Packing is the original sin of travel. In the beginning there was no packing. There weren’t even any clothes. If Adam and Eve had not gotten themselves banished from the Garden of Eden, their children and their children’s children would not have to decide between taking one pair of underwear and rinsing it out every night, or packing several, thereby taking up space that might better be used for a wide-spectrum antibiotic, a current adapter, or an alternate pair of walking shoes. We would all still be naked in Paradise. There wouldn’t be any need to get away from it all. As it is, in our fallen state, we must travel endlessly throughout the world collecting frequent flier points, doomed never to know if we’ve packed the right stuff.
Having nothing to wear is a condition I take with me wherever I go, no matter how many and various the items of clothing I possess. I take them out and I put them back. I lay out. I try on. I accessorize. I fold. I roll. I assess all the bottled items I’m planning to bring with me for their explosive potential, especially the hand lotion and shampoo, and decide to isolate them in a Ziploc bag. I count the days I will be away in pills and deposit them in my Sunday-through-Saturday plastic case. I pack them. Then I unpack them and put them in my purse, in case of luggage loss. Then I dump everything out and change suitcases. Invariably while packing I feel the need to shop. I dash from store to store in a sweat, like a druggie in need of a fix, at once ashamed and determined.
For extra credit I worry about what to wear on the plane. Jeans are getting too tight. I gave them up in a lavatory over Tokyo in 1992 when I discovered grommet indentations on my belly. It was during that same flight that I invented an inflatable outfit for air travelers, inspired by astronauts’ space suits. It’s an all-purpose, self-regulating minienvironment, equipped with gourmet food, music, TV, and movies. The pod is made out of opaque, flexible plastic so that you can lounge nude inside. It’s even got its own waste disposal and air recirculation system that guarantees that the only cold you catch will be your own. Plus it has exterior handles in case someone needs to move you into the aisle, and in the event of an emergency landing, you can serve as your own flotation device. Until I get the patent and enough investors to make a prototype, I settle for a sweat suit and sneakers so that all of me can swell with impunity.
My friend Brett has an irrational fear of wrinkles. Before she packs, she sends the clothes she’s planning to take with her to be dry-cleaned, whether they need it or not, just so they come back wrapped in plastic. Then she places them in a suitcase so large that she doesn’t have to fold anything.
Another friend, Lucie, has worse problems. She never has the right luggage. She wanders through stores trying out suitcases as if she were tasting porridge. Should she get the one that the gorilla jumps on in the commercials and can’t break, or maybe go with something less flamboyant and more patriotic, like American Tourister?
No matter how much I learn in advance about my destination’s climate, topography, style of dress, midday highs, and evening lows, not to mention its average monthly precipitation, I seem not to be able to process the information to any useful effect. Is hot in Paris the same as hot in Connecticut? I cannot imagine. Should I take an umbrella? It rained 2.1 inches in Prague last August, but was that all at once, or a little bit nearly every day? I wouldn’t know what to pack for a vacation in a nudist colony. I’d get hung up worrying about a suitable traveling outfit: Sweats? A muumuu? My imagination fails me. (I have a similar problem with travel books. No matter how intently I read them before a trip, no matter how informative, well-written, and sometimes even interesting they may be, I still don’t know what I want to see or how long I want to stay until I get there.) I compensate for not knowing what to take by taking everything I own. I’m one of the vacationing homeless. I pull my worldly possessions in a suitcase on a leash behind me.
It is as if I believe I must take everything I own because no matter where I’m going—Paris or Peru—they don’t have it. Larry has tried his best, including the use of both reason and sarcasm, to reassure me, but to no avail.
“My sun hat! I forgot my sun hat!” I cry as we run to the gate at La Guardia.
“I would hazard a guess,” says Larry, “that they have sun hats in Jamaica.”
Someplace in my brain where I’m sane, I must know that I’ll be able to find a sun hat in Jamaica or a toothbrush in Paris. Jacques Chirac, after all, must brush his teeth. He probably even flosses. But I am not soothed. Will I find tweezers in Dublin? It rains a lot in Ireland, but do they pluck? My fears defy reason. I am sure that nothing I have forgotten is available in any other country in the world.
It may be that packing is particularly difficult for me because my earliest ideas of what packing should be came from the films of the forties, where stars like Anne Baxter or Loretta Young made it look too easy. They grabbed armloads of dresses from their closets, sometimes with the hangers still attached, folded them hastily into their suitcases, and then struggled to close the lid and snap it shut. Usually something chiffon was hanging out as our heroine, dressed in a cloth coat, picked up her bag and closed the door behind her. Then she would show up in a New York hotel room with a fully accessorized wardrobe of gowns, gabardine suits, peignoir sets, a riding habit, and a change of fur coats.
I wish I could be fancy-free like my friend Mirela. On a recent trip to India she packed clothes she no longer enjoyed wearing and then, like an ambassador from Goodwill, left them, outfit after outfit, in hotel rooms from Delhi to Bombay. Why can’t I be cool like those postmodernist hippies who fill one half of a backpack with a change of clothing and the other half with bottled springwater? Or, failing that, I would settle for being the kind of savvy woman who packs five mix-and-match separates in black and beige tones, made of uncrushable fabric that breathes, plus a colorful scarf she knows how to tie eight ways. But I am not. I am an out-of-control packer. Larry is too. We are each other’s enablers. What else does “made for each other” mean?
Whenever we’re faced with two empty suitcases, we try to keep each other under control. We take it one outfit at a time. “Are you bringing khakis?” I ask Larry, who is fighting his own packing demons on his side of the bed. He is. I am reassured. I’ll take mine.
“How about three T-shirts?” he suggests, keeping the numbers down to what he knows he can handle. “Sounds about right,” I agree. He in turn wants to know if I think he can get away with one sport jacket and one pair of decent trousers, in case we do anything slightly fancy in the evening. “Absolutely. And I’ll take one pair of black slacks and a blouse,” I offer.
So far so good. These are our finest marital packing moments. We are centered. We are open and honest. We are mutually supportive. We are fighting a common enemy and working together toward a common goal—fitting everything into carry-on so we never have to go to baggage claim.
I’m always the one to give in to temptation first, a precedent established by Eve in Genesis 3. Just when we’re virtually finished and all that we have left to put in are the toiletries, I am seized by a perverse and irresistible urge to pack more. I know I’m engaging in destructive behavior. I even know I’m going to be sorry. But I don’t care.
“Sweetheart,” I say, “wouldn’t you like to have another outfit, just in case?”
He bites. What began as a commitment to control our packing habit ends in betrayal and a race to the bottom. He slips in an extra jacket. I retaliate with a sweater. He ups the ante with two more pairs of slacks. I pack three. We take a quick time-out while we head to the attic for larger suitcases. I end by packing a dress I don’t even wear when I’m at home. He stuffs in a pair of black wing tips. I tuck in some heels. We are like two bulimics with spoons in front of an open fridge. It’s Paradise Lost all over again. No wonder Adam and Eve were sent packing.
