Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  There were some uneasy moments, such as when my throbbing head belly-kicked my gag reflex again and I rushed to the toilet, yards of pale green silk ­collapsing around me as I crouched over the bowl, but eventually we finished dressing. Gabriel looked quite dapper in his antique tuxedo and, sick as I was, I couldn’t help feeling pride beneath the nausea. My own outfit was another birthday present: a beautiful silk ball gown of palest green. It was a replica of a Victorian pattern (rather than an authentic piece), but a faithful one, with genuine antique lace. Since hats weren’t worn while dancing, in my hair I wore an antique celluloid tango comb from 1919 that my mother-in-law had given me (another birthday present).

  I was starting to feel slightly better by the time we got to the ball, but then immediately had a sudden setback as the loud music slammed against my skull. I swayed on my sore feet, and Gabriel looked over to where I stood, slightly paler and slightly greener than my dress.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  I nodded, and we walked inside the dance room.

  It was a classic small-town hall, with a stage up front and a large wooden floor that could be used for anything from county fairs to light sports. Christmas lights had been hung as fairy arcs expanding outward from the center of the ­ceiling, and doves cut from white paper hung above the dancers. It was beautiful.

  I staggered my way uncertainly to a seat, hoping that my head would slow down its throbbing again. “Can I do anything for you?” Gabriel asked.

  “Well,” I looked uncertainly over at the table of re-freshments. “Could you bring me a cup of water?”

  “Of course.” He pounced at the opportunity to be useful and rushed off to the drinks. I took a full breath—a high breath, rather than a deep one. The corset meant that a large inhalation lifted my ribs instead of pushing out my belly. Closing my eyes, I willed my skull to stop cracking.

  Gabriel returned, water in hand. “They have chocolate-covered strawberries,” he told me. He knew they were particular favorites of mine. “Do you want me to bring you one?”

  I looked down at the water, sipping doubtfully. I still wasn’t entirely sure that I wouldn’t double over spewing bile at any moment. Still, chocolate strawberries . . .

  Gabriel seemed to read my thoughts. “It might settle your stomach a bit if you eat something,” he nudged.

  “Okay.” I was nervous, but I really didn’t need much urging. I love chocolate-covered strawberries.

  When he brought one back for me, I nibbled at it slowly between delicate sips of water. Nibble—stay, stomach, stay! Chew . . . swallow . . . sip. Sip . . . no! Okay . . . stomach—is—Ah! No, okay. Sip. Sip. Nibble.

  I feel fairly confident in stating that chocolate strawberries were not carried in the standard doctors’ bags of the nineteenth century9. Those iconic leather bags were far more likely to contain some variant of aspirin: the active painkilling constituent of the ­willow plant was identified in 1823, and by 1897 the Bayer company had developed and patented a way to artificially synthesize the drug10. There were other remedies of varying efficacies (generally available from drugstores without the bother of seeing a doctor), and of course there has always been the time-honored headache treatment in which I had been engaged earlier: lying quietly in a darkened room.

  By the time I had finished the strawberry, I was feeling improved enough to look over to where Gabriel had started a conversation with our neighbors at the adjoining table. They were from the same costume group we had encountered earlier, although the precise assortment had changed somewhat. The short woman who tended to grumble was there, dressed now in an electric blue polyester gown that fitted her like a sack. Ellen had been replaced by a more sedate and soft-spoken woman named Tilly who wore an outfit that was rather more tasteful than others we had seen. Her broad, hoopskirted gown was fashioned of a material that shifted color as the light changed; I couldn’t tell if it was real shot silk, but the fact that I could have that uncertainty spoke for its quality. I envied her thick waves of lustrous brown hair, tucked into a lace net at the back of her neck. Feeling the crush of pain in my head receding ever so slightly, I tried to concentrate on the conversation.

  Tilly ignored snarky interjections from her companion and continued to tell Gabriel more about their club, as well as about the other groups with which she was involved. She went into special detail about an upcoming tea she was organizing as a fund-raiser for a senior center. She told us about how it had become a regular event; every year on the Saturday before Mother’s Day she helped this center organize a Princess Tea. Volunteers served in formal dress, and there would be an antique fashion show as entertainment. She urged us to come help, and we said we’d think about it.

  The tea was Tilly’s own project, separate from the costume group, but she told us about upcoming events from that group as well. Picnics, parties, dances—we were urged to come to them all. Gabriel, excited by the prospect of opportunities for us to wear our Victorian clothing, started to tell Tilly about our collection.

  “We think it’s really fun to show people the real antiques,” he explained. “We think it’s a really good learning experience for people to see the real thing, to see all the detail that went into them. We’ve really learned a lot from wearing them and feeling the way clothes were meant to fit.”

  “You can’t wear real antiques!” snipped the diminutive woman in the baggy dress. (I think the glare of her neon blue polyester was making my headache worse.) “You’ll ruin them!”

  We’re not telling you what to do with your own property, I thought, my head pounding. What right do you have to dictate what we do with ours?

  “We’ve been getting antique clothes and repairing them specifically so that we can wear them and teach people about them,” Gabriel explained, speaking the words I may have said if I were feeling better. “We think people learn a lot more—”

  “You don’t seem to understand that when these things are gone, they’re gone!” she interrupted. She rolled her eyes while she talked.

  “Dance with me?” I suddenly asked Gabriel, eager to end the conversation.

  He gave me a dubious look. “Are you sure you feel up to it?”

  I nodded. I think I would have danced with my brains leaking out of my ears if it meant escaping Polyester Woman’s uneducated wrath.

  After a dance and several more cups of water, I actually was feeling better. By the time the ball was over, I was truly enjoying myself and the headache was nearly gone. My husband’s tender ministrations had helped greatly, and the throbbing pain in my head had been replaced by a swelling pride in my heart that Gabriel had helped distract me from my discomfort by dancing, even though he hates to do so.

  “You know,” I told Gabriel as we drove back to our hotel room. “I think I figured something out.”

  “Hmm? What’s that?”

  “Well,” I explained. “My anatomy teacher’s always talking about how much water the large intestine uses . . . ”

  “Uh huh . . .” Gabriel was clearly wondering where this was going.

  “He says the colon will steal water from anywhere in the body when it needs it, and the brain’s mostly water, and that’s why so many people get headaches when they get dehydrated, because the colon’s stealing the water.”

  Oh dear. This sounded a lot more coherent in anatomy class.

  “Uh huh . . .” Gabriel repeated, waiting to see where I was going with this.

  “Well, anyhow, I was thinking that maybe the reason my headache came on so fast this time was that the corset had been compressing my intestines all day, and then when I took it off, the intestines suddenly slurped up all the extra water because they could suddenly expand.”

  “So . . . you’re saying that next time you get a headache, we should keep your corset on?”

  “Well, maybe.” Honestly, it did make a lot more sense in the abstract.

  “It’s worth a try, I guess.”

  Back at the hotel, we snuggled deep into
the feather bed for our last night in Port Townsend, both agreeing that the weekend was passing far too quickly. This lovely little mini break felt like a step backward in time, and we had little desire to return to the present.

  The next day, we strolled through the beautiful Uptown neighborhoods, gazing on its glorious old Victorian homes from the late nineteenth century. In the heart of the historic district, a few blocks up from a corner grocery that sold sarsaparilla and on a street where the houses were adorned with bay windows and flashed glass, tears came to my eyes.

  “Hey,” Gabriel frowned, and his hand came up to stroke my hair. “What’s wrong?”

  I sniffed, trying to blink the tears away. “It’s just . . .” I looked around us, at surroundings that reminded me of a vibrant version of my dreams from childhood, when I had longed more than anything to live in the Victorian era. “We’re going back today. We’ll never be able to live in a place like this.”

  Gabriel wiped at my eyes. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, though.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t say ‘never.’” He kissed my gloved hand. Then a look of amusement crossed his face and he grinned. “After all, a few weeks ago, you never thought you’d be wearing a corset, right?”

  The corner of my own mouth turned up at that. “I suppose that’s true,” I admitted, nodding.

  “See?” He put his hand around my waist. “You never know what can ­happen in the future.” He looked around us and grinned again. “Or the past!”

  The sentiment that our time in the Victorian seaport was passing too quickly was one that stayed strongly with us long after we’d passed the Port Townsend city limits. As we waited for the ferry we would ride to cross Puget Sound, I smoothed down my modern shirt over my inward curves. I had been enjoying the daylong hug of my stays so much that I hadn’t wanted to take them off.

  Gabriel smirked at me. “Are you enjoying wearing the corset?”

  I gave him a sideways glance, and returned the expression with a smirk of my own. “Yeah. Actually, I am. I never thought I would. I would have said they were crazy if someone told me I would. But . . . I am.”

  He chuckled as we drove onto the ferry.

  Montgomery Ward’s “Venus Back” corset. Price: $2 each or $22/dozen.

  4

  Waisted Curves

  Victorian fashion plate.

  I was entranced. Within just a few weeks, the corset went from a gift reluctantly accepted at arm’s length, to something I didn’t want to be without. I loved the soft feeling of being hugged all day, and of course I loved my new figure. But more than these things, I loved the sudden change in the way I was treated by the world around me.

  On one of the corseting blogs I had been reading, someone posted a comment that struck a particularly deep chord with me. “When you look like an old-fashioned lady,” the blogger wrote, “people treat you like an old-fashioned lady.”11 It was true.

  I had lived in Seattle for years and had long since grown accustomed to all the jostling and elbow-shoving that is such a part of daily life in a big city, most metropolitan residents don’t notice it anymore. Suddenly, though, people were standing aside for me. People opened doors; men tipped their hats. I was still in modern clothes—cycling pants, sweaters pinned to take up the extra slack from the subtracted bulk, a polar fleece jacket I had altered a bit—but I was becoming, and being treated similarly to, a Victorian lady.

  Part of the change was in myself. With the corset holding my back straight, I couldn’t slump anymore. I was uncomfortable with this at first; being a naturally big girl, over the years I’d gotten used to making myself look as small as possible, as though to apologize to the world for my existence. Now I couldn’t, though, and I started to realize that the world didn’t need an apology for my inclusion in it.

  As I stopped slumping and my shoulders went back, my head naturally followed. I took to wearing hats, and my chin came up to steady them. When I started wearing my hair in a bun, the little chignon at the base of my neck acted as a counterbalance. My beloved boots came out at every opportunity, and to keep my balance on the kitten heels, I learned to walk with long strides, lifting up my feet, which I had been dragging for far too long. After a lifetime as a shuffling, slumping little duckling, I was learning to be a swan.

  I started rushing home after class, as eager to get into my corset as I had been to get out of school when I was young. Gabriel helped me on with it when he returned from his own classes, and I started to grow impatient with the lag of time between my own return and his. One day, I got tired of waiting.

  I stood in front of the full-length mirror on our bathroom and held the corset up, craning my neck around in a struggle to see what I was doing. With the clasps fastened, I reached around for the laces . . . and the corset immediately fell off from the lack of tension. I frowned, but refused to give up so easily.

  The second attempt was more successful. It took a while to pull the laces taught, working as I was behind my back and in the reversed image of the mirror. At last, though, I was laced and tied, sleek and curvy by my own hands. I beamed at myself in the mirror, nearly as proud of this accomplishment as I’d been the first time I’d tied my own shoes as a child.

  In time, practice would make the action of tying my corset laces as easy and familiar as styling my hair into a bun. However, I still generally have Gabriel check that the bow is secure. Corset laces, like shoelaces, will work themselves loose and come untied over the course of a day if they haven’t been tied properly, and there are few things quite as annoying as having to disrobe in a public bathroom to retie my laces. This tender confirmation serves to reinforce the ties that bind us together, as I’m sure it did for couples of the past.

  I loved the weekends, when I could wear the corset all day. I wanted to wear it more during the week, but worried about its compatibility with my classes. Beside the straightforward logistical problems, I fretted about what my classmates would think of me.

  I was studying massage therapy, working toward certification. A big part of massage school involves students using one another as guinea pigs, and we spent as much time receiving massage as we did giving it. Since the client is undressed during full-body massage, I wouldn’t be wearing anything for that portion of the class. When we switched roles from client to practitioner in each class, both time and space for the changeover was extremely limited: we usually had only five minutes for the whole class to get changed—and only two changing stalls to do it in. I was still having difficulty getting the corset on by myself; it took me at least five minutes just to do the laces, even with a mirror to help me see what I was doing. At school, I wouldn’t have a mirror, but I would have a class full of impatient fellow students standing on the other side of a thin curtain, eager to change their clothes, too.

  Front of a trade card advertising Ball’s corsets. (These cards were about the size of a business card and were given away to promote various products.) This particular one involves a slight visual illusion: by placing a card over the line in the illustration and bringing one’s eyes very close to the picture, the uncorseted woman becomes corseted!.

  There was also the very real—and distinctly unpleasant—possibility of getting lotion on the corset if I wore it to massage class. Some of my fellow students thought it was “nice” to use an entire four-ounce bottle of lotion when giving a massage. (For anyone who has trouble visualizing that, it is the equivalent of an entire stick of butter.)

  “Ah, this must feel so nice!” they’d brag, basting the helpless person under the sheet like a plucked turkey about to go in the oven. “Yummy!” (Some days I would have not one, but two showers when I got home, and I would still feel grease oozing out from between my toes as my pores desperately tried to rid themselves of the oil that had been forced into them.) I couldn’t toss my corset into a washing machine like those people did with their greasy T-shirts and jeans; it would have ruined it.

  There were days in school when we d
idn’t undress, purely textbook days when relacing and grease wouldn’t be an issue. However, the pressure of social stigma remained. What would everyone on campus think? What would they say?

  I worried about the attitudes I would encounter within the very particular community of my school. Massage therapists are an interesting bunch—students studying to become them even more so. The individuals at my school covered a dramatic range in degree of credulity, from the grounded to the stratospheric. I don’t think a single bit of science fiction, fact, or conspiracy theory has even been voiced by man that at least one person at that school wouldn’t have believed. (My personal favorite was the girl who thought Earth was hollow, and that if you walked to the North Pole you could drop in a hole and fall all the way to the South Pole. One of my friends, who has a degree in geology, nearly fell off his seat laughing when I told him about that one.) If quite a few of them believed that underwire bras cause cancer12, what on earth would they think of a corset?

  I started to feel like I was doing something clandestine after class, rushing off to engage in an activity that was hidden from the people who knew me in that other aspect of my life. Yet, the more I wore the corset, the more comfortable I grew with it. The more it taught me about grace and pride, the more I felt that this was truly myself. Somewhere, amongst the steady sweeping strides and the eyes lifted from dirt to horizon, amongst the smiles of strangers, I had stopped feeling like a duckling playing with a swan’s feathers. I wasn’t surprised anymore by the curves I saw in the mirror. I missed them when they were gone.

  I have always said that I don’t want my life to be dictated by the opinions of other people, but it takes courage to put that attitude into effect. While I was learning more about the corset, and consequently learning more about myself, I was also learning how to be courageous.