As
winter came in on the heels of his mother’s death, Skunk began to wear not the
branded gloves of the Levi Strauss clothing company, a pair of which he didn’t
own anyway, but rather the small red fleece pair his mother had sworn by.
Then,
just after Christmas and with the gloves in need of laundry, he faced a
decision that interested as much as upset him, interested him in that he
himself was curious as to what he might do: to wash the gloves as their
condition suggested was necessary, but in so doing eradicate from them their
last trace of his mother, or keep them as they were, the mingled essence of his
own skin and that of hers together until the material perished. Finally, it was
his girlfriend who settled the either/or equation for him:
ache1:
Just... wash the gloves. I mean, your choices, it’s not ahm... Just wash the
gloves. Your mother is more than that, she’s still more than that, and all that
is is, it’s a kind of a, a fake... Look at it this way, what d’you think your
mum would want, that you walk about the place with your hands freezing, or th-
Skunk: I
could get new gloves, that’s not going to be a
ache1:
But that’s, that’s avoiding what I’m, wash the gloves and wear them. If
you don’t, you’re making them, I don’t think it’s right to do that, to
ah, to
Some
further back-and-forth, but Skunk now nothing more than Devil’s Advocate,
checking himself for any real belief in attributing the gloves a totemic
representation of his mother’s life and, finding none (that responsibility
assumed to a greater degree by far more potent fragments from her estate), made
them part of his next coloured wash.
