210
MARGE PIERCY
sieres dug into the skin to leave a red welt encircling.
If
you
reached upward, if you moved suddenly, the bra would remain
anchored like a granite ledge. The freed breasts would pop out.
Suddenly you stood, Diana of Ephesus with four boobs. I remem–
ber my dormitory friend murmuring scorn of the boyfriend who
thought he had caressed her breast in the twilit lounge. All he had
contacted was Playtex padded perfect circle size 34A.
Girdles: my mother bought me one when I turned twelve,
saying to me that now I was a woman. I weighed ninety-two
pounds and cast no shadow standing sideways. Rubber coffins.
They were diving machines that made of air a sticky sea to
founder in. Who could eat with pleasure in a girdle? I remember
pain at restaurant tables, the squirming, the itching, the overt
tweaking and plucking. Who could dance? Run or bend over or
climb a ladder? Fuck? Scratch? No, in a girdle you stand and
stand. You sit rigidly and nothing jiggles, nothing bounces. You
are looked at like an avocad0 tree in a lobby. The pallid flesh
sweats coldly under the rubber mask with its smell of doctors'
offices and baby cribs.
What do these costumes say with their high, conical breasts,
deep waistlines, flat rib cages, and no bellies at all--no wombs, in
there, nothing to digest with? Girdles that chafed the thighs raw.
It
is not trivia, this catalogue of out-of-fashion clothes that arouse
lust in middle-aged men. These costumes say that flesh must be
confined, must suffer in rigidity. Women must accustom, them–
selves to a constant state of minor pain, binding themselves in a
parody of the real body to be constantly "attractive." A woman
must never be able to use her body freely.
Before this armory of underwear, flesh was quelled, cowed.
It
had the shape divine. We didn't have bodies then, we had shapes.
We were the poor stuff from which this equipment carved the
feminine. Under all this clothing our meat, imprinted with seams
and chafed with elastic, shuddered and waited in ignorance. Our
bodies were blind worms, helpless under rocks. Secretly they
turned to muscle or to flab as they would, but the clothes jailed
us, trained us to await babies and cancer and rape, dumb as a
centerpiece of wax fruit. I feel less vulnerable naked than in those
trappings.
