Buttonology

It’s 1971. I’m four. We live in the toy-empty wilderness and I’m in love
with my mother’s button jar. Buttons waterfall between my fingers.
I sort them: big, small, shiny, dull—carved and shaped like animals.

It’s the 1300s. Someone finally invents the buttonhole and everyone
goes crazy for buttons. Before then, we fastened our clothes with lacing,
belts, and brooches; buttons were only decoration for the rich and royal.

With everyone bedazzled in buttons–breasts, elbows, wrists and necks–
down backs and up shoes–rulers fear commoners will forget their place,
so they pass laws against being too buttony. Which everyone ignores.

It’s the 1800s. Buttoners craft buttons of nut, bone, horn, wood;
of silk, linen, metal, leather; of enamel, porcelain, paper mache,
mother-of-pearl. They are stamped, painted, pressed and crocheted.

Now, buttons are mostly plastic and mass-produced. Businessmen
wear matching button-down shirts, and sixty percent of buttons
are shipped from a single town in China. Buttoned up means “conservative

in style and dress,” means “carefully planned and executed,” means
“to shut one’s mouth.” The person who traps you in a corner at a party
and will not stop talking has buttonholed you. A fuss button frets

about unimportant matters. Buttons are no longer a threatening excess
of beauty. It’s 1983. I’m fifteen. We live in the suburbs and my mother,
fearing I’m too prim, unbuttons my top shirt buttons to show more skin.

My mother, rattley with anger and loneliness and something frightening
I cannot name, always seems on the edge of losing her buttons. I don’t
want to come undone. This is what women hear: Be cute as a button,

neat as a button, bright as a button. But listen: once, a button was a con
man’s apprentice; a buttoner, a hitman. This, too, is a button: a flower
bud, 1/12 of an inch, a clitoris, a man’s nipple, the end of a fencing foil,

a dog’s ear that folds forward, a white spot on a cat’s coat, the bud
of a baby rattlesnake’s rattle. I don’t want to be buttoned too tightly. But
we need some restraint. The moon is a button that keeps the night-coat

from opening and spilling all the black holes. Once in a remote wilderness,
I hiked a stretch of trail made of small, white buttons. I want to be that person,
to create anonymous, useless delights. There is no word, as far as I know,

for love of buttons. Koumpounophobia is fear of buttons. Koumopouno
means beans in Greek. The first Greek buttons were made of beans.
Steve Jobs, they say, had a fear of buttons, which accounts for his love

of turtlenecks and touch screens. “So what?” “Sew a button on your
underwear.” It’s the 1930s, and that’s a sassy answer. Cute as a button.
A button is the final joke, a punchy line of dialogue that concludes a scene.

*

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work appears in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in Only Poems and Potomac Review.