For my high school graduation present, I asked for my first suit. At the time, suits, I believed, were the chicest thing a woman could wear. (This is the kind of insane thought that, once embedded in the mind of a teenage girl, is impossible to trace or dislodge.) To me, suiting represented a bordering on French sophistication unreachable for a high schooler who had never been to France, a sexual confidence without crassness, a maturity without stodginess. The suit conjured cigarettes and witticisms. Now that I was to begin my voyage into womanhood, I wanted to look like Marlene Dietrich or Katharine Hepburn or Diane Keaton or Julia Roberts, all perk and pout. Once I had a suit, I felt sure, I would join the ranks of real intellectual lookers. My father, for whom the word casual holds no meaning and a great lover of suiting, carted me down to the West Village, where we went to several vintage stores and I had my dreams strangled by roughly 3.5 meters of pinstripe fabric.
The boyish ’fits I tried on just didn’t look right. I looked like a female news anchor. I looked like the curvaceous vice principal of my public middle school; like an elected official buckling under public scrutiny, the cracks in her campaign accentuated by off-the-rack slacks; a buxom background goon in an R-rated version of The Godfather. Pulling at the already taut material, I fixed an evil gaze at my chest. I realized that the thing standing in the way of my vision was actually two things. Yes, I lived it: I was a 17-year-old with a massive rack.
I’d barely even had time to participate in the honorable teenage tradition of envying other girl’s chests when my own sprung forth, arriving to the party early and severely overstaying their welcome. They gummed up my dresses, drew unwanted attention, and became home for things I’d thought I’d lost: crumbs, anxieties, misplaced hopes. Having breasts was one thing, but dressing for them, in my eyes, meant a world of lumpy sweaters and blouses that ballooned out slobbishly. Was my vision of washboard androgyny unattainable? Was my body just ill-suited?
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