dating less than two months when I broke up with him. He was a nice guy, but he had terrible breath, too many cats, and an entire bookshelf devoted to Dr. Who. I knew I wouldn’t miss his cats but might miss his ever-useful forest-green Subaru SUV, which he’d used to rescue my kids and me once; we were stranded at my daughter’s dance practice in a blizzard.
When I broke up with B, I did it in person at his apartment, which I think was pretty kind of me since we’d only been dating for three weeks. I could have broken up with him over email or text, but I did the decent thing. I delivered the news face-to-face. B had, after all, sat through an entire Irish step dancing show, comprised mostly of small children, to see me engaging in my latest post-divorce hobby. B was also a J.R.R. Tolkien fan. I’d read The Lord of the Rings trilogy multiple times, so this was a point in his favor.
I told B I was breaking up only because a former workplace crush, J, emailed that day to tell me he’d recently divorced. When J asked me to dinner the same night, I had abruptly canceled plans with B. After dinner with J, I just knew that we were going to become a thing, that we were going to dive into each other’s depths, and soon. So, I drove straight to B’s apartment to deliver the news. It was after midnight, but he still opened the door.
When breaking up with B at the threshold of his apartment, I quoted Ani DiFranco’s song “School Night,” which is all about difficult choices, to explain my abrupt turn from B (it was only the day before that he’d attended my Irish dance performance). B probably looked up the song’s lyrics after I left. This, in turn, might have given him the impression that breaking up had been a difficult decision for me. But it really wasn’t. I had to give the thing with J a chance.
Twenty-five years later, I can see that the only real reason I broke up with B in person is that I’d left my favorite green T-shirt at his house a few nights earlier. This shirt was the perfect just-on-the-forest-side-of-olive-green color. The shirt had been washed to a delicious softness. Also, something about that shade of green (I’ve never found it again) made my sometimes-blue, sometimes-green eyes look like the kind of deep indigo that sets in right before a lake turns to ice. If you’ve never seen this color before, might I suggest visiting Minneapolis in late November?
When I asked B for my green T-shirt back, B denied having it, even though we both totally knew he had it. What was I going to do? Push into his bedroom and comb through his closet or laundry basket. (I bet he never washed that shirt!)
Truthfully, I’d begun to sense B might be a jerk in disguise. I’d stayed at his apartment during a snowstorm the Friday before the Irish dance performance. That Saturday morning, I woke to find my car buried in hip-deep snow. B didn’t help me dig out my car. This really needled me because Strider (aka, Aragorn) totally would have dug me out. Instead, my leaving early seemed to piss him off, even when I had to pick up my two kids from my ex-husband’s home.
I feel like I should confess here that I did, in fact, mail P a check for $300 to cover the espresso machine he’d “given” me. I wish it had gone the way I told you earlier. But after the snobby dinner party and breakup in his Volvo, he sharply told me to “Get out!” when he parked in the alley behind my house. Honestly, I ran from his car to my back door, hurriedly turning my key in the lock. All the while, my heart vibrated into my throat. I locked the door behind me, pulled out my phone, and hovered my right index finger over the nine until his car pulled away.
After I broke up with the green-T-shirt thief, his usurper, J, and I dated for three years. When we didn’t last (he broke up with me), I was sad for a very long time. When the sadness finally began to disperse, I met my second husband, another Tolkien fan and a genuinely nice guy. He still is. Not “Minnesota nice”—he’s from Texas—but honest-to-God-push-my-car-out-of-the-snow-even-when-it-is-parked-on-a-hill nice. He didn’t have to give me any kitchen accessories. Instead, he moved into my house with the ragged assortment of utensils and gadgets his ex-wife had left him. Our household accessories magically filled in the holes in each other’s collections.
I don’t know when, but B finally took down his website homage to our relationship. Every few years, I’d check to see if it was still there. One year, it wasn’t. I neglected to capture the photo of me in my perfect green T-shirt before the website disappeared.
I’ve been remarried for 17 years now, and, honestly, I don’t miss dating. Not at all. But I do kind of miss the wildness of those post-Y2K years. I miss the adventure. Sometimes I even still miss my green T-shirt—or at least the young woman who wore it.
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By the time I began writing this essay, I’d been obsessing over a favorite missing green T-shirt for nearly two decades. I’d originally purchased this T-shirt at a Twin Cities Goodwill, and so, I reasoned, I’d eventually find its replacement—if not the T-shirt itself—at another Twin Cities Goodwill. Whenever I go Goodwill hunting, combing through bins of vintage vinyl (most of it worthless, unless you dig The Lawrence Welk Show), I’d also flip through the green T-shirts (fortunately, the Goodwill categorizes shirts by color).
Initially, I thought this essay was going to be about a former flame who (presumably) kept my favorite green T-shirt. Initially, I wrote him as kind and generous – and my narrator self as the asshole who dumped him (his hurt driving him to keep said T-shirt). But as I wrote, I began asking myself, “Was he really kind?” Why should my readers believe me on this account when I no longer believed me? Was I an unreliable narrator? As I enlarged the scope of the essay to include more of the guys I dated in the early aughts, I began to see that most of those men turned into frogs (all due respect to this very beneficial amphibian), as these relationships began to capsize. Months after I began this essay, Spotify’s algorithm handed me this song by Mipso, which is all about how “people change” (also the title of the song) when they walk away. Maybe people don’t change so much as they finally remove the veneer.
This essay is meant to keep readers wondering about what is and what isn’t real. Because that’s how it is when a relationship ends. These people we were once intimate with (to some degree or another) turn into strangers. But – and the end of the essay makes this point – don’t you sometimes miss mixing it up with strangers, don’t you sort of miss exploring “the strange” in your adult life? Not to mention pulling out the veneer, having a new love see you as nearly perfect, at least for a small while?
Heidi Fettig Parton’s recent work can be found in Brevity, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Beautiful Things @ River Teeth Journal, NDQ, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Pangyrus, Sweet, and The Keepthings. She teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University and serves as executive editor of its literary journal, Multiplicity. Learn more at: www.heidifettigparton.com.
