Cheryl Strayed, My Uniform, Tin House, Spring 2014 (elevation of object)

Cheryl Strayed is a deft and gifted writer. She elevates an object beautifully in this piece and lets a pair of sport pants  tell the story of her marriage to her husband (similar to what Stephen King did with his wedding ring.) She is the author of the wonderful memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which I highly recommend, if you haven’t read it already.

Strayed knows, almost better than any writer except Mary Karr, how to take a small object or a seemingly unimportant incident and give it life and death significance. She did this extremely well in her book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love andLife from Dear Sugar, which is a series of essays that stemmed from her time as an advice columnist on the TheRumpus. In this piece, Strayed writes about a black negligee and a pair of sport pants and uses them to magnify her relationship with her husband.  Do we want to know how she aroused her husband when he first saw her in a cheap negligee? Not really. But do we want to know how she uses clothing to dramatize the erotic nature of her marriage? Yes, as writers, we do. Especially, if there is a lesson about resourcefulness, not standing on ceremony or buying into conventional attitudes about what makes women sexy in the process.

Let’s look at how Strayed does this. She starts by describing her “sport pants…sturdy cotton twill rather than jersey material. Cut comfortably loose, the elastic waistband was the only place where the pants made any contact with my body. Anything could happen inside those pants without detection. I could be fat or less fat or kind of slender. They were extraordinarily utilitarian and patently unsexy. Nuns might opt to wear them. Or park rangers. Or seventy-year old piano teachers. Or butch lesbians who captained Ultimate Frisbee teams. Or me. I wore them so often my husband took to referring to them as my uniform.” We can all see this pair of pants; we probably all own a pair. It’s a great choice to write about a common object that is well known and understood and then give it new meaning.  Strayed deftly establishes herself as a no-nonsense, practical woman, someone who wears pants that would be beloved by a wide range of people.

Then she flips this image on its head and tells us that the first time she slept with her husband, she wore something entirely different. This is great writing---she does a 180-degree turn and surprises her reader with this “confession.” First, we get the titillating news that she slept with her then boyfriend the second night they knew each other. Oh my! That’s a little risqué---and intriguing. Clever of her to insert that here---readers always want to read about bad behavior. On that night, she writes she “wore a black lace getup that’s called a baby doll nightie. It was a little handful of a thing I’d purchased at Goodwill just before I met him, when I was twenty-seven and constantly roaming thrift stores on the hunt for something that would help me project the image of myself I was hoping for…” In the next graph, she continues to describe the nightie: “I grabbed the just purchased nightie from the top drawer of my dresser, a gob of cheap black lace in my hand...The nightie had thin shoulder straps, a form-fitting see-through bodice that gently mashed my breasts upward, and a flouncy short-skirted bottom…a black lack thingamajig that scarcely covered her rear… and then I got into bed with him and he pulled the damn thing off.” 

This is great, vivid, detailed writing, with a little sex play thrown in to keep us interested. We can see the lingerie, and the verbs she uses---“grabbed” and “”mashed” and “pulled” hint at violence and aggression. The verbs go well with the sexual tension she’s trying to build. As potentially exciting as it might be to read about black lingerie, there’s a limit to how much time a reader can spend reading about black lingerie if nothing sexy is going to come of it.

Then Strayed does another flip: she goes from being earnest and transparent in her desire to seduce her boyfriend to looking back at her young, foolish eager-to-please self with humorous disdain. In a sentence, her protagonist—the narrator, Strayed the writer---has been transformed. This is what every protagonist has to do—change, for better or worse.

Strayed returns to describing the sport pants. “I wore them so long and so often they’d become threadbare. The elastic of the waist had given way; the hemline had frayed.” She resolves to thrown them out; the pants had come to the end of their journey. She spells out their meaning: “My uniform. Our history. So I fished them out of the garbage and cut out the crotch with a pair of scissors. It was a neat black rectangle of fabric that only two people on the planet would recognize for what it is.” Then she adds another erotic note:  She mails the crotch of the pants to her husband, who is out of town. This is a risky, pushing-the-limits, bad girl, sexy, feminist, courageous, in-your-face act. It’s kind of a crazy, finn  bold thing to do. Strayed lets us imagine her husband’s hoped for reaction: He smells the crotch of her sport pants.  Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but it’s a powerful, erotic image to leave the reader with, as we contemplate the end of the sports pants’ “life.”