By the time we got to a cramped little antique bookstore, my broken toe was causing me considerable annoyance within its boot. To give it some respite, I settled down in a well-used chair near the cash register while Gabriel explored the shelves. The shop’s owner made a polite remark to Gabriel about his suit, and he started to tell her about the differences between Victorian suits and postures and modern ones. The Victorian suit he was wearing (an itinerant Irish preacher’s outfit from the 1870s) had always looked like a costume on him, despite its authenticity. Then one day, following an anatomy lecture on the effect of modern activities (driving, computer use, etc.) on muscular structure, I had suggested to Gabriel that he try adopting a more nineteenth-century posture: shoulders back, chest out, chin up. By those simple changes, he had instantly gone from a modern man dressing up in a costume to looking like he’d just stepped through a door to the past. Since then, he’d been exercising daily on the rowing machines at the gym near our apartment to strengthen the rhomboid muscles in his shoulders, so that he could hold the posture to which Victorian boys were trained from childhood. He told the shopkeeper all this and I smiled to myself, thinking of all the hours of massage I had given those sore rhomboids.
“Well, it’s easy for you!” An over-the-hill customer (clearly a tourist) sneered, looking down her nose at my husband. “Men have always had it easy! It’s not like you had to wear corsets!”
At that, I stopped holding my tongue and looked the rotund baby boomer in the eye. “I’m wearing a corset!”
She looked at me as though I’d just declared that I gave birth to live snakes and ate them for lunch on a daily basis. “You are?!”
I nodded coolly. “Yes.”
Her expression did not alter except to drop her jaw and leave it gaping open like one of the stupider breeds of dog. She didn’t say anything, just stared with an intensity of rudeness most people are required to leave behind with their diapers as a prerequisite of kindergarten.
As we left the store I held my head high, making a concerted effort not to limp on my broken toe.
That was the first of the negative reactions I was to encounter, but by no means the last. As surprising as my own corseted figure seemed to me, I was still within the realm of what might be attributed to lucky genes or exhaustive exercise. Later, as my corset-wearing became more dedicated and my form increasingly dramatic, I was to encounter entirely new levels of venom. But, I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
We had a considerably better reception from a group of costumed women slathered in pasteboard brooches. Having stopped us outside an antiques store, their apparent leader embraced us heartily and cooed over our nineteenth-century clothing, towering over us and proclaiming in a booming, cheerful voice how wonderful it was, whilst her diminutive companion (also dripping plastic gems) grumbled that we shouldn’t be wearing real antiques. Ellen (the taller woman) gave us her card, explaining that they were from a group of costumers visiting for the festival. She made us promise to come to the fashion show that afternoon, go to the ball that night, join the club, come to tea . . . I don’t recall her asking us to sign over rights to a hypothetical firstborn child, but then again, her list of insistences was lengthy, and I may have forgotten a few of them. By the time she and her entourage swept away in an effusion of well wishes and flurries of polyester petticoats, I was feeling slightly dizzy from the overabundance of good cheer.
I raised an eyebrow at Gabriel, who chuckled.
“Enthusiastic, isn’t she?” I asked, catching my breath.
“Uh huh.” Gabriel smirked, putting away the card. “She seemed nice, though.”
“Oh yes,” I agreed. “Very nice.” I thought about the group’s ensembles: loose rayon blouses, skirts dragging in the dirt, and plastic flowers glued to huge, floppy Target-bought straw hats. They weren’t exactly artifacts from which to extrapolate historical data. “But, they don’t really seem . . . like our sort of people . . .”
Gabriel laughed again. “Yeah . . . not really.”
“Very nice, though!” I added hastily.
“Oh, very nice,” he agreed. “You wanted to go to the fashion show anyway, didn’t you?”
“Oh yeah!” The ostrich plume on my hat bobbed as I nodded emphatically. “Absolutely!”
“Me too.” He looked down. “How are you doing, by the way?”
“Well . . .” I grimaced slightly. “My foot hurts, and . . .” I squirmed. “My back is really hurting, too.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” His eyes grew soft with concern. “Is the corset bothering you?”
“Yeah . . .” I nodded reluctantly. “My lower back has just been getting sorer and sorer.” My right hand crept to the ache, almost of its own volition.
“Do you want to go back to the hotel room and see if we can do something about it?”
I frowned, sighing. “I can’t really think of anything we could do. I don’t really want to change clothes.” I was having fun adding delight to everyone’s day. “But . . .” My hand rubbed against unyielding steel, under which my back was throbbing.
“Here, let’s go back to the room,” Gabriel insisted. “There must be something we can do.”
Back in the privacy of the hotel, it was a tremendous relief when Gabriel untied my laces and the two halves of the corset fell away after I’d slid the grommets free. I bent my stiff torso backward and forward and reached around to massage my aching lower back. Under my hands, I felt the grooves left by the corset laces against my flesh. Resembling very long shoelaces, the tight nylon cords had imprinted vicious red lines on my delicate skin. Further down, my massaging fingers found a divot.
It was fantastically sore, so I used great caution as I palpated it. Offset only slightly from being directly over the base of my spine, the hole in my tissue was slightly bigger around than the nail of my pinky finger, and about half as deep. If I craned my neck around far enough, I could see the spot in the mirror: it was angry-red, like the lines from the laces, and it seemed to be of a strangely familiar design.
“Hey, hang on a minute.” I pulled my hands away from the sorest spot on my aching back and turned an analytical eye toward the corset. I held it up, parallel to its position when I was wearing it. Near the bottom of the left side in the back, I found what I’d expected. “Aha!”
Corset laces, like shoelaces, are nearly always referred to in the plural. From a casual glance at a corset, it looks like there are two of them, since there are two separate ends coming out to tie in the middle. Realistically, it is just one extremely long cord (about five yards in length) tied end to end in an extended loop. In this case, the knot from this loop had gotten underneath the corset body and been compressed into the nerves at the base of my spine all morning. Imagine dropping a marble into one’s shoe, lacing it up, then walking around like that all day. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my back hurt.
At first I wondered why I had not just recognized the problem from the start. I hadn’t felt the pain localized as a simple knot; it had spread across a significant portion of my lower back. Then I remembered an experiment from my biology class back in college. In the lab, we had taken turns blindfolding and poking each other with blunt pins. Starting at the fingertips and moving up the forearm, each student would choose at random whether to poke their partner with one or both ends of the bent pin, and their blindfolded partner would have to say whether he or she felt one or two points. On the fingertips, where there are many, many touch sensors, there were very few errors in judgment. Nearly everyone could tell exactly how many points were poking them and how far apart the ends of the pin were placed. Farther up the arm, as the nerve endings grew widely spaced, it got increasingly more difficult to tell whether we were feeling two pinpricks or just one. The point of the experiment was to demonstrate difference in sensitivity between different areas of the body.
The back is even less discerning than the forearm. The nerve endings are too widely spaced to pinpoint the single
knot that was causing me pain, so instead my body had read it as a radiating soreness across an area as wide as my outstretched hand. The nerves back there are slower to react to stimuli as well: unlike removing a stone from a shoe, the relief was not instant when the corset came off. My back still ached, although I could sense a definite improvement.
Once I’d explained the matter to Gabriel, he, problem-solver that he is, instantly went about shifting the knot in the laces to a position on the exterior of the corset. I, meanwhile, propped my broken-toed foot up on a pillow, lay down on the feather-soft bed, and read a graphic novel.
“You know,” I remarked cynically, “I bet part of the reason naps figure so prominently in nineteenth-century Southern stories is that they were an excuse for the women to loosen their corsets!”
“Maybe.” Gabriel fussed with the knot in the cord. “But I think it had more to do with the fact it was too hot to do anything in the South in the middle of the day. Besides,” he grinned over at me, “people like to picture pretty girls in bed.” He lifted up the adjusted corset. “Okay, I think I’ve got it. You want me to help you put it back on?”
I looked over at him reluctantly. My back was aching, my foot was aching, and the feather bed was very comfortable. I looked pointedly at my taped-up broken toe and rubbed my sore back. Then I sighed. I had been looking forward to this trip for years; it would be a shame to waste our time in my favorite town hiding in bed.
Once Gabriel had helped me with my clothes again, we ventured out to learn more details about the vintage fashion show. It required quite a bit of wandering hither and thither and a long walk up the fennel-covered hill that separates the two halves of town. By the time we reached Uptown, my fractured phalanx was in sore want of respite, so Gabriel left me on a bench outside a bakery to rest my feet while he scouted ahead to work out the location and schedule of the event. When he returned, he had exciting news.
“They want us to be in the fashion show!” he told me.
“Really?” I cocked my head. I hadn’t been expecting that.
“Yeah!” He sat down next to me. “I found the lady in charge; she asked me about my clothes, and I told her about how they’re real antiques and that you’re wearing real antiques, too, and they want us to be in the fashion show!”
An hour or so later, we were in the back room of a church with a group of people in a hodgepodge of fancy dress. There were some interesting elements: a sweet, elderly woman wearing a shattered-silk cape; another woman of similar age dressed in an antique girl’s exercise outfit, which had been fashioned out of an old nun’s habit; and a man wearing a replica of an artillery officer’s uniform from the early 1900s. Many of the fashions displayed were strangely loose interpretations of yesteryear: a woman wearing a rayon-velvet bodice and long paisley skirt paired with ostrich plumes on her hat and modern pumps on her feet; several women dressed entirely in purple; and a number of teenage girls in modern evening dresses. In the corner lurked a parasol, which someone had apparently fashioned by gluing a massive swath of polyester lace to a plastic child’s umbrella.
Being part of the presentation, we didn’t get to see the entire formal production, and since we had been invited at the last minute, we didn’t have a terribly clear idea of the exact procedure. However, as the line progressed and we moved close enough to hear the commentary accompanying the show, a pattern emerged. The announcer would introduce each person using a microphone as they walked to one corner of, and then across, the stage. Then the person modeling the outfit on display would tell the audience about it—mostly explaining at which thrift shops they had bought various components and calling attention to where they had cut bits off or tacked bits on to make things look vintage.
The lady with the cape had an incredibly sweet story to tell. The garment had been her grandmother’s and was stored in a trunk in a dusty attic when she was a child. As a young girl, she used to sneak up to the attic and steal the cape out of the trunk to play dress up. She would fasten it around her waist like a skirt and twirl around and around.
When it was my turn to mount the stage, I told the story behind the item that, of all I was wearing, held the most pride for me: my grandmother’s watch. I lifted it from its place suspended by a silk ribbon around my neck and pressed the small button at the top to spring the case open. I concentrated on the heavy feel of the gold in my gloved fingers to steady my hands in front of the crowded audience.
“This watch,” I explained, focusing on the carved initials on the case, the intricate design of flowers and leaves in three colors of gold alloy, “belonged to my grandmother, and to her grandmother before her. It gets passed down to all the Almas in the family. I’m Sarah Alma, and my grandma was Alma Sarah. One of my earliest memories,” I leaned forward, holding the watch, trying to make the audience see, “was standing in the bank vault with my grandmother, and her taking this watch out of her safety-deposit box and telling me, ‘One day, this will be yours!’” I shook my finger in benevolent imitation of my grandmother and the audience laughed.
After I had exited the stage, I took a seat in the pews amongst the audience, my broken toe aching and another dreadfully familiar discomfort beginning that I tried vehemently to deny. Gabriel soon joined me, and after a few minutes, he turned to me with concern in his eyes. “Are you okay?”
I had been regretting my earlier decision not to have any water with breakfast, compounded by further lack of liquid throughout the rest of the morning. A well-known throbbing had started at the base of my skull, blooming out to nailed fingers of pain that tore at the brain behind my eyes.
Not now, I thought, angry at my own weakness. Not today. Why does this always happen on special days when I least want it?
“Just a bit of a headache,” I answered wanly.
“Uh oh.”
My husband was well acquainted with my migraines. They seem to be caused by electrolyte imbalance and always occur when I’ve either been eating too little salt or drinking too little water. Once they appear, they always follow a schedule of nearly train-like regularity, progressing from my initial denial stages of “a bit of a headache” to a climax several hours later when I wrap myself around the toilet to puke my guts out before dry heaving for a while and crawling into bed to sleep off the aftereffects.
“Let’s get you back to the hotel.”
I nodded meekly, willing my head not to fall off my shoulders, and allowed Gabriel to lead me back to The Swan. Once there, I tried drinking as much water as I could, but between the tiny little hotel-style plastic cup and the extremely reduced capacity of my stomach (owing to the corset), what I could drink was very little. Even if I had been able to chug gallons of water, past experience had taught me that by the time the screeching ache in my skull had progressed to this point, there was little that could be done but resign myself to vomiting and let it run its course.
I made Gabriel help me off with the corset and lay with a pillow over my face to block out the tiny bits of light glimmering from beneath the window’s curtains. The throbbing only grew worse, with a speed that shocked me. As I’ve said, the pattern of these migraines is unvarying and I know their pace with dreadful clarity, but this one was happening much faster than usual. It should have been several hours between the first warning aches and the point at which all light and sound was magnified to the point of intense pain, but this time it had taken little more than thirty minutes. I wondered if I was destined to just keep getting worse and worse migraines and wanted to moan in frustration, but I knew the noise would feel like a drill to my brain.
Hours passed. I looked over at the clock. I was feeling no better, but if I didn’t get dressed soon, we wouldn’t be ready for the ball in time to attend it. I pulled myself up from my prostrate position, weaving slightly as the room tilted.
“Feeling better?” Gabriel asked hopefully.
“Not really. I—” I paused, my hand going involuntarily to my mouth as my jaw flooded with thin water, the immediate pr
ecursor to vomit. I rushed to the bathroom and hunched over the toilet.
I thought that I was certainly going to throw up. I leaned over the toilet bowl, my knees against the cold tile floor, expecting the vomit to come, but it didn’t, and after a while I stood up and staggered back into the main room.
“Would you help me get dressed for the ball?”
Gabriel looked incredulously at me. “I don’t think we should go if you’re feeling this bad.”
“But the tickets are nonrefundable, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, but—” He stopped as I rushed back into the bathroom, my head and stomach rocking at cross-angles to each other. When I came out again, he had his eyebrows raised. “I don’t think you would have much fun if you’re this sick.”
I held one hand on my aching head, the other on my lurching stomach. “But I want to go,” I insisted. I felt like a seasick hangover victim, but the Grand Ball was the part of the weekend I had been anticipating with the dearest hopes. Not only was it a wonderful opportunity to show off my beautiful birthday clothes, but it was also a dance.
I love to dance, but my husband detests it. It had taken the combined power of both our extended families to force him to grant me a single waltz at our own wedding. Since then, he had danced with me once—again at a wedding, again under extreme duress, and he had complained about it afterward. For him to buy tickets to a ball was an absolute coup, but he had done it for me, to pamper me because it was my birthday treat and he loved me.
I didn’t care if I felt like I’d been clubbed over the head and force-fed rancid dog meat; I was going to that dance. I drank some more water, hoping it would do some good. My ball gown wouldn’t fit without the corset, so I made Gabriel lace me up as slowly as possible, with my stomach rebelling on several levels. (Not only was it already queasy, but now it was also full of water.)
Victorian Secrets Page 4
