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The end of July came, and my thirty-fifth birthday with it. Wayan threw a birthday party for
me in her shop, quite unlike any I have ever experienced before. Wayan had dressed me in a
traditional Balinese birthday suit—a bright purple sarong, a strapless bustier and a long length
of golden fabric that she wrapped tightly around my torso, forming a sheath so snug I could
barely take a breath or eat my own birthday cake. As she was mummifying me into this ex-
quisite costume in her tiny, dark bedroom (crowded with the belongings of the three other little
human beings who live there with her), she asked, not quite looking at me, but doing some
fancy tucking and pinning of material around my ribs, “You have prospect to marrying Felipe?”
“No,” I said. “We have no prospects for marrying. I don’t want any more husbands, Way-
an. And I don’t think Felipe wants any more wives. But I like being with him.”
“Handsome on the outside is easy to find, but handsome on the outside and handsome on
the inside—this not easy. Felipe has this.”
I agreed.
She smiled. “And who bring this good man to you, Liz? Who prayed every day for this
man?”
I kissed her. “Thank you, Wayan. You did a good job.”
We commenced to the birthday party. Wayan and the kids had decorated the whole place
with balloons and palm fronds and handwritten signs with complex, run-on messages like,
“Happy birthday to a nice and sweet heart, to you, our dearest sister, to our beloved Lady
Elizabeth, Happy Birthday to you, always peace to you and Happy Birthday.” Wayan has a
brother whose young children are gifted dancers in temple ceremonies, and so the nieces and
nephews came and danced for me right there in the restaurant, staging a haunting, gorgeous
performance usually offered only to priests. All the children were decked out in gold and
massive headdresses, decorated in fierce drag queen makeup, with powerful stamping feet
and graceful, feminine fingers.
Balinese parties as a whole are generally organized around the principle of people getting
dressed up in their finest clothes, then sitting around and staring at each other. It’s a lot like
magazine parties in New York, actually.(“My God, darling,” moaned Felipe, when I told him