Tailoring My Clothes, Fitting into My Life in America

A few weeks before my friend Alex’s wedding, I tried on the dress I intended to wear for the event and realized the bodice was too loose. I was surprised that it was suddenly big on me, but figured I must have lost some weight in the course of a recent summer cold so severe I’d at first thought it was malaria.

The dress—which I had just had made on a recent visit to my home country of Malawi—was strapless, perfect for a summer wedding, with a sweetheart neckline and a rippling A-line skirt cut to mid-calf, made of a glossy royal blue and canary yellow wax-print fabric. Made specifically for me, the dress was truly one-of-a-kind, making it perfect for a special occasion.

Alex’s wedding was going to happen well before my next trip home, and if I wanted to wear the dress without flashing all the guests during the Cupid Shuffle I would have to do what I’d never until then done: I would have to have it tailored here, in the US.

In the decade since I arrived in the US for college, I had saved any clothes in need of alterations for my annual trips home to Malawi. It didn’t matter whether I was going home in six weeks or six months, or that I was living in New York or Philadelphia, cities with lots of options for alterations. All year, a pile grew in the back of my closet: trousers in need of hemming, a dress that needed pulling in at the waist, a shirt whose shoulders needed letting out.

I would carry the clothes back with me to Malawi, and a few days after arriving home, I would take them to the great-aunt of a family friend, Mrs. Mauluka. A tall, friendly woman with an easy laugh, she was the person who had made and mended clothes for me and my family for years. She ran her business out of a small, sun-bathed guest room at the back of her house, and was always dressed in one of her latest creations.

The idea of getting the dress tailored in Philadelphia, by a stranger, made me feel nervous. Having never had a dress altered in the US before, I had no sense of what work like that cost, and was afraid of being ripped off; since the dress being one of a kind, I was also afraid of the job being irreparably botched. Several years prior, a one-of-a-kind wax print dress I’d bought at a market in South Africa came back irreparably bleached from my then-cleaners, who subsequently tried to insist it was that same pale shade the whole time. I was afraid to trust someone new with this special garment.

That spring, I’d gone home to Malawi for five weeks instead of my typical two. I had been in a sticky funk in the months prior, feeling stuck in a job I’d outgrown but didn’t know how to leave, and resentful of the smaller apartment I’d recently had to move into when I could no longer afford my nicer, bigger place. And I really missed my large extended family at home, the insistent weight of a community web that can sometimes be suffocating in its omniscience in Malawi, yet asphyxiating in its absence when I am in the US.

Although I told my parents I just needed a break and that’s why I was coming home for a longer holiday than usual, I had privately begun to think seriously about quitting my job outright, and staying home until I could find my way out of my emotional trough. I loved our home; it was always full of people and life, whereas I lived alone in Philadelphia, and returned home each day to silence.

At any given time, at least two or three cousins would be living with my parents, while doing their degrees at the Polytechnic of the University of Malawi in Blantyre. Other cousins who were attending Catholic University—an hour away in Mulanje—would come stay at the house over short school breaks. If my siblings and I happened to be home at the same time, we all often went out together, six or seven of us in a Cousin Crew, to the same two or three places that were in at the time—Twiga Lounge, Blue Elephant, TJs. My parents’ house felt like a giant, noisy nebula of warmth and familiarity, that seemed rarely to change and always welcomed me back no matter how long it had been since I was last in Malawi.

Yet during this last trip home, there were also extended family members who kept telling me that I was no longer really a Malawian, but an American. After returning from the annual graveyard clearing at my mother’s village that June, for example, I heard that a relative had referred to me—albeit affectionately—as an azungu, or white person, when she was impressed that I still decided to come to the ceremonies that day.

No matter how hard I pushed back, asserting that Malawi was my home, they insisted otherwise. Perhaps, to them, this distance from Malawianness felt like an achievement I should be proud of. To me, though, their declarations left me feeling cut off, as though there was an invisible test of Malawian authenticity that I had somehow failed.

They weren’t necessarily wrong, though. By then, I had already been away from Malawi for close to thirteen years. I had more friends in the US than I did in Malawi, and they knew more about me and my daily life than most of my Malawi friends did. I had long switched out the delicate British-Malawian accent I’d acquired at my boarding school for the hard i’s and soft t’s of American English.

Their declarations left me feeling cut off, as though there was an invisible test of Malawian authenticity that I had somehow failed.

By the time I graduated college, I had finally been converted to American spellings instead of British ones—neighbor instead of neighbour, organize instead of organise. My spoken Chichewa, Malawi’s national language, was by then so broken and badly accented that when my cousin was visiting with her three-year-old son and I told him to come with me to wash his hands before lunch, he asked me—only half-innocently—why I was speaking Chichewa like a baby.

In retrospect, I think the degradation of my Chichewa mirrored the growth of my Philadelphia roots—subtle, born out of necessity and then spreading into a life. I had close friends, people I’d known for a decade and had grown with; people whose weddings I was invited to. I had routines, like leaving work and stopping first at Metropolitan Bakery for bread and then Freshgrocer for beer, then going to my best friends’ place for dinner, building rocket ships out of Mega Bloks with their son to keep him from running into the kitchen every two minutes. I had a life in Philadelphia, and it was my home as much as Malawi was.

And so, despite a wonderful five weeks with my family, I knew I had to return to Philadelphia. I cried and cried when the airplane’s boarding door finally closed, understanding dawning with the rising of the plane that, after thirteen years of taking this flight, this goodbye was a door closing that I might not be able to open again. I had never known, until then, the feeling of understanding where exactly I had to be. Now I did, and despite the relief of belonging, it also broke my heart.

Three weeks after I got back to Philadelphia, I found myself in the predicament with the blue dress. I could have found a perfectly adequate substitute dress at any number of stores downtown, especially in July when so many stores would have already put out their summer’s end markdown racks. Then I could have waited to have the ill-fitting dress fixed until the next time I went home. But my idea of home had recently changed, so I decided to take the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.

I brought the dress to the same place in West Philadelphia where I take my dry-cleaning. The owner is a kind-eyed, soft-spoken lady who gives me the Ten Percent Tuesdays sale even when it’s not a Tuesday, and jokingly remarks, “Only one dress today?” when I bring her one dress for cleaning instead of the usual seven or eight.

She did an excellent job, and the dress stayed up at the wedding with almost no fidgeting. I’ve brought my clothes to her ever since, and over the years we have grown to like each other a great deal. She greets me now with a smile of recognition, and I make sure to tell her regularly how much I appreciate her work.

She has fixed everything from gala dresses for work events to bridesmaid dresses for destination weddings. She travels to her home country, Laos, every summer for one month; it takes her nearly three days to get there, the same amount of time it takes me to travel to Malawi. Last year, when she got back from her trip, I stayed for some time after picking up the dresses I’d dropped off there a month before, and we talked about our home countries and why we have both chosen to stay here.

In the fall, when I bought the dress I would wear to my father’s funeral in Malawi the following week, I didn’t even think about the no-charge alterations offered by the store for its refitting. I instead went directly to her, because I knew she would not only care about doing right by the work, but doing right by me.

My idea of home had changed, so I took the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.

The US is now my life, but Malawi is still my home. No matter where my dresses are fixed neither truth can be undone. They can be stitched into each other to form a more cohesive whole, though, and that’s been my project since that summer—to learn that I can miss my home in Malawi but continue to deepen my roots in Philadelphia at the same time.

I have now lived at the same place in Philadelphia for over five years, and have built a web of friends and loved ones that now carries weight enough to rival my Malawian community’s. I have a reliable circuit of coffee shops, food carts and bottle stores where the people working there recognize me immediately and know exactly what I want. I know where the best sales on books and dresses are, and keep a well-stocked wine rack for the Wine and Whining Party Series I began last year with a few friends from my old job. And, in my closet, the pile of clothes to bring home is gone.

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