Making good use of this week's at home time, today I packed my sweaters away and brought up the t-shirts and shorts from the basement. I'm going on the senior class trip again in June, and I need to pack. Now. I would have started packing weeks ago, except K has the big suitcase with her at school. But it got to be too much today for OCD me, so I started assembling what I'll need to bring, which meant I had to have the shorts and t-shirts where I could see them.
And the bathing suits. Today I tried on my bathing suits. Omigodomigodomigod.
Once, maybe 15 years ago, I was waiting on line outside the dressing room in the swimsuit department of Macy's with about four other women, all of us smiling and shifting nervously from foot to foot. In time, all of us were in the little booths with our hopeful scraps of spandex. One after another, we all began to sigh and groan, and then all of us started to laugh, each in our own little booth.
Are there women anywhere who think they look good in bathing suits? Even the Sports Illustrated models don't really look like that, those suits are glued on, or taped, and the lighting is just right, and they're posed so you can't see the ripples of cellulite in the back or on the side or wherever.
At least, I like to think so.
I have a couple of times fallen for the Lands' End line that they make swimsuits for every figure. This is a lie, do not believe the lie. Just like everyone else, they will sell you a swimsuit if you're a size 10, top and bottom. Oh, they think they fit everyone because they also carry that "long-torso" thing. Personally, I know a whole lot more women under five-foot-three than over five-foot-nine, but maybe it's just me.
One of my grandmothers was five feet tall; the other one was short. The taller one was beautiful, really, with straight posture and perfect features and proportions. The other one looked like the dictionary definition of grandma: she had steel gray hair and twinkling blue eyes and a magic smile, and as a tailor by trade, she made all her own clothes. She had to. She was four-foot-ten, had normally thin arms and legs, and wore what we would now euphemistically call a DDDD cup.
She wore a bra under her bathing suit, and since she lived twenty minutes from Cape Cod, she spent lots of time at the beach and in a bathing suit. A black one-piece bathing suit that could otherwise have been used to cover a baby-grand piano. She wasn't fat. She was Grandma, and when I was little I would sit in her lap for hours and rest my head against her unbelievably comforting presence.
Lands' End does not make a bathing suit that would have fit my grandma. And they do not make a bathing suit that fits me.
Oh, I am much more well-put together than grandma, heavens, yes. At five-foot-two, I'm only a DD cup. A very easy fit.
I don't like sand so I don't go to the shore (as we call it here in Jersey) and to tell the truth, I don't so much like to swim. What I do have to do is go along on a school trip with about 160 seniors, going each day to a waterpark or an amusement park in 100 degree heat, topped off by a pool party every night at the hotel. The required attire is, of course, a swimsuit.
What could be more fun than buying a bathing suit, except having to wear it in the company of 80 or so pretty young things? An ego trip, it ain't. Life, it is.
My parents saved everything. Grandma's black tank must be here somewhere.
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I'm watching SNL on Comedy Central
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