Keep It For Later
Editor Underground
Nahia Syeda
I step into the bathtub, momentarily checking the temperature before I let the weak pressure of the shower tap against my skin. It’s cramped. I can barely spread my arms either way before I touch the wall on my right or the shower curtains on my left. Mold flecks the curtains; little brown spots, tons of them, scattered across the bottom and stretching upwards like the cloudy band of the milky way. I squeeze my shoulders together and let the suds run through my hair. Tilting my head back, I stare at the ceiling. It has similar brown spots, but lighter and bigger. I’m not sure what they are. Residue from condensation? Small cracks connect some of them together, paint peeling off at the corners. The more I look, the more the cracks seem to multiply, softening the concrete until maybe one day it’ll collapse on top of me.
“Do we have new shower curtains?” I yell, turning the water off.
No reply.
I get out, dripping onto the tiled floor and open the door a little. “Shower curtains! Do we have any left?”
“I don’t think so!” my mom shouts back, louder than me. She probably has her earphones in. I can hear her humming “Chand Sifarish,” the sound drowned out under the running tap and the rhythmic squeaking of her rubber gloves.
After twenty more minutes in the shower, I get out, dry myself and rummage through the large plastic bags of Dollarama stuff in my brother’s closet. The cold zipper of his coat flicks against my forehead as I pull out bag after bag filled with cleaning supplies, pans, pots, cutlery. Some of the receipts date back to a few years ago. There's a baby blue plastic bag underneath the heaps of dishwasher scrubs and towels. I take it out. Silhouettes of seashells and starfishes patterned at the top-left dance around the “shower curtains” label. It’s wrinkled and more expensive than a dollar-store item.
I rush to my mother and thrust the package against her back. “You didn’t check well enough.” My cheeks are hot and I want to yell. Get on the floor and kick my feet and cry. I could’ve showered with clean curtains. I could’ve showered without flinching every time I felt that slime against my skin.
“Oh that?” She takes it from my arms and brushes the dust off with her wet fingers. “Put it away. I’ll get new ones later.”
“Why don’t we just use these?”
“Because we might need them in the future.”
“We need them now.” I try to grab it out of her hands but she’s strong. She holds onto it with white knuckles, up to her chest as if it’s some sort of sacred life force.
“I said no.” Her voice is firm. “I said we’ll use it later.”
“You’re so unfair!” I stamp my foot this time, five years old again. The lump in my throat brings about tears and I turn away into the comfort of the bathroom before I let her see me cry.
I could’ve showered with clean curtains. This is all her fault.
My dad’s fiftieth birthday is on the fifteenth of October. I’m not getting him a gift this year.
Instead, I’ll get him the fancy rolled ice cream from the QQ Thai store that opened up at the
Midland Plaza and costs seven dollars per serving. He likes to roll his eyes and scoff at ice cream being so ridiculously expensive, but he still drives me there and finishes his order, tonguing at the edges of the cup. I’ve only gotten a proper gift for him once when I worked as a cashier for Sobeys during pre-COVID 2020. Inflation wasn’t as bad, and I was able to afford a floral dress shirt from Hudson’s Bay at the cost of sixty dollars (on sale). He loved it so much he never wore it. I found the shirt with its price tag still on, tucked under the blankets folded on top of his ottoman bench, plastic packaging untouched.
“How come you never wore the shirt I got you?” I ask him the day we get our ice creams. Mine is with matcha base, topped with chocolate pocky sticks and a small KitKat. He gets mango with popping boba and lychee bits. I watch him suck on the melting lump in his mouth, chewing jelly.
“The floral one?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t found the right moment to. It’s too good to wear for simple paan and chai with the uncles.”
What about the wedding we went to last week? I almost ask. What about now? For your fiftieth birthday? Are you ever going to wear it?
Instead, I shovel heapfuls of green ice cream into my mouth until I get a brain freeze.
“You should. They’d all get jealous ‘cause you’d look the best there.”
I relish his laugh, wheezy from the cigarettes he’s smoked since he was a teen. My dad is the most handsome out of all his friends. He doesn’t even look fifty. Sometimes when we go out
in public, I’ve had people ask him if I was his niece, or his younger sister, and he gloated to my mom for weeks. He attributes his youngness to his ‘dashingly good looks’, but I think it’s just the black hair dye he slathers over his scalp and beard. It doesn’t deceive me anymore though. I can outline the crow’s feet around his eyes and the bald spots between his thick curls. His decaying premolars when he licks the spoon clean.
The urge to see him in that shirt gnaws through my skull like a wild animal, and I can’t pinpoint why I want it so bad. Will his shirt mold like those shower curtains until it’s useless and unwearable? What’s the point of getting him that shirt then?
I bought him that shirt because I’ve been racked with guilt since the summer of 2019. My dad had spent over two hundred dollars buying me new clothes from the mall for my first semester at UTSC. I was so tired, I plopped onto a bench with several shopping bags swelled around my feet. With a single air pod in my left ear, I half listened to my playlist, half listened to my parents bicker a few feet in front of me at the entrance of Tommy Hilfiger, going through the clearance aisle.
My dad picked up a navy-blue dress shirt, ironed to a crisp. He eyed it for a few minutes, turning it around, upside down, then he checked the tag and wrinkled his face.
“Too expensive,” he muttered to my mom.
The big, bright red sign read “$50 and less!”
I shattered to pieces.
Here I was, two hundred dollars’ worth of clothes around my feet while my dad checked each price tag of the fucking clearance aisle. He didn’t buy anything for himself. Not a single shirt.
The first time I’ve heard of ‘hoarding’ was through a friend on Zoom. Korean-Australian, middle class and only child; Yujin and I met through mutuals on Twitter and became quick friends in the pandemic. She told me she had a problem with “hoarding” --- that her room was stuffed with posters, toys, and old clothes from her childhood that she couldn't bring herself to throw out.
“Having hoarder parents’ kind of fucks you up, doesn't it?” She tells me on FaceTime. “I get so much anxiety just thinking about my room.”
I glance behind her at the display of succulents and her lilac wall covered in BTS posters. Her bed has neat rows of stuffed animals, a range of pastel pinks, yellows, and blues. She talks about her childhood for a bit; growing up poor, her mom teaching her that things shouldn’t be disposed of just in case. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, the way she frames it as some sort of trauma. I want to press my thumb over my camera and hide my single bed behind me, pressed together next to the bed my brothers share and void of anything decorative.
“That’s kind of stupid though.” I frown.
“If you don’t need it now, you won’t need it ever. You’ll have so much space after you clean the junk out anyways.” I must’ve said something wrong because she grimaces a little. All I think of is the patterned shower curtain and that shirt rotting away in my dad’s closet. She’s just like them.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m being silly.”
She cuts the call without a goodbye, and I’m met with my blank faced reflection. I should feel guilty– rush to grab my phone and text her a bunch of half-assed apologies. It is silly. When I get my own room someday, it will be clutterless and clean and alive. I’ll never be like her. I’ll never be like my parents. I’m different.
I snip open the orange net bag full of large onions, take one out, brush the peels off, and then arrange it on the second rack of the metal vegetable stand we got from Amazon. It’s a mundane enough task to zone out, but something hairy brushes against my hand and I flinch back to reality. A spider scurries to the far end. Small and white, not yet grown into the familiar long legs and beaded body that I often killed. The infestation has been going on for a year now; nobody knows where they’re coming from. I had already cleaned out the vegetable stand just a week ago, a total of three crumpled spider bodies for each rack. They can’t be back this quick.
The cleaning supplies are an arm’s length away in the cabinets under the kitchen sink. I grab the bug spray and it only takes a few seconds for the spider to tremble, shrivel up and fall, dangling from the web attached to its abdomen. In the back of the cabinet, little threads of spider silk sway from the top of the stainless steel idli maker that Mom brought from her trip to India back in 2002. I reach up to fling the overhead cabinets open. Inside, countless spice packets are tied up in plastic bags, Tupperware with dry herbs lined at the topmost rack, cans of beans and expired condensed milk, important letters sticking out from their columns. Everything thrown together in a messed heap. The white cabinet walls themselves are layered with a thin sheen of yellow grime, orange bits at the bottom, like a sickly infection overcoming it inch by inch.
It feels like that too, living in this house.
My mom sleeps too much, eats too little, and spends most of her time complaining about her aching joints. She’s become a geyser, bursting into a fit of scalding rage at the littlest disturbances. I’m afraid I’ll end up like her if I stay in this house for too long.
I smush whatever spiders I can find hidden at the junctions and stand there, staring at the mess in front of me. I could clean it right now. All of it. Sort through the heaps and throw out the expired stuff and wipe down all the dust and grime and spider silk and guts and maybe then I’ll have enough space to buy flour and bake like I’ve been meaning to for the past few years. Maybe if it were clean enough, I wouldn’t have to kill spiders every time I enter the kitchen. But fatigue settles deep into my bones– gathers at the bottom of my feet like the orange grime disease, and I close the cabinets. I tuck it into the ever-growing to-do list of cleanings and go back to neglecting the house like the rest of my family does.
At night, I brush my teeth and go through the steps of my usual skin care routine, face wash, toner, acne spot treatment and then a moisturizer. Most of my stuff takes the space of the dressing table, rows of little bottles and tubes that I got as free samples, toners and serums and oils. My mom says it’s a salon at this point; if I put a sign on the front of the door and usher people in, they’d think I was the real deal.
I dab the toner onto my cotton pad, the bottle so light that alarms start going off in my brain. With practiced ease, I open the first drawer and take the new toner bottle out of its package. I put it right beside the nearly empty one– squint inside it to see a layer swish at the bottom. A few days’ worth still left in there.
My shoulders relax, and I take my time patting the new toner onto my skin. If it empties faster than expected, I’ll have a backup plan. I won’t run out. I’ll always have some left, just in case.