Behind the Cotton Curtain

I want this. You see, I like girly underwear. I think it’s important to wear pretty knickers, especially if you, like me, spend most days dressed in men’s shirts and jeans. That way if you’re ever in an accident, the doctors will think that you’ve stolen some other, really sexy girl’s underwear.

My voice adopts the resolute tone of a lead actress in the last fifteen minutes of a made-for-TV movie about terminal illness, social injustice, or figure skating. I am surprisingly strong at this moment, though inches away from tears.

“I am a 32dd.”

She looks at me for a second and then sets aside the spray bottle. I am to her, I understand, a young pup who needs to be taught a lesson.

“Helga,” she calls to the lady alphabetizing tights. “Helga,” she says, “This one tells us she’s a 32dd.”

There is a sound like a sneeze from over by the change rooms. Helga had walked straight back there the first time I said it, 32dd. She doesn’t have time for every nut walking in off the street with delusional thoughts about her own bra size. But I hear the unmistakable clunk of a heavy tool box being opened and then Helga’s words, each one sounding like a snapped thread, come back.

“Well, Olga, I bring measuring tape.” They are wearing nurse shoes, lab coats, and lab skirts. I imagine lab underwear as well—severely cut, coarse, white bra-and-panties sets that are likely awarded to them, in unspeakable Masonic-type services, along with their glasses. At one point in my life I would have (okay, I did) run from the sight of women like this coming at my breasts with a measuring tape. But now I stand my ground.

I am a 32dd. The math of bra sizing is quite simple—the number 32 is the size of the rib cage, and the dd letters are the cup size. There is a physics aspect here, akin to the workings of Dr. Who’s phone booth, that escapes me, but, really, my breasts are not that big and dd is not that big; it’s just that I’m not very tall and what is unusual here is the ratio. The 32 ought to override the double D yet somehow doesn’t.

Helga does the first measure, the rib cage. Olga holds my arms out wide, lest I try to interfere.

“32,” says Helga.