A day in a tailor shop, starting with three minutes before the machine goes on

Out of black thread.

I knew it yesterday afternoon, when I sewed the last button on the ao dai due Friday, and I left it at that. Now there is nothing on the spindle but the paper core.

5:40. I am fifty-two, and I sew in a shop three meters wide and seven deep, on the ground floor, down an alley. The front is eight loose wooden boards. Every morning I take them down one by one and lean them on the wall, each with a number in chalk on the edge so I never put them back wrong. By the sixth board the smell of the shop has spilled into the alley: starch in the cloth, lint still warm from yesterday, the plastic smell of a new bolt of fabric not yet unwrapped.

Last month my daughter came to visit, sat watching me take the boards down, and said: Dad, try sitting three minutes before you switch the machine on. That was all. She let me read an article on her phone called Three-Minute Meditation for Your First Sit. I read it twice because the print was small. Then she went back to Saigon.

Now I drag the little stool up to the machine. I don't switch it on. My right hand goes flat on the tabletop, right where the wood has worn into a dip the size of my palm. Twenty years my hand has rested there, and today is the first time I see it is a dip. My eyes stay open, on the paper core. Early this week I tried closing them and was nodding off in under a minute.

Out in the alley someone is sweeping with a bamboo broom. Scrape, scrape, stop, then scrape again.

In the first minute my head runs a full lap. Mr. Đạt's suit for the wedding on Saturday, shoulders not yet joined. Two pairs of trousers waiting to be hemmed. The shop rent due on the fifth. It runs so clearly it is as if someone were dictating and I were taking notes.

— Join the shoulders first, or the sleeves?

— Never mind, sit first and sort it out after.

— Shoulders first. Although the sleeves...

The lines bounce back and forth, and in the end I get up to look for black thread, because the paper core keeps sitting there in front of me like someone waiting. In the drawer I find two spools of white and one of dark blue. No black. I sit back down. Probably not three minutes yet. I am not timing it.

My daughter pointed me to one more piece, called When the Mind Won't Settle, and Why That's Normal. I remember the title. I haven't read it.

11:20. Khoa comes by to pick up his trousers. He goes behind the cloth curtain, steps out, and the hems sit half a finger above his ankles.

— Uncle, I think these are shorter than I said.

— No, I measured them properly.

— I said touching the shoes. That day I was standing with my knees bent, and you only told me to stand straight after you measured.

I open the order slip. It says: hem to touch the shoe. I wrote it correctly. It's just that when I sewed, I followed the pins from the first fitting, when he was still standing bent, and never read the slip again.

— I'll redo it, about twenty minutes.

— It's okay, Uncle, I can wait.

I hate that "it's okay" more than being told off.

A seam ripper can't be rushed. The stitches are small, and you have to look at each one to get the tip in right, and one slip puts a hole in the cloth. For twenty minutes I do nothing but look at stitches and listen to Khoa tapping his fingers on his knee. I sat three minutes this morning and my hands still got it wrong. And before I sat at all, I made exactly this kind of mistake. So I don't know whether the two things are connected, and I don't want to tell myself they are just to feel better.

He puts them back on. This time the hems touch his shoes.

12:40. Lunch is standing at the cutting table, a bowl of braised fish next to the square ruler. The smell of the fish mixes with the smell of cloth into something that exists only in this shop. Auntie Sáu, who sells sewing supplies, carries a crate past and pokes her head in.

— Hai, you out of black thread? I'm getting stock this afternoon, come pick it up tomorrow.

— Been out since yesterday, Auntie.

— Out, and you didn't say? I'd have saved you a spool.

— I forgot.

She laughs and carries the crate away. I go on eating, chewing a little slower than usual, not on purpose. The fish is a bit salty.

3:30. Quiet. I sweep the lint around the legs of the machine, then trail a magnet on a string over the concrete floor. Twelve pins lie in places I don't remember dropping them, and the magnet lifts them one at a time, with a small click.

I sit down to join the shoulders for Mr. Đạt, and my hand lands on the dip in the tabletop before I switch on. Not even half a minute. Nobody told me to, and I haven't decided anything. Then I switch on.

The suit is charcoal blue, so the dark blue spool I dug out this morning turns out to work. On the first shoulder seam the machine rattles two or three beats and then settles. I hear the needle going through the cloth, dry and small, like someone tapping a fingernail on a table. I don't know if it always made that sound and I never heard it, or if it only started today.

7:30. I put the boards back by number, starting with number one. Auntie Sáu closed her shop early, so the black thread waits for tomorrow. I take the order book and write two lines in capitals at the top of tomorrow's page: BLACK THREAD. READ THE SLIP BEFORE SEWING. I underline both.

The paper core is still bare on the spindle. I haven't taken it off.

Before sleep. Mr. Đạt will wear the suit on Saturday, the shoulders are joined. Tomorrow I sit three minutes first, then go and buy the thread.

This article was created with AI assistance.