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The Last Hurrah
Pregnant
and shopping for "intimate" apparel
I am in the dressing room at Schwartz's
Intimate Apparel in an affluent suburb of Chicago. There is nothing
intimate about the place. Signs in the front windows blare "Girdle
Sale!" The overhead lights are a bright, unforgiving florescent, and
the round, middle-aged woman with a bad dye job who greeted me at the
door is now telling me to take my sweater off.
I used to be shy about my body, but nearly nine months of regular
prodding and pulling and palpating by my obstetrician have excised
whatever sense of modesty I once had. I remove my sweater without
pause, and I am not even bothered when she stares directly at my chest
for several seconds. "Okay," she says as if she knows everything she
will ever need to know about me. Then she disappears behind the click
of the closing door.
I have come to Schwartz's at the direction of several friends, none of
whom know one another, but all of whom have babies and are thereby
connected through the great ethereal web of mother wisdom. Before you
get pregnant, you know nothing of mother wisdom. You see babies in
strollers, but you don't think about what brand of strollers they are
or how they were chosen or if the cup holders are any good. You go
about your business. And then your pregnancy test comes up blue and you
begin to realize how little you really know.
The wisdom is given in small bits, like pearls, at first, but soon you
realize there are entire categories of knowledge you must acquire now
that you're with child. I'd long since bought the Snap-n-Go, the
Pack-N-Play, and the castle-themed saucer. I'd signed up for prenatal
classes and swept a whole row of instruction manuals off the bookstore
shelf. Now it was time to get down to business. It was time to buy the
nursing bras.
My friends had told me that Schwartz's was the place to buy nursing
bras. The nursing bra Mecca. The nursing bra bomb. So here I stand,
facing the mirror in the dressing room, trying to see what the
saleswoman saw.
My stomach is an enormous orb, my skin stretched beyond what any
Thanksgiving feast--or my wildest imagination--could ever yield. My
satiny black bra pulls tight across the top of me, seeming to cordon
off my ever-growing breasts like police tape.
In the midst of my reverie, the saleswoman returns, several bras
clutched in her hands like caught fish. She stands in the doorway
staring through thick-framed glasses, and it takes me a moment to
realize that I am to continue disrobing, strip-poker-like, while she
watches. Obediently, I remove my black bra. She instructs me to lean
forward, and as I do, she whips a particularly thick, textured,
flesh-colored thing around the front of me, pulls it taut, and latches
it together across my back. I feel lassoed.
I look up and see my grandmother. No, it's me, but my breasts are
trapped like objects never to be viewed or even thought about. I feel
mummified.
"Hmm," I say, afraid to offend her. Maybe I'm supposed to look like
this. I caress the top of the bra, as if contemplating its beauty and
functional appeal. "Maybe something a little smoother," I say. "I kind
of like my bras smooth."
"I know you do," she says, as if she has known and disapproved of me
all my life.
She reaches down and scoops up a smooth, white Olga. "Try this one,"
she says. It's a brand I wear in more normal times, and it feels
better. The only difference is that this one has these two little snaps
on either side of my breastbone for the baby's easy access. I touch one
of the snaps and try to casually undo it, but I feel her watching me,
and I can't get the snap undone. I pretend instead that I'm just
scratching my breastbone.
"This one's the wrong size," she barks, grasping the material beneath
my underarms and pulling it snug. I let out a small shriek, but she
doesn't seem to hear it. She is out the door again, leaving me to
ponder my bloated reflection once more.
She returns with the same bra, this time in a 38D. A 38D! All my life I
have wondered what it would feel like to wear a bra so deep into the
alphabet. Long years I have dabbled in petty A's and B's, always
curious if I would feel more beautiful, more womanly in a D-cup. But as
she hoists me into it and explains that I'll need the extra pockets of
space for nursing pads, my visions of taut bikini tops and sexy,
skin-tight sweaters disappear.
Still, it's a good bra, so I tell her I'll take it.
"Whew, that was easy," I think. "I'll be home in time for The View."
But then, as if tossing a verbal hand grenade into the dressing room,
she asks, "Do you have your nightgowns?" Like having one's nightgowns
is a matter of course equivalent to having one's underwear. I don't
want to tell her that I usually sleep in sweatpants and one of my
husband's T-shirts. Women who come here wear nightgowns. They have
robes. Probably even slippers.
"No," I confess. "I don't."
"I know just the one," she says. "Have you seen the ‘I Love Lucys'?"
I cannot even imagine what she is talking about.
"They're just what you're going to need," she says, leading me to a
rack of long, flannel nightshirts emblazoned with oversized,
cartoon-like pictures. One features Lucy and Ethel stuffing chocolates
into their mouths. Others are adorned with animals, some with Victorian
footwear. But the one she has picked out especially for me is a virtual
extravaganza of Oreo cookies--Oreos stacked on top of one another,
Oreos dunking themselves in tall glasses of milk, Oreos floating free
on a pink-and-blue-striped background.
"This is what you'll be needing now," she says.
What I'll be needing now? And just what is going to happen to me now?
I'm going to have a baby and suddenly need to wear
cartoon-cookie-emblazoned sleepwear?
"I was thinking of something, you know, a little smoother," I say. And
then, "Something a little sexy."
A small smile appears on her lips. It tells me that she thinks she
knows more than I do about all this. That what I will really want will
be that Oreo cookie nightshirt and I had better just get used to it.
Still, without protest, she turns and marches to the back of the store.
I follow her and watch as she pulls several nightgowns from a rack
along the wall.
All the gowns she shows me are variations on a theme--floral prints
with about five buttons down the center of the chest, topped with a
tiny satin bow. They flare out at the hips and end somewhere just below
the knees, and I can't help thinking of the cotton A-line nightgowns I
wore as a little girl.
It dawns on me that there isn't anything sexy here. I think back to
some of the items I noticed upon entering the store--plastic
flower-dotted shower caps, "easy-to-fasten arthritis bras," the
flagrant "Girdle Sale!" sign--and I realize that this is the place you
come when sexy is no longer the priority, when breasts aren't so much
erogenous zones as nutritive vessels. It occurs to me that my body has
left the make-up counter. I am in the cereal aisle of my life.
"Maybe pajamas," I offer.
"We have those," she says, turning to the circular rack beside us. She
riffles through the "large" section as I stand mute. She pulls out a
cropped aqua-and-white gingham set. I can tell by the way her face
lights up that it is a favorite of hers, and there is something so pure
about her love of it that I wish I could love it too. The sleeves are
cuffed in blue satin, and I think how easy my life would be if I could
just be happy lolling around the house in gingham pajamas with blue
satin cuffs.
"This is what you'll want," she tells me, and though I want to believe
her, I know that she is wrong.
"I don't think it's my color," I say.
She begins to flick the hangers across the metal bar with sharper
motions, and I fear she's losing patience. The next set she pulls out
is similar to the previous one, except the top of this one is a
tent-sized, button-down expanse of purple. The pants are
purple-and-white gingham, slashed vertically at the ankle, for what
purpose I cannot imagine. (Cowboy boots?)
"I think I'll just take these instead," I say, gesturing to a pair of
flannel bottoms and a tight, scarlet top the likes of which I haven't
worn since high school. It is an impulse purchase, and it feels as it
should: daring and wasteful and wrong.
I can tell she disapproves of my choice--that a tight, sexy top is not
what the baby will need from me. But the baby's not here yet. Except
for taking my prenatal vitamins and trying not to drink, smoke, or
sniff glue, there's not much I have to do. For now I am free. In a few
weeks, my son will come screaming into the world. The pain of that
moment, and the joy, will transform me. I will enter the ranks of this
woman. The knowing glance and the tone of self-assurance will be mine.
I will look back on all that came before as if it were one big keg
party--a frivolous, three-decade-long affair in which caring for others
was easy because their very survival didn't depend on it.
But I'm not there yet. I still have some time. And so, tight scarlet
top in my grasp, I hand over my credit card and seize the day.
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About the author:
KATHERINE OZMENT is a senior editor at Boston
magazine. Her essays have been published in Salon and Brevity: A Journal of Brief Literary
Nonfiction. Her journalistic pieces have been published in Boston magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and National Geographic magazine. Her
poetry has been published in Lifeboat:
A Journal of Memoir and Poetry
East. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband
and son.
I wrote this essay
when I was eight months pregnant and consumed with all things baby. The
original ending was different. At the time, I had no understanding of
what it would mean to be a mother, so I ended the essay with some pat
image of buying a pair of blue baby booties in addition to the other
things (which I did). But later, when revising the story, I realized
that buying that tight red top at the end of the comically tortuous
trip to the nursing bra store was my last gasp of reckless
independence. At the time, I had no idea what was about to be lost--or
gained.
Art
by Anne Matthews
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