In Praise of Classic Bras Worn in a Room of My Own

Today was bra shopping day with Mum,” Amy said on the phone during our monthly check-in. She lives in our old neighborhood, just north of Boston, I’m in L.A. She was laughing her ass off. “Our annual mother-daughter brapalooza. We hit Penney’s with a vengeance!”

The proper foundation for a refined lady in the ’60s.

This was Sunday. I was working on the second draft of my first romance novel, King’s Conquest. Lauren, recently Jeff, is fending off billionaire Thomas King’s advances. She doesn’t know (but we do) that she is doomed to fail. I was wearing a pink sleeveless sheath, the kind of dress a Mary Kay disciple wears to church – structured, tasteful, uber-feminine – with matching lips, nails, and the pinkest of baby pink stiletto heels. And pearls of course. Pearls galore. I was alone in my house, doors locked, curtains drawn, floating in my own private sea of satin and Chanel N°5. Girl time. I felt safe and warm and profoundly held together under the bony grip of a white Ragu girdle paired with the perfect bra for that dress, the classic, 1960 era, “bullet boob” Playtex 20/27. I bet mother still has one or two in the bureau, though it’s been a number of decades since my last raid on her unmentionables drawer. After high school it starts feeling kind of creepy. This was the first bra I ever tried on (1969), I was six, and it is still made today – a scratchy, four-hooked masterpiece that taught me how to reach behind my back when putting on a bra, as opposed to attaching it in front and spinning the band around like my ex-wife used to do (ugh, amateurs). And now it’s mine, along with a drawer full of other classic Playtex, Bali, and Vanity Fairs, the same bras millions of women have worn for years, the same bras my mother and sister and, unbeknownst to either of them, moi, stock up on when they go on sale. These are bras that long ago mastered the mystic art of breast support, along with providing some modicum of comfort, though even the least comfortable of them is sublimely comforting to me when I put one on. They are not the flimsy, thin strapped, demi-thingamajigs that look soooo sexy on twenty-something catalog models, or the crazy expensive La Perlas ($$$$), and Wacoals ($$$) of the rich and famous. They are the everyday, full coverage bras of real women, which makes them even sexier to me. Wearing one brings me closer to my truth, closer to being just another working class bitch from the North Shore like my big sister, but with better taste in clothes and men. My bras support a pair of Transform Supersoft Triangles, size 9, blissfully worn under a closetful of slinky tops and gorgeous dresses in a room of my own, my greatest childhood fantasy, short of being ravished by Shaun Cassidy in the back of an empty school bus, come true.

It’s not a room. It is, as I mentioned, a house, two stories, curtains drawn, hard won. Since I’ve retired the clatter of high heels on hardwood and tile reverberates daily. It is not the world at large, maybe I’ll get there someday, maybe not, but still, it is a victory over the tiny bathroom I used to lock myself into most afternoons after school, starting at age six, and continuing all the way through high school – little wee Brooke, all by herself, experimenting with whatever makeup she could find in the medicine cabinet, lipsticks mostly, and ransacking the family hamper desperate for anything girly to try on. That was the “before time,” before the internet, before I had a clue there were others like me, and long, long before trans kids were on TV. I remember the adventure of it all, the thrill of exploring undiscovered country, and the exquisite craving, downright aching for pantyhose, a grimy denim skirt, and shiny pink lips.

I also remember feeling sickened and ashamed, wishing like Pinocchio that I was a real boy as I franticly scrubbed off the lipstick when someone came knocking on the door. Over and over I swore I would stop. Over and over I cried, not to, but at God, “Why am I like this?” Certainly I did my part. I tried hard to quit. I played Little League baseball. I became a bully in school. Then I took my first steps in heels. They fell off my feet as I teetered around Mum’s bedroom, but God, how I loved them. A five or six year window soon followed, when her shoes were no longer too big, and not yet too small. Those were the best days ever, when I played sick so I could stay home from school, home alone, on a day-long safari through my mother’s closet, trying everything on, literally everything, while also taking maniacal care to note how a dress was hung, a top folded, the shoes arranged. Death before discovery I thought, or something like that, as I skipped half- crazed along my own Technicolor yellow brick road. I remember the horror of realizing that maybe I kind of liked boys, correction, craved boys, in a teenage girl goes boy-crazy kind of way, and then the agony of not knowing what to do about it. Most of all I remember deciding in my good little catholic boy/girl brain, as I twirled in front of a full length mirror in silver heels and my mother’s favorite sequin disco dress (1979), that I would never tell anyone any of this.

Ever.

“It’s not like she doesn’t know her size,” Amy says, regarding our Mum, now eighty. She was still laughing. It’s enviable, how easily my sister laughs (and cries). “It’s just our thing. Once a year we go to Nordstrom and get fitted. Then I take her to Penney’s and we buy them on sale! You wouldn’t understand.”

No, I thought, I wouldn’t. But what I wouldn’t give.

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Tags: closeted, crossdressing, featured, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul