by Scaachi Koul
Nearly a decade after that outfit stopped being a staple in my wardrobe, I yet again fell into the trap of believing cloth could be revolutionary. Walking through Toronto’s financial district, I passed a clothing chain known for simple skirts, blouses, blazers, and a terrible roll-on perfume that burned my neck. It was also the second (and last) retail job I ever had, when I was nineteen and living in my cousin Angie’s basement beside her husband’s table saw, which he used to make her hand-carved wizard wands. I was at least twenty years younger than the clientele that came into the store, I hardly made enough money to buy the $90 cocktail-casual dresses on the racks, and I managed to be twenty minutes late for every shift. I wasn’t fired, per se, but when I left my section of the store to reapply my $4.50 lipstick and a drunk man managed to swipe $800 of merchandise from the store without being detected, I nobly offered not to return for my next shift.
But that was years ago, and I felt a twinge of self-satisfaction in going back as a customer. So much of my life had changed since I had worked there: I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I had my own apartment, I had paid my taxes at least once, I bought shoes in real stores instead of waiting for my older cousins to tire of theirs. The store was little more than a reminder of how far I had progressed in a few short years. Help me with these buttons, shopgirl, I imagined saying, for I am an important woman. I own a microwave.
That said, the real reason I entered the store was far more practical than ego. It was the dead of summer, some thirty-five degrees Celsius, and I am a soggy woman even in the most forgiving conditions. Standing outside the store, I was already sweating in new and interesting parts of my body, and if I didn’t get into a building colder than the surface of the moon, my makeup would start bleeding and I’d look like a wax figurine inside a clay oven.
I walked in, relishing the blast of cool air, and immediately saw Aaliyah. She had trained me when I worked there but was now the store manager and still as tall, stately, and glamorous as I remembered her being when I was nineteen. Best of all: she didn’t seem to recognize me.
I rummaged through sales rack after sales rack, tossing aside shirts that I knew would cling in the wrong places, colours that brought out the sallow tint of my complexion, and the one-piece jumpers because, inexplicably, adult women were wearing jumpers in droves, and I never figured out how all of them managed to pee while wearing them. I was older, more mature, I had learned some important lessons.
But like most of my shopping trips, I grew frustrated quickly. There was little in my size, and the few things that were listed as an 8 or a 10 were really cut for someone who was a 4 or a 6. Just the thought of forcing my wide hips through trousers or my boulder shoulders through a T-shirt felt like more pain than it was worth.
And yet, on my way out, I found it: the thing. A black-and-white fall skirt that I knew would look perfect on me. It was soft wool, but in a slimming cut, and hit just below the knee. It would be perfect for work, or for going out after work, or maybe I would wear it with a big floppy hat and a trench coat at Parisian cafés, waiting for a parcel from a mysterious stranger. (I am Carmen Sandiego in this fantasy, like I am in most of my non-sexual, non-food-related fantasies.) I held my breath, turning it over to see the price and the size: it was on sale, and it was a size 8.
It’s happening, I thought. The item, the big item that changes the way I dress and thereby changes the way I am as a person. It’s not just a skirt; it’s the entry fee for a better existence. I would exude a new confidence, it would smooth out the wrinkles in my body, it would hide all the ways I have disappointed and failed people in the past. While wearing it, women would approach me and beg me to tell them where I got it. I would act coy and wink to the camera (in this version of the fantasy, I am perpetually in a commercial; don’t worry about it) and say something like, “I’ll never tell” or “Oh, just something I picked up.” People would see me on the street, shoving fistfuls of Teddy Grahams into my mouth on the way to the podiatrist, and they would think, “Boy, that lady sure does have her life together.”
That’s a lot of pressure for something on sale for $24.99.
Aaliyah led me to a changing room, complimenting me on my choice. I locked the door and looked at myself in the mirror, taking a deep breath. This could be it. I peeled the shorts off my sweating skin and stepped into the skirt. It slid up my body, resting on my waist, and I pulled the zipper up towards the lord. It didn’t just fit. No, it did more than that. It melded to my body, beautifully, as if it had been cut specifically for me, to mask and smooth and elevate. I would be better in this skirt. The dream was happening! I had the all-knowing smile, my hair was suddenly more luxurious, I felt thinner, more acceptable. I was a better woman. Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, “Is that Scaachi?” and I’d say, “YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH” and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth. (I have not thought this fantasy through; just let me have this.)
Conflated imaginings aside, I did look pretty good. I walked out of the changing room to vamp in front of people paid to tell me I looked great. The skirt was a little warm for the summer, but who cares, I’d wear it when fall came. I did one more spin in front of Aaliyah and her co-workers before feeling a thick droplet of sweat fall from my brow onto my eyelash. I was overheating in my perfect skirt, so I headed back into the changing room.
My hands were sweating too much to grasp the zipper in the back. I wrapped a T-shirt around my fingers to get a grip, but it wouldn’t budge. I sucked in, gathering the fabric, and tried to tug the zipper down. No luck. I struggled like this for a good fifteen minutes, the changing room lights feeling more like an interrogation lamp, sweat pooling in the dimples above my ass, my hair matted to my face.
I had fallen into this trap before, so many times. Years before this, I went through a phase of buying clothes only from vintage stores: beautiful dresses and skirts that required real care and attention that I wasn’t willing to give to another person, never mind a chiffon gown. They had no elastic, bled colour wherever you sat, with zippers that rusted and fell apart like rotting teeth. My favourite purchase was a cocktail dress: it was a simple blood-red shift that came with a layer that slipped on top, a long peplum type that made my waist look small. I wore it too often, too many places. Paired with irrational brown heels, I wore it to school with my hair done and red lipstick, as if at any moment, someone would rush into my JRN 121 class and say, “Help, I am a very wealthy lawyer and I need an extremely well-dressed young woman to join me on my yacht for a party that might have some influence in making me partner. Also, I am looking for a wife to politely ignore but who may spend my money freely and maintain multiple quiet affairs with my handsome co-workers. You look ironed. Are you interested?”
But I didn’t know how to care for the dress. It had been made in the ’50s for a woman an inch or two thinner than me, so I was already testing the tensile strength of the seams. I hand-washed it in cold water—isn’t that what you do with delicate items?—the dress bleeding out its red colour, fading it slightly. But it also shrank, somehow, now only reaching halfway down my thigh. It was too much for school (oh, now it’s too much) but fine for any other occasion. Yes, it was so tight on my ass and hips that I couldn’t sit down in it, but that just meant I’d wear it to run errands. When my cell phone broke and I needed to get it repaired, I wore my favourite dress and my brown heels to the mall. While the rep explained the damage to my phone (“Unfortunately, we can’t replace any phones that might have been dropped in liquids or foods, and I can see some marinara in the headphone jack”), I felt the dress tear right between my butt cheeks. There was no seam there, but certainly some considerable tension.
I pressed the flap of the top layer of the dress down over the new hole and tried to scurry out. Before I left, the rep stopped me to say, “By the way, I really like your outfit.” I kept the dress just in case my body one day became drastically different and I could maybe fit in it again. After, of cour
se, repairing the six-inch-long tear in the back.
But back in the changing room, I was reaching peak anxiety. I tried pulling the skirt over my head (alas, my waist is smaller than my shoulders, a problem I did not consider until I almost got my arms stuck in the skirt as well), then considered tearing the zipper and telling Aaliyah that it broke while I was trying to disrobe.
But I didn’t want to ruin such a good item. Maybe it was salvageable. Maybe I could still be the woman I felt I could be. My only options were to ask Aaliyah to help me out of the skirt, or to wear it out of the store, making me the only idiot sweating in a wool skirt in thirty-degree heat who wasn’t also handing out pamphlets that read “Have You Made Peace With Your God?” Sometimes zippers move when you rub a candle on them. I could run outside and yell, “DOES ANYONE HAVE A CANDLE? IT’S AN EMERGENCY.” That would be fine. I considered a secret third option in that changing room, one where I would type out a quick suicide note on my phone and then use a fabric belt to fashion a trendy noose.
Whatever the decision, I needed to make it fast, since soon my whole body would be covered in my salty, sticky shame-sweat.
I left the changing room and tapped Aaliyah on the shoulder, hoping she wouldn’t notice my entire face was glistening.
“That really does look great on you,” she said, giving me that wide smile I had seen her give to so many customers before.
“I’m stuck,” I said.
I turned around, my rear towards her, and she tried the zipper herself. She tried bunching the fabric to get a better grip. “Suck in,” she said, pulling more and more of the skirt towards her. She called over her co-worker to help. She, too, couldn’t manage. “It’s so weird,” she said. “It’s like the skirt is caught on nothing.” No, nothing except my own ego and humiliation. I flew too close to the sun with this skirt. I thought it would transform my life. I thought it would make me better.
A third employee came over and tried to use a pin to pull the zipper’s teeth apart. She spent a full minute just shaking my hips, as if she was trying to will me to a smaller size so the skirt would slide off. (Admittedly, a minute may not sound like a long time, but ask a loved one to shake the lower half of your body vigorously for an entire minute, and then ponder how long those sixty seconds feel like.)
The employees turned to each other and discussed what to do next. “We could rip out the zipper and then sew it back on?” “Do you think she can pull it over her head, or, no, no, her shoulders are too wide.” “What if we just cut her out?”
That last one was the ultimate nightmare. If you are a woman reading this, you know this to be true: the possibility of getting stuck in a garment at a store where the employees have to cut you out of it is the beginning of the end of your life. It’s like the saddest version of a C-section, where the baby is just a half-naked lady with no dignity.
“Yeah,” Aaliyah said to her cohorts. “Grab the scissors. We have to cut her out.” It was like listening to three surgeons decide you needed to be sliced in half, thinking you’re unconscious and can’t hear them.
Two women held the skirt to my hips, pressing me into the wall of the changing room hallway. I could see my reflection in the mirror, my face now drenched with sweat. From the outside, I looked like I was being hazed by a group of women far too old to be welcoming in new pledges. All I was focused on, however, was not exposing my entire lower half to whoever may have walked into the store during this ordeal. I said a silent goodbye to my beloved skirt, the garment that was supposed to change me but instead reminded me that, no, you are what you are, even if you remember to iron your clothes.
“Okay, hold still,” Aaliyah said. This was an intimate moment for us. Her face was closer to my butt than anyone’s had been in, oh, hours. We were like sisters now.
While the other two women flanked me and held the skirt up, Aaliyah pulled the fabric away from my body and started making small cuts. “I don’t want to cut you,” she said, but at that point, I welcomed any distraction from the sweat gathering on my back. Like tiny, resplendent pools of my greatest fear come to life.
The sound that’s made when one cuts a perfectly useful item of clothing is almost painful, especially when it’s one that you have fallen in love with. All those hems and seams and stitches destroyed so easily. It’s the same feeling, I imagine, that would come if you baked and iced a cake, only to drop it on the way to a birthday.
But the sound that’s made when someone, say, cuts an item of clothing they weren’t supposed to cut is criminal. It’s the dying scream of someone you love. It is the final whisper of your pride. It is the quietest slap in the face you will ever feel.
When she made her final cut, I turned to Aaliyah to thank her—maybe I would make a joke about how we had worked together, how I had let all that merchandise just walk out of the store and here I was, doing it again—but all the colour had drained from her face. She had sliced right through my underwear, leaving me exposed like either a confused surgery patient or a very physically confident crazy person.
It was an honest mistake on her part. I hope. I was wearing one of those 1999-esque whale tails that were popular among high school girls trying to attract boys with the forbidden fruit of tiny underwear. It wasn’t so much clothing as it was thickly woven black floss, hanging out inside the crevices of my garbage body.
Aaliyah wordlessly ushered me back into the changing room, then gave me the scissors, saying I could cut myself out further if I needed to. I tore the skirt right in half, looking at what was hanging off me in the mirror. One hip, wrapped in an elastic band like a still-raw roulade, the other naked except for a thick thread swinging, purposelessly, by my side. I started to get dressed, trying to see if I could tie my underwear back together or maybe cinch it with the hair elastic I had around my wrist. Instead, I opted to just stuff myself back into my denim shorts.
I handed Aaliyah the remains of the skirt and the scissors, apologizing for destroying a perfectly good item of clothing. “Oh, it’s okay,” she said, “it happens,” though she didn’t clarify to whom else it had ever happened. I bought that trendy noose belt to compensate. And then, of course, as I shuffled out of the store, I heard Aaliyah proclaim with great zeal, “Oh my god, I just remembered where I know her from!”
The nightmare was over, but I still had to sulk home in a heat wave, my clothes soaked from sweat, my underwear hanging on by a single thread. And if you have never experienced the sensation of your naked labia rubbing up against freshly washed denim as you manoeuvre through a subway car with broken air conditioning, you have had more than your fair share of luck in this life.
I returned home the way I always do, with no renewed outlook on life and no magic garment to change the way I am. I hung my new belt (still never worn) in my closet among all the other clothes that I had, at one point, bought in order to improve my life. All of them had failed me because clothes just can’t improve you. They can’t make you feel better about yourself for more than a few minutes, they can’t make you a better person than you are, because they’re all just things you bought at the mall, that you then ruin with pizza sauce stains, that you then wear to bed or use to polish jewellery. I still go through the same routine where I shop to save my soul instead of just to cover my ass, and it typically ends the same way. That maxi-dress from nine months ago didn’t cure me of hating the width of my hips. The earrings from two years ago don’t distract me from how I feel about my uneven hairline. And the skirt Aaliyah cut me out of would not have made me feel any better about how quickly sweat can puddle at the nape of my neck. I wonder, sometimes, if my mom had just bought me that shirt from Walmart, if I would have been saved all this nitpicking I do to my own body: maybe I would be kinder to my arms and my neck, maybe I wouldn’t worry about what people might be saying about my baby hair.
But probably not. There will be something else to make me feel bad, inching up towards all the things I currently feel bad about, and no crop top made by small, underpaid, foreign h
ands can cure me—or you. Clothes are ephemeral: they fall apart in the wash, you lose them at a friend’s house, they rip and crumble and go out of style. You’ll forget about them and buy new ones and then start the cycle again. But your insecurities, the ones that make you go hunting for something to make you feel better, to love yourself more, to give you a renewed sense of self or greater esprit—don’t you even worry. Those will last you a lifetime.
Papa
Do not forget to pack a towel in your suitcase in case.
Scaachi
In case of what?
Papa
It is India, the land of Sadhus, snake charmers, multizillioniars, charlatans, extremely happy destitute so be prepared for anything. So pack your towel.
Fair and Lovely
Like farts and the incorrect retellings of classic literature, racism is a lot cuter when it comes out of a little girl. When we first told my niece, Raisin, that we would all be going to India for a wedding, she scrunched her face up and said she didn’t want to go. “Everyone there is poooooor,” she told us. “And Indians smell bad.” She hadn’t yet connected that, to begin with, half of her family is Indian, and more importantly, she is half Indian. She was only five at the time, young enough that everyone just rolled their eyes at her and knew she would be swayed by her first fresh electric-orange jalebi.
But it bothered me. Almost a year earlier, she’d said something else about how she didn’t like Indians. It was one of only a few times I’ve yelled at her, and she went quiet and her eyes were glassy. “Sorry,” she said, hugging me around the waist. “Don’t be mad at me, Boo.” She calls me Boo, the truncation of Bua, or paternal aunt, and I call her Raisin because her skin wasn’t always so porcelain white. She came out purple, wrinkled, furious—like so many, regardless of race.