Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  I know what would have happened the next morning, though. Because it happened to me in civilian life, with a brand-new leather jacket, not long after I got divorced. John Wayne and Mary would have waked, stretched, smiled a little abashedly at each other, reached for their clothes, and found that Mary’s cat had sprayed foully — and that stuff will not come out — on John Wayne’s Marine Corps tunic.

  Frankly, having been in the situation myself and having given some thought to what he would do in it, I don’t think John Wayne could have come up with an expression in the corners of his eyes potent enough to return that salute. I think he would have tried to murder the cat, and Mary would have screamed and the baby would have waked up and screamed and John Wayne would have screamed and the cat would have screamed, lap dissolve to beachhead, projectiles shrieking.

  What is the problem?

  Getting to the Bottom of Women’s Underwear

  ISN’T EVERYONE INTO WOMEN’S underwear? In some sense. Reaching out toward it, wearing it, designing it, something. Women have now even managed to make men’s underwear interesting. By adopting it. After a fashion. Yes, women are wearing little brief Jockey-type shorts, and boxer-type shorts (which they call “tap pants;” a term that may have something to do with the verb “to hit on”) and undershirts instead of bras.

  In some versions, the boxers have fly fronts. It is all right with me if women want to wear fly fronts. (What I wish is that more things for men had fly fronts — I am thinking of sweatpants and jockstraps. A jockstrap could have a Velcro fly, couldn’t it? Have you ever tried to take a leak in — that is, while wearing — sweatpants and a jockstrap? It is enough to make you shrink from the fitness craze.)

  I think the main reason designers build fly fronts into women’s drawers is to make things awkward for the male underwear critic. There is an adversary relationship between underwear designers and underwear critics, and no one will ever win a Pulitzer in underwear criticism if he backs off from the hard questions, such as what to say about women’s drawers that have fly fronts. Nor will anyone win a Pulitzer if he says the obvious — that women’s drawers with fly fronts certainly do not have a certain famous drawback that panty hose have.

  Women, if they dust, use men’s underwear to dust with. Whereas women’s underwear makes men’s heads swim. As long as that situation holds, and I do not see a radical shift on the horizon, we are a long way from unisexualism.

  Women’s underwear has names like panties, scanties, undies, bloomers, bikinis, frillies, teddies, camisoles, flimsies, G-strings (according to Vogue, G-strings are selling like hot-cakes), and intimate apparel. Women’s underwear comes in colors such as shell pink, lapis, ivory, jonquil, blush, and nude. Nude. That is a color that you see in women’s underwear ads. For all I know there are now nude Crayolas.

  It seems to me that the most erotic phrase in women’s clothing is “nothing on underneath.” When you come to underwear, that goes without saying. William Faulkner was inspired to write The Sound and the Fury by the sight of a girl hanging in a pear tree, her underpants showing. It seems to me that The Sound and the Fury was the least he could do.

  What is the poem you remember most vividly from childhood? For me, two of them are locked in a dead heat: “I see London, I see France, / I see somebody’s underpants. … There’s a place in France, / Where the women wear no pants.”

  It gets my goat when women blame the arms race on men. Men are only struggling to come up with something half as potent as a pair of simple nonabbreviated pink panties whose extremely pullable-looking thin waistband stretches just below the navel. Nobody has ever really improved upon that basic panty.

  Nobody has improved upon the ’54 Chevrolet either, but new cars and new underwear have to be sold before the old ones wear out. Or this country will go right down the tubes.

  So men have to go into stores, look saleswomen in the eye, and ask for women’s underwear. This is always good for a laugh. To obviate the embarrassment factor, according to a recent news account, “a number of boutiques have instituted men-only nights, sometimes held at local bars.” Count me out of those, thanks. “Hey, Murph, you gonna buy one of them tea-colored floral nylon lace teddies so sheer it practically floats on the body?” “Hail no, Vinnie, it’s me for a set of them powder-blue wispies with the labial rosettes.” “Har, har, har.” “Whoooo!” Then people start fighting.

  Do you know that there is a line of women’s underwear called Titcha? That’s right. I saw an ad for it in Vogue. The model was wearing a black bra whose cup area was see-through except for a sprinkling of black flower petals and a black spot in the middle with a see-through spot in the middle of the black spot. I am not describing it very evocatively, but you see the point.

  You know how Titcha is supposedly pronounced? According to the ad? “Say it softly — ‘Tee-sha.’” Right! Right! Sure! Whom do these people think they are pulling the leg of?

  Not the leg of the underwear critic. The underwear critic sees through that kind of thing. The underwear critic knows that all underwear advertising is intended quite simply to make men start saying “Hammadahammadahammada.”

  The underwear critic refuses to be lured into sexism. The underwear critic does not focus upon these “you-shaped” and “next-to-nothing” and “girly-girl-look” bits of fabric. Nor does he focus upon the bodies of the models who are lounging about in one or another “light, soft underlayer.” He focuses upon what these women must be like, as persons.

  You take a model who is wearing a trim silky-lacy double-clasp bra and Lollipop panties. Lollipop panties! That’s what they call them! And pearls. A model like that is probably a person who says, “Oh, my goodness!” She has nice china, from her grandmother. I would probably chip it.

  Okay. So you take a model who wears black slinky stuff and a garter belt with black stockings. I am going to confess something to you. I never knew anybody who, to the best of my knowledge, dressed like that. Underwear critics do not hang out with people like that. Or it may be that people who might dress like that in the company of other people do not dress like that when they are with underwear critics.

  Now take a model who wears bikini Jockey shorts and one of those cutaway undershirts, the kind Italian men used to wear while sitting around the table. A model like that is probably what is called today “an active person,” which is a euphemism for someone who will wear your ass out. On the other hand, it would probably not cost an arm and a leg to buy this person some underwear for Valentine’s Day, if she did not insist on designer labels. You are always looking up to see a person like this running past the window. But she has to stop running sometime. And when she does, she is what they call “at ease with her body.” Sort of a military term. Such a person deserves a salute. Pre-sent … arms.

  You see the kind of trap an underwear critic can fall into.

  Once, years ago, I met an extraordinarily fine-looking person at a party. “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I model lingerie,” she said.

  “Lord have mercy!” is what I wanted to say, but I knew that would be gauche. I made an effort, first to stop my mouth from hanging open, and then to regard her in a cool manner. She misinterpreted.

  “So, automatically, I don’t have anything to say, right?” she said.

  “Whanh?” I replied.

  “I’m a model, so therefore I must not have anything to say.”

  I didn’t have anything to say. What I said was, “Oh, no, I’m sure you … have, ah, lots of things to say.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  I didn’t know.

  What I had failed to do was put myself in her place. I had regarded her as a person about whom it was appropriate to reflect, Can you imagine what she looks like in lingerie?

  What men ought to realize in this day and age is, hell, I don’t know. But let us say that what men ought to realize in this day and age is that women wear underwear not to look a certain way but to feel a certain way.

  Wh
at a man ought to do with that realization is another question. A question not for underwear critics but for active persons who don’t let things slow down long enough for questions to arise.

  It is a wise underwear critic who accepts that there are fundamental mysteries that he cannot break down, that lie underneath the “underneath” in “nothing on underneath.”

  I am looking at an ad for Maidenform “Sweet Nothings.” “Sweet Nothings” include “camisole and pettis” and “front-close bras” (see, if I’d written that ad I might have called them “front-open bras”). The ad copy reads: “Sweet Nothings are feminine, exquisite, delicate, enchanting, lacy, and lovely. In short, Sweet Nothings are quite something. Just like the dreams they inspire.”

  In this ad, a model wearing various hints of blue is lolling calmly amid frilly bedding, hand mirrors, perfume bottles, and flowers. In one picture she’s wearing a gossamer film of a dress, she is sitting on a rock beside a sylvan body of water, and she is gazing composedly into the rapt eyes of a man who looks like a younger Gary Hart who doesn’t need her vote. Her hair is perfect throughout.

  I think what this ad has in mind is women’s dreams. As opposed to men’s. I don’t recall ever having a dream that had any very highly defined underwear in it. What are pettis, anyway?

  Let us get it straight that women wear certain kinds of underwear for the sake of their own dreams. Let us also bear this in mind: you may start your day with a cup of black coffee, a glass of gin, and a jigger of hot sauce, but until you have been looped into a woman’s dreams, you don’t know anything.

  Erma Gets Down

  WHOSE ROLE DO HOUSEWORK and child care fit into best, in this time of sexual reapportionment? All I know is that they have often fit into my role like live roosters into a sack, and I love Erma Bombeck. I’ll tell you why.

  When I was a youth my mother, who at least by today’s standards waited on me hand and foot, and whose sense of humor and of everything else was intense, tried to interest me in various housewifely humorists who gave her solace. They always made me want to say what I remember Richard Pryor, in the role of lightning Bug Johnson, telling Lily Tomlin, in the role of the Tasteful Lady, when the two of them were trapped in an elevator. The T.L. tried to relieve the tension with a bit of tasteful whimsy. L.B. cringed. “If I told people I know a joke like that,” he said, “they’d beat me to death.”

  Bombeck, however, can get down. She has produced eight books with titles like The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, whose staggering sales I do not resent. There are best-selling humorists who do get my goat. Andy Rooney springs to mind. Wry. Who needs wry? I haven’t got time for wry. I’m too busy trying to fix the toilet, which I discovered didn’t work when I emptied the Kitty Litter into it, which I had to do because it was causing the entire first floor of the house to smell like the cat had died in it — I wish — nine times. Everyone else in the house had solved the problem by going upstairs. I don’t know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat’s keen insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug and someone has tracked it all the way over onto the other rug. I don’t know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They don’t seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while doing it. Every so often cats say to themselves, “Well, time to vomit,” and then they do. It’s in their nature. A dog is going to bark, a cat is going to vomit.

  If I offend you, I’m sorry. But these problems exist. It is no good sweeping cat vomit under the rug. As all of us who work at home know and Erma Bombeck conveys so well, no matter how modern women or men get — well, it will never be modern enough. But what I was going to say is, someone will always have to keep the home, and the home is not pretty.

  For one thing, there are far too frequently children in it. Bombeck gets them right:

  “SON: She’s doing it again.

  “FATHER: Doing what?

  “SON: Humming.

  “DAUGHTER: I am not humming.

  “SON: You are so. There, she did it again, Dad. Watch her neck. She’s humming so no one can hear her but me.”

  Children do unconscionable things, and Erma Bombeck knows it. Once when she was sleeping, “they put a hamster on my chest and when I bolted upright (my throat muscles paralyzed with fright) they asked, ‘Do you have any alcohol for the chemistry set?’”

  Not that mothers are any bargain. Bombeck:

  “‘You talk about dental work,’ said a small blonde. ‘Come here, George. Open your mouth, George.’ The lights danced on George’s metal-filled mouth like Ali Baba’s cave. ‘That,’ she said emphatically, ‘is my mink stole. A mother’s sacrifice. And is he grateful? He is not.’”

  I am not going to tell you that Bombeck is among our most polished stylists. Lapses on the order of those lights dancing like a cave do crop up. As do sentences like this one, which explains how she figured a box of cereal cost her $116.53: “This included repairing my tooth, which I chipped on a nuclear submarine in the bottom of the box, throwing part of the cereal to the birds in the snow, necessitating antibiotics, and the cost of packing, shipping, and crating it through three moves.” She is not what I would call unrelievedly hilarious, and I was not blown away by some of her serious declarations of what she wants from her children: “I want you to be a cornball, a real honest-to-God, flag-waving corn ball, who, if you must march, will tell people what you are for, not what you are against.”

  But her humor has a nice no-nonsense tone. She knows that in fact life is not cornball. (What is a cornball, anyway? Maybe that’s what that last thing the cat threw up on the rug was.) And she is a fine exaggerator:

  “‘Isn’t there another way you could get to the card club?’ he asked.

  “‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I could tape peanuts to my arms and maybe attract enough pigeons to fly me there, but I’d rather drive the car.’”

  Bombeck “used to shuffle through the house saying, ‘Who am I? Where am I going?’ All I did was scare the Avon lady half to death.” Trying to be a modern, on-the-go woman, she finds herself rushing about, “trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit. …”

  She wonders why a child will “eat yellow snow” but won’t drink from his brother’s glass.

  When she mentions a film her kids see at school, it is exactly right: The History of Sulfur.

  She knows someone who is so caught up in stamps that she has “glue-breath.” “In desperation, we even switched to a newly formed church across town that gave 120 trading stamps each time we attended. (We now worship a brown and white chicken with a sunburst on its chest.)”

  I think Bombeck would appeal to readers of all genders even had there been no women’s movement. But now that men’s roles have gone all to hell, and every modern person who is not rich or vagrant is half housewife, we can perhaps take Bombeck’s undespairing desperation more to heart. In my household, for instance, I seem to be the only person who understands how to replace a toilet-paper spindle. Bombeck in regard to this matter is on the money.

  For my part, here is something I don’t understand. Children take their shoes off whenever they step inside the house. Why is this? It doesn’t slow down the outgrowing process. When you take off your shoes your feet get cold, if you’re normal, and you catch your little toe on hard metal things. Whenever I want a child to go out into the snow and get the groceries out of the car, the child is standing there barefooted as a yard dog, as my mother would have said (I wish she were alive to discuss this with, except that she would probably say, “Just be thankful your children have feet”), and I know that by the time the child gets resocked and shod the groceries will have mildewed.

  This is a problem that bothers me more than the mounting federal deficit. And much as I esteem Doris Lessing, it is not she whose thinking I would like to hear on this.

  Back to BBs

  WHY DO PEOPLE WANT to technologize children? Some years ago I read about a kids’ BB-gun tournament
in Clarkesville, Tennessee. The contestants went through their BBs one by one. Occasionally they would throw one away. “The idea is to find ten exactly the same,” said a spokesman for the Daisy Air Rifle company. “These are our best BBs. Regular BBs vary from .173 to .175 caliber. Precision shot used in competition is .175. Still, you’ll find some bad ones.”

  Three hundred crack-shot boys and girls aged seven to fourteen, amid shushed adult spectators and under the hovering supervision of Jaycees and Daisy people, spent the weekend of the Fourth of July at the International BB Gun Championship matches, firing thousands, of just-right BBs from guns costing thirty dollars apiece. The guns, modified by coaches, were all but silent. The BBs floated softly, sometimes failing to go through the thin silver-dollar-sized cardboard targets. A quiet, flawless, slow-moving BB is a highly accurate BB.

  The afternoons that weekend in Tennessee were devoted to what the sponsors called recreation. I thought BB-shooting itself was supposed to be recreation. “We want this to be a total experience,” said the Daisy man. “We care about the human being.” Maybe some group ought to run an International Total Experience Championship.

  A lot of parents I know refuse to let their kids have any kind of toy guns. I think that’s repressive. The first time my son saw his older cousin Stuart’s BB gun, his eyes took on a glow. My daughter, who will try her hand at anything, could take Stuart’s BB gun or leave it alone, but she could shoot it straight. It turns out that in competition girls tend to be better BB shots than boys. They are said to relax easier. Maybe they don’t dwell upon the overtones involved.

  If I had spent as much of my childhood studying French as I did shooting a BB gun, I would have been prepared to go directly from grammar school to Paris and open a shop. I wasn’t picky about my BBs; in fact I would dig them out of trees and shoot them again. I had a Red Ryder carbine, unmodified except for various dents and rust spots and the cocking mechanism’s tendency to jam. This malfunction probably developed from my fondness for pulling the trigger with the cocking lever open, causing the lever to whang shut violently. I don’t know why that gave me such satisfaction, but it did. When fired properly my gun went punh and sometimes shot true enough to puncture the chicken-pie tin or knock over the cylindrical cardboard BB container I was aiming at. I pretended I was a pioneer shooting at Indians. My politics, I realize now, were crude.