Have you ever stashed a pile of your old bras and underwear under a couch
cushion, left the house and then had your fifteen-year-old son bring all his
friends over and discover the hoard?
Let’s say, just for fun, that this very thing has happened to you. Let me ask
you one thing further: were the bras in the stash very, very large in size? I
mean, were they so big that a single cup could be used to catch a person
leaping from a burning building? And how about the undies? Could you make a
comfortable hammock from a single pair?
If your answer to any of the above questions was no I’m afraid that that
however badly you want to sympathise with me -- and I know you do because you
who read this blog are my good, kind friends -- you really cannot.
Naturally you’ll want to know why I was stuffing old bras and underwear under
the couch cushions. That’s a reasonable question and one I will hasten to
answer.
It was cleaning day yesterday. That meant Selma was coming to our house –
remember Selma? The woman who tried to poison me by putting bleach in my tea
cup? -- and in Selma I have the equivalent of a weekly thrift store pick-up.
The woman will take anything I give her. It’s extremely convenient for me, and,
as far as I can tell, singularly delightful to her. She gets far more excited
about a second-hand pair of pyjamas than the generous tip on her wages.
Now, you know that I’ve changed my clothing size in the last six months. This
has been lovely, of course, but it has required me to buy a lot of new clothes.
Some new Tommy Hilfiger shirts and sweaters I brought back from Canada last
summer never did get worn. I was saving them for winter but when winter came
they were too baggy. I was sad about this and kept taking them out and trying
them on in the pathetic hope that they, like my body, would have magically
shrunken. Finally M told me that if I was considering gaining weight again so
that the sweaters would fit he would be happy to get on a plane and go to the
store in Calgary where I bought them and get me some new, smaller ones.
As an aside, but one well worth mentioning, I must tell you about M’s colleague
at work, Joseph. One day Joseph and M got talking about weight loss and Joseph said
that a few years earlier his wife had lost quite a bit of weight. She collected
up all her old, baggy clothes and told Joseph to throw them out because she
didn’t want to tempt fate. Joseph gathered up the bags of clothing and went
outside with them but he didn’t throw them out. He put them in the car, drove
to his parents’ house, and asked them if he could store the clothes there for a
while. “A year,” he told M. “I just thought we’d better keep them for a year.
They’re pretty expensive to replace.”
So I was facing the same decision with all of my old clothes. Would keeping
them be tempting fate? They did add up to a lot of money. Luckily the paucity
of storage space in our present apartment made the decision easy for me. There
just wasn’t room for them. Once I started buying new clothes to replace what
had become too baggy I had no space left.
So I packed them all up (all except those Hilfiger items – they’re still in the
top of my closet) and put them in bags for Selma. This did not happen in one
stroke but over the course of several months. There was a long transition
period before the last of my old clothes was too big for me, and even then the
flow of clothes out of my closet didn’t dry up entirely but slowed to a trickle
as some of my new clothes, the ones bought when I first began to shrink, became
too baggy themselves.
Selma was thrilled to get the clothes. Even the biggest jeans, which I
suggested she turn into sofa covers (no, I didn’t really), could find a home
somewhere amongst her extended family. And she loved all the cotton shirts. She
takes a fairly big clothing size herself and probably has a very trying time
finding clothes in Lebanese stores, where the largest pant size is often an
American 10 or 12. Plus, of course, she’s poor.
Well, it happened that yesterday I had a few bags of clothes ready for Selma to
take home with her and in one bag were some underwear of Dude’s, as well as
bras and underwear of my own. They were all ones in really good shape – I
wasn’t about to give Selma transparent undies with holes in them – but I
couldn’t make up my mind whether to give them to her or not. I figured I’d give
Dude’s -- what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him -- but did I really want
strangers seeing and wearing my underwear? Charity has its limits, heaven
knows.
If the bras in question hadn’t been my beloved, ultra-supportive Olga bras that
Theo put me onto I probably wouldn’t have hesitated to chuck them when they got
too big. But I had a soft spot for the Olgas. Those bras changed my life. They
got me through some really tough times with more lift than boobs like mine had
right to. A part of me thought that maybe Selma would love them the way I had,
and in this way the bras would live on through her, achieving something like
undergarment immortality.
In the bustle of cleaning and changing bed linens and avoiding death by blunt
trauma I forgot all about the bags until it was time for Selma to go. When I
saw that she was about to leave I suddenly remembered that I had made up my
mind to remove my undergarments from the bags. But because I had left the bags
near the door there was no easy way for me to remove them without Selma seeing,
and if she saw she was definitely going to ask me to leave them in.
When Selma walked over to the kitchen window for a moment to see if her husband
had arrived to pick her up I seized the opportunity and grabbed the bras and
undies out of the bag. There was no time to transport them out of the room so I
shoved them under the cushion of the nearest couch.
As soon as Selma was out the door I heard the dryer chime singing and trotted
to get the hot clothes out. Then I needed to fix lunch for Noonie and straight
after that to get ready for my Arabic class. 45 minutes after Selma departed I
was heading out the door myself, bra stash forgotten.
Dude sometimes brings his whole gang of friends home after school or basketball
practice to play PlayStation and hang out. He called me when I was at Arabic
class and asked if it was okay if the boys came over. I barely gave it a thought.
“That’s fine,” I said, and turned my mind back to the inexplicable rules of
Lebanese prepositions (“The dog is barking on me”; “Your house is far about mine.”)
The bras remained forgotten – at least, to me -- until I got home and found
them on my bed. I had just clomped in to throw my purse and sweater on the bed
and froze in mid-toss when I saw the bras lying there. The bedroom door had
been closed, I suddenly realised.
The boys were gone at that moment, but not for good. They had gone down to the
marina to eat at Classic Burger like they always do when they come over. They
would be back. I crept down the hall to Noonie’s room and asked her if she knew
anything about the bra exposition but she had heard nothing.
Mercifully the boys didn’t linger on when they came back from dinner. They all
grabbed their bags and left immediately again. I stayed in my bedroom till the
last voice had died away.
Then I came cautiously out of my room and found Dude. “Okay, just hit me
straight,” I said. “Who found the bras and how did they make it onto my bed?”
“Oh, the bras,” Dude said. “Well, Karim N found them. Why were they under the couch cushion?”
“Karim N?” I said faintly, bringing to my mind the face of one of the less shy boys.
Small mercies. “Did he say anything?”
“Well, he just came in to the living room, sat down and then said to me, ‘Can
you take these bras out of here?’”
“Did he seem horrified?”
“No, not really. But he didn’t seem to want to get too close to them.”
“Understandable,” I said. “So then you brought them into my room?”
“Yeah,” said Dude. “And closed the door behind me.”
“Well,” I said.
There was really nothing else to say about it. What was done was done. Dude
seemed mercifully unaffected by the experience and for that I was grateful. I
went in to the bedroom, got my Olgas and giant briefs, and stuffed them all
into the garbage.
I’m sure there is a lesson or theme in here somewhere, I just can’t make it
out. Advising you not to leave your bras stuffed under the sofa cushions seems
like something you may have figured out on your own already. So I guess I’ll
just wish you good luck. You know, like in a general way. Good luck!