I was reading at my table préférée, nestled around a steaming Americano, when I found myself treated to the most intriguing newcomer of the morning: a woman who was mostly scarf.

          The scarf entered first, swishing its frizzy orange tassels over the threshold and across the checkered floor like it owned the place. After it, attached to a prodigious length of chunky orange weave, came the woman, pitched forward at an angle. In the depths of the fluffy orange scarf-coils blinked two small eyes, glittering with cold.

          Unfortunately she failed to close the door behind her and instantly became the most hated person in the café. All of us seated at the tables were regulars. On cold days membership in this tribe is often expressed in an extra vigilance concerning the door, and it’s not unusual for one of us to shut the door in the face of someone entering immediately behind us, to demonstrate the principle.

          The retired school teacher, stationed near the entrance, sighed. She hooked the door with her cane and slammed it shut. The other regulars shivered unanimously.

          But if the newcomer noticed she made no sign of it. Near the register a small, muffled voice issued from within the orange scarf-bundle, requesting a café latte and a bendy straw, please. She waited by the self-service table where the scarf somehow got its long frontal tendril positioned behind her and helped itself to the whole milk, the cinnamon shaker, and the stir sticks. The barista, with the cold precision he reserved for outsiders, rocketed the beverage together behind the espresso contraption, jiggled the frond of milk-foam on top, and served it, bendy straw on the side.

          The scarf and the woman conveyed the beverage to the open window seat. As she sat, the scarf relaxed, filling the space around her in whatever way it pleased. It parted its fluffy coils just enough for the tip of the straw to be inserted into the woman’s mouth, then closed around it. Coffee rose the length of the straw, made a sharp turn, and vanished into the orange woolen vortex.

          Wonderful! I was delighted. Of course I was getting nothing read in my book this morning. I rarely do at the café. Admittedly, what brings me here on Saturday morning is the opportunity to enjoy the intricate little projects people make of themselves. My book is less reading material than rampart, a protective barrier from behind which I can keep watch without seeming creepy.

          Dear woman, if I may. An observation.

          Sometimes fashion gets the better of us. We believe we’re outwardly expressing our interior selves but then the clothing we’ve worn begins to make its own demands and things spin out of control.

          Take for example another regular, the playwright. The playwright isn’t here this morning, but he’s easy enough to describe from memory. Black turtleneck. Trotsky spectacles. Goatee. We know him immediately. In case there’s any doubt, his gray hair is styled in the highly recognizable fashion of an unkempt genius, as though ideas have been radiating from his skull with such ferocity that his hair has become warped in the resulting heat vapor.

          I’ve watched him work, clubbing away at the keys of his laptop, his face rumpled in exasperation at his characters’ lack of profundity. The playwright is miserable, but what else can the playwright do? He’s suited for nothing else. I wonder: upon opening his closet of black turtlenecks, does he ever feel enslaved?

          But are the rest of us any different? The man at the adjacent table is wearing fleece pajama bottoms that, despite the invigorating effects of black drip coffee and the occasional blast of cold through the open door, won’t permit him to wake up entirely. And today the woman who drinks a chai latte while playing Sudoku with a purple gel pen is enveloped in a pilly, off-the-shoulder sweater that gives her normally swift computations the sullen air of a cat bathing itself. And the retired school teacher near the door isn’t really so elderly—she’s been prematurely croned by her cane, poor thing (though we’re happy she has it to close the door with). And I’m not unaware of the effect of my own glasses and beard either, which encourage me to behave as though perpetually in disguise when I’d much prefer to be myself. No, we’re all ruled at least a little by whatever cloaks or contains or embellishes our bodies.

          But clearly you, who are primarily scarf, have passed a threshold. At some point the scarf gained the upper hand. What was that moment like for you, I wonder? Did you even know it was happening?

          The woman had grown still. As the last of the latte gurgled tranquilly up the bendy straw, the scarf appeared heavy, sated. I felt sure she would remain sitting there for days. But then a glint deep within the orange ravels indicated that her eyes had shifted in my direction. Caught!

          I hurried my features into an approximation of welcome—Yes, hello, nice morning, no? In the tiny lights of her eyes I saw that my greeting had been received and then what seemed the beginnings of self-semblance and response. But just then, at the moment of greatest possibility, the scarf intervened. In the orange complexity of its interwoven fibers I witnessed a sudden flection, a contraction made with spasm-like speed, meant to quash the breath that might’ve preceded her answer. And there she sat, staring out at me with the bulging eyes of a gerbil being squeezed in a giant orange fist.

          My fellow patrons! There is one among us who is not doing okay! What horrors of slow strangulation was she enduring right in front of us? What would she tell us if only the tyrant scarf would allow it?

          Well, there was no time to be shy about it. I ripped a page from my notebook, printed a message in large clear letters, and rushed it to her table:

          ARE YOU OKAY? DO YOU NEED ME TO SEND FOR HELP?

          I returned to my seat, ready to pop back up and help where needed.

          A struggle commenced between the woman and the scarf over what to do with the note. The scarf had by now wrapped around her arm and head in such an elaborate way that the motion of bringing the note into reading distance simultaneously folded her downward and into the corner, the way pulling a single thread can ball up an entire garment. The note disappeared and the scarf-lumps beneath the back of her fleece jacket moved busily around.

          She was at this activity for a while. I was at a loss to make any sense of it. Finally with startling speed she burst from behind the table and headed for the door. Before I could react, she and the scarf were gone. As she lurched out onto the sidewalk, I saw her reach back in an effort to close the door, but the scarf was in too big of a hurry—she failed to grasp it.

          The retired teacher, shaking her head with despair, extended the crook of her cane. Slam! The scarf-ingested woman had also failed to bus her own table, a courtesy that anyone who’d spent time in the café knew was actually mandatory. This confirmed everything everyone in the café had been thinking about her since her arrival.

          I looked around at my fellow regulars, at these strangers who I saw more often than my own family, Mr. Pajamas and Ms. Sudoku. Old Lady Doorkeep. So that’s it then? After so much time together manning the same tables, policing the same entrance, this is all our society amounts to? This casual good riddance for anyone who is not us? They each returned to me the facial equivalent of a shrug, and I felt that this blatant froideur would make today’s cold indelible, that our shared space would always be a few degrees chillier because of it. But then I noticed, on the bench behind the table where the woman had been seated, a note.

          I went and picked it up. It was written on the reverse of the note I’d written her in a rushed, fugitive handwriting that was the tiniest I’d ever seen. It seemed it wasn’t too late after all to know another person.

          Please don’t worry about me. I’m managing just fine. My scarf is sometimes restrictive and clingy. It can get stifling in here. But this scarf was made for me by my older sister before she got married and moved away. My sister was overbearing, too. It’s what I’m used to. This beautiful scarf reminds me of how we used to get so wrapped up in each other. Her hugs were always too tight. They were always a little more for her than for me.

          Thank you for your concern. You seem nice. It makes me sad to think of all the nice people without scarves who have to go around being cold all the time. If I could knit everyone a sister, I would.

          Stay warm