My Corsetiere

When I was around twelve years old, my brain was still firmly anchored in the clear waters of childhood, but the winds of puberty were blowing my body towards the foreign shores of womanhood. I had the mind and manner of a child in the body of a woman, which means that I looked odd at best, and slightly mentally retarded at worst. Braids and breasts, acne and hairy legs—that was me on the threshold of adolescence.

My mother, not sure what to do about this phenomenon that was unfolding in her midst, decided that what I needed was a girdle. But we were living in Quito at the time, and you couldn’t simply go to a store and buy a girdle. Everything had to be made by hand.

Fortunately, there lived in the old part of town, between a gilded baroque church and the market where Indian women squatted on the sidewalk, selling meat and vegetables, a corsetière. She was a middle-aged Jewish lady from somewhere in central Europe, one of the many who had fled the Nazis to South America. She looked formidable to me, with her gray hair in a bun, her sturdy lace-up shoes and that tightly corseted, moving-from-the-hips look that you never see in older women anymore.

She had me take off my skirt and, mumbling and clucking to herself in a language I didn’t understand, took my measurements. Several weeks later, the girdle was ready. It was a pink satin construction with bands of flesh-colored, rubbery fabric. It encased me from about three inches above the waist to mid-thigh, and when I tried it on I felt that I would never breathe, let alone walk again.

 “It’s too tight,” I complained.

“You wish to be beautiful, yes?” the corsetière asked me. I nodded. “Then you must suffer,” she said, tugging the girdle in place and winking at my mother.

From time immemorial, garments intended to compress the female form were stiffened with whalebone, or baleen, the strong, pliable strips of keratin in a whale’s mouth that filter krill out of the water. My corsetière, being modern, had foregone baleen in favor of two narrow, flat, flexible metal shafts that ran the length of the girdle, on either side of my abdomen. They were concealed by a strip of closely stitched pink fabric, so I didn’t know they were there, though I noticed that when I peeled off the garment it resisted folding and would spring back at me, like something alive.

I was disappointed in the girdle. The corsetière had not attached garters, since my mother thought I was too young for stockings, and without stockings to help keep it in place, it tended to ride up as I climbed the tree in our backyard, or ran up the stairs. Absent stockings, the girdle’s value as an emblem of adulthood was zero, since nobody could tell I was wearing it.

The girdle also made me very, very hot. Years later, in preparation for marriage, my future mother in law gave me Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, in which, along with instructions on table settings and “the art of tipping,” I read that a proper lady should change her girdle at least twice a day. By then it was the 1960s, and landfills across the land were overflowing with the discarded girdles of my generation, but remembering how much I’d sweated in that old girdle, I could see Amy V’s point.

Much to my relief, my first girdle did not last. Sitting in the backseat of our old Dodge one day, I bent to tie my shoelace and felt a sudden sharp stab into the soft flesh of my belly. I screamed.  My mother twisted around from the front seat “What? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I think something bit me. Something big,” I said. Ecuador abounded in large, appalling-looking bugs, and I lived in fear of them.

My father pulled over to the side of the road and my mother got out. She unbuttoned the waistband of my skirt, pulled up my blouse, rolled down the top of my girdle and discovered the cause of the pain: one of the metal stays had broken, pierced the fabric casing, and stabbed me in the abdomen. On the way home, I had to stretch out on the back seat and lie still, because whenever I sat up the girdle would stab me all over again.

Later, my mother tried to mend the tear, but the stay kept poking through, and she finally relented and let me throw the girdle away. But in later years, whenever I underwent discomfort for the sake of looking good—burning my neck with a curling iron, say, or squeezing into too-tight jeans--I would recall the fateful words of my corsetière, “You wish to be beautiful, yes? Then you must suffer.”

Pearls

I’m pretty much o.k. with looking my age, whatever that means. I don’t dye my hair or have bits of my anatomy surgically lifted, but I do try, whenever possible, to avoid decking myself out in the emblems of past eras, such as bubble hairdos, pillbox hats, and cadaverously pale lipstick.

In the mid-twentieth century, as we girls reached puberty we were given a series of objects that marked our progress towards womanhood: first pair of heels, first girdle, first razor, first strand of pearls. The pearls—real, cultured, or artificial-- were usually gifts from parents or grandparents, a single strand to encircle our youthful necks on special occasions.

My generation didn’t get much use out of our pearls. By the mid-sixties, “serious” jewelry had given way to ethnic and artisanal adornments. We wore chandelier-like earrings that hung down to our clavicles, paper mache bracelets, and bizarre beads and amulets in lieu of pearls.

I still have my pearls. They sleep in a box, wrapped like mummies in a lace doily crocheted by my father’s mother. Sometimes I take them out and look at them. Almost certainly man-made, the pearls are a mellow ivory color, and they have kept their looks over the decades, without peeling or losing their luster. They feel heavy in my hand and, on the rare occasions when I put them on, pleasantly cool on my skin.

I like pearls. They go with everything. They are almost alive, “breathing” air and moisture and changing color with the years and the wearer’s chemistry. The better kind of artificial pearls get their luster from a concoction of fish scales slathered on a glass sphere, so they react to their environment in much the same way as their oyster-made cousins.

In Colette’s novel, Chéri, the courtesan Léa wears her magnificent “rope” of rosy pearls to bed with her lover. If I lived on a desert island, I too would wear my little strand round the clock. But I live in Vermont, where, for good reason, the atmosphere is ultra casual. It’s hard to dress in fancy clothes when you’re trudging through snow drifts in winter and deep mud in spring. In the all-too-short summer, Vermonters are frantically growing veggies in their gardens, and can’t be bothered to dress up.

The Green Mountain State, however, is nothing if not accepting of quirks and fancies of all kinds. You can wear an organza shift with your rubber boots to town meeting and nobody will bat an eye, so why don’t I wear my pearls? Sheer vanity is why. I’m afraid that they might be one of those markers of bygone eras, like the teased hair of the sixties or the pillow-sized shoulder pads of the eighties, that will telegraph my elderly status before I’ve had a chance to impress my audience with how relatively non-elderly I am.

It’s vanity on the same spectrum as hair rinses and eyelid tweaks. But at least the people who undergo these procedures are exchanging something they don’t like (gray hair and droopy eyelids) for something that they like better. I, on the other hand, am denying myself something I enjoy in order to avoid looking like Queen Elizabeth.

Given what I’ve seen on TV in recent weeks, however, looking like the Queen, who wears her near-century with pride, would be infinitely preferable to looking like my fellow septuagenarian, the man with the orange face.

Senior prom, 1962

Temples of the Holy Ghost/Occasions of Sin

In the 1960's, long before bra straps became a fashion statement, we girls used to sew little tabs on the inside shoulder seams of our dresses to keep bra straps out of sight. To hide our incipient cleavage we used a dickey--a triangular piece of cloth that snapped into the center of a too-revealing neckline. At prom time in our Catholic high school, we were warned that if we showed up in a gown with spaghetti straps (or, God forbid, strapless), we would be sent back home. Our bodies were Temples of the Holy Ghost, but unless we were ever watchful, they could also be Occasions of Sin. 

1962 Senior Prom. Note the sin-avoiding straps on my dress.

 It was a difficult message for our hormone-marinated brains to disentangle because those same bodies, as our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and the entire culture never ceased to remind us, were our passport to the main if not the only source of personal fulfillment for women: marriage and motherhood.

Beauty and modesty were supposed to coexist in an eternally precarious equilibrium. Neglect your looks for a single day and you risked passing unnoticed by the Brylcreem-anointed boy who might have been your ticket to happiness. Disregard modesty and who knew what might happen? We certainly didn't, because it was never spelled out--nobody said the words pregnancy, or venereal disease, or rape as they might apply to us. But the consequences of immodesty were all the more alarming for being unspoken.

It was drilled into us that we had to make the most of whatever portion of beauty Providence had bestowed on us. Hair was supremely important. It had to balloon off the scalp to give us the wide-eyed, neotenic look that made us seem vulnerable and attractive. This required nightly work with brush rollers--I used to sleep with twenty-seven of them digging into my scalp--many cans of spray, and prayers for dry, windless weather.

Our skin gave us fits, being liable to erupt in pimples when we least wanted it to, despite copious applications of Clearasil. But breasts constituted the ultimate dilemma. From the movies--Sophia Loren! Marilyn Monroe! Jayne Mansfield!--we figured that they were a major asset, a helpful tool in luring the father of our future children. Yet because they also had the potential to provoke unbridled lust, they needed to be completely covered, although they could be hinted at by the artful positioning of darts in our bodices.

Legs were less of a liability, though we worried that our nylons would develop runs, a disgrace comparable to having our slip show. Until the blessed invention of pantyhose, stockings were held up by garter belts, an item that has since acquired fetishistic status but that I remember mostly as giving me severe pain in the lower back.

Sacred vessels on the one hand, agents of disgrace on the other, our bodies came to feel like two-edged swords, or UXBs that might go off unpredictably. It is a miracle that we managed to learn anything in school, worried as we were that the "rats" might be showing under the upper layers of our hair, or that the middle button on our uniform blouse might have popped open.

And yet we did learn, despite all the distractions, and ours became the first generation to aspire to having both meaningful work and a guy. And when the pill, the pantyhose, and the second wave of feminism burst simultaneously on the scene a few years later, we put away our dickeys, our garter belts and sometimes even our bras, and believed, at least for a while, that we could have it all.

Summer Ironing

It was 96F on our north-facing window the other afternoon as I prepared to go out.  I thought linen would be marginally more tolerable than anything else on my sweaty skin, but my linen shirt had spent the last ten months rolled up in my ironing basket. 

Who irons anymore?

First there was ironing, and misting with spray bottles, and even starching.  Then there was polyester, women's lib, and the putting away of irons.  A return to natural fibers and a brief resurgence of ironing followed after which, as our faces grew as wrinkled as freshly-laundered cotton, my generation put away the iron for good.

Still, even in Vermont, where the soft, wrinkled look is a sign of wisdom and common sense, I couldn't bring myself to show up in completely crumpled linen.

I set up the ironing board--whose unacustomed clatter sent Bisou scuttling under the bed--turned on the ceiling fan, plugged in the iron and turned it on "high."  As a teenager, it had been my job on Saturday afternoons to iron my father's weekly supply of white shirts as well as my own blouses and dresses.  Ironing was more pleasant than my other chores:  cleaner than dusting, quieter than vacuuming, less disgusting than washing dishes.

I had forgotten what hot work ironing was.  Being in a rush, I did not stop to fill the steam reservoir or even spritz the fabric--a false economy of time.  Ironing dry linen, even with a red-hot iron, takes much, much longer than if the fabric is damp.

But in the end I got the shirt ironed, put it on, and got in the car.  And fastened the seat belt across my chest, which instantly undid all my work with the iron.  And then remembered that the fading of ironing as a way of life in the early 60s had coincided with the advent of seat belts in cars, sort of the way panty hose had arrived on the scene shortly after the invention of miniskirts. 

There was a parade in the village, and I was diverted a long way from my route and had to drive much faster (55mph) than I normally do.  Between the seat belt and my sweaty, anxious state, by the time I arrived at the art opening I looked like I was wearing a fine linen accordion.  But there was a woman with hip-long gray dreadlocks, and nobody even blinked at her, or at me.

Summer Of Love, 1967

It was a hot and muggy summer in Alabama.  In the afternoon, terrific thunderstorms would roll in.  Skirts were short, hair was long, and "Puff, the Magic Dragon," with its deliciously illicit resonances, played on the radio.  We were mere infants, and I'm surprised that our parents allowed us to get married.  But, of course, they were young too....

                                                                    Can you tell who's who?

Adventures In Home Sewing

A very long time ago, in the wild and carefree 60s, many women sewed their own clothes. Some were quite good at it. A graduate school classmate of mine made a Madras sport jacket for her husband. Men's clothes are hard to make--they have to fit just right, since in social situations most men don't move around enough to hide an uneven hem or an ill-fitting sleeve. Sport jackets are especially hard--they have to have padding, and lining, and buttonholes, and in the case of a Madras print you have to match all those lines. I was never in that league.

I specialized in shifts: loose-fitting, sleeveless, collarless tubes, with at most a couple of darts. With time I became more daring, and made a couple of long-sleeved outfits to wear to graduate fellowship interviews, in sober brown fabric to make me look scholarly. I made a robe with flounces at the collar and cuffs for my honeymoon, and a couple of years later I made my maternity clothes, including a cape to wear in winter. And I made cute little dresses for my daughters until, at an amazingly early age, they developed their own notions of cool attire.

The item I remember best, however, is my tablecloth dress, which I made while still in graduate school. My husband and I had been invited to a party, and I wanted to wear something new. This desire hit me with great force on the afternoon of the party, too late for me to run to the fabric store and make even the simplest pattern.

How I made the tablecloth-into-dress leap is not clear in my mind, but I remember holding a dark-green, round, fringed tablecloth in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other and thinking, "this is going to be a snap."

And it was (see below). I folded the tablecloth into fourths, cut a hole for my head in the pointed end, then made a cut about as long as my arm from the circumference towards the center. I threaded my needle and hemmed the neck hole, then sewed the sleeve and side seams. Thanks to the fringe, there was no need to finish either the cuffs or the skirt.

I slipped the tablecloth over my head, thrust my arms into the sleeves, and stood in front of the mirror. The dress needed some interest around the middle, so I pulled a paisley scarf out of a drawer and tied it around my waist.

I looked again. The sleeves were really really long, and the skirt quite short. The thought crossed my mind that people might think I was crazy, but it didn't linger. Those were unconventional times, and I was a grad student, and if those two factors didn't give me license to wear a tablecloth when I felt like it, nothing ever would.

I had a good time that night, despite having to push up my sleeves every time I wanted to stick a carrot into the California dip. But the stiffish fringe prickled on my thighs and on my fingertips, and I wasn't wild about the color of the dress--that deep avocado green which, along with harvest gold and daisy prints and lava lamps conjures up the era almost as powerfully as the smell of pot.

Although, come to think of it, the thing might have worked as a tunic over bell-bottom pants, after the party the bloom was off the rose, and I never wore my tablecloth again.

How To Make A Tablecloth Into A Dress:

Anniversary

It was the Summer of Love, 1967.

"Puff, the Magic Dragon" was at the top of the charts.
Hair was in rehearsal for its October debut.
Hopes for the liberalization of the Catholic Church after the Second Ecumenical Council were running high, as did hopes for many other things.

We scheduled the nuptial Mass for 9 a.m. because Ed said he wanted to wake up, shave, and get married.
Too nervous to swallow any breakfast earlier that morning, I got slightly drunk on the sacramental wine.

Ed wore a dark suit that later served him well at job interviews. I wore a hand-me-down Mexican wedding dress that was a little too short, and my First Communion veil. My little sister, who was flower girl, wore a long pink empire-waist dress I had made. My matron of honor wore the bridesmaid dress that her sister had worn at her wedding.

My father composed the organ music for our walk down the aisle. I did my mother's hair (my own was so short I just ran my fingers through it). A friend was in charge of picture-taking.

It was pretty much a do-it-yourself, proto-hippie wedding--our first act of rebellion against consumerism.

It was a broiling-hot day in Birmingham, Alabama, forty-one--no, forty-four--no, forty-three years ago.