The Caftan
Meiko Ko
I’m clearing out my closet. These clothes are all going to the dumpster. I won’t be bringing them to the second-hand shop because the elevator in my building is broken and I live too high up to take the stairs. What a waste, as I might get good money for this peacoat. It was worn only once and the color is still peach bright. The pair of dungarees too, completely new, the denim blue and strong.
I’m sorting and putting them into a trash bag. There are years here and I’m sweating. The clothes are dusty and I sneeze. My closet is not particularly big, but I’m surprised by the amount of clothes stashed there in disarray: skirts (the pencil, the A-line, the knife-pleated, the yoke-waist), blouses (high neck, square neck, cowl neck ...…), dresses, pinafores, halter tops, pants, jeans, culottes, capris, hoodies, parkas, cardigans, anoraks, housecoats, trench coats, windbreakers, hosieries, leotards, chemise.
You guys are too much, I say. How did you get in there? I don’t remember hanging them here, or days out shopping. They look like they belong to someone else or to a couple or a family fighting for space. I’ve been using a small section for my daily wear, two tiers of shelves at the bottom. In the drawer below, I store my socks and underwear.
I pull out a pair of boxer briefs and hold it up against the window’s light. It’s Vichy-check, dark blue squares and white, the waistband elastic. Did I wear that? Why would I wear men’s underwear? It’s XL size, too large for me. I rack my brains trying to recall when I’ve last seen it. My bed is small. I don’t remember a man sleeping in it. Maybe I bought it by mistake.
I chuck it into the trash and dive back into my closet. I emerge with a roll of white cloth. It’s square, the material rough, the edges fraying. Definitely not a scarf. No one would wrap this rough thing around their necks. I check the label and it has the regular laundry symbols—the washtub, triangle, square, iron, circle—and it says,
Care: Knock solids into toilet
store in dry pail
cold machine soak/cold rinse
tumble dry low or line dry
An hour later I realize it’s a diaper. I’m at a loss. I don’t have a baby, I’ve never babysat. Years ago I used to be fat. People often mistook me as pregnant. They asked, how many months? A waiter in a ramen shop went as far as to study the shape of my stomach and said, I bet it’s a boy. I went along with the lie, nodding, and continued to eat there.
* * *
I keep going through the hanging clothes. I pull out a dress and a moth flutters out. I’ve never liked the smell of mothballs and figured I’d take my chances. The moth isn’t big, half an inch, wings a gold brown. This dress is a caftan. Off-white with maroon paisley prints, teardrop shapes repeating through the fabric. The batwing sleeves flow down to the elbow. I remember buying this dress. The office I worked at was having a party that year themed “Beach,” and the women should feel free to wear “bikinis or swimsuits.” For the men, “swim trunks or briefs.” I was a clerk and my boss thought we’d been too serious, in his words, “stuffy and uptight” with our suits and shirts and leather shoes. It was time to live it up.
I remember joining a Pilates program months before the party. I’d lost weight since the days when strangers that I’d meet congratulated me for my “pregnancy” and I’d stopped eating ramen, but an unsightly belly hung around my waist. Each day I tightened it with high-waisted tummy undies. The Pilates program was conveniently near my office, but after levitating for hours, stretching and swimming on mats, legs circling and rolling like a ball, I wasn’t any closer to losing the leftover fat.
I remember imagining scenarios in which my colleagues point their fingers at my belly. What’s that, how did it get there, oof, I never thought you carry so much weight … I couldn’t blame them. My stomach wasn’t ordinary. It bulged out in two layers, upper and lower, with the upper containing my belly button that looked down at the ground rather than faced the front. The lower layer formed another valley of loose, wrinkly meat. My body looked like it had three pairs of breasts. How could I wear a bikini? How could anyone not ask about my stomach?
Fortunately, my arms and legs were normal. They did not reveal the secret about my belly. And my waist was still a waist, not a model’s hourglass, but I wasn’t egg-shaped, just the flaps obscenely hanging. I could hide a pen in there. I once hid an important office key. I don’t know what was locked behind the key, I was only its keeper. My boss told me under no conditions should anyone else have it. I tried the drawers and the safe in his office but nothing opened. He was on a vacation for a week and praised me for my discretion when he returned.
I’d thought long and hard about what to wear to the party. It’d be at a beach far from the office, an hour’s train ride south, a place I’d never been. Eventually I settled for a caftan. I didn’t think everyone would be wearing bikinis or swim trunks. Some colleagues might be like me, their bodies in flux or sagging, or maybe even badly tattooed or scarred. I went to several shops and finally found the perfect caftan. I put it on and the silk flowed like cool water. The batwing sleeves made me feel like a moth. The material is silk and diaphanous, and I’d decided to wear my bikini underneath.
The beach day arrived. My boss said I was the best dressed. But I was wrong about people hiding their bodies. Everyone except me was bare-chested or bikinied, their bronze skin glimmering with suntan oil. The styles and colors of swimwear range from vivid orange to egg yolk yellow, emerald monokini or racerback pink, bandeau in leopard prints or hot shorts in kingfisher blue. The men were less colorful. Albert wore the outstanding flamingo trunks. The entire office crew, usually stern and somber from their faces to their gray and black suits, went mad on the beach.
There were squealing and shrieking, chasing and volleyball tossing, beers, balloons, barbecue. I remember the sun was setting when Dee suggested we do the vote. One winner for the women and one for the men. Who had on the best bikini and trunks? We’d sit in a circle to appraise the one up for voting, who’d pose in the middle of the ring. Dee would be passing paper slips and two Kleenex boxes marked WOMEN and MEN. Write down the name with the sexiest swimwear!
I blanched. They were all heading to the circle. I was eating a T-bone steak, pretending it was irresistible, delicious. Come on, Lynn said, it’s starting. I prayed the sun would set, but it was summer bright, seven p.m. bright, and daylight would last another hour. I told Lynn, in a minute, it’s my heartburn, it’s acting up. She set down her plastic cup of beer and raced to the circle. I went to the Portaloo a short distance away. It was unexpectedly clean and had a sink and a soap dispenser. Inwardly I cursed Dee for the great idea, I cursed my boss for the beach and bikini theme. I lifted up my caftan and looked at my monstrous double layers of drooping belly, the button watching the ground. Then someone knocked on the wall of the Portaloo.
Who’s in there? This loo has no toilet paper. Can you pass some? the voice said. It was Alan, my boss. In all the time I’d known him I’d never let him in on what I was thinking. Neither did I measure my words with a rule and let them out like traps. Nor did I butter or sugar coat what I say, or say yes when I meant no, or never say no. Between yes and no is a tree I climb up to do my thinking, with a vista of a house. Alan’s in there, pacing past the windows or going up the stairs, talking to his dog or to himself, and he never leaves the house.
There’s a louver window up there, he said. I unrolled the toilet paper, stepped up on the toilet and slipped the sheets through the gaps. I washed my hands and went out. Alan was soon out. He was bare-chested, in khaki shorts, his cheeks flushed carmine, and he said, oh it’s you. I thought it was Melanie. I could have sworn she’s in the Portaloo. Are you ready? Everyone’s at the circle. I wouldn’t be able to escape this one, I thought. Running off would be weird. We walked towards the ring of people, the sounds of whooping and whistling as Diana did an over-the-shoulder pose, bowed, and bounced back into the ring.
I didn’t know where the minutes went or who I voted for. Someone passed a pen and I could only think of the one I hid in my belly months ago. I think I wrote a C and left it like that, the alphabet sitting alone, exposed, nameless, on the post-it-sized note. Then my turn came like the equity files I had to do in the office. I was still wearing the caftan with the teardrops of paisleys. What a beautiful dress! someone shouted. I told myself it was going to be fine. It’d be only a few minutes. No one would see a thing. The belly was just loose meat, it didn’t affect my thinking or my productivity, my appetite or my workouts, and my salary had remained the same for three years. Even if they did see my disfiguration, so what? Nothing changes in the universe if anyone has a weird stomach hanging off them.
The clapping carried me into the middle of the circle. I remember giving the exact smile I had whenever we finished a team project, work well done and claps on the back. I peeled off my caftan and stood before my colleagues, breathing in and out like the Pilates teacher had instructed. I was wearing a white bikini underneath. But the clapping, whooping, whistling that’d sounded so enthusiastic, just people goofing around having fun, sizzled off. I heard someone say, what’s that? It was Lynn. She was pointing at my belly. Then Dee asked the same question. Soon, half the circle had their fingers raised, all trying to figure out what the two layers of meat on my waist were, and someone asked, are they breasts, and someone else said, crouching nearer and bending low, wait, is that your belly button?
No, no, uh, yes, I said. It’s just saggy. I’ll fix it. My cheeks were burning but I grabbed my layers of belly to face the people. When I went home that night I did the same thing in front of the mirror, and it looked like I had a face buried in the middle of my body. The face of an 80-year-old man sitting right between my breasts and my pelvic area. I don’t think my colleagues knew how it was to live like me. To have to wear the thick, uncomfortable, body-sculpting panties every day. They forgot about the voting. Their eyes never left my stomach, and no one looked at my bikini, a balconette with ribbons on the sides. Their eyes feasted till Alan burst out laughing. Everyone guffawed. I returned to my place in the circle, clutching the caftan. No one voted for me.
* * *
After that, I remember working there felt wrong, exposed. All the clothes I wore—suits, jackets, pencil skirts, shirt dresses—felt transparent, like I was only wearing the caftan and the bikini. There was nowhere to hide, behind my clothes or in the cubicle. Alan’s eyes would inadvertently and inevitably drift down to my stomach, and my own eyes would flip up to the ceiling and wait for his beach memories and chuckles to fade, and return to the work at hand. Those on my team never stopped reminding me of my bizarre layers of meat. At lunch Dee mock-stabbed herself with a fork, squeezing at her own belly and fetching up an invisible piece of meat to her mouth. Lynn jabbed her fingers into my waist each time she passed by, in the office hallways or photocopy machines, How’s the tire, how’s the old man? she’d say. Is he all right? She seemed genuinely concerned.
Albert and King, the ones who wore the flamingo trunks and the tight Speedo briefs at the beach, caught me alone in the elevator once, both rehashing that day, King (yes, that’s his actual name) lifting his shirt ends to remind me of the moment I took off the caftan, whistling. But the surprise really came from Melanie. She’d taken a picture of me without my knowledge. Some weeks later, when I’d hoped that life in the office had gone back to normal, the afternoons quiet with only the sounds of keyboard clacking, I opened my equity file and saw a picture of myself grabbing my belly and pointing it at the crowd. She’d circled an area and blown it up, directing with a red arrow to an enlarged image of my belly on the side. The toothless old man looked like he was sucking on a straw. His eyes were two crescents shut to the world, his face the rough texture and wrinkles of a dried prune.
Soon, Diana, Teresa, Jordan were at my cubicle. Can you not be so obscene? We just had lunch! We can’t work seeing pictures like this! Dee, Lynn, and Alan had opened their files too, and they couldn’t stop laughing. Melanie, when I confronted her, said, But it’s a moment worth preserving!
I grew fearful of opening the equity files, any binder file. It became like a full-length mirror, the three white patches of my bikini staining the silvery plane like mist. I knew my days there were over. I had no idea what to do, where to go, but I walked into Alan’s office one Monday morning and turned in my resignation. Aww, don’t be such a spoilsport, he said. You’ve livened up the office. But I understand if you have to go. You have an old man to take care of.
I have myself to take care of, I said. I hurried out of the building, said good-bye to no one.
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