Hard Bodies

In my mind’s eye, I can still see my grandmother undressing for bed, silhouetted by the hall light, long after my sister and I have gone to bed.

Born in 1896, Grandma Anderson is visiting from Detroit, where she and her engineer husband raised my mother on Lawrence Avenue when life was good, before the stock market crash of 1929. We live in Northern Virginia now, and my sister and I are sharing our bedroom with Grandma while she visits.

The last piece of clothing removed is a corset, a full-length pink monstrosity with endless hooks and eyes that have been holding Grandma under strict control all day from stem to stern. I marvel at the redoubtable antique corset, just a few steps removed from those lace-up corsets that rearranged women’s internal organs in Victorian days just so they could boast an hour-glass figure. I’m excited at the prospect of wearing its younger cousin in just a few years, when I’m more grown up.

That time comes all too soon, and in high school and college in the 1960s I wear a girdle when I dress up. It’s a tight rubber contraption fitted with little tabbed devices to hold up my stockings while reconfiguring my teenage chubbiness. In stewardess school, our foundations consultant says she likes “her girls” to wear a little firming girdle so they look professional. We all agree, and purchase the necessaries to look as professional as possible.

 

In the 1970s come pantyhose, some with built-in tummy-flattening, butt-hardening elastic tops to create hard bodies out of soft flesh. Then comes the era of real hard bodies, the compact, well muscled, bikini-clad California roller bladers along Venice Beach. We dance aerobics and take up running to be like them, and give up elastic in favor of real muscles. What a difference exercise makes! As a mother of elementary school kids, I may not have a really hard body, but I feel fantastic! I run 1-1/2 miles to aerobics class, dance for an hour, then run 1-1/2 miles home to cook dinner for my husband and children. All this after working at a full-time publishing job during the day.

The years have taken their toll, and I admit to looking more like the saggy baggy elephant than the svelte somebody I set out to be. I’m not much of a shopper, and rarely set foot in a department store, so it came as a total surprise on a recent visit to JC Penney to discover that girdles are back! Can you say Spanx?

Will we ever stop trying to rearrange our bodies and just be ourselves, let it all hang out? Come to think of it, that’s what the Hawaiians invented muumuus for. Total comfort in a colorful drape. That’s for me!