The Dress on the Back of the Door

Magnify

A pink bikini I bought in the youth department at JCPenney sits in my underwear drawer. I’ve worn it twice in Djibouti.

Once as an experiment—would people gape at the stretch marks left by carrying twins to full term as much as I thought they would? And once to make a statement. I don’t know whether the statement was being made to myself or the American woman I was with, but it was this: I have a pink bikini from the youth department and I have stretch marks and I don’t care.

I was trying to impress her, trying to show her I was as American as anyone even though I haven’t lived there for seven years, can’t remember English idioms and have never heard of a decade’s worth of Academy Award-winning movies. I was trying to prove the same thing to myself: I could fit in on either side of the ocean and I really don’t care about breast size and peachy silver scars.

She wore a black and yellow bikini. We speculated on why Americans are so concerned about bikinis when Europeans wouldn’t dream of wearing a tankini or one-piece no matter how old they were, how many wrinkles they had or how low their breasts swung.

Without saying it out loud, we were both smugly happy in our bikinis using Dora the Explorer shovels to bury our children in the sand.

I don’t think we impressed or proved anything to anyone.

I also have, hanging on a metal clothing rack on the back of our bedroom door, a black abaya. Well, mostly black. There are blue sequins and a squiggle of blue ribbon sewn down the length of each arm. In Djibouti, the flowing black cloak was as much about convenience and modest fashion as it was about the Islamic religion.

I thought they were beautiful. Beautiful for the way they flowed and swished around ankles, the shimmer of fabric and the elegance of black. And beautiful in the aura of mystique shrouded about the wearer.

No one knows if a woman wearing an abaya has a spare tire around her waist or if she has breastfed 10 children or if her hips have spread, her butt fallen and her thighs mushified. For all the world knows, the body beneath the coat is sexy and desirable. The abaya says, “I’m not concerned about attracting a man with tight jeans and a low-cut shirt.” The woman wearing it holds the power of secrecy and discovery.