by Jessi Klein
At home alone after school one day, I dug through my mom’s drawers until I found a bra. After creating a cat’s cradle out of it for the better part of an hour, I finally wrangled myself into it correctly. I wanted to gaze at myself to see if I was now a sexual being. Unfortunately, we did not have a full-length mirror, so I went into our bathroom in just the bra and my purchased-in-a-bag underwear, climbed up on the side of the tub, held on to the shower curtain rod, and leaned toward the medicine cabinet mirror, trying to strike a sexy pose. I didn’t look sexy. I looked like someone trying to escape from a storm drain.
But what I remember most vividly, despite the reality of how pathetic I looked, is that I suddenly felt sexy. Even though the bra (which was very small) was too big, for the first time I had the sensation of feeling as if I had the potential to have breasts. Wanting to push my pinup look farther, I decided to try rolling up the sides of my underwear (there were significant sides) to create more of a “string bikini” effect. It didn’t work. It didn’t matter.
It was the first time I looked in the mirror and wanted something from what I was seeing.
I wanted to look like a Sexy Lady.
Either my mother noticed that I’d rummaged through her bras, or else maybe I was beginning to have some pre-adolescent floppage, because one weekend she announced that it was time to take me to get my very own bra. I was excited. I pictured visiting a dream-like feminine space where I would go on an intimate journey of bra discovery and feel sexual and womanly and wouldn’t the boys in my seventh-grade class be surprised when they reached around my shoulder again and felt the telltale sign that I was now a sexually alluring sex woman.
I pictured bra shopping this way because I hadn’t yet been introduced to the concept of bra ladies. I didn’t know that getting a bra, especially your first bra, most often involves standing topless in front of a slightly cranky Jewish/Russian woman of a certain age who isn’t happy to see you or your tiny tits, who then takes out an ancient tape measure that always has the same color and texture as the original Constitution and wraps it around your torso.
My mother took me to a store on 8th Street called Lee Baumann, which was less a feminine fantasy space than a warren of plastic bins and old cardboard boxes filled with utilitarian bras that you would most definitely not see on the cover of Victoria’s Secret. I remember the woman who measured me had that hair color that only a certain kind of old lady has, a kind of unnatural pink-brown, and if she noticed my shyness about taking my shirt off in front of her she did not say or do anything to put me at ease.
The whole experience was horribly embarrassing, but I did leave with maybe two bras, both the color of Band-Aids, and I felt triumphant. I was now strapped in, ready for…whatever happens when you wear a bra that resembles a medical-grade compression stocking.
Nothing happened.
I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was nineteen. He was almost as virginal as I was, which meant sexy underwear wasn’t required for him to get excited. Still, my primitive understanding of how humans have sex meant that he was supposed to want to see me in lingerie. At each holiday and birthday, I expected him to gift me with some kind of naughtily wrapped box, but it never happened. He did buy me an electric foot massaging plate from one of those open storefronts on Canal Street, and I also recall a top from H&M that had the price tag hanging off it.2
In our second or third year together, I recall insisting that he buy me lingerie. Because there is nothing sexier than receiving sexy underthings that you have DEMANDED of another person. The result of this request was a white satiny slip thing that he presented with the dutiful obedience of a cat leaving a dead mouse at your bedroom door. It was the most virginal version of sexy underwear imaginable. It was loose and was at least a size too big. At best, it could be described as sweetly unflattering.
Still, in my mind, it checked off an important relationship box: My boyfriend had bought me lingerie. I remember putting it on for the first time and waiting for him to get some kind of super-intense steroidal erection in response to the exotically attired temptress before him. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know it wasn’t that. If anything, when I think back to that relationship now, I mainly remember us watching Mets games and eating spinachy Indian food.
When we broke up after six years, I found myself single for the first time as an adult. I felt ill prepared. At some point in that relationship, I had upgraded from regular Hanes-in-a-bag underwear to their “bikini” line, which still came in a bag but had a higher-cut leg on the sides. It was more breathable than sultry. I figured if I was going to be Hot to TrotTM in the Big CityTM it was time to step up my underwear game. I didn’t actually think in those exact words; it was more like I just felt lonely and sad and isolated and was flailing for a way to feel attractive again. But Hot to Trot in the Big City sounds better.
So I made my way to Victoria’s Secret on my own. Even though I was now in my mid-twenties, I still harbored a bit of my lingerie-shopping fantasy from when I was a kid, that I would walk into Victoria’s Secret and transform into a tawny scrawny lioness like those ladies on the catalog with the wings and the smiles and the brond hair.
That is not what happens at Victoria’s Secret.
Victoria’s real secret, or at least it was a secret to me, is that their stores are shitshows.
The first thing that strikes you when you walk into a Victoria’s Secret is the color of the walls, which are an aggressive, relentless pink. I suppose the purpose of this is to reinforce an atmosphere of undeniable femininity, but instead I always feel like I’m walking into someone else’s vagina. And not just any old vagina, but one that employs an army of women in inexplicably mannish black suits. Unlike the bra fitters at Lee Baumann, who exude the toughness of a people who’ve escaped the Cossacks, these ladies, in their corporate attire, look and act more like bank tellers in a land where the economy is tits and the currency is demarked in the cup sizes A, B, C, and D. Their main task is rifling through little drawers under the display cases for your size. The little drawers seem to be unlocked, and you could rifle through them yourself, but it seems to be understood that you mustn’t do this. I don’t know what would happen if you did. But you mustn’t.
The second thing you notice is that the tawny scrawny lionesses from their ads do not seem to shop there. Instead, I am there, along with an average assortment of deer and mice and hippos—none of us tawny, most of us pasty.
And more often than not, their bras and underwear, which seem in their campaigns to have been beamed down from a planet that’s thinner and more precious than ours, are carelessly stuffed into sale baskets. We wildebeests patrons, yearning to be SexyTM, crowd around and elbow each other for $5 thongs sadly tangled into rat-king-level knots.
Often these buckets contain deals that are shockingly, almost disturbingly, generous, i.e., fifteen pairs of string bikinis for $4; the kinds of prices that serve to remind you that the “panty” you’re hoping will make you AlluringTM was probably assembled by an underpaid, potentially underage, laborerTM in the thirdTM worldTM.3
Still, like the rest of the hopeful bison shoppers, I would leave Victoria’s Secret with an embarrassingly pink bag, filled with optimism that what I’d purchased there would turn me into a fuckstick AngelTM. I remember one of the first things I bought there was a pair of red bikini underwear that had the store’s name on the waistband. I had never owned a pair of red underwear before, and putting them in my drawer that night I felt like a slutty little nymph (in the best way). I wore them to work the next day, and it wasn’t long before I was attracting male attention. It should be noted that the male attention I received was only from a friendly married co-worker who beckoned me into his office and then, embarrassed, whispered into my ear that my underwear had bunched way up over the top of my pants in the back and I might want to tug them down.4
Was any of this agita worth the bother?
Over the years, I would ask boyfriends if they cared about lin
gerie, and the answer was always no. Their standard explanation was that for men, nothing is as exciting as getting all of a woman’s clothes off, and fancy underthings are simply a speed bump in the way of that goal. But I never believed them. How can there be a gadillion-dollar industry around tricked-out lady underwear if there aren’t gadillions of men demanding it? It doesn’t seem possible.
What began to bother me the most was the idea that they were lying, that they all loved lingerie—and they simply didn’t want to see ME in lingerie. This irritating little burr of an idea grew into a full-fledged paranoia. I worried that me trying to wear expensive underwear had the same visual effect as William Wegman’s photographs of his Weimaraner dressed as a chef—comic, jarring, slightly repulsive.
This fear continued to gnaw at me until the spring of 2007, when for the first time in my life I had an affair. Not an affair like a married affair, but an affair like the kind of affair where you meet someone from another country who’s in town for just a few weeks, and in that short amount of time you decide you are maybe in love with them, and after days of long walks and showing them where you went to elementary school, you kiss on a New York City sidewalk at two in the morning. The whole thing was short and intense, unlike most of my relationships in the years leading up to it, which had tended to be long and dull.
Of course, I couldn’t quit while I was ahead, which led to me flying to Europe on New Year’s Eve, using every single one of my frequent flier miles. A few weeks after I returned, in the midst of a busy work/travel schedule, he offered to come visit me for the forty-eight hours he would be free in the next four months. Excited that this might be the beginning of my relationship with my Husband, I decided the occasion called for a serious lingerie attempt, with no bullshitting around at Victoria’s Secret, which I’d finally realized was the McDonald’s of underwear stores.
This is how I found myself at La Petite Coquette, a lingerie store in Greenwich Village. I’d passed it a million times over the years, noting their carefully curated store window display for Valentine’s Day (theme = Frisky). Their displays for every holiday looked sort of the same, i.e., Frisky Christmas, Frisky Easter, etc. Their inventory appeared classier than the offerings at VS (no panties with JUICY or SKANK on the butt), so on the day before my man friend’s arrival I walked over.
That morning I’d started to feel the first little inkling of a cold coming on. This often happens to me in the week leading up to an event that might bring some kind of joy. My body rejects this foreign feeling and crashes. But I was determined not to miss out on a visit from my gentleman caller, so I took some echinacea and decided I would fight it off.
I had always assumed that La Petite Coquette was French in name only, but it turned out the three women who worked there were in fact real French ladies from actual France, which meant they were impossibly thin and beautiful in that French off-kilter jolie-laide way. They all basically looked like Charlotte Gainsbourg.
One of the Charlottes floated over to me and asked if I was looking for anything in particular. I was actually prepared with an answer, having thought about what lingerie identity I could plausibly pull off. I’d decided I could try a matching chemise and underwear set (I just had to Google “chemise” to make sure that’s what it’s called). If you are a man, or a woman who doesn’t waste her time with this nonsense, a chemise is basically a loose long top that covers your butt, yet can flash a solid amount of boob. When I explained this to Charlotte #1, she said she would pull a few things for me and ushered me into a fitting space, the kind where there’s a curtain that’s not nearly big enough to actually give you privacy. (I don’t know why so many stores have this issue. It’s very obvious it’s a problem and yet the clerks always pretend like they’re not seeing your nips or peen or whatever is clearly visible through the gapingly open margins of their fitting rooms.) She asked me what size underwear she should bring. I said medium or large, but she didn’t hear me and asked me to repeat myself. “MEDIUM OR LARGE.” I really wasn’t feeling well.
She brought back a selection of gauzy little outfits, all of which were paired with thongs as the bottom half. “Do you have any sets that aren’t thongs?” I asked. She looked at me like I was asking if she would like to join ISIS. They did not. I closed the curtain and put on the medium thong. I looked like a groundhog wearing a tiny belt. I tried on the large thong, which yielded results that were only slightly better. I then endured the indignity of having to yell back over the curtain that I needed the thong in an extra large. She couldn’t seem to fathom that such a size even existed. I could feel my temperature climbing. I was definitely getting the flu. I suddenly found myself missing Victoria’s Secret and their drawers full of underwear that go up to size infinity.
We went back and forth this way for an hour, during which my physical condition continued to deteriorate. Charlotte kept returning to my dressing room with lacy little trifles that did not fit me. By the time she handed me a scalloped black thong with the promise, “Duhn’t wehrrree [French pronunciation of worry], theez run very large,” I was sopping in sweat. I tried on the thong that ran very large to find that it still barely fit. This was actually the least distressing thing that was happening, because as it turns out, I had started to cry.
I was crying because, just like when I was a little girl, I sorely wanted something from my reflection that I wasn’t getting. I wanted to be desired. I wanted to be desired the way women are desired in movies and commercials and Victoria’s Secret catalogs and all that cheesy shit. Because looking good in lingerie felt like part of the package of being female. And to be female means to inspire lust. And lust seemed inextricably snarled with G-strings and bralettes and demicups and garters.
Weeping and sweating in a dressing room, on the other hand, felt like the opposite of lust.
I left La Petite Coquette with the black scalloped thong, which only kind of fit, and its matching bra and chemise counterpart. I was a mess. At home I got into bed with a mug of tea, but not before I took my lingerie arsenal and carefully folded the pieces into my underwear drawer, where they looked like purebred French poodles sleeping with a pack of mutts (i.e., stretched-out Gap boy shorts).
On the first night of my Affair’s stay, I was excited for him to take off my clothes and reveal the $375 investment I’d made in our sex life.
But all I remember when I think back to that night is how dark it was in my room; that the underwear was revealed with no reaction or commentary; that the underwear itself was off in seconds and ended up on the floor. I don’t remember anything about the sex itself. I remember that in the two days we were together, my sense that he was my Husband began to fade. He was jet-lagged, and always seemed a little distracted. The magic of our initial rendezvous had been replaced by a low-grade anxiety that seemed to constantly buzz between us like AM radio static. I remember I had bought tulips, and that at one point he walked naked through my apartment with the stem of one of the tulips tucked into his butt cheeks to make me laugh, and I remember that he wanted to make me laugh because I was sad. I remember I was sad because I realized he did not feel the same way about me that I did about him.
There is that Maya Angelou quote about how people may forget what you said or what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. I don’t remember the last words that guy and I said to each other.
But I remember feeling that lingerie is really never worth the agita.
1 Shitting.
2 Nine bucks.
3 I’m just kidding around. I’m sure Victoria’s Secret would never exploit anyone. Right? I mean, of course they wouldn’t. Would they? They seem very against exploiting anyone. Well, maybe they exploit women’s bodies in their advertising a little bit. Just kidding; everything’s fine with them. Is it? I’m hungry.
4 Thank you, Richard!
How to Get Engaged
It’s about ten thirty a.m. and I am sitting at a bar at Logan Airport (Boston Beer Works, specifically), sucking down my t
hird giant glass of lager. I’m a little enamored of the bartender, a solidly built young woman whose working-class accent hovers somewhere between Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting and Mark Wahlberg in The Departed. I have always found this accent endearing. My boyfriend Mike grew up in Boston but he doesn’t speak with the accent, which is yet another reason that right now he is a massive disappointment. He is the reason I am here, waiting for a puddle-jumper Cape Air flight to Martha’s Vineyard, where I am going to meet my friends Jenny and Zander.1
They will comfort me about the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be in Los Angeles, doing a victory circle around the city as friends congratulated Mike and me on getting engaged. That is no longer happening now. What is happening now is that I am guzzling beer for breakfast, and very quickly I am drunk. Among other things, I’m trying to get over the fact that when I checked in for my flight, the clerk asked me for my weight, which at first I thought was a joke. But that’s how small this plane is. If my butt’s too big, we could die. Thinking about this possibility, as well as the fact that the man whom I thought I was spending the rest of my life with just choked on proposing to me, has led me to the third beer. I am tilting toward very drunk as I start messaging all my girlfriends to tell them where I am and what has happened. Over the next few days, as they begin to respond, via text, email, and phone, I will be initiated into an ancient world of female knowledge, one that I never thought I’d have to know, about how men and women really decide to get engaged.
Mike and I were set up on a blind date, analog-style—as in we were actually set up by a mutual friend, not the Internet. We had a slow start, but once we began to date in earnest, there never seemed to be any real doubt that we would be together forever. This was the inverse of most other serious relationships I’d been in in my thirties, in which the breakup had always been taken as the assumption. (Seriously, my last boyfriend before Mike—a man I’d dated TWICE, like a big fat dummy—was begging me to spend Thanksgiving with his family about an hour and a half before we went back to my house, where, after some gentle prodding, he admitted he wanted to break up.)