Today, I put on an olive-black shirt that I bought three years ago and just had dry-cleaned. I buttoned the buttons, exhaled, and the shirt's entire front seam ripped open. I was left staring down at my stomach, which peeped through the popped seam like the filling of an overstuffed calzone.
This disturbing incident, coupled with the fact that my recently dry-cleaned jeans are now so tight I feel like my waist is being executed by garrote, led me to ask myself a disturbing question with vast implications for my self-esteem: is my dry cleaner incompetent?
Ahem.
They say that a woman's age always shows in her hands, but in my case, it shows in my clothes. Because I don't throw them out or stop wearing them. Let me give a prime example of why I have this philosophy.
When I first moved to Delhi, I lived with a meticulous aunt. One day, while cleaning the basement, she accidentally spilled acid all over one of my shirts. The shirt was red, and the acid left thick, black burn marks all down the front, like the paw prints of Sasquatch.
"I suppose you can give it to the servant," my aunt said.
"I can wear it around the house," said I. Three months later, I extracted the shirt from my wardrobe and found that the acid stains had miraculously disappeared. The shirt had healed itself!
It was not alone. A few weeks later, I was washing one of my white shirts by hand when suddenly the water turned a deep and cloudy red. When I extracted the shirt, it looked a set piece from a Quentin Tarantino film. I tried everything - scrubbing with toothpaste, adding bleach, freeing the Israelites - but the horrid red stains were there to stay.
I folded the shirt up and put it in the back of my closet. To my astonishment, two months later I came upon the shirt again. The red stains were gone! I am wearing that shirt today. (The healing process appears to have shrunk the shirt, since it's now a bit snug around the middle, but who cares!)
I'm now convinced that all my clothes have this remarkable ability. They are not normal clothes; they are super-clothes. They are clothes on Kryptonite. Just like Clark Kent never discarded his glasses, I don't plan on getting rid of my magical clothing.
It helps that I've retained the tedious neatness I had even as a child. When other kids were playing paintball, wrestling with monkeys, diving fully clothed into swamps and throwing knives at each other's heads, my most physically strenuous act was to walk to the library. When I wanted to be rebellious, I checked out books from the "Adult" section and hoped the librarians wouldn't notice I was underage. Either the trick worked or they felt bad for the weird-looking kid in floral leggings who obviously didn't have many friends, because they lent me "Lady Chatterley's Lover," "My Secret Garden," "Cosmopolitan" Magazine," and the Old Testament. On the same day! (I also tried to read them on the same day, which led to an internal confusion that only became apparent years later in a college literature course, when I tried to stun the class with my exegesis of the chapter in the Bible where Naomi quizzes Ruth as to whether or not she has fun, fearless yet disturbing sexual fantasies about their kinsman Boaz's groundskeeper.)
But the past few months have taxed even my super-clothes. Throughout the monsoon season, I rotated through the same three pairs of shoes. All three eventually gave up on me. The straps on one unglued themselves and now lie helplessly on the ground, miles away from the sandal. The sole of another separated entirely from the body, which means the shoe must be dead. Yet another has worn down to the point that the wedge heel is now just a few wayward splinters of wood around a nail.
I've had straps come out in the wash and weird stains appear in mysterious places. Most tragically of all, these injuries are not fixing themselves. I mentioned the problem to a friend.
"The monsoon murdered my clothes too," she said. "Think of it as an excuse to buy more."
"I guess," I mused, still morose. "But I feel guilty spending money on clothes when my size hasn't changed."
After a few moments of stunned disbelief (no doubt caused by jealousy), she choked out an awkward, "I guess there is that."
But I'm still not throwing my clothes away. Because you just never know.
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