A letter from a reader

At 63, I was still hiding in the kitchen at every party, washing somebody else's dishes, because I have never known how to start a conversation

The longest thing I have written all fall is my name on a strip of masking tape on the bottom of a casserole dish, so it would find its way home from a fish fry, and it still has not. I am not a writer, and it has never once been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women crossed a room to ask me about my cardigan out in Haskell this past October, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

Frank spent thirty-one years on a road crew. Every October the old crew and their wives get together for a fish fry at the Legion hall in Haskell, because Hoyt, their foreman, retired home out there and nobody has ever dared hold it anywhere else. Frank and I have made that drive for nineteen years. Frank walks in the door and somebody hands him a plate and a story. And I go find the sink.

I am not exaggerating. I can tell you which faucet in that kitchen drips. Forty people in the next room, and I have spent nineteen Octobers with my back to all of them, up to my elbows in somebody else's dishwater, telling anybody who looked in that I was just helping out.

I was not helping. I was hiding. I just happened to be getting the skillets clean while I did it.

It is not only Haskell, either. Weddings, retirement parties, the neighbors' Christmas open house. If there is a kitchen, I will find it. If there is not, I will find the coats.

I did not decide to become the woman nobody at the party could pick out of a lineup. Nobody decides that. It happens one offer to dry the glasses at a time, until forty people have known your husband for thirty years and all they know about you is that you are good with a skillet.

How it happens

When my children were small I never had this trouble. I had a baby on my hip, and a baby is the easiest conversation in the world. Every woman in the room walked right over.

What changed was not me. It was that the children grew up and left me standing there with empty arms and nothing to point at.

And there I was, in a room full of women I see one day a year, trying to think of a way to begin. You cannot ask about the weather twice. You have already asked after the hip. So you stand there holding a paper cup and smiling at nothing, for about as long as you can stand it.

And then you say, I will just see if they need a hand in the kitchen. They always do. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought the problem was me. I thought I needed to get better at small talk. I have practiced openers in the car on the way out to Haskell, out loud, while Frank pretended to listen to the radio. I once checked a book out of the library about it. None of it ever survived the walk from the truck to the door.

It turns out I never needed a better first line.

What I needed was for somebody else to go first, and for them to have a reason to. Nobody in that room knew how to begin with me any more than I knew how to begin with them. I had spent my whole life dressing so that nobody would have anything to ask me about, and then wondering why nobody asked me anything.

Nobody walks across a room to ask about a beige cardigan. That is the whole thing, and it took me until 63 to see it.

It is called the Velma

My sister Sue is the one who showed me, though she did not mean to. She came up for my birthday this summer, and we went to lunch, and she walked in wearing a cardigan that was orange on one side and pink on the other, with leopard spots and tigers all over it. We had not got our iced tea before the woman at the next table leaned over to ask about it. Ten minutes later Sue knew all about her knee.

Now, Sue can talk to a fence post. I said so. And she put down her menu and said, that is just it, Peggy, I did not say one word first. Then she said, you have washed every dish in Haskell County for nineteen years so you would not have to say hello to anybody. Get one of these and let the tigers do it.

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now. I looked them up that same evening.

Mine is the green and cream. One side is emerald green with big leopard spots in black and soft pink, and the other side is cream with green tigers prowling across it, down the front and all along the sleeve. There is a row of brown buttons down the middle where the two sides meet. Each side even has its own cuff, green on the one arm and pale pink on the other.

I was afraid it would look like a costume on a woman my age, and I will tell you what fixed that. It is cut easy, with a dropped shoulder and a relaxed shape, in one size, and I wear it open over a plain white top with navy pants or jeans. The cardigan is the loud one, and everything else stays quiet. You can button it up and wear it as a top too, with the V-neck showing off a necklace, but I like it open.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a cardigan somebody had a good time making.

I hung it on the closet door the night before we drove out. Then I took it down and put it in the closet. Then I got up at eleven o'clock and hung it back on the door.

What happened in Haskell

I did not get as far as the kitchen.

The first one got me at the card table inside the door, before I had my name tag on. That was Hoyt's granddaughter, who was doing the name tags, and who wanted to know if the tigers went all the way around. The second was a woman I had never spoken to in my life, standing by herself at the coffee urn. Corinne. She married one of the crew a few years back, and she came straight across that hall with her cup in her hand.

She said, I have been standing here for forty minutes trying to think of something to say to somebody, and then you walked in with tigers on.

Forty minutes by the coffee urn. All those years at that sink, and I had never once thought there might be another one of me out in the other room.

We sat down with our plates and did not get up for an hour. Her grandson goes to school in Belton, not two miles from my daughter.

And then there was Roberta.

Roberta is Hoyt's wife, and she has run that kitchen the whole nineteen years. In all that time she has said two things to me. Dish towels are in the second drawer, and you missed one. When I finally went back there out of pure habit and reached for a towel, she turned around from the fryer and looked at me, top to bottom, for what felt like most of the afternoon. Then she said, put that towel down, Peggy Dalton. You are not allowed in my kitchen in that.

So I went back out. Frank had to come and find me when it was time to go, and in nineteen years he has never had to look for me anywhere but the sink. He stood there with his hat in his hand and a look on his face I have not seen in about forty years.

I have hardly taken it off since. To church on Sunday, to the grocery store, to my granddaughter's school program, where two more mothers asked. I have started to enjoy it, which I would not have predicted.

Three things I have learned since

One. You do not need a first line. You need something to point at. I spent years trying to think of what to say. All I ever needed was to give the other woman a reason to say it first, and a tiger is a very good reason.

Two. Let the cardigan be the loud one. Plain white top, navy pants or jeans, nothing else to think about. The two sides do all the work, so I do not have to match anything or wonder about a necklace. It is the easiest thing I own to get dressed around.

Three. The woman across the room is just as scared as you are. I wish somebody had told me that forty years ago. Half of the women I have been hiding from were standing out there by the coffee, hoping somebody would come over.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Velma is $69.95. It was $140.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, and then that it was a lot of money to spend on a cardigan with tigers on it, when I own a perfectly good beige one that has never caused anybody any trouble.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman from Rochester had written, “My husband says it is a lot of tiger. Two women stopped me at the feed store the first week, and one of them is coming over for coffee on Thursday.”

Then I went back and ordered the yellow and cream for my daughter for Christmas, and I am not telling her.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on my back porch with a cup of coffee and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have ever offered to help in the kitchen so you would not have to stand in the other room, if you know where the coats are at every party you have ever been to, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look. Tigers may not be for you. There are a dozen other sweaters and cardigans in the same collection, and some of them are a good deal quieter.

Not because a cardigan will change your life. It will not. But there is something in having a woman walk across a room to talk to you that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, with the whole season of parties and open houses and rooms full of people just ahead of us. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Nineteen years I washed the dishes in Haskell. This year somebody else got the skillets.

Peggy