Misleading Shirt

I have a t-shirt that reads “Cayman Islands” across the front and has a picture of a scuba tank on the back. If you saw me wearing it, it would not be unreasonable for you to guess that I’d been there, or at least had a relative or friend who had. You might also guess that the relative in question was not creative with regard to gift shopping.

As it turns out, both of those guesses would be wrong. I’ve never been to the Caymans, nor has anyone in my immediate family (at least not while they were a part of my immediate family). In fact, I’ve never been scuba diving anywhere (though my stepdad likes it a lot). Instead, I got the shirt as a hand-me-down when I was little. At the time, it was huge on me, but I’ve since grown into it and wear it on laundry days.

One such laundry day, I happened to be at the movie theater at the Headquarter’s Plaza in Morristown, New Jersey. Headquarter’s Plaza used to be a busy mall, but has since emptied and seen storefronts bought up and turned into office space for low budget law and realty firms. Still, the building has the structure of a mall, complete with a parking structure connected to the building with an elevator.

The movie theater is pretty much the only reason to go to Headquarters, so after a movie lets out (in the case in question, the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) the crowd leaving the theater will walk together through the non-mall to the elevator. The halls are wide enough that people spread out in the way they do when walking near other people, but want to make clear they are not affiliated with them. These divisions are then challenged at the elevator, when people cram together, recognizing each other as those they’ve been walking within a few feet of without acknowledging.

Usually this results in elevator silence, but sometimes it’ll lead to forced conversation: about the movie, or the weather, or what’s happened to the Plaza. This time, after an initial elevator silence, an old man in a suit looked me over and asked “How were the Caymans?”

“I’ve never been,” I began. I’d intended to leave it at that, but realized that this was unfair to my would-be conversational partner. It sounded curt, and his shirt-based assumptions were completely reasonable. “This is a hand-me-down,” I explained.

I immediately regretted that one too. After my initial response, he probably expected me to say the shirt was a gift, and here I was challenging that assumption too. Who was I to make this guy uncomfortable? All he’d wanted to do was talk about my vacation.

The image must have jarred him, because he paused for a moment. Here he was, asking about expensive vacations to a guy wearing beat up, laundry day jeans and a hand-me-down shirt; he might have worried that he was flaunting his wealth. None of that was true, of course; we’ve been to Italy twice, and one of those trips could have been to the Caymans if I’d had a different heritage or if the Caymans were higher on the family destination list. Still, at this point, I was beyond correcting the guy. What was I going to say? “But I could have been, just in case you were feeling awkward about bringing up expensive vacations. Sorry to have been unclear.”

Anyway, after his pause, the suited man tried to salvage the conversation. “Well, have you been out of the country at all, at least?” I’m not sure what the “at least” was supposed to mean in this context, like somehow wearing a misleading shirt was okay so long as I’d done something approximating what it suggested I had.

“Yeah, I’ve visited family in Italy,” I reassured him as the elevator reached my parking level.

“That’s good,” he said.

I told this story to Max on a New York subway the other day. He was wearing a shirt that proclaimed that life was simple: one must merely eat, sleep, and go caving. Max has never been caving, nor does he like the idea of it, but he does believe that life is simple and involves eating and sleeping. He expressed that he doesn’t like the shirt because of this discrepancy, and a woman sitting near us responded, “But is it really lying to someone to wear a misleading shirt?”

She’s right, of course; it’s not. There’s nothing malicious in making people think you’ve been somewhere you haven’t or like subterranean adventures when you don’t. There’s no duty to make the details of one’s life easily interpretable. I shouldn’t have felt bad about misleading the man in the elevator (several times), but the fact the remains that I did. In part, I think it’s a recognition of having made him uncomfortable, but I also think there’s a universal desire to be understood; it’s a prerequisite for being accepted. Wearing a misleading shirt and saying misleading things about it makes that marginally harder.