I took them into a fitting room, where there was a sign that said, LET US FIND YOUR PERK-FECT FIT! and a cartoon of a happy salesperson in smart librarian glasses wrapping a tape measure around a giddy-looking customer with the exact dimensions of a toothbrush. No, thank you.
I tried the purple overhead one first, because it looked so comfortable.
It was comfortable like wearing a scratchy vest made of old dryer sheets and thorns that stopped halfway down your boobs would be comfortable. Okay, that one was a long shot anyway. Doesn’t matter.
I picked up the plaid bra. There were only two hooks in the back (mine had four), and the straps resembled thin pink ribbons you’d tie on a baby’s head to signal she was a girl, but the cups were like mixing bowls. It was sort of like if you took the sails off a pirate ship and made them into a bikini.
I hooked the band and slid my arms through the straps. It’s a good thing I liked that plaid print, because now I was looking at a lot of it—enough so that the bra actually covered most of Maude and Mavis, without rolls of boobage coming out the sides. It fit! Sort of.
That is, it did until I bent down to pick up the purple bra that I’d dropped on the floor, and both breasts slid completely out of their cups. I stood up and tucked them back in. So it wasn’t something I could do a handstand in, but I wasn’t much for handstands anyway. It wasn’t comfortable. Or supportive. Or cheap. But it was enough to feel like I was wearing something a fifteen-year-old would wear, instead of a grandmother.
I leaned forward just a bit. They stayed in.
A bit more. Still in!
I leaned forward as far as you’d need to to hand someone your money if you were buying this bra. Ploop! There went Mavis. “What’s going on out here?” she asked.
When I held perfectly still and stood straight, Perk Up! was right—the bra was the extended size that fit over my extended body. But already the skinny ribbon straps were digging a thin wedge in my shoulders, and even the tiniest bounce on my heels had M&M flopping like a mattress on the roof of a Volkswagen.
Essentially, they had made a bigger version of the same bra but had not modified it to account for the different physics of a shape like mine. It would be like if you stacked thirty snowballs on top of each other to make a super tall snowman and expected him to be as stable as the standard three piece. Or if you tied that mattress onto your Volkswagen with a friendship bracelet.
I stared at my plaid-patterned self in the mirror.
This bra didn’t do any of the hoisting, holding, or hauling I needed it to do, and Maude and Mavis were hanging troublingly close to my belly button. This was not my Perk-fect fit.
But for the first time since my C-cup days, they were wearing something cute.
“You all set?” asked the clerk, who had given up pricing underwear and was playing on her phone.
I bought the useless plaid bra and the matching boy shorts. I have no idea why. They are in the bottom of my pajama drawer with the tags on and will stay there forever.
CHAPTER 14
“Tyler needs a haircut.”
“I need one, too. I can take him to my place.”
“He doesn’t need a fifty-dollar haircut.” Mom means Dad doesn’t need a fifty-dollar haircut, either. He has nice hair, wavy and dark and thicker than most of the other dads, but it’s not a complicated style or anything.
“Would you like me to just trim him up in the bathroom?” Dad smirks. He tried the trim-him-up-in-the-bathroom route when Ty was little and ended up having to shave his whole head. Everyone assumed that he was the one that brought lice to preschool and that’s why we shaved him. Mom was humiliated. Ty said his ears were cold.
They go back and forth for a while about whether it makes sense to spend fifty dollars on hair that mostly lives under a hat anyway. Mom caves when Dad reminds her that for fifty bucks, they will also give Ty a good, scalp-scrubbing wash, which they wouldn’t do at the ten-dollar place and which the boy clearly needs.
I’m anxious for Dad to take Tyler and go already, because I need to talk Mom into ordering a bra from a website that looks like a Ukrainian internet scam, and I really, really don’t want Dad to be part of the conversation. One time I had to get pads when he was pushing the grocery cart and I spent the rest of the time wondering when Mom had told him I’d gotten my period, because I sure hadn’t.
When the boys are gone, I sit down next to Mom, who is in front of her laptop studying online reviews of feng shui providers to add to her binder of recommendations.
She looks up from her computer. “I’m supposed to find a good feng shui practitioner, but they all look like middle-aged white women.” She says it like she’s not a middle-aged white woman herself.
I look over her shoulder at the thumbnails, where all the businesses are called things like Four Winds Resources and Pathways to Peace and The CHI-cago Center. “I feel like I should try to make the recommendations in the binder more diverse, you know?”
“What review site is this?”
“Neighbor-to-Neighbor.”
“Aren’t the only people on Neighbor-to-Neighbor middle-aged white women?” My mom usually complains about the neighborhood app because she sees it as competition, but maybe she still poaches the crowd-sourced intel.
She sighs. “That’s why I don’t like to use it,” she says, still using it. She clicks on a picture of a woman with a long gray braid and a bird on her shoulder: Pamela Holly Desrosiers.
“I’m thinking of going out for volleyball,” I begin.
She doesn’t look up from the screen. “Volleyball? Do you know how to play volleyball?”
“We did a unit in gym, and I was pretty good at it.”
She nods and makes a note in her notebook. “I think that would be good for you. You should have more activities.” I know Mom is disappointed that I don’t have more “activities.” She’s an “activities” kind of person.
“Practice would be after school every day.”
“Maybe we should try one of them,” she says, looking around the house. She must be excited about all the five-tiny-house-icon ratings Pamela Holly Desrosiers has gotten. I wonder what Pam would say about the pile of Tyler’s gear you have to climb over to get in the front door. That can’t be good for the flow of our energy.
I try to bring the conversation back to the bra. “So with volleyball and everything, I’m going to need a new sports bra.”
“Okay. We can go to Master’s this weekend.” Master’s is the big sporting-goods store on the highway. You can buy everything from golf tees and no-show socks to yurts and hunting rifles. It’s Tyler’s happy place.