I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.

Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.

But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head fumed in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.

“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.

“Come out into the yard,” I say.

Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.

Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.

I used to think she hated Maggie too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away, like dimwits, at just the moment we seemed about to understand.

Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask my why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.

I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs anymore. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?”

She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.

When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her fault-finding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.

When she comes I will meet … but there they are!

Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here, ” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.

It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”

Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.

“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.

“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and snaps off picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead.

Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.

“Well,” I say. “Dee.”

“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”

“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.

“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.”

“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.

“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.

“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.

“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”

“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.

“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?”

He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.

“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.

“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call you.”

“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.

“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”

Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask.

“You must belong to those beef cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd, the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.

Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.” They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.

We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.

“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.

“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”

“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.

Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.

“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”

“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”

When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.

After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.

“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?”

I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.

“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.”

“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.”

“That’ll make them last better,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them.

“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.

“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.

“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.”

She gasped like a bee had stung her.

“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were old-fashioned, out of style.

“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”

“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”

“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”

“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.

Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.

“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”

I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.

When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.

“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.

But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.

“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.

“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.

“Your heritage,” she said, And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”

She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and chin.

Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.

Alice Walker is an American fiction writer and a poet. Everyday Use was first published in 1973 as part of the short story collection In Love and Trouble.

Forgive me, dressing gown! My friend in idle bliss,
Comrade of leisure, a witness to my secret thoughts!
With you I knew a life monotonous
But peaceful, where the noise and glitter of the world
Could never touch my dreaming mind.
Upon the field of fads and fashion
Where Tsar Caprice enslaves his thralls,
What callow student of the art of living
Avoided falsehood? In salons a serf,
I am a king in my own place,
No need to follow others’ lead
Like some poor slave indentured to a villain,
In servitude beleaguered day and night,
Who tastes of paradise when he is free from bonds;
So I, removing worldly livery
Together with the yoke of vanity,
Revived when I put on my dressing gown,
And reconciled once again with my abandoned home.
When I was with you, vanity avoided me,
And dreams and reveries caressed me.
By my hearthside, where the crimson flames
Did flicker bright in evening hours,
Reflection, silver-tongued friend,
Enlivened my deep languor’s dream.
Awakening shades of bygone days
That crowded round in gloom transparent;
Or when on wings of dreams I journeyed
Through mists of times as yet unknown,
The distant drawing near, I lived a far off life
And, blending artifice with truth
I painted castles in the air.
Just as my body in your pliant folds
Escaped the tailor’s tyranny,
So did my mind enjoy free range
In company of memory and hope.
In those sweet days of happy inspiration,
When verses flowed unceasing from my pen
And rhyme, that foe of simple pleasure,
That whip-like scourge, indulged me;
How often, rising out of Morpheus’s arms,
I went straight to my desk, where tenderly the Muse
Awaited me with an epistle or a fairy tale,
A fancy whispered to me yesterday.
My household garb was to her liking:
Her greeting, flouting social codes,
Was warm, she favoured my informal attitude.
My verses flowed, quite easily and freely,
My writing flew, a light-winged jest,
My smile untouched by labour’s traces.
How pitiful the Muses’ hapless suitor
A stranger to the dressing gown’s delights.
A devotee of fashion, dressed up like a doll
And flushed with decorous excitement,
Comes to his study as if entering a ball.
His colours rouge and powder-white;
In aromatic ink he dips
His quill, and drafts a madrigal.
Some mincing grace in her boudoir
May favour him with artificial smile
For demonstrating in his verse
His florid style and his muse well-coiffed;
But I prefer to follow that immortal slob
Anacreon, that friend of Bacchus and of beauty,
Who drank and sang while in his dressing gown;
The Muses’ favourite, by the graces softened
Disposed to gaiety alone,
He brushed with immortality in play.
I’ve no pretense to equal him in glory,
But still in indolence with him I can compete.
Like him, I love insouciant charms,
Like him, I love my idle, peaceful dreams.
But soon this quiet life will disappear,
And worries, cares will close in all around,
And you, my dressing gown! my dearest friend,
Forgive me! Your disloyal friend will leave you.
I’ll push my way among the servants of the crown,
Succumb to this alluring bait.
What will await me on this path, where mist
Prevents us separating truth from lies?
Where can a blind and callow man
Wind up? Where does this journey end?
How can I go before the tawdry throne
Of hired goddesses who toss
Their gifts from urns capricious
Among the crowds of worshipers
That swarm before them swinging censers?
A stranger to pretense, coercion’s foe,
From youth a connoisseur of quiet joys,
I cannot follow her commands.
Compared with all the practiced grace
Of craftsmen trained in artifice,
My every step betrays my awkwardness.
I’m still a novice in the pliant arts:
To be at once all things, and nothing,
To bend my neck with ready smile
Into the golden but yet heavy yoke;
Upon this field where enemy ranks
Are occupied in ceaseless battle,
Where enmity’s triumphant, I will leave
A mark, perhaps, of useless bravery,
Mayhap a trace of shameful failure.
O dressing gown, forever welcoming!
Accept me, then, in your embrace
In you I shall again find pleasure.
Accept me with the dreams and idleness
That used to crown my spring with flowers.
Bring back the treasure of my former bliss;
Grant me the joy alone with you,
My passions calmed, my soul at peace,
Unblushing in the presence of my private judge
To find my former self within myself.
Rekindle in me, by coercion cooled,
My passion for the muses’ service,
And then my genius, free of bonds,
Will waken sleeping inspiration.
O, let me live my former life again,
And, born anew in magic ecstasies
Of pleasant dreams, let me forget
All I have seen in wakefulness.

21 September, 1819, Ostafevo

Prince Piotr Viazemsky (1792-1878) was a prominent player during the golden age of Russian poetry, and a close friend of Pushkin. Dressing Gown Farewell was written at the Viazemsky family seat in Ostafevo, near Moscow.

Time is always running out, and I need to alleviate the angst rising from my throat, chest, stomach.

I bought a robe especially for this because it felt necessary at the time. The robe is called ‘Venice’ – which I thought was a good sign as the belt from Balzac’s robe was claimed to be Venetian gold. The online shopping description had said, ‘Living up to the legendary charm of its name, this is the Rolls Royce of all terry robes. Outside of the robe is lavish tufted pile, while the inside is soft and thirsty terry fabric.’ I’d pulled it straight out of the box at the post office and put it on straightaway. I’d expected some kind of ecstasy but the terrycloth only weighed heavily upon my body.

And – right at this moment, I’m blaming it for my inability to think clearly, and (in Hemingway’s voice) to write good, honest sentences.

I write to chase an idea – a fleeting moment to approach some kind of authenticity. It is an exasperation to feel alive. Often the source of pursuit is nameless and formless, more visceral than it is intellectual, more about the experience itself than its fulfilment. The pursuit is felt as an intensity that arises from the psyche and extends throughout the physical body. I clothe myself in narrative and write myself into the scene. I need to resolve the story, and this robe is going to help.

Lately my body has been breaking out in a rash. This almost always happens when I’m anxious, like when I’m late for something. I’ve been wearing this ankle-length robe for the past week to hide the rash (did I have a premonition of this rash when I bought the robe?). In my semi-delirious writing state I’ve been referring to it as ‘my’ Balzac robe, ‘my’ Balzac rash. The rash grows and travels from one part of my body to another; it’s hard to catch where and when it stops and ends, and at which point it mutates. When the rash travels up past my neck I just hide in my room. This gives me lots of quiet time to write and scratch at the rash. Staying for days on end in my room without any human contact draws me deep into other worlds – often dangerously but ultimately necessary. These are places where anything is possible, its limits bounded only by one’s own.

The sustained periods of self-absorption lend another dimension to the state of writing, transforms loneliness into solitude, empty pages into narrative. Thoughts become entwined with misperceptions, memories bent out of shape. No matter how hard I try it is simply impossible to represent thoughts and memories accurately. Something always mutates in the passage from image to word and vice versa. Instead of forcing links between them, I trace their trajectories. It’s my way of meandering the corridors of thoughts and spinning my own webs.

The robe covers my rash, lets me assume the role of other bodies, grants me access to extraordinary lives beyond these ordinary walls. In the theatre of my imagination, countless bodies are clothed in violent contortions. Lately they wear robes embroidered with gold and red thread, elaborate Baroque filigrees growing and pulsating across the entire width and length of the back. At times it looks like a giant gold beetle, at other times a Rorschach creature viewed through a kaleidoscope. Ruby clusters grow from points on the body – shoulders, elbows knees, simultaneously burgeoning and disintegrating. Around the waist they wear thick gold cords dripping with crushed rubies, the red thick like blood – heavy, glistening. Slick oils simultaneously hardening and melting. Molten lava. Faceless bodies. Or rather, whole heads covered in latex masks melting into the surface of skin and hair, a sticky composite where everything is pushed up or pressed against one another – a gelatinous force eating away at the faces. The robed bodies act out their parts via gestures and mutations in appearance. Are they trying to get somewhere or are they just going? Robed bodies with twisted limbs and weak hearts, kaleidoscopic visions at the edge of consciousness. I try to chase them down, pull back their robes and scratch at them. Shameful desires and broken memories, gaping holes and torn seams – narratives emerge from these hidden places like scent on a collar.

Here’s a memory that I return to again and again. He came and sat next to me on the curb early one morning. Californian high summer heat, the concrete sizzling on my skin. He was covered in a full-length bathrobe. ‘I started writing a new story today,’ he quipped. He rolled back the terrycloth sleeves. On his arms he had inscribed several lines with a thick needle, letters and symbols in an indecipherable arrangement. He would code all of his imagination this way: in a language that was not an end in itself, but full of departure points for imaginary worlds. He was Alice through a kaleidoscopic looking glass, a way of seeing through multiple dimensions all at once.

‘What’s the story about?’

He said, ‘It’s about these people we meet all the time here in this wretched place, you know, the ones who just want to be somebody else. Aspiring actors, directors and models in their waitressing and retail jobs, desperately wanting to be transformed. Not all that different from us, I suppose.’

I squinted at him, trying to make out whether he was real.

‘So they wear all these different robes, and the robes transform them into different people, or – you know – ideas of other lives. And after a while they begin to lose touch of who they really are. The robes start to mutate and grow, attaching themselves to the bodies, becoming the bodies. And soon enough these people start living through the robes, speaking in voices that are not entirely their own. They build identities out of the robes and construct histories out of the fragments of distorted memory and convoluted desires.’

He stressed, ‘It’s the robes – they clothe and take over the bodies, empty shells wanting to be filled with potential. They inscribe the bodies with meaning. They are access points to other worlds, other possibilities of becoming. Don’t you see – the robes write them into being.’

He asked me to look closer. His entire body was covered in inscriptions – glistening, raw, dripping with inky fluids the colours of ruby and gold, wandering over his back, chest, arms, thighs, neck, face. Mysterious shapes and symbols – seemingly alive – traversing and crawling on the surface of his skin, forming hardened clusters around the bends and joints, liquid gold articulating into filigrees. The coloured inks were growing and oozing out of incisions on his skin, covering almost the entirety of his body. It was hard to make out where his body finishes and where the inscriptions begin.

His inscribed skin was the robe – the fabric of his self, and his body – the shell – is the very medium through which the inscriptions could form and exude meaning. The inscriptions were written in code, as with all language I suppose, and it was up to me to use them, to access the other places.

In my daydreams I sometimes still see him, passing over the other bodies with his robe floating about his stride – silently, filled with repressed narratives, trapped in my memory. It is difficult trying to represent him in words – all of him, all of these bodies; once they are recalled, they mutate – they lose some essential part that could have only existed at that one singular point in time. You can repeat them, remember them, reproduce them – but they are no longer what they were, or what you think they were.

Extraordinary narratives arise from the hidden corners, the walls between the actual and non-actual become translucent, and the deeper I peer – through the doors, into the robes, at the surface of the bodies – the farther my thoughts travel and the more I uncover.

The city, the robe, the bodies – like language they ripple out to many tangents and dimensions the more you try to locate and fix them in place. You are perhaps reminded of an event or somebody from the past, or it might have been something someone had said, then you think it might have been a flicker of a dream instead, or perhaps it had all been imagined and that imagination had reminded you of some story you read. The deeper you go the more you lose yourself within the kaleidoscope of memory, imagination, and dream – all expanding in your present experience.

I am writing all this from my bed, within the four bare walls of a suburban bedroom. I am in my terrycloth bathrobe, sunken within its folds, and – coaxed by daydream – find myself in extraordinary circumstances.

Winnie Ha Mitford is a writer and doctor of philosophy at RMIT University, Melbourne.

‘I don’t care anything about goin’ to that Fourth of July picnic, ‘Liz’beth.’

‘I wouldn’t say anything more about it, if I was you, Em’ly. I’d get ready an’ go.’

‘I don’t really feel able to go, ‘Liz’beth.’

‘I’d like to know why you ain’t able.’

‘It seems to me as if the fire-crackers an’ the tootin’ on those horns would drive me crazy; an’ Matilda Jennings says they’re goin’ to have a cannon down there, an’ fire it off every half-hour. I don’t feel as if I could stan’ it. You know my nerves ain’t very strong, ‘Liz’beth.’

Elizabeth Babcock uplifted her long, delicate nose with its transparent nostrils, and sniffed. Apparently her sister’s perverseness had an unacceptable odour to her. ‘I wouldn’t talk so if I was you, Em’ly. Of course you’re goin’. It’s your turn to, an’ you know it. I went to meetin’ last Sabbath. You just put on that dress an’ go.’

Emily eyed her sister. She tried not to look pleased. ‘I know you went to meetin’ last,’ said she, hesitatingly; ‘but — a Fourth of July picnic is — a little more of — a rarity.’ She fairly jumped, her sister confronted her with such sudden vigour.

‘Rarity! Well, I hope a Fourth of July picnic ain’t quite such a treat to me that I’d ruther go to it than meetin’! I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself speakin’ so, Em’ly Babcock.’

Emily, a moment before delicately alert and nervous like her sister, shrank limply in her limp black muslin. ‘I — didn’t think how it sounded, ‘Liz’beth.’

‘Well, I should say you’d better think. It don’t sound very becomin’ for a woman of your age, an’ professin’ what you do. Now you’d better go an’ get out that dress, an’ rip the velvet off, an’ sew the lace on. There won’t be any too much time. They’ll start early in the mornin’. I’ll stir up a cake for you to carry, when I get tea.’

‘Don’t you s’pose I could get along without a cake?’ Emily ventured, tremulously.

‘Well, I shouldn’t think you’d want to go, an’ be beholden to other folks for your eatin’; I shouldn’t.’

‘I shouldn’t want anything to eat.’

‘I guess if you go, you’re goin’ like other folks. I ain’t goin’ to have Matilda Jennings peekin’ an’ pryin’ an’ tellin’ things, if I know it. You’d better get out that dress.’

‘Well,’ said Emily, with a long sigh of remorseful satisfaction. She arose, showing a height that would have approached the majestic had it not been so wavering. The sisters were about the same height, but Elizabeth usually impressed people as being the taller. She carried herself with so much decision that she seemed to keep every inch of her stature firm and taut, old woman although she was.

‘Let’s see that dress a minute,’ she said, when Emily returned. She wiped her spectacles, set them firmly, and began examining the hem of the dress, holding it close to her eyes. ‘You’re gettin’ of it all tagged out,’ she declared, presently. ‘I thought you was. I thought I see some ravellin’s hangin’ the other day when I had it on. It’s jest because you don’t stan’ up straight. It ain’t any longer for you than it is for me, if you didn’t go all bent over so. There ain’t any need of it.’

Emily oscillated wearily over her sister and the dress. ‘I ain’t very strong in my back, an’ you know I’ve got a weakness in my stomach that henders me from standin’ up as straight as you do,’ she rejoined, rallying herself for a feeble defence.

‘You can stan’ up jest as well as I can, if you’re a mind to.’

‘I’ll rip that velvet off now, if you’ll let me have the dress, ‘Liz’beth.’

Elizabeth passed over the dress, handling it gingerly. ‘Mind you don’t cut it rippin’ of it off,’ said she.

Emily sat down, and the dress lay in shiny black billows over her lap. The dress was black silk, and had been in its day very soft and heavy; even now there was considerable wear left in it. The waist and over-skirt were trimmed with black velvet ribbon. Emily ripped off the velvet; then she sewed on some old-fashioned, straight-edged black lace full of little embroidered sprigs. The sisters sat in their parlor at the right of the front door. The room was very warm, for there were two west windows, and a hot afternoon sun was beating upon them. Out in front of the house was a piazza, with a cool uneven brick floor, and a thick lilac growth across the western end. The sisters might have sat there and been comfortable, but they would not.

‘Set right out in the face an’ eyes of all the neighbours!’ they would have exclaimed with dismay had the idea been suggested. There was about these old women and all their belongings a certain gentle and deprecatory reticence. One felt it immediately upon entering their house, or indeed upon coming in sight of it. There were never any heads at the windows; the blinds were usually closed. Once in a while a passer-by might see an old woman, well shielded by shawl and scooping sun-bonnet, start up like a timid spirit in the yard, and softly disappear through a crack in the front door. Out in the front yard Emily had a little bed of flowers — of balsams and nasturtiums and portulacas; she tended them with furtive glances toward the road. Elizabeth came out in the early morning to sweep the brick floor of the piazza, and the front door was left ajar for a hurried flitting should any one appear.

This excessive shyness and secrecy had almost the aspect of guilt, but no more guileless and upright persons could have been imagined than these two old women. They had over their parlour windows full, softly-falling, old muslin curtains, and they looped them back to leave bare the smallest possible space of glass. The parlour chairs retreated close to the walls, the polish of the parlour table lit up a dim corner. There were very few ornaments in sight; the walls were full of closets and little cupboards, and in them all superfluities were tucked away to protect them from dust and prying eyes. Never a door in the house stood open, every bureau drawer was squarely shut. A whole family of skeletons might have been well hidden in these guarded recesses; but skeletons there were none, except, perhaps, a little innocent bone or two of old-womanly pride and sensitiveness.

The Babcock sisters guarded nothing more jealously than the privacy of their meals. The neighbours considered that there was a decided reason for this. ‘The Babcock girls have so little to eat that they’re ashamed to let folks see it,’ people said. It was certain that the old women regarded intrusion at their meals as an insult, but it was doubtful if they would not have done so had their table been set out with all the luxuries of the season instead of scanty bread and butter and no sauce. No sauce for tea was regarded as very poor living by the village women.

To-night the Babcocks had tea very soon after the lace was sewed on the dress. They always had tea early. They were in the midst of it when the front-door opened, and a voice was heard calling out in the hall.

The sisters cast a dismayed and indignant look at each other; they both arose; but the door flew open, and their little square tea-table, with its green-and-white china pot of weak tea, its plate of bread and little glass dish of butter, its two china cups, and thin silver teaspoons, was displayed to view.

‘My!’ cried the visitor, with a little backward shuffle. ‘I do hope you’ll scuse me! I didn’t know you was eatin’ supper. I wouldn’t ha’ come in for the world if I’d known. I’ll go right out; it wa’n’t anything pertickler, anyhow.’ All the time her sharp and comprehensive gaze was on the tea-table. She counted the slices of bread, she measured the butter, as she talked. The sisters stepped forward with dignity.

‘Come into the other room,’ said Elizabeth; and the visitor, still protesting, with her backward eyes upon the tea-table, gave way before her.

But her eyes lighted upon something in the parlour more eagerly than they had upon that frugal and exclusive table. The sisters glanced at each other in dismay. The black silk dress lay over a chair. The caller, who was their neighbour Matilda Jennings, edged toward it as she talked. ‘I thought I’d jest run over an’ see if you wa’n’t goin’ to the picnic to-morrow,’ she was saying. Then she clutched the dress and diverged. ‘Oh, you’ve been fixin’ your dress!’ she said to Emily, with innocent insinuation. Insinuation did not sit well upon Matilda Jennings, none of her bodily lines were adapted to it, and the pretence was quite evident. She was short and stout, with a hard, sallow rotundity of cheek, her small black eyes were bright-pointed under fleshy brows.

‘Yes, I have,’ replied Emily, with a scared glance at Elizabeth.

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, stepping firmly into the subject, and confronting Matilda with prim and resolute blue eyes. ‘She has been fixin’ of it. The lace was ripped off, an’ she had to mend it.’

‘It’s pretty lace, ain’t it? I had some of the same kind on a mantilla once when I was a girl. This makes me think of it. The sprigs in mine was set a little closer. Let me see, ‘Liz’beth, your black silk dress is trimmed with velvet, ain’t it?’

Elizabeth surveyed her calmly. ‘Yes; I’ve always worn black velvet on it,’ said she.

Emily sighed faintly. She had feared that Elizabeth could not answer desirably and be truthful.

‘Let me see,’ continued Matilda, ‘how was that velvet put on your waist?’

‘It was put on peaked.’

‘In one peak or two?’

‘One.’

‘Now I wonder if it would be too much trouble for you jest to let me see it a minute. I’ve been thinkin’ of fixin’ over my old alpaca a little, an’ I’ve got a piece of black velvet ribbon I’ve steamed over, an’ it looks pretty good. I thought mebbe I could put it on like yours.’

Matilda Jennings, in her chocolate calico, stood as relentlessly as any executioner before the Babcock sisters. They, slim and delicate and pale in their flabby black muslins, leaned toward each other, then Elizabeth straightened herself. ‘Some time when it’s convenient I’d jest as soon show it as not,’ said she.

‘Well, I’d be much obleeged to you if you would,’ returned Matilda. Her manner was a trifle overawed, but there was a sharper gleam in her eyes. Pretty soon she went home, and ate her solitary and substantial supper of bread and butter, cold potatoes, and pork and beans. Matilda Jennings was as poor as the Babcocks. She had never, like them, known better days. She had never possessed any fine old muslins nor black silks in her life, but she had always eaten more.

The Babcocks had always delicately and unobtrusively felt themselves above her. There had been in their lives a faint savour of gentility and aristocracy. Their father had been college-educated and a doctor. Matilda’s antecedents had been humble, even in this humble community. She had come of wood-sawyers and garden-labourers. In their youth, when they had gone to school and played together, they had always realised their height above Matilda, and even old age and poverty and a certain friendliness could not do away with it.

The Babcocks owned their house and a tiny sum in the bank, upon the interest of which they lived. Nobody knew how much it was, nobody would ever know while they lived. They might have had more if they would have sold or mortgaged their house, but they would have died first. They starved daintily and patiently on their little income. They mended their old muslins and Thibets, and wore one dress between them for best, taking turns in going out.

It seemed inconsistent, but the sisters were very fond of society, and their reserve did not interfere with their pleasure in the simple village outings. They were more at ease abroad than at home, perhaps because there were not present so many doors which could be opened into their secrecy. But they had an arbitrary conviction that their claims to respect and consideration would be forever forfeited should they appear on state occasions in anything but black silk. To their notions of etiquette, black silk was as sacred a necessity as feathers at the English court. They could not go abroad and feel any self-respect in those flimsy muslins and rusty woollens, which were very flimsy and rusty. The old persons in the village could hardly remember when the Babcocks had a new dress. The dainty care with which they had made those tender old fabrics endure so long was wonderful. They held up their skirts primly when they walked; they kept their pointed elbows clear of chairs and tables. The black silk in particular was taken off the minute its wearer entered her own house. It was shaken softly, folded, and laid away in a linen sheet.

Emily was dressed in it on the Fourth of July morning when Matilda Jennings called for her. Matilda came in her voluminous old alpaca, with her tin lunch-pail on her arm. She looked at Emily in the black silk, and her countenance changed. ‘My! you ain’t goin’ to wear that black silk trailin’ round in the woods, are you?’ said she.

‘I guess she won’t trail around much,’ spoke up Elizabeth. ‘She’s got to go lookin’ decent.’

Matilda’s poor old alpaca had many a threadbare streak and mended slit in its rusty folds, the elbows were patched, it was hardly respectable. But she gave the skirt a defiant switch, and jerked the patched elbows. ‘Well, I allers believed in goin’ dressed suitable for the occasion,’ said she, sturdily, and as if that was her special picnic costume out of a large wardrobe. However, her bravado was not deeply seated, all day long she manœuvred to keep her patches and darns out of sight, she arranged the skirt nervously every time she changed her position, she held her elbows close to her sides, and she made many little flings at Emily’s black silk.

The festivities were nearly over, the dinner had been eaten, Matilda had devoured with relish her brown-bread and cheese and cold pork, and Emily had nibbled daintily at her sweet-cake, and glanced with inward loathing at her neighbour’s grosser fare. The speeches by the local celebrities were delivered, the cannon had been fired every half-hour, the sun was getting low in the west, and a golden mist was rising among the ferny undergrowth in the grove. ‘It’s gettin’ damp; I can see it risin’,’ said Emily, who was rheumatic; ‘I guess we’d better walk ’round a little, an’ then go home.’

‘Well,’ replied Matilda, ‘I’d jest as soon. You’d better hold up your dress.’

The two old women adjusted themselves stiffly upon their feet, and began ranging the grove, stepping warily over the slippery pine-needles. The woods were full of merry calls; the green distances fluttered with light draperies. Every little while came the sharp bang of a fire-cracker, the crash of cannon, or the melancholy hoot of a fish-horn. Now and then blue gunpowder smoke curled up with the golden steam from the dewy ground. Emily was near-sighted; she moved on with innocently peering eyes, her long neck craned forward. Matilda had been taking the lead, but she suddenly stepped aside. Emily walked on unsuspectingly, holding up her precious black silk. There was a quick puff of smoke, a leap of flame, a volley of vicious little reports, and poor Emily Babcock danced as a martyr at her fiery trial might have done; her gentle dignity completely deserted her. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ she shrieked.

Matilda Jennings pushed forward; by that time Emily was standing, pale and quivering, on a little heap of ashes. ‘You stepped into a nest of fire-crackers,’ said Matilda; ‘a boy jest run; I saw him. What made you stan’ there in ’em? Why didn’t you get out?’

‘I — couldn’t,’ gasped Emily; she could hardly speak.

‘Well, I guess it ain’t done much harm; them boys ought to be prosecuted. You don’t feel as if you was burned anywhere, do you, Em’ly?’

‘No — I guess not.’

‘Seems to me your dress — Jest let me look at your dress, Em’ly. My! ain’t that a wicked shame! Jest look at all them holes, right in the flouncin’, where it ‘ll show!’

It was too true. The flounce that garnished the bottom of the black silk was scorched in a number of places. Emily looked at it and felt faint. ‘I must go right home,’ she moaned. ‘Oh, dear!’

‘Mebbe you can darn it, if you’re real pertickler about it,’ said Matilda, with an uneasy air.

Emily said nothing; she went home. Her dress switched the dust off the wayside weeds, but she paid no attention to it; she walked so fast that Matilda could hardly keep up with her. When she reached her own gate she swung it swiftly to before Matilda’s face, then she fled into the house.

Elizabeth came to the parlour door with a letter in her hand. She cried out, when she saw her sister’s face, ‘What is the matter, Em’ly, for pity sakes?’

‘You can’t never go out again, ‘Liz’beth; you can’t! you can’t!’

‘Why can’t I go out, I’d like to know? What do you mean, Em’ly Babcock?’

‘You can’t, you never can again. I stepped into some fire-crackers, an’ I burned some great holes right in the flouncin’. You can’t never wear it without folks knowin’. Matilda Jennings will tell. Oh, ‘Liz’beth, what will you do?’

‘Do?’ said Elizabeth. ‘Well, I hope I ain’t so set on goin’ out at my time of life as all that comes to. Let’s see it. H’m, I can mend that.’

‘No, you can’t. Matilda would see it if you did. Oh, dear! oh, dear!’ Emily dropped into a corner and put her slim hands over her face.

‘Do stop actin’ so,’ said her sister. ‘I’ve jest had a letter, an’ Aunt ‘Liz’beth is dead.’

After a little Emily looked up. ‘When did she die?’ she asked, in a despairing voice.

‘Last week.’

‘Did they ask us to the funeral?’

‘Of course they did; it was last Friday, at two o’clock in the afternoon. They knew the letter couldn’t get to us till after the funeral; but of course they’d ask us.’

‘What did they say the matter was?’

‘Old age, I guess, as much as anything. Aunt ‘Liz’beth was a good deal over eighty.’

Emily sat reflectively; she seemed to be listening while her sister related more at length the contents of the letter. Suddenly she interrupted. ”Liz’beth.’

‘Well?’

‘I was thinkin’, ‘Liz’beth — you know those crape veils we wore when mother died?’

‘Well, what of ’em?’

‘I — don’t see why — you couldn’t — make a flounce of those veils, an’ put on this dress when you wore it; then she wouldn’t know.’

‘I’d like to know what I’d wear a crape flounce for?’

‘Why, mournin’ for Aunt ‘Liz’beth.’

‘Em’ly Babcock, what sense would there be in my wearin’ mournin’ when you didn’t?’

‘You was named for her, an’ it’s a very diff’rent thing. You can jest tell folks that you was named for your aunt that jest died, an’ you felt as if you ought to wear a little crape on your best dress.’

‘It’ll be an awful job to put on a different flounce every time we wear it.’

‘I’ll do it; I’m perfectly willin’ to do it. Oh, ‘Liz’beth, I shall die if you ever go out again an’ wear that dress.’

‘For pity sakes, don’t, Em’ly! I’ll get out those veils after supper an’ look at ’em.’

The next Sunday Elizabeth wore the black silk garnished with a crape flounce to church. Matilda Jennings walked home with her, and eyed the new trimming sharply. ‘Got a new flounce, ain’t you?’ said she, finally.

‘I had word last week that my aunt ‘Liz’beth Taylor was dead, an’ I thought it wa’n’t anything more’n fittin’ that I should put on a little crape,’ replied Elizabeth, with dignity.

‘Has Em’ly put on mournin’ too?’

‘Em’ly ain’t any call to. She wa’n’t named after her, as I was, an’ she never saw her but once, when she was a little girl. It ain’t more’n ten year since I saw her. She lived out West. I didn’t feel as if Em’ly had any call to wear crape.’

Matilda said no more, but there was unquelled suspicion in her eye as they parted at the Babcock gate.

The next week a trunk full of Aunt Elizabeth Taylor’s clothes arrived from the West. Her daughter had sent them. There was in the trunk a goodly store of old woman’s finery, two black silks among the other gowns. Aunt Elizabeth had been a dressy old lady, although she died in her eighties. It was a great surprise to the sisters. They had never dreamed of such a thing. They palpitated with awe and delight as they took out the treasures. Emily clutched Elizabeth, the thin hand closing around the thin arm.

”Liz’beth!’

‘What is it?’

‘We — won’t say — anything about this to anybody. We’ll jest go together to meetin’ next Sabbath, an’ wear these black silks, an’ let Matilda Jennings see.’

Elizabeth looked at Emily. A gleam came into her dim blue eyes; she tightened her thin lips. ‘Well, we will,’ said she.

The following Sunday the sisters wore the black silks to church. During the week they appeared together at a sewing meeting, then at church again. The wonder and curiosity were certainly not confined to Matilda Jennings. The eccentricity which the Babcock sisters displayed in not going into society together had long been a favourite topic in the town. There had been a great deal of speculation over it. Now that they had appeared together three consecutive times, there was much talk.

On the Monday following the second Sunday Matilda Jennings went down to the Babcock house. Her cape-bonnet was on one-sided, but it was firmly tied. She opened the door softly, when her old muscles were straining forward to jerk the latch. She sat gently down in the proffered chair, and displayed quite openly a worn place over the knees in her calico gown.

‘We had a pleasant Sabbath yesterday, didn’t we?’ said she.

‘Real pleasant,’ assented the sisters.

‘I thought we had a good discourse.’

The Babcocks assented again.

‘I heerd a good many say they thought it was a good discourse,’ repeated Matilda, like an emphatic chorus. Then she suddenly leaned forward, and her face, in the depths of her awry bonnet, twisted into a benevolent smile. ‘I was real glad to see you out together,’ she whispered, with meaning emphasis.

The sisters smiled stiffly.

Matilda paused for a moment; she drew herself back, as if to gather strength for a thrust; she stopped smiling. ‘I was glad to see you out together, for I thought it was too bad the way folks was talkin’,’ she said.

Elizabeth looked at her. ‘How were they talkin’?’

‘Well, I don’ know as there’s any harm in my tellin’ you. I’ve been thinkin’ mebbe I ought to for some time. It’s been round consider’ble lately that you an’ Em’ly didn’t get along well, an’ that was the reason you didn’t go out more together. I told ’em I hadn’t no idea ’twas so, though, of course, I couldn’t really tell. I was real glad to see you out together, ’cause there’s never any knowin’ how folks do get along, an’ I was real glad to see you’d settled it if there had been any trouble.’

‘There ain’t been any trouble.’

‘Well, I’m glad if there ain’t been any, an’ if there has, I’m glad to see it settled, an’ I know other folks will be too.’

Elizabeth stood up. ‘If you want to know the reason why we haven’t been out together, I’ll tell you,’ said she. ‘You’ve been tryin’ to find out things every way you could, an’ now I’ll tell you. You’ve drove me to it. We had just one decent dress between us, an’ Em’ly an’ me took turns wearin’ it, an’ Em’ly used to wear lace on it, an’ I used to rip off the lace an’ sew on black velvet when I wore it, so folks shouldn’t know it was the same dress. Em’ly an’ me never had a word in our lives, an’ it’s a wicked lie for folks to say we have.’

Emily was softly weeping in her handkerchief; there was not a tear in Elizabeth’s eyes; there were bright spots on her cheeks, and her slim height overhung Matilda Jennings imposingly.

‘My aunt ‘Liz’beth, that I was named for, died two or three weeks ago,’ she continued, ‘an’ they sent us a trunk full of her clothes, an’ there was two decent dresses among ’em, an’ that’s the reason why Em’ly an’ me have been out together sence. Now, Matilda Jennings, you have found out the whole story, an’ I hope you’re satisfied.’

Now that the detective instinct and the craving inquisitiveness which were so strong in this old woman were satisfied, she should have been more jubilant than she was. She had suspected what nobody else in town had suspected; she had verified her suspicion, and discovered what the secrecy and pride of the sisters had concealed from the whole village, still she looked uneasy and subdued. ‘I sha’n’t tell anybody,’ said she.

‘You can tell nobody you’re a mind to.’

‘I sha’n’t tell nobody.’ Matilda Jennings arose; she had passed the parlour door, when she faced about. ‘I s’pose I kinder begretched you that black silk,’ said she, ‘or I shouldn’t have cared so much about findin’ out. I never had a black silk myself, nor any of my folks that I ever heard of. I ain’t got nothin’ decent to wear anyway.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘We sha’n’t lay up anything,’ said Elizabeth then, and Emily sobbed responsively. Matilda passed on, and opened the outer door. Elizabeth whispered to her sister, and Emily nodded, eagerly. ‘You tell her,’ said she.

‘Matilda,’ called Elizabeth. Matilda looked back. ‘I was jest goin’ to say that, if you wouldn’t resent it, it got burned some, but we mended it nice, that you was perfectly welcome to that — black silk. Em’ly an’ me don’t really need it, and we’d be glad to have you have it.’

There were tears in Matilda Jennings’s black eyes, but she held them unwinkingly. ‘Thank ye,’ she said, in a gruff voice, and stepped along over the piazza, down the steps. She reached Emily’s flower garden. The peppery sweetness of the nasturtiums came up in her face; it was quite early in the day, and the portulacas were still out in a splendid field of crimson and yellow. Matilda turned about, her broad foot just cleared a yellow portulaca which had straggled into the path, but she did not notice it. The homely old figure pushed past the flowers and into the house again. She stood before Elizabeth and Emily. ‘Look here,’ said she, with a fine light struggling out of her coarse old face, ‘I want to tell you — I see them fire-crackers a-sizzlin’ before Em’ly stepped in ’em.’

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) began writing as a teenager to support her family and found success almost immediately. She continued writing throughout her life, and her children’s stories, poems, short stories and novels made her a prominent feminist author of the nineteenth century. A Gala Dress is taken from A New England Nun and Other Stories, published in 1891.

Katie lifted her chin towards the ceiling, then down and slightly to the right. She was puckering her lips unconsciously, as if she had the face of a juvederm-filled Beverly Hills housewife instead of that of an acne-prone twenty-seven-year-old girl. Realising her dysmorphia, she relaxed the tiny muscles around her lips and eyes, stared blankly at her reflection, and groaned. Without her mirror pout, she looked gaunt and lifeless, sad even. She edged her hips up to the sink, leaning her torso over the basin to examine her face under the fluorescent-toned light. Her eyelashes had clumped together on one side, an errant group of five to seven blackest black-coloured spikes twisted around one another like horny teenagers at a high school dance. Katie could never get her makeup right.

She wiped some stray mascara from her eyelid with a Q-TIP, revealing a trail of pink skin beneath the acid-green eyeshadow she had applied just moments earlier. The smudge of black and green on the white cotton tip reminded her of the bottle of wine she reluctantly purchased that day. The label was designed to look unpretentious, as if a child-like painting of a clown could make a thirty-dollar bottle of sour, alcoholic juice more palatable. Like the no-makeup-makeup of injectable-clad influencers, the biodynamic wine trend seemed to her to be anything but natural. It was just part of the consumerist, neoliberal move toward inconspicuous consumption, she thought, fuelled by some bullshit narrative around organic food and small-scale production. She had read somewhere that a lot of these small companies were actually operated by major landowners in Europe who paid immigrants slave wages to tend to their grapes. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, she thought, remembering a meme she saw earlier. We’re all just pawns of the system.

Katie struggled out of a black vintage high-waisted Vivienne Westwood skirt, cringing when she heard the sound of the zipper pop as she shimmied the silk-lined velvet garment past her fleshy hips. She wanted to wear something archival to impress Claudia, but her face was already showing her anxiety, and a tight skirt would only make it worse. Besides, no-one would even know it was Vivienne Westwood unless she told them, or if they examined the tiny orb etched into the button on the side of her waist. She tossed the skirt on her unmade bed, readjusted her amazon.com thong, and made her way back to the closet.

As she slid the sticky mirrored door to the right, she caught a glimpse of her suffocated torso. Two deep lines encircled her waist, echoing her resentment towards the fact that she was no longer a size zero. She yanked a Jean Paul Gaultier button-up from the back of her closet. It was the same hue as the bright yellow goo she watched get pumped out of the thighs of a doll-like woman on Bravo earlier that day. Katie tried to imagine what it would be like if the small pucker of fat above her kneecaps was her biggest insecurity. She buttoned the oversized garment across her chest, the space between the silk and her skin made her feel light — skinny like the girls she used to stalk on the internet, who taught her that the best way to hide an eating disorder was by wearing gigantic clothes. But by the time she made her way to the mirror the billowing blouse had turned on her. It, or rather she, had become blob-like, a hunk of yellow fat accentuated by bright green eyelids.

 ‘Fuck,’ Katie mumbled, making her way back to the bathroom mirror. She fumbled through a large silver bag filled with pencil shavings and tubes of sparkly lip gloss, retrieving a small, cotton round stained with the crumbs of a broken highlighter palette. She grabbed a bottle of makeup remover and dripped the cool liquid onto the dirty pad before rubbing it across her right eye. The green powder turned to mush, but the colour didn’t go away. A black and chartreuse stain encircled her socket; the discharge of a nuclear disaster. Katie could feel her contact lens sliding around as she scrubbed, the neon liquid seeping through the cracks of her eyelid. Green tears streamed down her cheeks. Goosebumps meets Jeffree Star cosmetics. Choose your own adventure.

Panicked, Katie reached for her foundation, pouring the pale liquid over the top of her hand until it rolled off the side of her thumb and into the sink. She dabbed her index finger into the fluid, wiping it around her yellow-stained crevices before attempting to pat it in like the influencers she watched on TikTok. As she worked the paint around her face, massaging the liquid into her parched skin, she noticed a series of red bumps clustered around her chin. They jutted out proudly from the layer of white cake, crusts of flakey skin surrounding them like freshly baked filo dough. She lifted a finger and considered what might happen if she took her nail to the dry pastry. She could bleed, she thought, but the bump would be gone, for a moment at least. Katie resisted the urge to pick. Maybe I just need a drink, she thought as she wandered toward the fridge. I’m sure Claudia won’t mind if I sample the bottle. 

She stood at the counter, mindlessly picking at the mounds on her chin in between sips. The juicy liquid felt cool and acidic on her tongue. She poured another glass, making sure to leave the bottle half-full. She sat down on the edge of her mattress, holding the cup of wine between her bare legs while she checked the stories on Instagram. There was a video of a hot girl wiggling around in front of a mirror hung above her bed, another of her friend’s new cat taking a shit in a potted houseplant, and a post from Claudia — a tasteful pan over a dinner table set with art deco plates, and a bouquet of black lilies and feathers and something that sparkled. She hadn’t realised but she was digging now, this time more methodically. Manicured nails lifted up the edges of fresh scabs, her padded fingertips tracing circles over her already-pocked face looking for rough, bumpy spots to grab onto. She tossed her phone on the bed and caught a glimpse of her caked up hand. The foundation had seeped into the creases of her skin, forming an ashy, dry landscape that reminded her of the desert back home. Her nails were crusted with blood.

Katie pulled out a pair of poufy Comme des Garçons shorts from the top of her closet. She had never worn them, partially because they had been too big for her, but mostly because her boyfriend said they made her look thick. She slid the soft shorts up her legs, the waist fit perfectly. Katie tucked in her chartreuse top, stepped into a pair of knee high boots, and floated over to the kitchen to grab the bottle of wine. If she wanted to make it in time for the dinner party she would have to work quickly. She ignored her caked up hands and the swollen raw mounds on her chin, and reached for the eyeshadow pallet. Yellow goes with purple she thought, as she swept a fluffy royal-toned brush across her eyelid. Eyeshadow in place, she completed her routine: black liquid eyeliner by Kat Von D on top of the eyes. Under eye concealer by Tarte under the eyes. Under eye concealer by Tarte on the chin. Translucent powder by Laura Mercier all over the face. Bronzing powder by Fenty on the cheeks. Pink orgasm blush by Nars on the cheeks. Highlighter palette by Anastasia Beverly Hills on the upper cheeks. Star tattoo stamp by Milk Makeup around the eyes. Rouge Cerise lip liner by Chanel around the lips. Rouge Cerise lipstick by Chanel on the lips.

A sewage-like flavour enveloped her mouth as she took a final swig from the bottle. A trickle of rancid, sparkling sediment had drained onto her tongue, her reflexes allowing it to dribble from her lips and down onto her pocked chin. Her bloody, makeup-covered fingers rushed to catch the sludge before it reached her blouse, but it was too late. Her makeup was ruined, and a pink splatter spread down the front of her shirt.

She’d have to change her clothes again.

Taylore Scarabelli is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on fashion, feminism and technology. She is fond of Ed Hardy and fist-size hoops.

IT’S FEBRUARY 18 1960. Jean Cocteau has just released his film ‘The Testament of Orpheus’. Mme Francine Weisweiller is in it, just a small part, but important nevertheless. Mme is not an actress but the aging poet’s best friend and she plays ‘la dame qui s’est trompée d’époque’ or, in translation, and I fear less smoothly, ‘the woman who found herself in the wrong decade’. Janine Janet, the creator of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s surreal window displays, is the costume designer, but Mme wears a trailing white dress by Balenciaga himself, which she paid for. Instructed by Cocteau to take his inspiration from Claude Monet and Sarah Bernhardt, Balenciaga produces exactly what suits Mme best and into the bargain doesn’t sully his reputation. Cocteau describes Mme’s appearance as a ‘live phantom of flesh and bone’.

Mme Weisweiller (née Worms, born in Brazil to a French Jewish family) is the daughter of money, and the wife of Alec Weisweiller, who keeps racehorses. Cocteau has been living at Santo Sospir, Mme’s Mediterranean holiday villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, since 1950 when they first met. She invited him to stay for a few days and he has been there for a decade. His serpentine doodles cover every wall in the house, like snail tracks. Cocteau has three years to live. He will leave in 1963, after a terrific row, and die before they have time to make up.

It’s 1960. Mme is making plans for her daughter Carole’s eighteenth birthday party. Janine Janet is to create magical unicorns decorated with silk rose petals and artificial flowers (which later pop up in the royal box at London’s Covent Garden – an early case of recycling). Mme has to decide what to wear. The dress she orders from Balenciaga, who dresses both, as is the wont in a France rich with sartorial heritage in a time and class when daughters still wanted to look like their mothers. It is as delicate as a shell; beribboned, chaste, and takes some liberties with historical dress.

Given that I have never met Mme, it would be presumptuous to guess what she thought when she commissioned it. The milkmaid fichu and slender skirt has a touch of the Marie Antoinette about it, with its tiny pink ribbon work roses, cream lace florets, delicate beadwork and matching buttons wrought by Lesage. In documentary evidence¹ I can see the fichu wraps snugly across Mme’s torso, like a shawl, and stands proud of her neck at the back. I can see that her fair hair is beautifully coiffed and that she wears a string of pearls as big as marbles, with a jewelled pendant that makes her neck seem very frail. The skirt poufs out a little around the waist, a trademark Balenciaga touch to conceal any slight swelling of the stomach. Her daughter hovers closely by her side, in a fuzz of white organza.

‘C’est Carole Weisweiller qui a eu le plus beau bal de la saison. Elle a fêté ses 18 ans dans un décor echanté, inspiré des thèmes de Jean Cocteau, sphinx, licornes, personnages magiques…’ writes Vogue.

It’s 2010. I observe Mme’s very dress, sprawled flat on a table before me. Let me make this as objective as I can. Its pale pink organza is still crisp, its delicate embroidery still fresh, its ribbon roses still pert but… It’s ruined. We have ways of knowing when a dress is worn – a little smoothness here, a few crinkles under the arms, a little stain or two. But never has a garment been so disfigured by a stain in my many years of searching for meaning in the name of fashion.

It seems unholy to dissect the dress without a surgeon present, but let me perform this autopsy alone. Undo the tiny hooks, the fused poppers, and lift to each side the fleshy flaps of the fichu. Here’s the heart of the dress – it’s a place only meant to be seen by Balenciaga’s finishers, and Mme’s maids. Its organs are pale and boneless. The interior is formed in limp pink silk, visible through the organza, and gives the dress its overall colour, like a cooked shrimp. The inner dress has tendril-like shoulder straps and is fastened with hooks and eyes at the bodice front – making my fingers fumble – and then with a waist belt of pink silk, also fastened with hooks and eyes. There are eight suspender attachments connected to the waistband, like squid.

Let us place the following in context – Mme is wealthy, always fashionably dressed, but not a slave to fashion. She dresses on her own terms. But what on earth was Balenciaga thinking of? He sculpted moulds for dresses and chiselled many a matronly form, he chose firm colours, not delicate floral patterns and darling buttons (although if you want to get technical, the same little embroidered motif turns up in the collection dresses of 1960). This is a Dioresque dress, for a spring fête. But Mme is such an important client that Balenciaga will do anything for her, even take instructions from Cocteau and even make a birthday dress.

I forget myself – this is an essay about magic, about stains, not a commentary on power. And that great dark stain didn’t just appear by itself, it arrived, from a height, and at an angle and with the speed of a stabbing (the dress still shrieks with disdain). If I were a forensic scientist I could mark exactly where the coffee cup (I jump to conclusions) was poised, exactly the tilt at which, once jogged, Mme’s hand lost control, for let’s solve the mystery of the stain with logic. The obvious explanation is that on June 24, 1960, someone at the birthday party walked backwards, alarmed by the unicorns, and knocked the porcelain coffee cup from her hand soaking the fine organza and sullying the perfection of the dress, the epitome of haute couture, forever.

Whatever happened, it was ruined, but not thrown away – perhaps for sentimental reasons. It was 1960, the year of the glorious Testament of Orpheus, its mysterious landscape peopled with fantastic bestiaries and magical persons, and it was the year of the birthday party. Later, after the row, but not because of it, the family gradually lost everything, the house, the collections of art. Forty-six years go by. The dress goes into an auction in London – we spotted it across the room – it wasn’t expensive – it was ruined.

The museum has it now, it’s been given an identity number to add to the terse labels lodged inside like calling cards (Balenciaga, 10 Avenue George V, Paris. ‘72814’ hand written on a tape secreted behind). What more can I tell you? It’s hung in a white metal cupboard, swathed, motionless, flattened and hemmed in by other Balenciaga dresses that abhor it. It’s in an airless and windowless room, at the heart of the museum, without flesh and bone to fill its body. Every time it moves location, it will be tracked like a criminal. It is a little lost, and the snail tracks of the stain get darker every day. Was it Cocteau that dirtied that dress?

Claire Wilcox is the Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and a Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion.

This article was originally published in Vestoj Issue Two, On Fashion and Magic.

1. By which I mean photographs by Robert Doisneau, Vogue Paris, October, 1960, pp. 142-5. ↩

Playing chicken on Mombasa road can be stressful. The road is full of trucks overtaking trucks, person cars following in their tails, and matatus overtaking them all. If you’re lucky, there’s a hard shoulder, or at least some flat gravel, onto which you can swerve when the oncoming vehicles start flashing their headlights. Once you’re through that stretch of the road, you reach the wilderness: Tsavo National Parks.

My travel companion, let’s call him Mr Honey Badger, had meticulously planned a route along the back roads to avoid the Mombasa road horror show. He thought we could do better than risking our lives. Thus, we found ourselves driving along a C-road with smooth tarmac and light traffic, and then through a smaller park, Amboseli, under a sky that was blue and sun that was white, past a green lake and pink flamingos, and zebras that were surprisingly clean.

By the time we reached Tsavo West it was already dark. Lava fields merged with the blackness of the night and tangled bush framed both sides of the road. We arrived at the lodge and soon made our way to the large, semi-open dining hall with tapestries hanging from the ceiling and a magnificent view over a watering hole and Chyulu Hills. Dressed for dinner, Mr Honey Badger and I sat down at the only candlelit table – we were the only guests – and took in the spotlighted view of the watering hole while eating vegan curry. All kinds of moths and beetles emerged from the darkness, buzzed around our table and nearly drowned in our wine. We rescued one after the other, while the wild animals stayed clear of the watering hole in front of us.

Mr Honey Badger and I slept late the next morning, got up, and put on clothes that were still fresh from the city. We decided to go for a drive. The blue mountains rose in front of us and we passed scattered bush that burst into technicolour green, giraffes with their heads in the Acacia crowns, and ostriches that gallivanted across the savanna. We soon learnt that the map was not to be trusted and had to turn back on more than one occasion as the road disappeared into a faint trail or pond of mud. Yet we got stuck. We were within mobile network coverage, and Mr Honey Badger called the lodge for rescue. Indeed, the white tablecloths and electric fences didn’t seem far. While waiting, we managed to collect enough dry sticks for traction and succeeded in getting ourselves out of the hole. Little did we know that this was the first hole of many that we were to encounter in the days to come.

On this second day our mood was still cheery, and we continued to wear our best behaviour like freshly pressed clothes. The next day’s stuck-in-the-mud situation got a bit dirtier. The cheeriness had already faded over breakfast as the kitchen staff repeatedly delivered the wrong order. Frustration and annoyance followed us into the car. Mr Honey Badger directed his anger at me and I looked for relief in the trees and the bush outside the window. Our mutual frustration and anger grew and swelled in the heat as the day progressed. We got stuck in the mud again. It engulfed the car like smooth porridge and nearly did the same with our feet. A few nearby construction workers came to our rescue and helpfully pulled us out with their car. We continued along the rocky, uneven road. Eventually we reached a river, only to realise there was no way to cross. We opened the windows to let in fresh air, but annoyance, frustration, and anger clung to our clothes like the red Tsavo dust.

Driving perhaps a little too fast, playing the music a little too loud, we got caught in a groove in the road. The car went up an adjacent ridge and rolled over: a dog ready for a belly scratch. We crawled out, a bit shaken, and investigated the damage. The windshield was cracked and the rear light was broken. Otherwise it simply lay there with its belly in the air. Fear overtook anger, compassion overtook fear. Under the blazing sun, we crawled back into the car and stretched out on the ceiling while waiting for help. With Mr Honey Badger’s arm around me, we stared at the upside-down seats of the car, giggling and imagining we were lying in a field gazing at the stars.

A crew from the lodge eventually turned up and took us back. Resting in our rooms, the wilderness started to encroach on us. Moths batted their heads against the windows and dead insects lined the edge of the terrace door. Our clothes and suitcases were full of dust, and the air swirled with insults. I could see a tortoise slowly making its way on the ground underneath the terrace. Apparently, a honey badger can chew through the shell of a tortoise. I can tell you it hurts.

Our replacement car arrived the next day. Mr Honey Badger took it for a test drive while I was still asleep. Before too long, he called me and said, ‘Wake up, get dressed, I spotted a pack of wild African dogs!’ I dragged my sleepy body out of bed, found some clean clothes, and we both delighted in the sight of a dozen or so of these rare, playful, curious dogs running along a landing strip and playing tug-of-war with a piece of black plastic. Later on, a guide told us that wild dogs often don’t kill their pray, they just eat them alive.

We decided to try being better towards one another. During another candlelit dinner with white tablecloth, soup spoons, wine glasses and beetles buzzing around our heads, we talked about ways in which we would try avoiding falling into the same holes. I hid behind laughter, he looked at me and said, ‘Well at least I’m trying.’

In the days that followed, we went for game drives and nearly fell off the map, nearly got lost in darkness, yet managed to stay on the road, caught the last glimmers of daylight. We saw lions snoozing by the roadside, a puff adder crawling across the road, a pair of ostriches racing alongside our car on the open savannah, a rock monitor emerging from a riverbed.

We went deeper into the wilderness, to the other side of the national park. The night before the long drive, an offhand comment about past lovers stung me, venomously, and I fell asleep paralysed on the edge of the bed. We woke up and drove through a jungle of criticism and contempt, then crossed the savannah in defensive silence. We stayed at a lodge outside the park gate, but wilderness surrounded us. Out of clean clothes, we sat down for dinner in shirts and trousers encrusted in dust, sweat and sunscreen, at a table laid for us next to a crocodile-infested river.

We started our drive back to Nairobi the following day, the way we came. Too long a distance to complete in a single journey, we stayed over at a lodge in Amboseli. As darkness fell, safe in our room, we heard an animal calling out in distress. We soon found out that a set of lions had killed a wildebeest right in front of the hotel terrace. The staff swiftly laid a table for us al fresco and we watched the lions in torchlight while we ate. Eventually the lions dragged the carcass away and only darkness remained.

Alexandra Cronberg is a Nairobi based survey methodologist and occasional writer.

Somewhere in your story you must pause to describe your heroine’s costume. It is a ticklish task. The average reader likes his heroine well dressed. He is not satisfied with knowing that she looked like a tall, fair lily. He wants to be told that her gown was of green crepe, with lace ruffles that swirled at her feet. Writers used to go so far as to name the dressmaker; and it was a poor kind of a heroine who didn’t wear a red velvet by Worth. But that has been largely abandoned in these days of commissions. Still, when the heroine goes out on the terrace to spoon after dinner (a quaint old English custom for the origin of which see any novel by the ‘Duchess,’ page 179) the average reader wants to know what sort of a filmy wrap she snatches up on the way out. He demands a description, with as many illustrations as the publisher will stand for, of what she wore from the bedroom to the street, with full stops for the ribbons on her robe de nuit, and the buckles on her ballroom slippers. Half the poor creatures one sees flattening their noses against the shop windows are authors getting a line on the advance fashions. Suppose a careless writer were to dress his heroine in a full-plaited skirt only to find, when his story is published four months later, that full-plaited skirts have been relegated to the dim past!

I started to read a story once. It was a good one. There was in it not a single allusion to brandy-and-soda, or divorce, or the stock market. The dialogue crackled. The hero talked like a live man. It was a shipboard story, and the heroine was charming so long as she wore her heavy ulster. But along toward evening she blossomed forth in a yellow gown, with a scarlet poinsettia at her throat. I quit her cold. Nobody ever wore a scarlet poinsettia; or if they did, they couldn’t wear it on a yellow gown. Or if they did wear it with a yellow gown, they didn’t wear it at the throat. Scarlet poinsettias aren’t worn, anyhow. To this day I don’t know whether the heroine married the hero or jumped overboard.

You see, one can’t be too careful about clothing one’s heroine.

I hesitate to describe Sophy Epstein’s dress. You won’t like it. In the first place, it was cut too low, front and back, for a shoe clerk in a downtown loft. It was a black dress, near-princess in style, very tight as to fit, very short as to skirt, very sleazy as to material. It showed all the delicate curves of Sophy’s under-fed, girlish body, and Sophy didn’t care a bit. Its most objectionable feature was at the throat. Collarless gowns were in vogue. Sophy’s daring shears had gone a snip or two farther. They had cut a startlingly generous V. To say that the dress was elbow-sleeved is superfluous. I have said that Sophy clerked in a downtown loft.

Sophy sold ‘sample’ shoes at two-fifty a pair, and from where you were standing you thought they looked just like the shoes that were sold in the regular shops for six. When Sophy sat on one of the low benches at the feet of some customer, tugging away at a refractory shoe for a would-be small foot, her shameless little gown exposed more than it should have. But few of Sophy’s customers were shocked. They were mainly chorus girls and ladies of doubtful complexion in search of cheap and ultra footgear, and — to use a health term — hardened by exposure.

Have I told you how pretty she was? She was so pretty that you immediately forgave her the indecency of her pitiful little gown. She was pretty in a daringly demure fashion, like a wicked little Puritan, or a poverty-stricken Cleo de Merode, with her smooth brown hair parted in the middle, drawn severely down over her ears, framing the lovely oval of her face and ending in a simple coil at the neck. Some serpent’s wisdom had told Sophy to eschew puffs. But I think her prettiness could have triumphed even over those.

If Sophy’s boss had been any other sort of man he would have informed Sophy, sternly, that black princess effects, cut low, were not au fait in the shoe-clerk world. But Sophy’s boss had a rhombic nose, and no instep, and the tail of his name had been amputated. He didn’t care how Sophy wore her dresses so long as she sold shoes.

Once the boss had kissed Sophy — not on the mouth, but just where her shabby gown formed its charming but immodest V. Sophy had slapped him, of course. But the slap had not set the thing right in her mind. She could not forget it. It had made her uncomfortable in much the same way as we are wildly ill at ease when we dream of walking naked in a crowded street. At odd moments during the day Sophy had found herself rubbing the spot furiously with her unlovely handkerchief, and shivering a little. She had never told the other girls about that kiss.

So — there you have Sophy and her costume. You may take her or leave her. I purposely placed these defects in costuming right at the beginning of the story, so that there should be no false pretenses. One more detail. About Sophy’s throat was a slender, near-gold chain from which was suspended a cheap and glittering La Valliere. Sophy had not intended it as a sop to the conventions. It was an offering on the shrine of Fashion, and represented many lunchless days.

At eleven o’clock one August morning, Louie came to Chicago from Oskaloosa, Iowa. There was no hay in his hair. The comic papers have long insisted that the country boy, on his first visit to the city, is known by his greased boots and his high-water pants. Don’t you believe them. The small-town boy is as fastidious about the height of his heels and the stripe of his shift and the roll of his hat-brim as are his city brothers. He peruses the slangily worded ads of the ‘classy clothes’ tailors, and when scarlet cravats are worn the small-town boy is not more than two weeks late in acquiring one that glows like a headlight.

Louie found a rooming-house, shoved his suitcase under the bed, changed his collar, washed his hands in the gritty water of the wash bowl, and started out to look for a job.

Louie was twenty-one. For the last four years he had been employed in the best shoe store at home, and he knew shoe leather from the factory to the ash barrel. It was almost a religion with him.

Curiosity, which plays leads in so many life dramas, led Louie to the rotunda of the tallest building. It was built on the hollow centre plan, with a sheer drop from the twenty-somethingth to the main floor. Louie stationed himself in the centre of the mosaic floor, took off his hat, bent backward almost double and gazed, his mouth wide open. When he brought his muscles slowly back into normal position he tried hard not to look impressed. He glanced about, sheepishly, to see if any one was laughing at him, and his eye encountered the electric-lighted glass display case of the shoe company upstairs. The case was filled with pink satin slippers and cunning velvet boots, and the newest thing in bronze street shoes. Louie took the next elevator up. The shoe display had made him feel as though some one from home had slapped him on the back.

The God of the Jobless was with him. The boss had fired two boys the day before.

‘Oskaloosa!’ grinned the boss, derisively. ‘Do they wear shoes there? What do you know about shoes, huh boy?’

Louie told him. The boss shuffled the papers on his desk, and chewed his cigar, and tried not to show his surprise. Louie, quite innocently, was teaching the boss things about the shoe business.

When Louie had finished — ‘Well, I try you, anyhow,’ the boss grunted, grudgingly. ‘I give you so-and-so much.’ He named a wage that would have been ridiculous if it had not been so pathetic.

‘All right, sir,’ answered Louie, promptly, like the boys in the Alger series. The cost of living problem had never bothered Louie in Oskaloosa.

The boss hid a pleased smile.

‘Miss Epstein!’ he bellowed, ‘step this way! Miss Epstein, kindly show this here young man so he gets a line on the stock. He is from Oskaloosa, Ioway. Look out she don’t sell you a gold brick, Louie.’

But Louie was not listening. He was gazing at the V in Sophy Epstein’s dress with all his scandalised Oskaloosa, Iowa, eyes.

Louie was no mollycoddle. But he had been in great demand as usher at the Young Men’s Sunday Evening Club service at the Congregational church, and in his town there had been no Sophy Epsteins in too-tight princess dresses, cut into a careless V. But Sophy was a city product — I was about to say pure and simple, but I will not — wise, bold, young, old, underfed, overworked, and triumphantly pretty.

‘How-do!’ cooed Sophy in her best baby tones. Louie’s disapproving eyes jumped from the objectionable V in Sophy’s dress to the lure of Sophy’s face, and their expression underwent a lightning change. There was no disapproving Sophy’s face, no matter how long one had dwelt in Oskaloosa.

‘I won’t bite you,’ said Sophy. ‘I’m never vicious on Tuesdays. We’ll start here with the misses’ an’ children’s, and work over to the other side.’

Whereupon Louie was introduced into the intricacies of the sample shoe business. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the V, and learned many things. He learned how shoes that look like six dollar values may be sold for two-fifty. He looked on in wide-eyed horror while Sophy fitted a No. 5 C shoe on a 6 B foot and assured the wearer that it looked like a made-to-order boot. He picked up a pair of dull kid shoes and looked at them. His leather-wise eyes saw much, and I think he would have taken his hat off the hook, and his offended business principles out of the shop forever if Sophy had not completed her purchase and strolled over to him at the psychological moment.

She smiled up at him, impudently. ‘Well, Pink Cheeks,’ she said, ‘how do you like our little settlement by the lake, huh?’

‘These shoes aren’t worth two-fifty,’ said Louie, indignation in his voice.

‘Well, sure,’ replied Sophy. ‘I know it. What do you think this is? A charity bazaar?’

‘But back home — began Louie, hotly.

‘Ferget it, kid,’ said Sophy. ‘This is a big town, but it ain’t got no room for back-homers. Don’t sour on one job till you’ve got another nailed. You’ll find yourself cuddling down on a park bench if you do. Say, are you honestly from Oskaloosa?’

‘I certainly am,’ answered Louie, with pride.

‘My goodness!’ ejaculated Sophy. ‘I never believed there was no such place. Don’t brag about it to the other fellows.’

‘What time do you go out for lunch?’ asked Louie.

‘What’s it to you?’ with the accent on the ‘to.’

‘When I want to know a thing, I generally ask,’ explained Louie, gently.

Sophy looked at him — a long, keen, knowing look. ‘You’ll learn,’ she observed, thoughtfully.

Louie did learn. He learned so much in that first week that when Sunday came it seemed as though aeons had passed over his head. He learned that the crime of murder was as nothing compared to the crime of allowing a customer to depart shoeless; he learned that the lunch hour was invented for the purpose of making dates; that no one had ever heard of Oskaloosa, Iowa; that seven dollars a week does not leave much margin for laundry and general recklessness; that a madonna face above a V-cut gown is apt to distract one’s attention from shoes; that a hundred-dollar nest egg is as effective in Chicago as a pine stick would be in propping up a stone wall; and that all the other men clerks called Sophy ‘sweetheart.’

Some of his newly acquired knowledge brought pain, as knowledge is apt to do.

He saw that State Street was crowded with Sophys during the noon hour; girls with lovely faces under pitifully absurd hats. Girls who aped the fashions of the dazzling creatures they saw stepping from limousines. Girls who starved body and soul in order to possess a set of false curls, or a pair of black satin shoes with mother-o’-pearl buttons. Girls whose minds were bounded on the north by the nickel theatres; on the east by ‘I sez to him;’ on the south by the gorgeous shop windows; and on the west by ‘He sez t’ me.’

Oh, I can’t tell you how much Louie learned in that first week while his eyes were getting accustomed to the shifting, jostling, pushing, giggling, walking, talking throng. The city is justly famed as a hot house of forced knowledge.

One thing Louie could not learn. He could not bring himself to accept the V in Sophy’s dress. Louie’s mother had been one of the old-fashioned kind who wore a blue-and-white checked gingham apron from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., when she took it off to go downtown and help the ladies of the church at the cake sale in the empty window of the gas company’s office, only to don it again when she fried the potatoes for supper. Among other things she had taught Louie to wipe his feet before coming in, to respect and help women, and to change his socks often.

After a month of Chicago Louie forgot the first lesson; had more difficulty than I can tell you in reverencing a woman who only said, ‘Aw, don’t get fresh now!’ when the other men put their arms about her; and adhered to the third only after a struggle, in which he had to do a small private washing in his own wash-bowl in the evening.

Sophy called him a stiff. His gravely courteous treatment of her made her vaguely uncomfortable. She was past mistress in the art of parrying insults and banter, but she had no reply ready for Louie’s boyish air of deference. It angered her for some unreasonable woman-reason.

There came a day when the V-cut dress brought them to open battle. I think Sophy had appeared that morning minus the chain and La Valliere. Frail and cheap as it was, it had been the only barrier that separated Sophy from frank shamelessness. Louie’s outraged sense of propriety asserted itself.

‘Sophy,’ he stammered, during a quiet half-hour, ‘I’ll call for you and take you to the nickel show to-night if you’ll promise not to wear that dress. What makes you wear that kind of a get-up, anyway?’

‘Dress?’ queried Sophy, looking down at the shiny front breadth of her frock. ‘Why? Don’t you like it?’

‘Like it! No!’ blurted Louie.

‘Don’t yuh, rully! Deah me! Deah me! If I’d only knew that this morning. As a gen’ral thing I wear white duck complete down t’ work, but I’m savin’ my last two clean suits f’r gawlf.’

Louie ran an uncomfortable finger around the edge of his collar, but he stood his ground. ‘It — it — shows your — neck so,’ he objected, miserably.

Sophy opened her great eyes wide. ‘Well, supposin’ it does?’ she inquired, coolly. ‘It’s a perfectly good neck, ain’t it?’

Louie, his face very red, took the plunge. ‘I don’t know. I guess so. But, Sophy, it — looks so — so — you know what I mean. I hate to see the way the fellows rubber at you. Why don’t you wear those plain shirtwaist things, with high collars, like my mother wears back home?’

Sophy’s teeth came together with a click. She laughed a short cruel little laugh. ‘Say, Pink Cheeks, did yuh ever do a washin’ from seven to twelve, after you got home from work in the evenin’? It’s great! ‘Specially when you’re living in a six-by-ten room with all the modern inconveniences, includin’ no water except on the third floor down. Simple! Say, a child could work it. All you got to do, when you get home so tired your back teeth ache, is to haul your water, an’ soak your clothes, an’ then rub ’em till your hands peel, and rinse ’em, an’ boil ’em, and blue ’em, an’ starch ’em. See? Just like that. Nothin’ to it, kid. Nothin’ to it.’

Louie had been twisting his fingers nervously. Now his hands shut themselves into fists. He looked straight into Sophy’s angry eyes.

‘I do know what it is,’ he said, quite simply. ‘There’s been a lot written and said about women’s struggle with clothes. I wonder why they’ve never said anything about the way a man has to fight to keep up the thing they call appearances. God knows it’s pathetic enough to think of a girl like you bending over a tubful of clothes. But when a man has to do it, it’s a tragedy.’

‘That’s so,’ agreed Sophy. ‘When a girl gets shabby, and her clothes begin t’ look tacky she can take a gore or so out of her skirt where it’s the most wore, and catch it in at the bottom, and call it a hobble. An’ when her waist gets too soiled she can cover up the front of it with a jabot, an’ if her face is pretty enough she can carry it off that way. But when a man is seedy, he’s seedy. He can’t sew no ruffles on his pants.’

‘I ran short last week,’ continued Louie. ‘That is, shorter than usual. I hadn’t the fifty cents to give to the woman. You ought to see her! A little, gray-faced thing, with wisps of hair, and no chest to speak of, and one of those mashed-looking black hats. Nobody could have the nerve to ask her to wait for her money. So I did my own washing. I haven’t learned to wear soiled clothes yet. I laughed fit to bust while I was doing it. But — I’ll bet my mother dreamed of me that night. The way they do, you know, when something’s gone wrong.’

Sophy, perched on the third rung of the sliding ladder, was gazing at him. Her lips were parted slightly, and her cheeks were very pink. On her face was a new, strange look, as of something half forgotten. It was as though the spirit of Sophy-as-she-might-have-been were inhabiting her soul for a brief moment. At Louie’s next words the look was gone.

‘Can’t you sew something — a lace yoke — or whatever you call ’em — in that dress?’ he persisted.

‘Aw, fade!’ jeered Sophy. ‘When a girl’s only got one dress it’s got to have some tong to it. Maybe this gown would cause a wave of indignation in Oskaloosa, Iowa, but it don’t even make a ripple on State Street. It takes more than an aggravated Dutch neck to make a fellow look at a girl these days. In a town like this a girl’s got to make a showin’ some way. I’m my own stage manager. They look at my dress first, an’ grin. See? An’ then they look at my face. I’m like the girl in the story. Muh face is muh fortune. It’s earned me many a square meal; an’ lemme tell you, Pink Cheeks, eatin’ square meals is one of my favourite pastimes.’

‘Say looka here!’ bellowed the boss, wrathfully. ‘Just cut out this here Romeo and Juliet act, will you! That there ladder ain’t for no balcony scene, understand. Here you, Louie, you shinny up there and get down a pair of them brown satin pumps, small size.’

Sophy continued to wear the black dress. The V-cut neck seemed more flaunting than ever.

It was two weeks later that Louie came in from lunch, his face radiant. He was fifteen minutes late, but he listened to the boss’s ravings with a smile.

‘You grin like somebody handed you a ten-case note,” commented Sophy, with a woman’s curiosity. “I guess you must of met some rube from home when you was out t’ lunch.’

‘Better than that! Who do you think I bumped right into in the elevator going down?’

‘Well, Brothah Bones,’ mimicked Sophy, ‘who did you meet in the elevator going down?’

‘I met a man named Ames. He used to travel for a big Boston shoe house, and he made our town every few months. We got to be good friends. I took him home for Sunday dinner once, and he said it was the best dinner he’d had in months. You know how tired those traveling men get of hotel grub.’

‘Cut out the description and get down to action,’ snapped Sophy.

‘Well, he knew me right away. And he made me go out to lunch with him. A real lunch, starting with soup. Gee! It went big. He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was working here, and he opened his eyes, and then he laughed and said: ‘How did you get into that joint?’ Then he took me down to a swell little shoe shop on State Street, and it turned out that he owns it. He introduced me all around, and I’m going there to work next week. And wages! Why say, it’s almost a salary. A fellow can hold his head up in a place like that.’

‘When you leavin’?’ asked Sophy, slowly.

‘Monday. Gee! it seems a year away.’

Sophy was late Saturday morning. When she came in, hurriedly, her cheeks were scarlet and her eyes glowed. She took off her hat and coat and fell to straightening boxes and putting out stock without looking up. She took no part in the talk and jest that was going on among the other clerks. One of the men, in search of the missing mate to the shoe in his hand, came over to her, greeting her carelessly. Then he stared.

‘Well, what do you know about this!’ he called out to the others, and laughed coarsely, ‘Look, stop, listen! Little Sophy Bright Eyes here has pulled down the shades.’

Louie turned quickly. The immodest V of Sophy’s gown was filled with a black lace yoke that came up to the very lobes of her little pink ears. She had got some scraps of lace from — Where do they get those bits of rusty black? From some basement bargain counter, perhaps, raked over during the lunch hour. There were nine pieces in the front, and seven in the back. She had sat up half the night putting them together so that when completed they looked like one, if you didn’t come too close. There is a certain strain of Indian patience and ingenuity in women that no man has ever been able to understand.

Louie looked up and saw. His eyes met Sophy’s. In his there crept a certain exultant gleam, as of one who had fought for something great and won. Sophy saw the look. The shy questioning in her eyes was replaced by a spark of defiance. She tossed her head, and turned to the man who had called attention to her costume.

‘Who’s loony now?’ she jeered. ‘I always put in a yoke when it gets along toward fall. My lungs is delicate. And anyway, I see by the papers yesterday that collarless gowns is slightly passay f’r winter.’

Originally published in Buttered Side Down: Short Stories by Edna Ferber, 1912

And when you finally came, you came like fucking Krakatoa.

You were up before the alarm. It was starting to get light outside and for a second you thought you overslept. You reached for your phone, it was only half past five. Nerves you whispered to yourself. Calm the fuck down. Babe, breathe, just breathe. You could hear it raining outside, and inside, 10 hours of Epic Thunder and Rain: Sounds for Relaxing, Focus or Sleep still going strong on your laptop. You scored your eyebrows lightly with your fingers, then dug your knuckles into your eyes and pressed your eyeballs deep into your head. You can do this, it’s here. Just breathe and get up.

You looked once again at your phone and wondered if you had time for a quick rub. Your record was seven and a half minutes and right now you had twenty-five. You cupped your breasts over your T-shirt and squeezed them so hard they hurt. You grabbed your throat with your left hand, lined up your fingers on your jugular and slid the right hand down. Good for the nerves, yes, but is there enough time? You closed your eyes and started scanning inside your head, trying hard to find the stuff that worked when you needed it to be quick. Teenage pool sex? The beautiful Indian boy with almond shaped eyes, long, black curly hair, drilling his blonde nymphet (something like Sue Lyon when she was fourteen) from behind? Or the late night multistorey car park lesbian 69 in the Midnight Blue ‘89 Cougar. They’d scratch its bone white leather interiors with black patent heels and fire engine manicures and smudge the windows with cummy fingers.

Here, tried and tested, young, olive skin ass in a purple thong and a black man biting into it like it’s a peach. Actual biting, not pussy pretend biting. You played the black man with your mind’s eye, with teeth so white they were almost violet. You traced over with your finger to see if it was working. Nope, nothing. Desert dry. Maybe anal? Brute? A giant black hand stroked the girl’s shiny brown hair and pushed her head flat into a pillow so she couldn’t breathe. Too rough. Fuck, forget it, there’s no time. You weren’t going to force anal on this little thing at five thirty in the morning. You had overdone it this week because of all the stress and now there was no juice left. You’d have to wait a day or two for it to come back. Defeated, you got up.

Shower, shower, shower. You said everything out loud as you got ready. Shampoo. Conditioner. Hammam shower gel. Foam face wash. Towel. Cream. Comfy bra. Comfy knickers. Comfy socks. The word comfy made you feel safe. You’re good, girl, you’re good. If you’re not gonna jerk off, you deserve a puff. You know why? Because you paid your dues, you paid your dues! Comfy leggings! Manically switching between I, it, you, she, they, made you feel like you were at a party. And a party was good for the nerves, sometimes. Once your boots were on, you felt apocalypse ready. You surveyed the room, neatly draped the towel, unplugged the mini radiator like the host had asked, fluffed the pillows and grabbed your joint from the ashtray, a hash tobacco mix, it would be your last puff for a while. You saw yourself in the mirror and immediately cupped your breasts again. Ugh, why are they getting smaller? You had started losing weight because you were anxious about travelling and the poundage was going from all the wrong places. You pressed your thumbs into your nipples. Whatever, just come back afterwards okay?

Downstairs you scrunched your backpack to see if it was dry, it was. Thank god. You’d washed it to get rid of the dank hash smell. The smell that had gotten you into that situation with the Uber driver the night before. What was his name? Driss. Driss came on heavy. If you want more drugs, you can get them from me. Trust me I can get you anything, you’re not going to find that stuff so easily anymore. You told him you were travelling and didn’t want anything. Where are you going? He asked. Take me please. You look like the type of girl who likes to have fun. If you hadn’t been so high and paranoid you would have laughed at this. He was wrong about you. He’d mistaken you for your ass, which was plenty, a defining feature impossible to ignore no matter what you wore, noted by girlfriends and random men alike, and often understood by the latter as some kind of invitation. You weren’t a girl from a fucking Pepsi ad. You didn’t like to have fun. You hated fun. If you liked to have fun, you wouldn’t be leaving in the first place. He would never know your truth, but it was simple. You could only be happy if you were denied and deprived, not fed and fucked.

Passport, check, wallet, check, phone charger, check, sustenance, check, laptop, yep, pouch with random shit, check. You opened a small gap in the zipper of your suitcase and shoved everything in at the top, careful not to crush the poster size photo of you and the fake psychic you met in Rome. The psychic had no problem with looking like an utter fraud, she used pieces of coloured glass instead of crystals. She told you that your life was about to change drastically. And here it was, the fucking change. A hot planet with a fresh new FEVER! Lock, check!

You picked up your phone and tried to find a car nearby, there were several. Tap, tap. Zulfikar was on his way, you had fifteen minutes. You secretly hoped that he would ask you where you were flying to and if you would take him with you and that you looked like the type of girl who liked to have fun. You would respond to this sexual charge with nothing more than silence. The exchange would be awkward and meaningless, pathetic even, but would fit neatly into your pocketbook of fraudulent yet insistent enactments of puritanical behaviour. Surely, there was nothing as kinky as that. This false antisexuality made sure you were rarely penetrated, a pastime you considered to be better suited for animals. It wasn’t sin you were afraid of but submission because submission meant weakness and for your type of girl, weakness meant death. Deep inside, however, you knew these myths were for the purposes of self-preservation only, you wished, rather than believed them to be true.

You made a small coffee, swirled it round your mouth and spat it into the sink. Actual caffeine would kill you right now but you needed the taste to get rid of the nausea. It was either this or scotch. You washed the strawberries and put them in a bowl next to the sink with a handwritten note to Natalie, your host, asking her to enjoy them and to stay safe! Your place is wonderful and I would love to come stay again the next time I am in Paris and when everything is normal again, you whispered as you scribbled. Normal? You had lost that last week and it wasn’t ever coming back.

You wheeled your suitcase out the door and down the stairs. Zulfikar was ten minutes away. Perfect. The streets were empty and the rain had stopped. You lit up on the steps. You hardly gave a shit anymore and you reckoned no one else did either. You took a long drag and the ecstasy was immediate, god bless hash, weed, everything. Why was there nothing else in the world like this? You closed your eyes and there it was. The entire Milky fucking Way. Seconds later you were swimming through the high, you had grabbed a dolphin by the tail and the two of you were surfing through its creamy waves.

I’m going to have you all, you said out loud to the spliff. You know why? Because I don’t know when we’ll meet again. It was too late to change your mind now, you had to leave. You couldn’t go back to Milan because that was out of the question. You forgot why you were leaving in the first place but it had something to do with your mother crying on the phone begging you to come back. Please aa jao, please, in between sobs you immediately recognised as fake, which was as good as real when it came to your mother. Your mum used tears like the psychic used chunks of coloured glass, both worked even if no one believed in them. You finished the spliff and named it Jeremy as you stubbed it out on the step. You knighted Jeremy. Thank you Sir Jeremy for your services to your country and to your queen. You immediately reconsidered why you were only a queen and thought perhaps you should be an empress instead. You were highhh! You saw a car turn the corner. A silver Peugeot, AY-817… yes that’s it. The ride was here. You put on a pair of latex gloves you had kept in the pocket of your jacket and wrapped a bandana around your mouth and nose. It was all you could find. The masks had sold out days ago. You suddenly felt sick.

Zulfikar was a pretty face from what you could see and dapper, probably Kashmiri. His eyes were the colour of honey and his gloves and mask were both black, he looked like an assassin, HASHSHASHIN DNA! There were sharp lines everywhere; long straight nose, cut jaw, fine jacket. The creases at the front of his off-white slacks were like knives. He opened the door for you and put your suitcase in the back. When you got inside you ducked your head immediately so that your eyes would never meet in the rear view mirror, even by accident. The seats were dark grey leather, almost black, which crunched like it was brand new. As always, you had to pin the scent and this time you concluded that the car smelled like dusk and petrichor. You scanned the back of Zulfikar’s neck, his haircut was very fresh and you could tell he had just showered, he was a bouquet in human form. You wanted to graze the back of his neck with your ring finger like one might graze the edge of a petal, Kashmir ki kali you whisper inaudibly. He confirmed the terminal and you set off. You looked out the window at the empty Parisian streets and had no idea how but you suddenly started crying uncontrollably. They weren’t streaks of tears but more like sheets of tears, as if your eyes were very short waterfalls, flooding your cheeks and chin and your fucking bandana mask with buckets and buckets of salty water. Zulfikar tilted his head, but didn’t turn around. You sank further in your seat, sobbing.

So, what’s the problem? He asked, his voice deep and dark, like a rare coffee liqueur.

I don’t know. I’m afraid and very sad.

We all are, but we’re not crying like this.

You appreciated the over familiarity and the arrogance, qualities you’d come to expect from those types of guys, you know, the ones with the nice, generous eyebrows, but you couldn’t stop crying or even take a breath for that matter. You were feeling the weight of a giant boot on your heart. It was as if the entire car was literally filling up with your tears and you were drowning inside it.

Is it about love?

Yes.

Don’t worry, you’ll see him again.

Her.

You were stopped at a light so he turned around and looked at you. You had never cried in front of a stranger and your knee started to shake. Your eyes met and you instantly felt robbed of all your secrets. You were always torn about outing yourself in front of a Muslim man, a brother, and in this case an assassin, but the world was going to hell and you didn’t care anymore.

Stop crying. You’ll see her again.

You and Zulfikar didn’t speak after that. You went back to your Milky Way high which was one of the two beautiful things in your world right now. The other beautiful thing was your – your neighbour, but you had left her behind in Milan. Everything else was a steaming pile of shit, so you clutched the high even tighter because it was literally all you had. Except now you had grabbed a giant Roc instead of a dolphin, you were flying not swimming and the flight was bumpy. When you reached the airport, Zulfikar opened the door for you and put your suitcase on a trolley. You didn’t make eye contact and you didn’t thank him. From there on everything was a blur. The exodus had taken place in waves and you were catching one of the last flights home. While searching for your check-in desk, you felt a slight tickle in your throat, a scratchy gift from the hash. Scared that even the slightest sign of a cough would have you ‘noticed’ by security you suppressed the itch causing two sharp streams of water to jet out of your eyes. At check-in, the woman asked you if you knew of the quarantine situation where you were heading. It’s two weeks, mandatory, you know that right?

Yes. I know.

Before the passport control desk you joined a line for a compulsory temperature reading. As the nurse held the thermometer to your forehead, you considered disclosing the fact that you did indeed have a FEVER! That like a female ferret on heat, you were going to BOIL to death this very instant because it had been three years since you had last had sex. That you were going to die from aplastic anemia right there in the middle of the airport, a lonely woman, a tragic cliche of the times we live in. You tried to imagine what kind of response this would elicit and struggled to find an image. Like the cough, you suppressed this impulse for awkward hilarity, a ruse you often employed to cut the tension and connect with strangers. Especially those in charge at airports. It was one of your more dangerous activities.

Have you recently had a flu or a fever, miss?

No, you answered and shuffled on. But I’ve suffered everything else, you said under your breath.

Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born artist and writer from Dubai.