Hips and How You'd Better Show Them Or Else

Ah, late May and summer is in the air.  Bikinis are in all the shop windows and though I can pretend not to see them with the same ease I pretend not to see the weigh scale at home I can’t get out of having to take my hip measurements.

A dear friend in Canada will be walking down the aisle in July and I’m going to be a bridesmaid. Though my friend – bless her vintage soul – has chosen 1950’s-style skirts and tops in varying shades for the bridesmaids’ attire rather than the traditional matching pastel gowns, I am still going to need to be fitted up for the skirt.

By the fantastic goodness of her heart it is my sis Theo who will be making my skirt. No one but she need ever see my measurements and I kept that thought running through my head like a mantra this morning as I bore flesh and wielded the measuring tape. It was going to take courage to read the numbers on that tape when wrapped around my hips like string on a standing roast.

Finding my ‘natural’ waist turned out to be impossible.  The tape kept sliding upward towards my armpits.  I was pretty sure my natural waist was lower than that so I just picked a latitude somewhere between ribs and navel and held the tape in place long enough to get a reading.

I managed to take all the required measurements without fainting but by the end I had heart palpitations and a nervous tremor in my hands. The numbers I’d written on the paper were terrifying to behold.  I thought about converting them into centimetres to see if that would make them less imposing but of course centimetres are smaller and therefore you need more of them.  In centimetres the list looked like the heights of a class of junior high kids. Would it be weird to send the numbers converted into kilometres? Everything would be to the right of the decimal, as if I was the size of a fly.  But Theo wouldn’t appreciate that, I thought, and went with the inches.

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Thinking about my hips and the bikinis in the shop windows reminded me of something odd that happened to me the first year we lived in Lebanon.  I had taken the kids to one of the beach resorts just outside Beirut for a day of swimming. It was a fairly upscale resort, with expensive entry fee and separate ‘VIP’ pool which you had to pay an additional fee to enter (I didn’t, of course, and when I walked past it looked like no one else had opted to do so, either).

The beach and pools were beautiful and well worth the price of entry.  Noonie and Dude swam and played in the sand and ate ice-cream.  I would have liked to have had a friend along to chat to but the weather was lovely and I read my book contentedly.

I didn’t fit the mould of the typical guest there that day.  I was used to that, however.  I always felt like Wanda Walmart at these places.  I didn’t shine nearly enough – or at least, not in the right places. My sunglasses were the only pair on the beach not encrusted with fake diamonds and  my swimsuit was a tankini top and shorts-style bottom.  My sandals were Timberland and flat.

Later in the afternoon when I finally felt hot enough to shift my carcass into the pool for a dip I heaved up off the lounger and wove my wave through the pert, bronzed bodies and sequined bikinis to the edge of the pool.  I was just lowering myself into the cool blue water when a lifeguard hastened up to me and said something in Arabic.  I didn’t understand him.  I looked quickly towards my kids, playing happily nearby.  They were fine.  What was it?  The young man knew just a little English and, indicating my swimsuit, said that I couldn’t enter the pool.

I climbed back out of the pool and told the guy I didn’t understand.  He was very polite and looked embarrassed to be causing a problem but he didn't seem able to explain.  He asked me to come with him and I followed him around the pool to a door in the side of the building. 

Inside, behind what was obviously a manager’s desk, sat a girl in her twenties, talking on the phone.  The lifeguard spoke to her in Arabic and she nodded.  Turning to me, unsmiling, she said, “I’m sorry but you cannot swim in those clothes.  Only swimming suits are allowed in the pool.”

I was stunned. “But this is a swimming suit.” 

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I’m very sorry but you can’t enter the pool in that.”

“It is a Nike swimming suit,” I said, a little louder, and undoubtedly getting red in the cheeks. “I bought it in Canada at a swimming suit store.  It is a swimming suit.” 

She regarded me with a look that clearly said she didn’t believe me.  I didn’t know what to do to prove my swimming suit’s authenticity.  It wasn’t a situation I had ever anticipated finding myself in and I’m more what you’d call a steady thinker than a quick one.  Mainly, though, I was too shocked and angry to do much more than glare.

When she said nothing further I lifted my chin.  “Would you care to explain to me what exactly the problem with my suit is?”

She wasn’t going to be honest about it.  Her body language made that clear right away.  She dropped her eyes and said something about it being unsafe.

“What?  Unsafe?” I said loudly and, I hope, rudely.

“Women can’t wear shorts, you see,” she mumbled.

“No, I’m sorry but I don’t see.”   

“The problem is the length.  The short is not safe like the regular swimming suit.”

I stared down at my suit bottom.  The shorts were the short kind, not the board kind that go to the knee.  It was incomprehensible.  I felt like I was in a Candid Camera skit.

“His shorts are way longer than mine,” I said, pointing to the lifeguard.  “So are every other pair worn by a man at this beach today.”

She shrugged. “They are mans.” 

“This is ridiculous,” I said, standing up. I wanted to shout but it came out more as a cracked, pitchy whine. “I’m never coming back to this place, I want you to know that, and I’m telling all my friends about it and they won’t come here, either.  They’re all foreigners and they won’t come here.”

I added the last bit about them all being foreigners because the Lebanese usually love to have foreigners at their clubs and restaurants.  I guess they see it as bringing a cosmopolitan air to the place -- though frankly you can’t get more cosmopolitan than the average young, educated Lebanese.  But that was beside the point.  I wanted to threaten.  In truth I didn’t know that many people and only had a small group of friends.  They were all foreigners, that much was true, but I doubted they would blacklist this beach club just because I asked them to.

The girl sighed and got up from her chair. “Okay, I will look at your swimming suit.”

She came around from behind the desk and to my disbelieving eyes reached out a hand and pinched a fold of my shorts between thumb and fingers and began to rub it around as if she were a merchant selecting a bolt of silk.

“Can I see the tag please?”

“The tag?  What?  It’s inside the suit, I don’t think I can –-“

But she indicated with an impatient gesture that I should show her the tag.  I don’t know why I obliged.  I should have told her to go stuff herself but I guess I felt the hot glow of a judicious light and just wanted to hear her acknowledge that it was a proper bl**dy bathing suit.

I turned so my back was facing away from the lifeguard, standing there with a gormless look on his face, and reached in and pulled up the back of the shorts with the tag on it.  The girl bent and read it. 

“Okay.  You can swim,” she said.

I could tell that she had already decided to let me swim before she looked at the tag.  What could the tag tell her, anyway?  Swimming suits don’t say ‘swimming suit’ on their tags. I’m pretty sure it was the threat about telling all my ‘foreigner’ friends not to swim there that convinced her.  Ridiculous but most probable.

I walked out of the office followed by the lifeguard, poor sap, and grabbed up our beach bag and towels from the pool lounger, calling to the kids. I took them down to the sand for the remainder of the day.  I was burning with anger and almost light-headed in my desire for vengeance.  I wouldn’t have gone into their wretched pool if my hair had been on fire. My day was ruined and though I didn’t ask my friends to blacklist the place I never went back there again.

Later that day in the rather more amused than sympathetic company of M I told the tale.

“Well, I think I can answer as to why they didn’t want you swimming in shorts,” he said.

“What, really?  You’ve heard of that happening before?”

“Oh yes.  Places like that work very hard to nourish a party atmosphere.  They don’t want women showing up in modest clothing and spoiling the mood of depravity. Though it’s hard to believe they interpreted your swim suit as too modest.”

"Well they did."

"Yeah, so it would seem," he said, turning on the tv and leaving me to my own smouldering reflections.

After that I heard a few stories from friends of seeing Saudi or Emirati women here on holiday wearing their full-body swimming suits to the beach and being told they were not allowed to swim.  And it wasn’t just at the club I went to the day I got a dressing down (if you will). Apparently all the upscale clubs have more or less the same policy and my being a white westerner probably spared me being told off at the other clubs.

Quite something, eh?  In a way, it tells you all you need to know about one side of Lebanon. The other side, like my mother-in-law and my driver’s wife and daughter are out in their headscarves and long sweaters that cover their bottoms, haggling over the price of cabbages under  road-side tents.

Though even these women have fake-diamond encrusted sunglasses.  Pardon me but they’re still Lebanese.