by Scaachi Koul
“How many pants should I take?” my dad asked.
“One,” I said. “It’s thirty degrees in Cuba. Why will you need multiple pants?”
“What if we go for dinner?”
“So then you have your one pair of pants.”
“But if it rains?”
“It will still be thirty degrees and you will be indoors.”
“I don’t like being cold.”
“It won’t be cold, it will be thirty degrees.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“I feel like meteorologists know that.”
My dad took three pairs of pants, two shorts, an armload of T-shirts (mostly emblazoned with the logos of pharmaceuticals he used to hawk when he was working), and his go-to vacation outfit: linen pants, sandals, and a muted Tommy Bahama knock-off, with palm trees painted in beige and off-white and light brown.
I watched in awe as they proceeded to stuff suitcases with a five-pound bag of almonds (“I need to have almonds every day and what if they don’t have almonds there?”), a 500 mL jug of SPF 60 (have I mentioned that my parents have brown skin?), a “family-sized” bottle of Tylenol with enough pills to kill a small camel, energy bars, three packs of gum, and four ham sandwiches for the four-hour flight. They brought ham sandwiches to the place that inspired the cubano.
Papa insisted that Mom bring non-perishable chutneys “just in case,” while all she took were a few dresses and a bathing suit. Before they even left the house, my father was already telling her that they would not be going anywhere near the ocean and they would never leave the quiet protection of a shaded area. Mom tucked a sun hat and a few books into the remaining nooks of her bag. Papa flicked on the television to watch the news—the third of his four daily doses of television news, where he tsk-tsk-tsks his way through local news at five, local news at six, national news at ten, and international news at eleven, marvelling at the destruction and decay on his doorstep. “I don’t even know why I agreed to this in the first place,” he said. “What’s out there that I don’t have at home?” Mom just sighed and rewrapped their sandwiches in T-shirts so they wouldn’t get squished. Papa didn’t like the idea of being in a foreign bed, in a country that has a blistering sun, near sand that once in your shoes can never be emptied, and away from the routine of my mother making him an egg-white omelette in the morning and my niece swinging by in the early afternoon to pinch and kiss and bite and scream. Papa, the vessel for once; Mom, holding the keys and trying to get him out the door.
I told her that we would all be fine. Nothing bad would happen while they went on vacation for one week. My brother and I are adults, I reminded them, we can take care of ourselves, we know how to survive without our mother. We would call. The world would not crack open just because they took one vacation in more than a decade.
After they would have arrived at their resort in Veradero, they didn’t call, but my brother and I assumed they were eager to start their vacation. The day after, we still heard nothing, but guessed that Wi-Fi was hard to find. Hamhock, my latchkey man, took more relief in his in-laws taking a nice vacation than I did, suggesting they were probably busy drinking and vacationing. “It’ll be good for them,” he said, so relaxed by their departure that he nearly fell asleep while I expressed my concern.
By the third day, I was in a full panic. They hadn’t answered any emails, or turned on their phones, or tried to contact us. Neither I nor my brother had bothered to take down their flight number to make sure the plane landed on time. All we had was the hotel name, with a front desk that spoke exclusively Spanish. With the exception of their trips to India, where they’d send frequent emails, it was the longest I had gone without speaking to them.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Hamhock said. “They’re on vacation. Let them go on vacation.” But how are you supposed to relax when the people who taught you to be afraid of the world, to be alert, to be suspicious, have vanished without a trace and haven’t even bothered to let you know that, no, they did not get careless and a wave didn’t just come and “get” them? My stomach churned out bile for the remainder of their vacation, and I hoped that they were, in fact, staying out of the sun and far from the ocean and at a safe distance from strangers. This is how these stories start, you know. Someone you love goes on a vacation somewhere relatively safe—my parents have invented this story for me countless times—and then they aren’t heard from for a few days too long, and soon their bodies are found mangled on the underside of a cruise ship. This is how it starts.
But that is rarely how it ends. My mom texted me when they returned, and I had fully unhinged by then. My brain had planned their funeral and I was already trying to figure out how to tell my brother that I did not want to sell their house because I didn’t want anyone else living in our old home.
“INTERESTING HOW YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ACCEPTABLE TO NOT CALL ANYONE FOR NINE DAYS,” I texted back to her. “HOPE YOU HAD A GREAT TIME, I AM FURIOUS WITH YOU AND AM NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN.”
Mom said she was sorry and asked me to call her in the evening so she could tell me about their trip. Apparently they spent nine blissed-out days on the beach. She read a few books and my father tolerated going near the water. Mom patiently listened to me yell at her for forty minutes.
—
Everything does, usually, turn out to be okay. Mom says this to me all the time now that her fear doesn’t swallow her whole, often when I feel like the world won’t do what I say. “You know everything always works out,” she says. “It always ends up okay.” She’s right: no real tragedy has occurred, and our family is otherwise quite fortunate. Death has always been an inevitability, but never one that came before we could prepare for it.
But I know something will come. Something always does. It came for Mom when it took her parents. It came when she lost touch with her brother while they were in their fifties, an unexplained but severe estrangement. It came for Papa when his father died in his sleep. It came for him when his mother started to lose her mind and would disrobe in his brother’s living room. It came again when she died. It will come for me, in one way or another, taking my parents, or my brother, or my niece, or, more pressingly, Hamhock.
For now, our age difference is a cute oddity, a funny thing about our relationship that we make light of. But he takes blood pressure medication and will likely die before I turn sixty. I’m staving off this fear. I don’t want to play with it right now. “I’m healthier than you,” he’ll remind me when I worry about his death. “Besides, when it’s time to die, it’s time.” This is of flimsy comfort: unknown forces do not give a shit if your boyfriend is technically in great shape, they will kill him regardless. Sometimes when he’s sleeping, I pull on his hair to make sure it’s still strong, poke his face to see if he’ll swat at me, if he still has his reflexes. Then I can relax. But whatever it is, it will come, and if I can’t prevent it, at least I can stay home where it’s safe, where I know it’s safe, where it’s as safe as I can possibly make it.
I let go of my grudge two days after my parents came back from Cuba. I told Hamhock they were fine, that he was right, he’s always right. My blood pressure dipped and I got my appetite back. I asked him to rub my back. He shook his head and laughed while I crawled into his lap. “Of course they’re fine,” he said. “I mean, what exactly were you expecting?”
Papa
You act like I did nothing for you like you were raised by wolves.
Scaachi
When’s my birthday?
Papa
I don’t need to answer that.
Size Me Up
Among the many unfair stereotypes lodged against women—small hands, delicate fingers, weak arms, poisonous knees—is the belief that we all love shopping. There is nothing all women like, except maybe television shows where other women scream at each other or have long discussions promoting the demise of th
e modern man so that we can all live in some utopian future where we can procreate on our own and can finally stop pretending that any of us appreciate having the thin, eerily soft skin of a testicle in our mouths. But shopping is a strange thing to attribute to a specific gender. What about it could be so intrinsically satisfying?
I don’t like shopping. In movies that depict a futuristic dystopia, people tend to wear uniforms in a single colour, usually a metallic onesie with a high neck and gender-neutral panelling in the front. I am fine with this. I look great in silver and gold.
Shopping reveals the id in all of us. At blowout sales, I am ready to cold-cock other women also trying on size 10 work-appropriate cocktail dresses that hide their shame (upper arms) while promoting their glory (elegant pinkies and/or pillow-butt). In the changing room, attempting to shove your misshapen body into the size you think you should be rather than the size you are usually leads to some form of weeping while screaming, “IT’S FINE, I’LL JUST WEAR A BAG OF FLOUR AROUND MY BODY UNTIL I DEHYDRATE ENTIRELY AND CAN DIE IN PEACE.” Opening your closet to find that you hate every item of clothing you have ever bought is a specific circle of hell: hanger after hanger of poly-cotton blend T-shirts, all with thick layers of deodorant crusted on the armpits, every skirt ironed so poorly it’s on the verge of unravelling if you swivel too fast in it, your shoes just leather hunks you force your bunions into.
But despite this hatred of shopping, I have faith in clothing, in its ability to transform you into something or someone better. At our cores, we are all swirling masses of infectious disease, pulsating orbs of pus, moist tubes filled with piss and shit. But maybe if we put on a nice suit or one of those giant statement necklaces that suggest we have more money than we do, someone else will think us clean enough to touch, to go to dinner with, to greet without flinching, to introduce to their parents.
That is why we go shopping. To touch even the tip of our humanity.
—
Around the age of ten, I gained a significant amount of weight, the kind that family members stop referring to as “cute” or “baby weight” and start referencing with a heavy sigh. There was, in reality, nothing wrong with my weight, but I was too young and too insecure (a lethal combination) to know that. So I did what I thought I should: I hid my rapidly developing body. I started wearing B.U.M. Equipment sweatpants and long-sleeved heat-locking tops—both items were perhaps utilitarian in the winter, but tended to turn my person into a walking, sweating radiator by June. Shopping was my mother’s game. She would return from stores that sold clothes exclusively for hikers with a wagonful of wool socks and dungarees for her puberty-stricken daughter. Nothing I owned fit anymore, and I didn’t trust that buying the right clothes could make me feel better about the way my hips had widened or my arms had softened or my neck now had ridges running across it as if I were an old tree and these were my rings.
At the time, I claimed my style was some kind of feminist protest: “I don’t need to look like every other girl. Why should I have to dress up when guys can wear whatever they want?” I listened to Avril Lavigne and recited the lyrics as if they were my own thoughts; I watched CNN because I didn’t want to be a frivolous teen; I had crushes on adult men like Jon Stewart and Rahm Emanuel and hot dads at the mall with salt-and-pepper hair and Palm Pilots. But in truth, I just didn’t know if I was allowed to look like a “cute girl” if my body was bigger than the other girls I knew, if my skin was darker, if I was more sullen than sugar. I hid in muted drapery hoping no one would notice or, better yet, they would assume I was just a very tough, genderless sphere.
This crumbled by the time I was eleven: a well-meaning woman at my mother’s Jenny Craig meeting told her what a precious son she had. I was wearing a baseball cap with the Coca-Cola logo emblazoned on the front, a red puffy vest, and grey sweatpants. It was July. It was embarrassing to be mistaken for a boy. Not a girl with masculine tendencies, not a girl rejecting traditional gender roles, but a boy. I was being defined by my clothing instead of transformed by it. This was the same year I discovered Lord of the Rings weenie Orlando Bloom, a crush that would last twenty-four months and spawn more than one fan club. (My brother was the only member, and only by force.) Boys don’t like girls in promotional hats, and I wanted boys to like me. I started growing my hair out, and asked my mom to take me shopping. I wanted to dress like a girl, and not just a pretty girl but a hot girl, that poor definition of whatever makes a woman worth looking at, worth touching. At least, from a teenage boy’s perspective. Clothes, the right clothes, could make me—even me!—hot.
Unfortunately, my tastes differed drastically from my mother’s. My interests were swaying towards T-shirts with hilarious and racy sayings paired with elastic-waist-banded jeans. I wanted to try on belly tops and white belts with big silver bolts! My mom suggested matching stretchy pants and long-sleeved tops with watercolour wolves standing near the reflection of the moon in a calm river, T-shirts with little frogs posed on 3D lily pads, flowing Indian tunics that I could tell were clearly not “English” clothes, as we called them, ones in jewel tones and gold stitching that screamed, “MY MOTHER IS AN IMMIGRANT, WE ONLY EAT OFF METAL PLATES.” She’d hold them up and say, “They look so nice!” and I’d say, “They’re itchy!” and she’d say, “How?” and I’d furiously rub the sequins against my skin until I flashed red bumps and then say, “SEE?”
A particular fight between my mother and me broke out in the women’s aisle at Walmart the summer before I started middle school, when I found a royal blue shirt with “IF IT WEREN’T FOR BOYS, I WOULDN’T EVEN GO TO SCHOOL” scrawled across the front in harsh yellow. This was a completely false statement for me to support: I wrote extra-credit English essays, joined the school paper, and wept for weeks when my grade-six yearbook failed to print my “Future Goals” next to my school photo, worried that everyone would think I was a purposeless hack. I was afraid of the boys who went to my school, all of whom did not like me and were prone to calling me a faggot. But I felt that if I got this shirt, I could transform myself at my new school. I would be cool and elusive and one of those types people refer to as “chill.” What does that even mean? I still have no idea, but I wanted it, and even now, as a tense, uncomfortable adult, I forevermore aim to be “chill.”
I had the whole scene planned out: I would walk into school wearing that shirt, along with a set of earrings from Claire’s, the ones shaped like lightning bolts to really bring out the yellow in the shirt. I’d pair it with my floor-length patchwork denim skirt with a little Union Jack on the pocket—I did not know the flag’s country of origin, but it’s not like there was a class I could take at school to teach me junk like flags or stuff. I would encircle my eyes with thick black liner, all the way around, elevating myself from mousy girl to sex-raccoon. Graham, the boy I had the hots for, would really see me for the first time. Not as the girl he once tackled in flag football, but as the woman he once tackled in flag football. I would pull my glasses off and the transformation would be complete. Who is this girl? everyone would ask. It’s me, I’d say. The crowd would gasp in amazement and I would have a million friends and be very thin and rich and filled with an embarrassment of sexual energy for a thirteen-year-old.
While I was concocting this elaborate fantasy in Walmart, my mom was explaining to me why she wouldn’t be buying the shirt. “That’s inappropriate,” she whispered, as if the words themselves were sinful. My mother had a tendency to slip into outrage and shock as a first reaction to anything, and the lower her voice dropped, the more she was disappointed in me. I could barely hear her. “It’s not even long enough to cover your tummy!” she said, pulling me towards a row of long-sleeved T-shirts that said “Glam!” in different colours.
We settled on a short-sleeved number with glittery navy vinyl lettering that proclaimed “I’m not perfect, but I’m so close it scares me!” Even though I loved the shirt (so clever, so quietly smart, so, dare I say, elegantly subversive), I raged at my mom for weeks. She claimed
that shirts like the royal blue one were intended for women like my twenty-year-old cousin and not for pudgy middle-schoolers. But what twenty-year-old is shopping in the girls’ section at Walmart, Mother? It got worse a few days after classes started, when my arch-nemesis, Stephanie, wore the shirt I’d wanted, getting an obscene amount of negative male attention. I stomped all the way home that afternoon. That was supposed to be my negative male attention.
This thinking—finding an outfit that I believe will revolutionize my very existence—is a repeated one of failure throughout my life. There was the pair of faux-leather red peep-toe pumps in 2006, the high-waisted oatmeal-coloured wide-legged trousers of 2008, the black-sequined bolero of 2009, the skin-tight cerise knock-off Hervé Léger “this New Year’s Eve is gonna be amaaaaaziiiiiing” bandage dress of 2011 that I still own and pull out from my closet now and then to remind myself of what I cannot be. I still remember my favourite outfit from the tenth grade: a mint-green V-neck lace top, dark-wash boot-cut jeans, and black-and-teal-butterfly Mary Jane kitten heels. I wore that outfit for every major occasion: when I wanted Drew to ask me out (he did not), when I wanted to ace a math exam (I did not), when I wanted to be noticed by an attractive guest speaker (I was not). Despite this piss-poor batting average, I felt a renewed sense of potential every time I put it on. Today, something good has to happen.