INCOMPLETE1
An insidious pest is creeping into our house and taking it over.
It has been there under everybody’s nose while we have been worrying about other things.
It is a simple affair and its very simplicity makes it seemingly innocuous.
I refer to the dry-cleaner’s delight, the wire coathanger.
Once we had a household where you couldn’t find a coathanger. Once we had plastic hangers that soon broke, and wooden hangers that gave us splinters. Once we went wardrobe robbing each other’s.
Now we have a million. They hang on doorknobs and snag your coat as you pass. They hang upside down from racks and spear your sleeves or lacerate your lobes. An earful of wire coathanger is no laughing matter.
I know of a friend who fell into his wardrobe and was set upon by these coathangers. He was under suspension for three hours.
Not only are coathangers insidious. They have criminal tendencies. Many of them are definitely bent.
I crept upon my wardrobe last night and placed my ear warily against the door. Sure enough, I heard a metallic tinkling, a saucy whispering of wire inside.
It is my firm belief that the coathangers are breeding. Meanwhile, more keep entering the house. The more there are the more we use. This week I rushed out yelling and screaming with an armful of coathangers and my wife immediately hung one on me.
Take the deplorable incident of a couple of days back. I saw my half-dozen shirts, leaping and waving from the line, each with a wire hanger while redundant pegs brooded in their baskets. When I tried to retrieve the shirts it was like furling the sails of the Herzogin Cecilie in a Cape Horn hurricane.
The shirts flounced away from me and the hangers tried to gouge my eyeballs and we wrestled and struggled in a mad maelstrom of fabric, fat, wind and wire with my wife screaming in the background for me to keep my shirt on.
She says that the hangers keep the shirts in shape. She rushes off to the dry-cleaners and returns with reinforcements. Hanger after hanger after hanger, some to be suspended from the wardrobe doors, some swinging from furniture.
She’s coathanger happy slave of wilful wire. They have her well and truly hooked.
I’ve even heard of woman who hangs spaghetti on wire coathangers so that she can tease it and stroke it from the pot.
In fact, hangers are becoming an even more desperate problem than the apricot jam that is left for us at the height of the fruit season.
Max Fatchen