“So, I can tell they provide your clothes,” began a grocery store checker as she filled my bag. “But how much do they pay you?”
“They?” I stared at her a moment. “Who are ‘they’?”
She stopped with a can of tinned peas in midair, her head slowly cocking to one side. I am sure my own puzzled expression cannot have been too different.
“I make my own clothes,” I explained.
A brief but uncomfortable pause ensued.
“So . . .” she slowly lowered the peas into the bag. “No one pays you to do this?”
I shook my head. “To be me? No, sorry. It would be nice, though.” I smiled at the thought.
As I have continued to receive variants of this question on other occasions, I’ve started amusing myself by speculating about “They.” If “They” are in the habit of paying people simply to be themselves, I would truly like to meet “Them.” I picture this mysterious “They” as some shadowy secret organization, with headquarters like a hybrid of a Masonic lodge and something out of a Marvel comic book. From some exotic eyrie-like location on a remote, snow-swept mountain top, “They” would make decisions on patronage for worthy benefactors, to support diversity of lifestyle. I enjoy imagining what “They” might fund. Dating services for gays and lesbians? Fertility advice for interracial couples? Speculation on the topic can provide endless entertainment.
Most of the commentary I receive tends to be warmly positive.
I was standing in line to buy candy at Bartell’s one day when a tall man with a deep voice and an accent straight out of Chicago stopped and gave me an admiring look from hat to toes. “Miss,” he said with a huge smile. “That’s classic. Tell Great-Grandmama, it’s working!”
The next afternoon, a woman passing opposite myself at a crossroads called out, “Your outfit is lovely! You look so serene and peaceful!”
It’s rather pleasant to be able to invoke such comments from nothing more than a trip out for groceries.
Coming out of the supermarket on a different day, a little girl tugged at her dad’s hand and, staring at me, told him quite loudly, “Look at that pretty lady! She’s pretty!”
As I was walking home, an elderly man saw me through the window of the restaurant where he was eating lunch and actually left his half-eaten lunch on the table to run outside and call to me.
“Ma’am! Ma’am!”
I stopped, surprised and a little amused.
“I just want to say, you look beautiful!” he told me. “I was sitting having lunch, and I just had to run out here and tell you you’re gorgeous! When I was a young man, this—” He made a sweeping gesture, encompassing me from hat to shoes. “—was the style. You’ve made my day! Thank you! And take care of yourself! That smile looks like it’s worth about two or three trillion dollars, at least!”
Some of the approbation is nonverbal; I love it when men tip their hats to me. There’s something wonderfully chivalrous about it, whether it’s a full-on, off-with-the-hat bow, or the simple tapping of a baseball cap. Nor is it only old men who do it, although that would be easy enough to expect. It also comes from men far too young to remember the era of doffed top hats: thirty-odds, college boys, and some who seem barely out of high school; I’ll never know whether their mothers taught them or perhaps their fathers, but someone out there brought them up properly. It’s not something I see every day, but perhaps once every few weeks or so, and it tickles my heart every time, just as it gives me a warmly flattered glow when men open doors or give up their bus seats for me.56
Other commentators are not quite so complimentary. Sometimes, people are simply clueless. On the bus one day, a sloppily dressed white man glanced at me and plastered on a cheesy grin.
“Cinco de Mayo!”
I raised an eyebrow at this. “Pardon?”
“It’s a Mexican holiday. I thought . . .” His voice trailed off.
I pointedly looked myself over: ankle-length wool skirt, three petticoats, cashmere-lined leather gloves . . . I’d have died of heat prostration anywhere in Mexico that wasn’t at least a mile above sea level.
“Does this look Mexican?”57
Blanco looked embarrassed and muttered something incomprehensible before taking a seat elsewhere.
One of the sillier confrontations to which I’m subjected from time to time is when some clueless ignoramus starts berating me for makeup that does not exist. Very rarely it’s a man but more usually it’s a woman who launches into a patronizing lecture about how horribly anachronistic it is for me to be wearing makeup, which is actually present only in the scolder’s mind. The situation always grows invariably more ridiculous when I point out their error and instead of apologizing they’ll insist, “But you look like you are!” And then either resume their lecture or start spouting out a litany of archaic synonyms for prostitute, demonstrating that they have not the slightest clue as to the difference between wit and rude stupidity. I generally just walk away at that point and let my silence have the last word.
Some people recognize the corset for what it is; some don’t. Waists have fallen so far off the radar of modern people that a significant number can’t identify a corset when they see one. “What a pretty dress!” they’ll say, attributing the entirety of the hourglass figure to a flimsy piece of cotton to which no one gave a second glance before I started corseting.
Some attribute my small waist to an optical illusion. “Is your waist really that small?” they’ll ask.
To this question, I’m always tempted to reply, “No. Actually, I’m wearing a special device designed by a physicist I know at the University of Washington. It warps the physical space around me to make my waist appear smaller than it actually is.”
It would be fun to see if anyone would actually be gullible enough to believe me, but unfortunately such tactics are not very educational.
Cross-cultural encounters are generally pretty fun. As I’ve mentioned, I have a degree in international studies (I also have one in French), so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I enjoy witnessing the differences in social reactions. Any human response is an individual matter, but I have encountered sufficient consistencies within groups to notice general trends. Asian women giggle behind their hands; the Japanese call me “cool beautiful”(sugoi kirei)in their own language. Mexicans demand to know where I’m from, then refuse to believe that I’m American. Tourists want to take my picture.
Often, encounters are just plain sweet. I was walking home from the library one day when a smile-faced babushka pointed at me emphatically and said something in Russian. She hurried over to me, pulling a little wire shopping trolley with one hand and pointing at my waist with the other.
“Hello,” I greeted her, smiling.
She circled my waist with her hands. “You eat? Something? No!”
If an American had walked up and started groping me in such a manner, I would have been sorely tempted to practice some of my old judo moves on them; however, I was willing to cut a foreigner some slack in the interest of cultural sensitivity.58 Perhaps issues of private space are different in Russia.
I nodded my head, laughing at her question. “I eat!”
“No!” She squeezed the corset, shaking her head. “Is no food in there!” I giggled. “How old, you are?”
I put my hand on my chest. “Thirty.”
She shook her head and motioned to another woman who had just come out of the grocery store. The first pointed at my waist again, and there was a rapid-fire exchange of Russian at amusing volume. The first woman started to leave, and I decided to try one of my meager six words of Russian.
“Do svidaniya!” I waved to her. Good-bye.
“Do svidaniya.” She was still shaking her head. After half a beat, she paused again. “Like doll!” she called out in English.
An 1890 fashion plate.
I could have hugged her for that last comment, so endearingly was it spoken. Instead, I giggled from behind a gloved hand, and waved to them both as they
retreated a short distance.
After the well-received public presentation of “Fifty Years of Fashion,” I faced a greater challenge: Mother’s Day at the zoo with my mom. I had more or less resigned myself to Mom’s sniping comments and incomprehension. We had so little in common since I’d grown up; maybe she just couldn’t think of anything to say. The outing would be a bit more than halfway finished when I would get a small glimpse into the idea that there might be something deeper—and more tender—at work that I had not considered.
From the start of our zoological visit, I was getting the sort of comments that, by now, were standard to me. Little girls in the ticket line stared at me, open-mouthed, and told me I was beautiful. Their mothers said I looked lovely. A photographer taking pictures of hummingbirds stopped his avian shots to ask if he could snap some photos of me for a local blog. Given how many objections she’d made previously, I was surprised to see how proud my mom seemed through all of this.
Around afternoon and near the tiger cage, Mom got quiet.
“You know,” she said, “the only problem with you looking like that is that people see your waist, and then they see this.” She pointed at her own belly.
I sighed, not knowing how to respond. Mom had always been insecure about her physical appearance, and in all my years of trying to reassure her, I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever said having had any effect. We walked on in silence for a while.
At the penguin exhibit, we joined a crowd of people in marveling over a wild heron that had paused amongst the captive birds. Serene and beautiful, it balanced on the highest point in view. It looked all the more elegant for being out of place.
As we stood there, a woman sitting on a large rock yelled a fairly typical question at me. “Is that an eighteen-inch waist?!”
Questions about the exact size of my waist are always problematic for me. “Waist” is another word for corset, and I was wearing a nineteen-inch corset. It would be perfectly truthful to say I had a nineteen-inch waist. I could have passed a lie detector with it. But the outside measurement when I took a tape to my midsection was twenty-two inches, and that’s what counted when I sewed my clothes. For responses to random inquisitive strangers, I generally chose my answer based on the whim of the moment.
“Twenty-two inches,” I told the woman on the boulder, who looked disappointed.
“The only problem with her looking like that . . .” Mom broke in, and I inwardly cringed because I knew what was coming. Mom loves to repeat herself. “. . . is that people see that, and then they see this!” She shook her stomach.
The stranger laughed cruelly. “Well, Mom, you need to go on a diet!”
My fingers clenched around the handles of my tote bag and I pivoted away, guiding Mom to come with me.
“Girdles don’t work for us!” the stranger yelled after us.
I’m not wearing a girdle—and mind your own bloody business about what people “need” to do!
“You want me to slap her for you?” I offered once we were out of earshot, shaking my bag. “I’ve got a nice, heavy water bottle in here.” Nearly a liter sloshed in the stainless steel bottle as I swung the bag.
I was kidding, of course. Clueless idiots aren’t worth assault charges. But the desire was real. Had there been no danger of legal ramifications, I would have gladly beaten the obnoxious stranger to a pulp.
“No,” Mom sighed. “I used to let stuff like that bother me, but now . . .” She looked into the distance ahead, and sighed again, a sadly resigned expression on her face. “Life’s too short.”
She looked down at her feet, unsure of her footing on the steep slope we were ascending. I put my arm around her back, taking some of her weight upon myself and letting the corset support us both.
“Well,” I told her, dropping my voice. “I’ll still slap her if you want me to!”
She laughed as I supported her up the hill.
John Chrisman and family: Gabriel’s ancestors. John was blind, but his wife, Mary, still very obviously had a corseted figure.
Epilogue
“What is woman’s sphere? . . . Much may depend upon the times, says one; and another replies that the woman herself and not the times is responsible for the place she fills—responsible for her sphere.”
—Godey’s Lady’s Book, July 1894
Fashion plate.
I hadn’t wanted the corset when it was given to me. I had no way of knowing what lessons it would teach, how many fulfillments of long-held desires I would find bound in its silken curves. Making this external object internal, taking all its lessons of graceful poise and assurance into myself, could happen only with time. This was not knowledge that could ever have been gained casually, any more than a dilettante could dance a role of Tchaikovsky’s. The corset and my clothes have never been a costume to me, and I could not have grown under their tutelage if I had treated them as such. Costumes are for those who wish to playact, who put on a role they plan to remove shortly. A caterpillar cannot learn to fly by pasting on paper wings. True transformation can occur only if metamorphosis is fully embraced.
Having originally intended this to be a chronicle of my first corseted year, I find now that I have overshot that mark by several months. However, I hope it is not hubris in me to consider the tales of these extra moon-turns to be an enrichment, rather than a bloating, of my story.
Conclusion of an autobiography is necessarily a troublesome business. It cannot end in the protagonist’s death, and the alternative in this case—the cessation of the experiment described—is one of which I have no intention of seeing drawn. That experiment has become my life, and it is ongoing.
At the time I write this, it has been more than four and a half years since that fateful birthday. Gabriel and I now live in Port Townsend, in the same neighborhood where I grew misty-eyed because I thought we could never dwell in a place so perfect and Gabriel told me that “never” was too strong a word for a world in which anything is possible. The very first time I stepped into my home, I knew it was truly that: home. The old Victorian house was more than 120 years in age and completely devoid of furnishings the first time I saw it, having been the property of an absentee landlord for a decade and empty of tenants for more than a year. Yet I felt wholeheartedly welcomed there, as if the sunshine filling the high-ceilinged rooms were the smiling joy of a kind heart that had long been lonely. We are slowly restoring it to the beauty it once knew, and thus our adventures continue.
It is seldom that a birthday present leads to a complete shift in one’s view of their placement in time and society, but in a way, it is perhaps appropriate that a token presented in celebration of birth’s anniversary should lead to rebirth, that an honor to that first wakening should lead to a reawakening. With opened eyes I close this tale. May it lead to fresh sight in those who read it.
Victorian fashion plate.
Further Reading
The following are resources on which I drew in learning about corsets and to which I returned when writing this book. Sources that I found particularly valuable and would like to recommend to others are marked with an asterisk (∗). I would especially like to recommend Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History. It was invaluable to me in my early days of research, when I first started wearing a corset. I read it and reread it until I had virtually the whole thing memorized, and in point of fact, I actually did memorize some of the poetic citations verbatim. Ms. Steele has a remarkable gift for transforming the obscure into the obvious, and being able to call up many of her points from memory was to later prove invaluable to me when talking to people about corsets. I am sure that reading her extensive research had an influence upon my own lines of inquiry.
Articles:
Campbell, Nicole, Martin Richardson, and Phillip An-tippa. “Biomechanical Testing of Two Devices for Internal Fixation of Fractured Ribs.” The Journal of TRAUMA Injury, Infection, and Critical Care 68, no. 5 (2010): 1234—38.
Cormier, J. M.; Stitzel, J. D.; Duma, S.
M.; Matsuoka, F. “Regional variation in the structural response and geometrical properties of human ribs.” Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. 49 (2005): pp. 153—170.
Cormier, Joseph Michael. “Microstructural and Mechanical Properties of Human Ribs.” MS thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003.
Dickinson, Robert L. “The Corset: Questions of Pressure and Displacement.” The New York Medical Journal (November 5, 1887).
Granik, Gerald and Ira Stein. “Human Ribs: Static Testing as a Promising Medical Application.” Journal of Biomechanics 6 (1973): 237—40.
∗Hustvedt, Siri. “Pulling Power.” New Statesman, February 6, 2006, 40—42.
Kemper, Andrew R., Craig McNally, Eric A. Kennedy, Sarah J. Manoogian, Amber L. Rath, Tracy P. Ng, Joel D. Stitzel, Eric P. Smith, Stefan M. Duma, and Fumio Matsuoka. “Material Properties of Human Rib Cortical Bone from Dynamic Tension Coupon Testing.” Stapp Car Crash Journal 49 (November 2005): 199—230.
Kemper, Andrew R., Craig McNally, Clayton A. Pullins, Laura J. Freeman, Stefan M. Duma, and Stephen W. Rouhana. “The Biomechanics of Human Ribs: Material and Structural Properties from Dynamic Tension and Bending Tests.” Stapp Car Crash Journal 51 (October 2007): 235—73.
Kleinman, Paul K., and Alan E. Schlesinger. “Mechanical Factors Associated with Posterior Rib Fractures: Laboratory and Case Studies.” Pediatric Radiology 27 (1997): 87—91.
National Cancer Institute. “Pregnancy and Breast Cancer Risk—Misunderstandings about Breast Cancer Risk Factors.” http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/pregnancy.
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