“Why go to a store when you could go to a museum?” she might ask.
“Um, because the museum doesn’t sell shit?” My sisters and I refuse to feel bad about shopping. And why should we?
Obviously we have some hole we’re trying to fill, but doesn’t everyone? And isn’t filling it with berets the size of toilet-seat covers, if not more practical, then at least healthier than filling it with frosting or heroin or unsafe sex with strangers?
“Besides,” Amy said at the dinner table on the first night of our vacation, “it’s not like everything we buy is for ourselves. I’ll be getting birthday presents for friends and all sorts of things for my godson.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I told her, as we’re cut from the same cloth. Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don’t sell things. Our sister-in-law, Kathy, swears by eBay, but I like the social aspect of shopping, the getting out. The touching things and talking to people. I work at home, so most days the only contact I have, except for Hugh, is with salespeople and cashiers.
My problem is that if someone really engages me, or goes the slightest bit out of his way, I feel I have to buy whatever it is he’s selling. Especially if it involves a ladder or a set of keys. That explains the small painting of a forsaken shack I bought on the fourth day of our vacation, at a place I like called On Sundays. It’s on an odd-shaped scrap of plywood, and though it’s by a contemporary artist I’ve always gotten a kick out of—an American named Barry McGee—and was probably a very fair price, I bought it mainly because the store manager unlocked the case that it was in.
“I would have got it if you hadn’t,” Amy, my enabler, said, as I left with the painting in a recently purchased, very pricey tote bag that had cowboys on it.
Then it was on to another one of our favorite places, the Tokyo outpost of the Dover Street Market. The original store, in London, sells both clothing and the kind of objects you might find in a natural history museum. I got the inner ear of a whale there a few years back and a four-horned antelope skull that was found in India in 1890.
The Ginza branch sticks to clothing and accessories. I’d gone with Amy on our first trip together, in 2014, and left with a pair of wide-legged Paul Harnden trousers that come up to my nipples. The button-down fly is a foot long, and when I root around in my pockets for change, my forearms disappear all the way to the elbows. You can’t belt something that reaches that high up on your torso, thus the suspenders, which came with the trousers and are beautiful, but still, suspenders! Clown pants is what they are—artfully hand-stitched, lined all the way to the ankle—but clown pants all the same. They cost as much as a MacBook Air, and I’d have walked away from them were it not for Amy saying, “Are you kidding? You have to get those.”
This time I bought a pair of blue-and-white-polka-dot culottes. Hugh hates this sort of thing and accuses me of transitioning.
“They’re just shorts,” I tell him. “Bell-bottom shorts, but shorts all the same. How is that womanly?”
A year and a half earlier, at this same Dover Street Market, I bought a pair of heavy black culottes. Dress culottes, you could call them, made by Comme des Garçons and also beautifully lined. They made a pleasant whooshing sound as I ran up the stairs of my house, searching in vain for whatever shoes a grown man might wear with them. Hugh disapproved, but again I thought I looked great, much better than I do in regular trousers. “My calves are my one good feature,” I reminded him as he gritted his teeth. “Why can’t I highlight them every now and then?”
The dress culottes weren’t as expensive as the pants that come up to my nipples, but still they were extravagant. I buy a lot of what I think of as “at-home clothes,” things I’d wear at my desk or when lying around at night after a bath, but never outdoors. These troubling, Jiminy Cricket–style trousers, for instance, that I bought at another of my favorite Japanese stores, 45rpm. They have horizontal stripes and make my ass look like a half dozen coins collected in a sack made from an old prison uniform.
I’d have felt like a fool paying all that money and limiting my nipple-high pants and black dress culottes to home, so I started wearing them onstage, which still left me feeling like a fool but a different kind of one.
“I hate to tell you,” a woman said after a show one night, “but those culottes look terrible on you.”
I was shattered. “Really?”
“They’re way too long,” she told me.
And so I had them shortened. Then shortened again, at which point they no longer made the pleasant whooshing sound and were ruined.
“Are these too long for me?” I asked the saleswoman on our most recent trip.
“Not at all,” I’m pretty sure she told me.
A few days later, at the big Comme des Garçons shop in Omotesandō, I bought yet another pair of culottes, a fancier pair that are cerulean blue.
“What are you doing?” Hugh moaned as I stepped out of the dressing room. “That’s three pairs of culottes you’ll own now.”
All I could say in my defense was “Maybe I have a busy life.”
I then tried on a button-down shirt that was made to be worn backward. The front was plain and almost suggested a straitjacket. You’d have to have someone close you into it and, of course, knot your tie if you were going for a more formal look. I’d have bought it were it not too tight at the neck.
“Maybe it’ll fit after you have your Adam’s apple shaved off,” Hugh said.
Amy loaded up at Comme des Garçons as well, buying, among other things, a skirt that looks to have been made from the insides of suit pockets.
“What just happened?” she asked as we left the store, considerably more broke, and went up a few doors to Yohji Yamamoto, where I bought what Hugh calls a dress but what is most certainly a smock. A denim one that has side pockets. The front closes with snaps and, for whatever reason, the back does as well.
Most days we returned to our rental house groaning beneath the weight of our purchases, things I’d often wind up regretting the moment I pulled them out of their bags: a pair of drawstring jeans two sizes too large, for instance—drawstring jeans!—or a wool shirt that was relatively sober and would have been great were I able to wear wool. As it is, it causes me to itch and sweat something awful. “Then why did you get it?” Hugh asked.
“Because everyone else got something,” I told him, adding that it was on sale and I could always send it to my father, who might not wear it but would undoubtedly appreciate the gesture.
Shopping with my sisters in Japan was like being in a pie-eating contest, only with stuff. We often felt sick. Dazed. Bloated. Vulgar. Yet never quite ashamed. “I think I need to lie down,” I said one evening. “Maybe with that brand-new eighty-dollar washcloth on my forehead.”
Nothing was a total waste, I reasoned, as paying for it gave me a chance to practice my Japanese.
“I am buying something now,” I’d say as I approached the register. “I have money! I have coins too!”
As if he or she had been handed a script, the cashier would ask where I was from and what I was doing in Tokyo.
“I am American,” I would say. “But now I live in England. I am on vacation with my sisters.”
“Oh, your sisters!”
Then I started saying, “I am a doctor.”
“What kind?” asked a woman who sold me a bandanna with pictures of fruit and people having sex on it.
“A…children’s doctor,” I said.
I wouldn’t set out to misrepresent myself, but I didn’t know the word for “author” or “trash collector.” “Doctor,” though, was in one of the ninety “Teach Yourself Japanese” lessons I’d reviewed before leaving England.
I loved the respect being a pediatrician brought me in Japan, even when I wore a smock and had a tower of
three hats on my head. You could see it in people’s faces. I grew before their very eyes.
“Did you just tell that lady you’re a doctor?” Amy would ask.
“A little,” I’d say.
A week after leaving Tokyo, I was on a flight from Hobart, Tasmania, to Melbourne, and when a passenger got sick and the flight attendant asked if there was a physician on board, my hand was halfway to the call button before I remembered that I am not, in fact, a doctor. That I just play one in Japan.
Though it cut into our shopping time, one thing we all looked forward to in Tokyo was lunch, which was always eaten out, usually at some place we’d just chanced upon. One afternoon toward the end of our vacation, settling into my seat at a tempura restaurant in Shibuya, I looked across the table at Amy, who was wearing a varsity sweater from Kapital that appeared to have bloodstains and bits of brain on it, and at Gretchen, with her toilet-brush hat. I was debuting a shirt that fell three inches below my knees. It was black and made me look like a hand puppet. We don’t have the same eyes or noses, my sisters and I. Our hairlines are different, and the shapes of our faces, but on this particular afternoon the family resemblance was striking. Anyone could tell that we were related, even someone from another planet who believed that humans were as indistinguishable from one another as acorns. At this particular moment of our lives, no one belonged together more than us.
Who would have thought, when we were children, that the three of us would wind up here, in Japan of all places, dressed so expensively like mental patients and getting along so well together? It’s a thought we all had several times a day: Look how our lives turned out! What a surprise!
When the menus came, Gretchen examined hers upside down. She had never used chopsticks before coming to Tokyo, and for the first few days she employed them separately, one in each hand, like daggers. Amy was a little better, but when it came to things like rice she tended to give up and just stare at her bowl helplessly. Always, when the food was delivered, we’d take a moment to admire it, so beautifully presented, all this whatever it was: The little box with a round thing in it. The shredded bit. The flat part. Once, we ate in what I’m pretty sure was someone’s garage. The owner served only one thing, and we had it seated around a folding table, just us and a space heater. The food was unfailingly good, but what made lunch such a consistent pleasure was the anticipation, knowing that we had the entire afternoon ahead of us and that it might result in anything: Styrofoam boots, a suit made of tape—whatever we could imagine was out there, waiting to be discovered. All we Sedarises had to do was venture forth and claim it.
Leviathan
As I grow older, I find that the people I know become crazy in one of two ways. The first is animal crazy—more specifically, dog crazy. They’re the ones who, when asked if they have children, are likely to answer, “A black Lab and a sheltie-beagle mix named Tuckahoe.” Then they add—they always add—“They were rescues!”
The second way people go crazy is with their diet. My brother, Paul, for instance, has all but given up solid food, and at age forty-six eats much the way he did when he was nine months old. His nickname used to be the Rooster. Now we call him the Juicester. Everything goes into his Omega J8006—kale, carrots, celery, some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees—and it all comes out dung-colored and the texture of applesauce. He’s also taken to hanging upside down with a neti pot in his nose. “It’s for my sinuses,” he claims.
Then there’s all his disease prevention, the things that supposedly stave it off but that the drug companies don’t want you knowing about. I’ve heard this sort of thing from a number of people over the years. “Cancer can definitely be cured with a vegan diet,” a friend will insist, “only they want to keep it a secret.” In this case the “they” that doesn’t want you to know is the meat industry, or “Big Meat.”
“If a vegan diet truly did cure cancer, don’t you think it would have at least made the front page of the New York Times Science section?” I ask. “Isn’t that a paper’s job, to tell you the things ‘they’ don’t want you to know?”
Paul insists that apricot seeds prevent cancer but that the cancer industry—Big Cancer—wants to suppress this information, and has quietly imprisoned those who have tried to enlighten us. He orders in bulk and brought a jarful to our house at the beach one late May afternoon. They’re horribly bitter, these things, and leave a definite aftertaste. “Jesus, that’s rough,” my father said after mistaking one for an almond. “How many do you have in a day?”
Paul said four. Any more could be dangerous, since they have cyanide in them. Then he juiced what I think was a tennis ball mixed with beets and four-leaf clovers.
“Add some strawberries and I’ll have a glass as well,” my sister Lisa said. She’s not convinced about the cancer prevention but is intrigued by all the weight our brother has lost. When he got married in 2001, he was close to 200 pounds—which is a lot if you’re only five foot two. Now he was down to 135. It’s odd seeing him thin again after all these years. I expected him to look the way he did when he was twenty, before he ballooned up, and while he’s the same physical size as he was back then, his face has aged and he now looks like that kid’s father. It’s as if a generation of him went missing.
Part of Paul’s weight loss can be attributed to his new liquid diet, but I think that exercise has more to do with it. He bought a complicated racing bike and rides it while wearing what looks like a Spider-Man costume and the type of cycling shoes that have cleats on them. One day that May, as I walked to the post office, he pedaled past without recognizing me. His face was unguarded, and I felt I was seeing him the way other people do, at least superficially: this boyish little man with an icicle of snot hanging off his nose. “Mornin’,” he sang as he sped by.
It’s ridiculous how often you have to say hello on Emerald Isle. Passing someone on the street is one thing, but you have to do it in stores as well, not just to the employees who greet you at the door but to your fellow shoppers in aisle three. Most of the houses that face the ocean are rented out during the high season, and from week to week the people in them come from all over the United States. Houses near the sound, on the other hand, are more commonly owner-occupied. They have landscaped yards, and many are fronted by novelty mailboxes. Some are shaped like fish, while others are outfitted in cozies that have various messages—BLESS YOUR HEART or SANDY FEET WELCOME!—printed on them.
The neighborhoods near the sound are so Southern that people will sometimes wave to you from inside their houses. Workmen, hammers in hand, shout hello from ladders and half-shingled roofs. I’m willing to bet that the local operating rooms are windowless and have doors that are solid wood. Otherwise the surgeons and nurses would feel obliged to acknowledge everyone who passed down the hall, and patients could possibly die as a result.
While the sound side of the island feels like an old-fashioned neighborhood, the ocean side is more like an upscale retirement community. Look out a street-facing window on any given morning, and you’d think they were filming a Centrum commercial. All these hale, silver-haired seniors walking or jogging or cycling past the house. Later in the day, when the heat cranks up, they purr by in golf carts, wearing visors, their noses streaked with sunblock. If you were a teenager, you likely wouldn’t give it much thought, but to my sisters and me—people in our mid- to late fifties—it’s chilling. That’ll be us in, like, eight years, we think. How can that be when only yesterday, on this very same beach, we were children?
Of course, the alternative is worse. When my mother was the age that I am now, she couldn’t walk more than ten steps without stopping to catch her breath. And stairs—forget it. In that regard, our father is her opposite. At ninety-one, the only things wrong with him are his toes. “My doctor wants to cut one off, but I think he’s overreacting,” he said on the second morning of our vacation. The sun shone brightly through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and he was sitting shirtless at the kitchen table on the side of t
he house that Hugh and I share, wearing black spandex shorts.
The toes he presented for my inspection looked like fingers playing the piano, all of them long and bent and splayed. “How do you fit those things into shoes?” I asked, wincing. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go the Howard Hughes route and just wear tissue boxes on your feet?”
Just then, the plumber arrived to look at our broken dishwasher. Randy is huge in every way, and as we shook hands I thought of how small mine must have felt within his, like a paw almost. “So, what seems to be the problem?” he asked.
It’s the same story every time: Hugh calls and schedules an appointment regarding something I know nothing about. Then he leaves for God knows where and I’m left to explain what I don’t understand. “I guess it’s not washing the dishes right, or something?” I said.
Randy pulled a screwdriver from his tool belt and bent down toward a panel. “I’d have come sooner, but we’re still catching up from the winter we had. Pipes frozen, all kinds of mess.”
“Was it that cold?” I asked.
“Never seen anything like it,” he said.
My father raised his coffee cup. “And they talk about global warming. Ha!”
After twenty minutes or so, Randy suggested we get a new dishwasher, a KitchenAid, if possible. “They’re not that expensive, and it’ll probably be cheaper than fixing this here one.” I showed him to the door, and as he made his way down the stairs, my father asked when I was going to have my prostate checked. “You need to get that taken care of ASAP. While you’re at it, you might want to get a complete physical. I mean, the works.”
What does that have to do with the dishwasher? I wondered.