66: Tissue Paper

I don't wear thongs. There's nothing about having a thin strip of fabric shoved between my butt cheeks that appeals to me. Sure they eliminate underwear lines, but when you have a behind like mine, they create other lines that you should be more concerned about. I've never enjoyed shopping for underwear or bras. I go to Victoria's Secret once a year, sometimes every two years, make a direct line toward the back of the store, grab several pairs of the cotton granny panties that have been 5 for $25 for years and recently became 5 for $26, walk directly to the cash register, refuse to provide my phone number or email or whatever else they want to send me coupons and catalogs that look more like porn magazines, and decline the boxy, pink, striped bag. Still, they insist on wrapping my underwear in tissue paper as if it is a gift. The only gift is getting away from the store without running into someone I know or, worse, a seeing student of mine.

I can't say I wasn't embarrassed the first time a boyfriend saw my plain-Jane white bra and full-coverage underwear. I hadn't even thought twice about something that came natural to me until he made a comment. I have since switched to black bras and sometimes even allow for lace, but thongs are just wrong.

My preference didn't stop my husband from buying me lingerie. He told me the story of how he went into Victoria's Secret the first time he bought me something. He was wearing his usual ripped jeans, old Vans skate shoes, flannel, holey band t-shirt, and baseball hat. He said he had his head phones in and music blaring and quickly told the sales associate he didn't need help that he was buying something for his wife. I could picture him perfectly when he told me the story and I wondered if the sales woman laughed at the idea that he was married. He was 20 and I was 21 when we exchanged vows, but neither of us looked our age. Recently when I was sitting in the exit row of an airplane, the stewardess asked me if I was at least fifteen years of age. Nearly double that, I laughed at the idea that I could pass for one of my high school students.

He gave me the bra and thong wrapped in the telltale pink tissue paper. If he wrapped gifts in tin foil I was lucky they were wrapped at all. The bra was too small and the underwire cut into my skin. The thong was the first one I'd ever worn and it didn't make me a convert to the open-end. I wore them infrequently because I knew he liked them and I knew that when I did wear them, they didn't stay on for long.

He bought me several other sets over the first few years of our marriage. Cleaning through my clothes was one of the first things I did when he left me and getting rid of the years of lingerie I'd kept in the far corner of my sock draw buried beneath my more practical things was freeing. When I found the folded up pink tissue paper pictured above I knew that it was the paper the first bra and thong had been wrapped in. Why had I kept this? At one point I thought it was cute that he'd gone into Victoria's Secret for me. It was nice to have someone think I was sexy enough to be scantily clad and I didn't mind the reminder. Now, it just seems like another way we both differed, another example of how I kept quiet because I knew it was something he liked.  Getting rid of the old lingerie and crumpling this pink tissue paper into a ball before throwing it in the trash was my own version of 1960s bra burning.