lingerie

I hate shopping. I hate confronting the difference between what a beautiful dress looks like on a hanger and on my body. I hate making decisions. (Another black dress? Or am I ready to show on the outside how iconoclastic I am on the inside, by wearing, say, neon orange?) And then there’s the pesky little detail about money. (Shouldn’t I just put every penny into my kids’ college funds?)

But here I am in Paris, during the twice-a-year season of soldes. Everything is on sale, marked way, way down. Plus I didn’t bring enough underwear.

My husband and I are alone for a few days while the kids are at camp. Even the dog has a sitter. And, since we’re in the Land of Lingerie, an underthings store beckons me on every block.

The last time I shopped for unmentionables was a year ago, again during the season of soldes, right before our sabbatical year here ended. I thought I’d gotten over my feelings of inadequacy vis-a-vis the natives (French women are so tiny! So chic!) I’d recovered from the fear that the boutiques wouldn’t even have anything that fit me. I knew my French bra size now. I took off the one I was wearing and looked at the tag. Then laughed out loud.

Why? Because the size is a ludicrously high number.

In America I am a 36, but in France I am a 90. (No need to remind myself that my dress size went from 8 to 38 and my shoe size from 7 to 37. I can just ignore the numbers I don’t like, the way politicians do.)

I’ll try to pretend I don’t know that the difference has to do with centimeters being smaller than inches. I’ll tell myself that all I had to do was fly over the Atlantic and my breasts almost tripled in size. And my weight, in kilos, is almost half its imperial number. Those 90-size breasts must be filled with something as light as fantasy. I imagine slipping my shirts over a couple of hot air balloons.

I bought a bra and panties to replace the ones that had stretched out and faded since last year. I also nabbed a lacy red nuisette. I didn’t actually need a nightie, but it was 50 percent off. Judging from how little fabric there was, it seems only fair that I was able to buy it for next to nothing.

So I still have a little money left to take care of my kids. But I’m not going to think about that—or them—tonight.

With one week left in Paris, you’d think I would have run out of time to have transformative or embarrassing experiences. I managed to have both, thanks to this bra.

My daughter was at a sleepaway camp for six days. My older son was at camp, too, working as a counselor. My husband James and I were alone in Paris for the first time since our honeymoon eleven years ago. It was the last night of what my friend D jokingly called our “second honeymoon” when I called James at his office and asked if he wanted to meet me at Etam to pick out lingerie. He leapt at the chance.

James had been nudging me since we arrived in Paris a year ago buy new underwear, bras, and nighties. The entire city, with its beautiful window displays of nearly naked women and gigantic ads in the metro of scantily clad babes, had been prodding me, it sometimes seemed. I’m frugal and modest. I resisted. Until now.

James seemed to enjoy rifling through the silky fabrics. He chose a super-short nightgown and two bras. One, I realized only after I tried it on, was a push-up. It pushed way up. It pushed out, too. It had a mind of its own.

At dinner James said, “I had no idea how much difference a bra could make.” He seemed both impressed and disillusioned. All the seemingly well-endowed women on the streets of Paris might just be the beneficiaries of this marvelous technology, he mused. (But now, so was I.)

Some things in life we have to be born with. Others we can acquire, and it’s not really cheating. This is a simple, useful lesson it’s taken me a year (or perhaps my whole lifetime) to learn. That’s the transformative part of my Parisian lingerie experience.

Here’s the embarrassing part. The next day, James and I took the train to pick up our daughter Ella from camp. I had hastily thrown on a button-up V-neck blouse that I had worn many times before without incident. This time, my push-up bra pushed so much that the top button kept coming undone, revealing a lot more about myself than I wanted to show to Ella’s camp counselors and her new camp friends and their families. I would have killed for a safety pin.

When I reunited with Ella, she hugged me and said, “Your bra is showing.”

The director of her camp, a 20-something guy with a goatee and a hoodie, whom I had just been chatting with, smiled at me as I said, “oops” and quickly buttoned up.

“It’s OK,” Ella said. “It’s a pretty one. Very sexy.”

I’m probably not the only person who has a recurring nightmare of being in my underwear when everyone else is clothed. It may be a symbol of my secret worry of revealing too much, in general, about myself.

Next time my buttons burst, I’ll try to remember the saleswoman at Etam, who was making no effort to hide her hot-pink bra behind her almost-transparent blouse. I’m still too shy to dare something like that, even in my dreams. But I’m going home a little more “push”-y than I was before.

You say linger-ay, I say linger-ee

Push Ups