9 1/2 Narrow by Patricia Morrisroe Page B

to go into the dressing room and try it on. On one side was Mrs. Howard, on the other a woman being fitted for a nursing bra.
Milk spillage?
Did the saleswoman actually say, “
Milk spillage”
? My mother never nursed any of us, and I didn’t know any other mothers who’d dream of letting their children anywhere near their breasts. Hadn’t this woman ever heard of baby formula? You mixed it up, poured it into a bottle, and stuck it in the baby’s mouth, thereby doing away with bizarre problems like milk spillage. I was getting ill. Even my new wedgies didn’t compensate for the newfound horrors of becoming a woman.
    â€œHow ya’ doin’ in there, hon?” the saleswoman asked.
    â€œI need more time,” I said, thinking in terms of decades.
    I reluctantly took off my white Lollipop undershirt with its delightful pink rosebud and pulled the bra over my head. The saleswoman, overstepping all civilized notions of privacy, barged in and began fiddling with the bra. “There!” she said. “Now that really holds you in.” Bind was more like it. The bra flattened me so completely I could have been playing Viola disguised as Cesario in
Twelfth Night.
    Mrs. Howard and I emerged from the dressing room at the same time. She had something black and slinky in her arms. I stepped on her foot and in the midst of apologizing dropped my training bra. She picked it up for me. “Oh, thanks,” I said casually, as if shopping for brassieres was something I did all the time.
    â€œI’ll
die
before wearing this thing,” I whispered to my mother, who was debating whether she needed a new girdle to get herself back into pre-Nancy shape.
    â€œYou could use a girdle too,” she said.
    I was a gawky five feet eight and weighed 110 pounds. Nothing jiggled, nothing wiggled, nothing moved at all.
    â€œI don’t want a girdle,” I said. “I don’t want a bra. I don’t even want these stupid nylons or this garter belt.” My mother gave me the death stare. I was causing a scene. In a store. With a movie star nearby.
    â€œWhy do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?” my mother whispered loud enough for the saleswoman to overhear.
    â€œYou’re just overwhelmed, hon,” the saleswoman said. “It’s like when I had my first baby and I was screaming, ‘Just knock me out, because this kid is ripping me apart.’”
    Yeah, just like that.

    On confirmation day, I couldn’t attach the nylons to the garters, and my mother said, “You’d better learn because they’re now a part of you.” She wasn’t kidding. Within minutes, they’d left figure-eight marks on my thighs. With the slippery hose, my wedgies were now too big and I could barely keep them on.
    With his Kodak Instamatic in hand, Daddy asked me to go outside so he could take a picture to commemorate the day. I followed him out to the front lawn, where he usually took all our pictures, posing us next to the cherry blossom trees, which depending on the season and Daddy’s eye were either gloriously in bloom or not in the photo at all. Since he didn’t like to impose himself on people, he never set up his shots properly, and if somebody was blinking or grimacing or looking away, he still snapped the picture. Photography was too intimate an activity for him and he could do it only by doing it quickly. And yet, away from us, removed from direct personal contact, he’d spend hours pasting the photographs into albums, writing, in his perfect script, little notes, such as
Patricia celebrates her First Communion
or
Patricia on her sixth birthday
. He’d date everything, every single picture, so we’d have a record, a history, and I loved looking at the albums. They were among my favorite items in the house.
    â€œOkay,” Daddy said, “why don’t you stand in front of the cherry blossoms?”
    I straightened