The Yellow Towel
I found myself in trouble at home for buying a yellow towel. Wandering the canyon aisles at the megastore off the highway I came to the “bath” department, where I noticed the towels and wanted one. Stacks of them sat plump and clean; our towels at home were thin and gross. We didn’t wash them enough.
Then I just had to like the yellow. The yellow was cheerful, I saw right away. A friendly color: like Big Bird. Then I thought, to convince myself:
Who could fail to be charmed by this?
I bought just one, because I’m dumb. The yellow towel matched nothing else. Well, had I thought of that? So asked my wife, with a smear of tact.
“I’ll buy another,” I bargained.
“Get it out of here,” she said, closing the door to any debate.
“You won’t see it again, I swear.”
I laid the towel in the trunk of my car. Next morning, I took the towel to work. I put it in the bottom desk drawer. Like hiding a little sun down there.
“Sorry,” I whispered to the towel. “I don’t quite know what the issue is.”
The bright yellow towel stared fuzzily back. Objects aren’t that innocent. I was on edge, ready to dispose of it to keep the peace. But the yellow was pure, and it radiated warmth. Where else could one get this color? How else could I bring it into my life? It took my trust. I opened the drawer when I craved a look.
“The hell’s in there,” my boss asked around lunchtime.
“Some privacy,” I snarled.
Which is how I came to be jobless, driving around with my yellow towel, wondering where we might survive.
From the city into planned suburbs, street upon street of beige, replicated homes. Nothing saturated, not even their yellow traffic signs, which were not yellow like my towel. Sterner yellow, no trace of wit.
At a murky hotel on the fringes of town, my yellow towel was conspicuous.
“Won’t need that,” said a man at the desk. “Bathrooms are all fully equipped.”
“I’m not using—it’s a memento.”
The desk man frowned.
“Our policy is no outside towels.”
Night. I trudged with my towel to a neon bar, the cloth rectangle folded as squarely as when I took it off the shelf. I began to wish it were wrapped in plastic, however wasteful that may be. My fingers alarmed at the dust now gritting itself into the fabric. The poor yellow towel wasn’t meant for this. Yet it plotted my course. I had direction.
“ID,” said the bouncer. What a relief, this easy hurdle.
“How’s your night?” I replied with my license.
“Hey.” He returned the card without scanning it and pointed into my jacket. “What’re you smuggling there?”
“It’s a towel. Just in case.”
I hoped next he would not ask: In case of what?
“Open the towel, sir.”
I hated to give in, though his request was gentle compared to the hours that dragged behind me. I flung open the towel in full. The bouncer recoiled from its color, a radioactive panel in the glare of the halogen light he shone. Even I was unnerved.
“OK. Check it inside.”
“Check my towel?”
“At the coat check. Go ahead and check it there.”
“The fuck I will.”
The bundled-up bouncer, at least three inches shorter than I, stepped toward me and raised his ballcap to show his eyes that were flinty dull.
“Then good night,” he said, “both of you.”
I went off mulling the phrase: Both of you. Although the first recognition of my towel as a separate entity, this also affirmed the bias against it. The towel and I traveled together. The towel was not welcome, so neither was I.
Except it’s never the same everywhere. Someplace would accept the towel.
And I was going there.
My parents lived in a development upstate, five-six hours, fewer if I started out dead of night, which it was. I tossed things out of the glovebox, the manuals and insurance papers, to stash the yellow towel in there. I had to be careful—the towel would estrange me from anyone who knew how much I cared for it.
I drove without incident, the last forty miles through wooded backroads scary enough in the day. For that stretch I opened the glove to receive a dose of bravery from the towel. Or, when I glimpsed it in the green light of the stereo, it urged me farther into the wild.
I would not have found the house were my parents not early risers who drank their coffee on the front porch around 7 a.m.
“What in the world!” shouted mom.
“What’s wrong? You should’ve called,” said dad.
“It’s over,” I told them. “You were right. She didn’t understand me.”
The three of us hugged, and then mom cooked me bacon and pancakes.
“Sorry I’m out of eggs,” she said. “But I don’t make them a lot since I’m only allowed to eat the whites.”
Afterward I went to the guest room, collapsing from the weight of my own body. The creaking, uncomfortable mattress had me asleep before I could complain.
I woke in heavy light to a careful knocking I figured was dad’s. When I sat up and said to come in, both parents entered.
“Son,” dad said. “We found this.” In his two frail sets of knuckles he gripped and worried the yellow towel.
Mom started crying, of course.
“You’re letting yourself be changed,” she wailed. “We want to support you…”
“But you realize,” dad said, “that we can’t have this around the house.” The towel landed in a tidy heap on my lap.
“It’s not so bad,” I protested, and mom fled the room in tears.
“Don’t say that. Don’t pretend it’s normal,” dad said. “I want you gone, and don’t come back until you’re past all that.”
My car wouldn’t start. I’d left it unlocked, with the glovebox open, headlights draining the battery. I walked some miles to a bus station, where the homeless had claimed an area protected by an overhang. Seeing the torn-up clothes that covered them, I prized my unsoiled towel more. I wasn’t about to sleep on it. I slipped it inside my sweater and I lay on a bench out in the brick plaza, exposed.
When I woke this time, voices needled the crust of my head.
“The towel. He has this yellow towel, the bastard.”
I gathered, in a fogged-up way, that the homeless were denouncing me. To the police, as I understood. Fascinating, wasn’t it: the towel upset the rich and poor, a universal taboo.
“We’ll have to search you,” said a cop into my squinting face. “You’ve caused this major disturbance, and that’s probably why we’re searching you.”
“I don’t consent,” I mumbled.
“Ah ha,” said the cop. He stood up—having bent low to address my pathetic form—and spoke to his partner. “Guy doesn’t consent.”
“Doesn’t have to, if probable cause.”
“Oh.”
I was not arrested, only detained, as the officers put it. They urged me threateningly to accept a ride in the cruiser. Nothing of my conduct was illegal. There in the backseat, twisting my towel, I pictured them transporting me to a farm, the field of my execution. They took me instead to a hospital.
“Home again home again, jiggity jig,” said the cops together.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re in medical custody now,” said the cop in the driver’s seat.
“Some evaluations. Your folks filed the hold,” said the other.
“Lucky. I’d love a long weekend myself,” said the first.
Orderlies carried me to a room. My parents arrived soon after, exhausted from an afternoon of regret and decisive action.
“It’s fine now,” my mother said, patting down the hair on my arm.
“You can rest,” said dad. Although he made the effort, his eyes sank to the yellow towel, which I had wrapped around my waist.
I lost several days after that. I don’t know what they put in me. What I recall is coming to, much later on, and screaming at a nurse, a timid man with a mustache, that my towel had been stolen. He sweated from his widow’s peak.
“No, no,” he panted, waving his hand. “It’s there.”
I saw the towel folded square on a table beside me, yellow and neat as ever. After a period I was allowed to hold it, and the day after that I was wheeled to a psychologist’s office with the towel firmly in my grasp.
“I’m Dr. Stanmore,” she said. Her face had the healthiest sheen. I could see her on the white sand beaches in Hawaii. Maybe that was where she had her clinic, the rehab center my parents would spend handsomely to enroll me in.
“You look quite well,” I said.
“It’s nice you think so.”
“I couldn’t take this to Hawaii,” I said, raising up the yellow towel.
“I wanted to ask about that. You’re quite attached to this towel, and nobody can tell me why. Maybe it is cliché to ask: is this a security blanket?”
“Of course. But the towel isn’t protecting me—I am protecting it. I find it horrifying to imagine a world in which I let it become garbage. Feel, it’s nice. What kind of person am I, if it winds up stained and torn before it’s used?”
“Have you not used it,” Dr. Stanmore asked.
A hard, long time to answer.
“I couldn’t,” I told her at last.
“Why.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose like someone in a movie.
“Don’t you get it?” I exploded. “There isn’t some cozy trauma. I have no idea why a yellow towel, or why I’m its guardian angel and never dry myself with it. Things attach, that’s all. This isn’t therapy, it’s an evaluation.”
When we finally came to it, the pitch was New England, not Hawaii. But the photos sold me; I made the visit. These rolling hills were lush in summer, meadows a million types of green. I got a tour of the old cemetery. For some reason, I couldn’t shut up.
“What would you make of a yellow towel?” I boldly asked the counselor from the rehab center. He leaned on a tombstone, gathering thoughts.
“What towel,” he said.
“Some towel, imagine. Bright yellow. Not fancy.”
“I’d rather it be fancy.”
“But it’s not.”
“Then I don’t like it. Yellow is strange.”
“That’s pretentious,” I said. “Calling yellow strange, unless it’s fancy.”
I landed again in the guest room at my parents’ house and continued to not qualify for the healing retreats they funneled me toward. I kept the yellow towel in a secret bucket in the garage. If they ever found it, they didn’t tell me; the subject didn’t come up at all. Sleeping, I had the kind of dreams that are usually called nightmares. I dreamed of my smothering by the towel, and I felt it as a huge release—the absent air, the pilled texture, the buttery glow of a world beyond.
At the end of a month of depression, I remembered the 401(k). An account set up through my former job, it liquified to a middling sum. I had nothing else to spend it on but avoiding mom and dad's reproach. I traveled to a commune out in the western mountains, deep in a forest of quaking aspen. Underground, the trees shared roots, knitting together a colony. Each autumn, their crowns became a low sky of rustled gold. This outshone whatever I knew, and soon I stopped looking up at all—for fear of offending the silent, serious yellow towel, its dye by now almost leached away.
“Evening, brother.” So said, one evening, a short member whom I didn’t care for. I was meditating in a clearing, my yellow towel across my lap.
“Good evening, brother,” I said to him.
“You guard that towel as if it is heaven.”
“Who says it’s not?”
My brother walked off toward the vegetable garden, where I’m sure he met with my other critics. Maybe I’m the paranoid type. Life’s a gut feeling. Am I wrong? We had two ascetic meals per day and were let to shower twice a week. Cold water, and the lot of us nothing to dry ourselves. Except me, as I possessed a yellow towel that I washed most days on the river stones. In those moments, I grew calm. The water babbled past. Staring down into the yellow towel, I laughed until I forgot myself, the gold leaves trembling above.
God, I prayed in my bunk that night. Conceal my towel, and I’ll be content.
Is that all? God asks.
It is the most, I tell the Lord.
Miles Klee covers the internet, culture and more for MEL Magazine. He's the author of the story collection True False and the novel Ivyland, which was a finalist in the 2013 Tournament of Books. Other writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica, Lapham's Quarterly and Electric Literature. He lives in Los Angeles and can be found tweeting as @MilesKlee.
