Settling into Suburbia

I’ve gone off fashion. I don't feel a pang in my stomach when I walk past Arden B. or get an anxiety attack on entering Forever 21. Not like I did before. No more the forever-floating girl about town. I’m now the picture of stability: printing crème caramel recipes from the Internet and joining in on a lengthy discussion about the versatility of the eggplant, with a group of Persian women, at a recent cocktail party, sans cocktails.

No man likes to come home to a wake, so I've resorted to wearing pastels. I’ve discovered that pink blusher has a miraculous effect on my facial expressions. It helps create the rosy appearance of permanent serenity. I’ve also found my prior aversion to florals has disappeared. It’s opened a new world of possibilities that had been off limits. Just like finding you can eat something that you’ve been allergic to. They say our bodies change every seven years, maybe so does our sense of style. It’s only a matter of time before I’m writing about the benefits of the Moo-Moo vs. the Miu-Miu dress.

It’s far more sensible to be planning for travertine tiles and a granite counter top than a big shiny, red Valentino handbag. I tell myself that the bag; is better suited to a former Madame and not a former Magazine Editor. As the salesgirl tells me about the necessities of the color red and shows me the inside compartments of this enormous, almost luggage size handbag (perfect for carrying props), I interrupt her:

“Thanks, but it’s not right for me,” I say, sheepishly.

I hover away from her. I find myself in an unfamiliar place; somewhere between restraint and reason. Trance-like I walk on, not knowing where I’m headed, until I snap out of my daze, relieved that I’ve entered my comfort zone: the shoe department. Like being handed a mug of hot chocolate and a soft blanket; It’s all-better now.

Surely I haven’t turned frugal? God, I hope not. I regain my optimism as I spot a pair of dainty calfskin, peep-toe shoes in the palest shade of pink by Via Spiga. They fit like a soul mate. What’s the use of buying them (even if they are on sale), if my next project is to grow basil in my own vegetable patch? The only forms of life taking a peep at me there will be the hummingbirds and the olive trees.


At least I haven’t become all domesticated. It would be pushing it to have lost an interest in fashion and turned into a Cleanzilla. There is consolation in knowing that I have a spider’s web in my bathroom and that I’ve managed to ignore the nasty ant situation behind the fridge for a week. The beige carpet between the sofa and the coffee table (where a good amount of food lands) has turned a blotchy orange color due to a recent two-day fiesta of Spaghetti Bolognese. The skin of roasted red melon seeds, the perfect snack while watching thrillers, is now permanently embedded over the stains.

The spare bedroom is set-up perfectly for any unannounced overnight guests, except right now, it’s turned into a makeshift laundry room. Heaps of clothes are thrown on the bed directly from the adjacent official laundry room, to be sorted later. The pantry is off limits to everyone apart from my husband and I. Guests are steered away from all drawers, cupboards and closed doors. Pretending to be a control-freak, I prevent guests from helping out in the kitchen and putting away dishes and cutlery in their “right” place. There is an average of 0.3 cm of dust on all horizontal surfaces in the house. There are large fingerprints on glasses, splashed toothpaste residue on the bathroom mirrors and bird droppings on all the sliding doors that lead to the garden.

I’ve stepped out to the garden a total of five times during a period of eight months. Once because I was being the perfect hostess at our BBQ party and the other times I’d gone out there in my underwear long enough to figure out what the whether was like so that I could decide on what to wear.

Our walk-in closet is a war zone. I’m often accused of having invaded and taken over a foreign country. My husband has been given the Gaza Strip. Why can’t he just be happy with the space he’s got? The battle continues.



I haven’t bought a single item in a week, apart from the big ceramic mixing bowl from TJ Maxx and household items don’t count. My last trip to the mall was at least 2 weeks ago. I bought exactly what I needed. In this case my studio fix foundation and medium brown powder by Mac. Nothing more, nothing less. It felt like I was having an out of body experience when the sales person at the Mac beauty counter asked:

“Is there anything else?” and I heard myself saying “No.” I almost had to pinch myself.

I stood there holding the smallest size see-through bag with two items, as he went off to help another big spender. I caught sight of my own reflection over the beauty counter and saw a vacant expression on my face. Had the real me been surgically removed? Maybe she has run off somewhere. Perhaps she was on a remote island in the Caribbean sipping on a Piña Colada with her cell phone turned off. That’s why she couldn’t be bothered to find out about Mac’s new summer collection. There could be no other explanation.

The Barber of O.C.

Barbie's Beauty Regime?
Eight months into our marriage, my husband suggested that I should go and see a barber. He said it gently without giving me cause for alarm. He didn’t use the word hair stylist, hairdresser or beautician. I wonder why? I thought barbers cut hair, give shaves and trim beards, often with mechanical tools. Maybe I’m being sensitive but to me the word has a distinct masculine connotation. Isn’t it derived from the word barbaric? Doesn’t the word barbaric mean someone uncouth and often bearded? It’s possible; it has an entirely different root word, which I’m unaware of.

Maybe its origin relates to Barbarella, the Queen of the Galaxy. She’s the fantasy space traveler, with a mane of bouncy hair. She has various intergalactic adventures and fights off evil with her shiny space gun wearing skin-tight cat suits and metallic knee high boots. Maybe he’s trying to tell me my hair needs more volume. I can easily fix that with my “big sexy spray and play” hairspray. Even though he wasn’t looking at the hair on my head when he mentioned it, I’m sure that’s what he was thinking; more bounce and body. I prefer to believe the latter derivation.

What’s All The Fuzz For?

Darwin has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to female body hair. It must have some benefit. Evolutionary science tells me so. If it didn’t it would have shed by now. My fuzz must serve some purpose. Maybe it’s protecting me from bacteria, spread of disease and harmful UV rays. That’s now all taken care of with penicillin, hand sanitizer and sunscreen. Whoever’s making the decisions must see how futile it is. Surely they must know we’re taking it all off. Why don’t they bring the human conveyor belt to a halt? Don’t they realize that faulty batches are going out? Why has natural selection turned a blind eye to the plight of over protected women?

It’s too late for me. My concern is for future generations. Every day thousands of baby girls are born with what society tells me is a genetic deviance. These girls will spend a great deal of time and money on removing excess hair. Forget the rashes, cuts and the in growing hairs. It’s the psychological damage that leave the worst scars. I knew a girl that was driven to therapy because of her deep shadowy facial hair. Her brother had given her the nickname Mach 3 when she was three years old. Twenty years later, despite hopeful family predictions, the hair had not fallen-out. She wasn’t even Persian.

Baby Barbarella
Misguided information from family and friends creates anxiety. Adults tend to lie when confronted with a newly born, hairy baby girl. Female family members are particularly prone to well-meaning deception. They give the mother false hopes that the beard, neck and forehead hair on her bundle of joy will miraculously metamorphose from coarse black to blonde and eventually fall off. Just like the belly button does. They call it baby fluff. This is myth number 1. No one has the fortitude to tell the truth. It’s misleading and unkind. They recall imaginary cases when it’s happened to the baby of a distant cousin back home or a friend of a friend that they’re no longer in touch with. Their examples are always vague and never taken from the immediate family gene pool. Frankly they would be better off telling the mother the truth and allowing her to make the necessary provisions and preparations both emotionally and financially for herself and daddy’s furry little princess.

No matter how cute her dimples are when she smiles the velvety moustache is distracting, so the baby is adorned a with huge bow, gold hoop earring and a shiny name bracelet specifically to publicize: “I’m not a boy!” The color blue is boycotted. The parents invest heavily in everything pink.

Moo-Mitzvah?
Growing up, Baby Barbarella knows she’s not like the rest of the girls and feels more comfortable with other Persian Princesses or girls from the Mediterranean community. Who else can understand what it’s like to have sideburns and lose a front tooth? When she’s old enough to say moo (hair) she’s given a pink Gillette ladies razor with a tiny bow tied around it along with a can of what looks like Barbie’s whipping cream. Here begins what will be a lifetime ritual. This is the point of no return. There should be a Bat-Mitzvah or some other formal entry into this coming of age but instead it’s done quietly, discreetly and only in the presence of other women. This secret female society will play an important role in her life. The initiation is usually suggested by an aunt, cousin or a close family friend. There will always be a debate as for the best course of action. Should she start shaving right away or would it be wiser for her to wax, and prevent thicker hair growing back, or maybe her condition is better suited to threading? Which brings me to myth number 2: when you shave, wax or thread hair on any part of your body, it will grow back looking exactly how it looked before, maybe even worse. The pain you experience during your method of hair removal doesn’t give you any re-growth advantages. Trust me, I know.

Counterfeit Conquests

I miss my fake Givenchy sunglasses. The ones I bought from a street vendor in Rome. He wasn’t exactly a vendor, but more like a traveling salesman. He kept mobile and carried his goods in a duffle bag. Far more efficient than having to set up shop and to redo his display every five minutes (like the others) because of the fashion police patrolling in their Vespas. Surely there must be worse crimes taking place in Rome. What I liked about him, beside his Senegalese/French pronunciation of Givenchy, is that he worked in close proximity to the actual flagship Givenchy store across the street in Via Borgognona. This meant he kept up with the “real” trends. To think of all the new stuff he must have. Those were a real fake. They were worth the trip to Rome. Beautiful heavy black lacquer, with a discreet yet visible, rhinestone encrusted iconic Givenchy logo on each side and a clean, uniform polish. The fact that they left red marks on my nose was secondary. Most of the time I wore them on my head, so it didn’t matter.

A few weeks after I got back home, I left them in my car by mistake. The next day when I tried to put them on they suddenly snapped. Either my head had got bigger or they had shrunk. I had left them in 90-degree heat but that couldn’t have had anything to do with it. After all you were supposed to wear them in the sun. They even had an authentic UV sticker, which I had peeled off. I never found what caused the snap. Maybe I hadn’t read a warning about “extreme direct sunlight may cause retraction,” but it wasn’t like I was given a booklet, a receipt or a proper case for them when I bought them. Otherwise I could have tried to give them back. Yes, not even those snooty shop girls would have known the difference. They looked that real.



And then there was the fake Cartier watch. Not the run of the mill Pasha or Santos. It wasn’t anything like the stainless steel fake ones you see everywhere. This one was a rare find. It was a classic leather strap. It had a dark red, (almost) real crocodile leather strap, Roman numerals, great workmanship and a tiny look-alike sapphire on the crown just like the real one I had seen at the Cartier store for $35,000. I got this one for $25. It was just like a cubic zircona. No one could detect it from the real thing with a naked eye. In this case, unless you got really close. And how rude for someone to try and get such a close look at my watch as if to deliberately check its authenticity.

I bought it while I was working as a reporter for a newspaper in Miami. Every few months, Ricardo, the second cousin of Consuelo, our Puerto Rican, print assistant would make a trip from New York and bring us goodies. He’d come down on our lunch break and lay out all the goods right there on the production line, on top of the proof sheets. There would be rows of fake Gucci, Fendi, and Prada bags. Rolex watches, Hermes belts and Louis Vuitton wallets. Sometimes he would even take orders for special requests. The newspaper would come to a complete halt. Our front desk receptionist would announce in a giddy voice that “Ricardo’s here!” The salespeople, production department, editors and writers would all gather around. Even the publisher’s wife would pop in on those days. In fact if it wasn’t for my swift judgment she may have snatched that watch right from under my nose. She ended up buying exactly the same Cartier watch as mine, but hers was in boring black. Serves her right, after all she’s the only one that could’ve bought the real thing.

I was pleased with my purchase and looked at the time more often than I did before. In fact I wondered how I had got by without it. I started developing a keen use of my left hand. I now used my left hand to drink coffee, point at things, and flap my hands to show how hot the weather was getting. The only problem was that since it was new, the "pleather" strap was a just a bit stiff. So I decided to sleep with it, just to break it in. And just when it had finally molded perfectly around my wrist, I went to visit my sister in Atlanta.

I hadn’t got past the baggage claim, when she gasped and said, “I can’t believe how real it looks.” I had emailed her a close-up photo of the watch on my wrist but it was different seeing it in the flesh. By the end of my trip she had tried it on so many times, I decided, against my better judgment, to give it to her. I could always buy another one from Ricardo, I thought.

When I got back to work I asked Consuelo about Ricardo’s next visit. She was really upset that she’d never get the denim LV purse she had ordered. I found out that there had been a crackdown and he’d been caught at JFK airport with all his knock-off goods. Why did he not drive instead? Not only was he on probation, he was given a hefty fine and worse still; he had all his goods confiscated. Unfortunately for all of us at the newspaper, after that episode Ricardo decided to change careers. Although he’s still in the luxury goods business, he’s now selling used BMW’s in New Jersey and it's just not the same.

A week after I got back from Atlanta my sister called frantically and said that she had developed a nasty rash, on her lower wrist precisely where she had been wearing the watch.

“Are you sure its not chickenpox?” I asked.

“But it’s only red my wrist.” she said

“Maybe you caught something from Danny's friends at school. They’re so susceptible to skin disease at that age.” I said.

Being the hasty person she is and jumping to unnecessary conclusions (as always), she stopped wearing the watch. She threw it in the bottom of her bathroom drawer. To my surprise the rash completely cleared up after a few days. I still think it was because of all the stress she was going through at work. Stress will do that to you.

As for the watch; well, the glass frosted up with droplets of water and the pleather veneer flaked off to reveal shameful plastic. If only she had taken care of it and placed it in the imitation suede pouch that it came in. I could be wearing it now. Instead I’m waiting in line at the grocery store and looking at my cell phone every five minutes, to see what time it is.