by Rita Rudner
“Which one?” the too-young-to-be-that-pinched woman asked in an accent that sounded Japanese-Italian.
“This one,” I replied.
I opened my purse and began to search for the photo I had ripped out of the magazine. (A magazine I had purchased, by the way, not one from the waiting room of a dentist’s office.)
“It’s in here somewhere,” I explained, emptying many different shades of lipsticks and glosses onto the glass counter.
You see, that’s another reason I wanted that particular handbag. I’m constantly searching for a bag that’s big enough to hold my essentials, but not so big that it encourages me to include nonessential items in my inner handbag mix, thereby causing me to empty the contents on a counter in order to find the item I’m looking for. I also need straps that are long enough to snuggle my shoulders but not so long that I couldn’t slip them over my wrist if my shoulders were already in use. In the picture I was desperately searching for, I had found just that: the perfect handbag.
“I’ll come back when you’ve found it,” batwoman announced with a haughtiness that can only be mustered by someone making minimum wage in an incredibly expensive store.
“Here it is.” I held up the wrinkled picture of my dream bag.
Batty grabbed the picture, brought it over to a folder, and began to flip through plastic-encased photographs of Louis’s creations.
“Hmmm…the waiting list for that style is six months to a year, but I’ll be happy to take your name and number.”
With that, she picked up a tattered notebook, turned to a particularly inky page, and presented it to me.
“Sign here,” she commanded.
I gazed at the page filled with desperate women’s signatures and noticed the top ones were beginning to fade.
“You know, I could get this handbag sooner than you think. Many of these women could be dead by now.”
“I have no way of knowing that until I notify them.”
Evidently there is no laughing in the bat cave.
I decided to allow the practical side of my brain to have a voice.
“Is there another style that might be available sooner?”
She actually laughed. I had finally said something funny.
One month later, I received a call from the store saying that a handbag had arrived. It was not the handbag I had ordered, but it was a style that was in demand.
I flew into the shop at 10:01 the next morning only to find that the bag had been purchased by a client who had made the journey the night before. I felt rejected by the woman, the bag, and Louis V. himself. I was neither important enough nor quick enough to cajole this store into accepting my eight hundred dollars plus tax.
Shuffling dejectedly back to my car, I spotted a woman carrying a multicolored LV bag. It was not the one I had ordered, but at this point I was happy to accept a knapsack.
I accosted the unsuspecting woman.
“Where did you get it? Is there another store that had better connections than this one? Did you pay extra? Are you someone special?” I had so many questions.
“It’s a fake,” she whispered.
I inspected it.
“The reds are not quite the same red,” she explained. “That’s the only difference.”
“I can live with that. Where did you get it?”
“I know a guy who has a handbag store. He gets the best stuff.”
“Where is it?” I demanded.
“He moves around. Right now he’s looking for a new location. Give me your number and I’ll call you after he calls me.”
Oh, great, I’m on another list, I thought.
I decided to leave it to fate; whichever person called me first would be the one to get my money.
My connection phoned a week later.
“This is Cindy. I met you in the parking lot of the mall,” she whispered conspiratorially. “My guy has another place. Two twenty-two West Apache, suite five-oh-two. Tell him Cindy sent you. He might give you a free pair of Dior sunglasses. I send him a lot of people.”
I didn’t hesitate. Hesitation had cost me my last bag and delivered me into this predicament in the first place. I pulled into the mini-mall and walked to suite 502. It was closed. The blinds were pulled shut and there was no name on the door.
He can’t have moved already, I thought. The woman only called me ten minutes ago.
I pushed on the door and heard the unmistakable happy chatter of women considering potential purchases.
“I love this one.”
“Yes, but this one is even better.”
“Buy them both.”
I felt a shiver run up my spine, down my arm, and into my current handbag. The deliberately undecorated room was filled with folding tables showcasing many of the different styles of bags that were totally unavailable to customers who walked into stores hoping to buy the bags legitimately. On the walls were makeshift racks where more initialed bags hung like dead meat.
Directly in front of me I saw my dream bag. It was the last one of its kind. I saw another woman look at it. I turned primal and grabbed it off the rack.
“How much is this?” I asked the man who wore a gold chain, sunglasses, and what appeared to be a full wig.
“Fifty dollars, cash.”
“I know Cindy.”
“Forty, and I’ll throw in a pair of sunglasses. Cindy’s a good girl.”
I wore my fake handbag proudly until the LVs began to fade where they rubbed against my lawbreaking body.
It was Cindy who shopped me (no pun intended). They found her list of co-conspirators and she gave me up along with the rest of her friends in exchange for her own freedom.
I didn’t care. I had the handbag I wanted. I paid only forty bucks for it and I’ll be out soon. I’d do it again. Cindy, meanwhile, has entered the Handbag Protection Program. She lives somewhere in Iowa and is only allowed to carry her possessions around in a paper bag.
P.S.: I was notified a month after I was released that my dream handbag had arrived. I told the bat-faced woman I didn’t want it anymore. It felt good.
* * *
I don’t want to be in good shape anymore. I don’t want to be one of those women who look great from the back and then turn around and frighten people.
* * *
Undercover Wear
“THIS PANEL HOLDS IN YOUR STOMACH, AND THIS panel slims your thighs,” said Lucille, the overweight underwear specialist who had been flown in especially to lecture on the benefits of the new line of body bossers.
She then proceeded to hold up a Lycra garment that appeared big enough to fit a three-year-old.
“Does it stretch?” I asked.
“Yes, but only in certain places. It’s a miracle garment.”
As I tugged and pleaded with it in the dressing room, I began to believe. It certainly was a miracle garment. It would be a miracle if I could get it on, a miracle if I could walk, and a miracle if I could breathe.
For a while there it seemed we were making progress in recognizing that women could dress, get on with their day, and remove their clothes without incurring red welts. I remember my mother and her girdle dance. I was not yet ten and didn’t yet understand the demands placed on a woman’s waist.
“Do you need help?” I recall asking her as I witnessed the tops of her legs turning blue.
“No, I’ll get it eventually,” she puffed.
“Why do you have to wear that thing?”
“Your father and I are going out to dinner tonight. If I don’t put this on, I’ll never fit into my dress.”
“How are you going to eat anything?”
“I’ll eat when I get home.”
“Then why are you going out to dinner?”
“To prove I can fit into the dress.”
As I grew older, I paid very little attention to the role a girdle might play in a woman’s life. That was for my mother, not for me. Anyway, I was a dancer and had a stomach that was flatter than a supermodel’s chest. N
ow, after twenty years and a baby (all right, I adopted, but I still think that counts), I was in search of the sort of garment I had ignored for decades, with the additional pressure of it needing to be entirely invisible to the human eye.
I had already been warned about the evils of displaying a panty line by Bonnie, my lingerie-addicted friend.
“Look at you. You have a V in the back. How can you live with yourself?” she asked me in horror.
In Bonnie’s defense, she is single and still only wears bra and panty sets. Excuse me, bra and thong sets. She would not be caught dead in panties. The old saying was “What if a car hits you and you’re wearing dirty underwear?” The new saying is “What if a car hits you and you’re wearing underwear?”
I thought my brightly patterned bikini briefs were hip enough. At least I wasn’t sporting the old white cotton numbers that could double as truce flags. But no. Now I’m a thong lady. Bonnie has me convinced that the backside V is synonymous with a woman who doesn’t wash.
It’s typical of the differences in a man’s life and a woman’s. A man is allowed to wear boxer shorts that tickle his knees. A woman has to wear a slingshot.
Having sorted out my bottom half with Lucille’s miracle garment and the slingshot, I was next in search of a strapless bra that offered support; so many of the dresses that are available to women today fail to take into account the breast factor. I again deferred to Lucille’s expertise and her suggestion of a convertible bra.
“You just remove the back of this strap, extend it, hook it to the top of the other side, and voilà—a one-shouldered bra,” Lucille instructed.
“Let me try it.”
“It’s easy,” Lucille said, closing the dressing room door. “Call me if you need any help.”
I attempted to follow the same steps Lucille had so carefully explained to me. I fastened and unfastened and fastened again. I extended one arm through one hole and avoided the other. I hooked the back and turned hopefully to the mirror. I had fashioned what could only be described as a strapless noose sling.
“Help…Lucille…I’m choking,” I coughed out.
Lucille did not respond. She was evidently strangling another customer.
I went to work at repositioning my bra straps. In a movement worthy of Houdini, I unhooked the back, grabbed one strap with my teeth, and forced my head underneath an opening to win my freedom. Like my husband appearing in the kitchen after all the dishes have been done and asking, “Anything I can do?” Lucille appeared in the dressing room and asked, “Need any help?”
“No, I don’t need help. However, I do think I need a lawyer.”
I abandoned the convertible bra and decided to try something Bonnie had recommended to me that I had studiously been avoiding: the sticky bra. This bra was a risk because there was no way to try it on. You just had to buy it and hope it stuck.
Unpacking it at home, I became trepidatious when I saw the instruction booklet and the bottle of glue. I wasn’t putting together a model airplane; I was trying to wear a bra. There was no turning back. I had cut the box open, and the This Item Is Not Returnable label decorated the front of the package with the obviousness of a cigarette health warning.
Wash your skin thoroughly before using this product. Do not swallow. If rash occurs see a doctor. I forged on. I applied the glue under my left breast. I let it go for the briefest of seconds so I could pick up the corresponding cup. My breast stuck to the skin beneath it. I grabbed for the instructions and turned to the troubleshooting section.
If breast becomes stuck to skin beneath, gently pry apart, using soap and water if necessary. I pried and soaped and began again, this time not letting it go. I positioned the cup and reached for the instructions.
Hold in place until secure.
Never mentioning how long this would take seemed to me to be a crucial bit of missing information. I slowly removed my hand. Things were still moving.
Twenty minutes later, with both breasts glued into place, I carefully slipped into my slingshot and shimmied into my miracle garment. I stepped into my ultra-tight strapless dress, proving I could fit into it. I was then ready to go out to dinner with my husband and not eat anything until we arrived back home.
I am my mother.
* * *
I worry about being an older mother, but I guess we’ll just connect in different ways. We’ll both be losing our teeth at around the same time.
* * *
Speak Up
ONE OF THE MANY THINGS THAT’S BECOME MORE complicated in my fifty-plus years is sound. Maybe it’s a tender-gender issue, but do you know what sentence I’ve never heard a woman say? “It’s time to update my speaker system.”
I know lots of different types of women, and not one of them has ever felt the need for a subwoofer.
When I was single (and boy, was I single…I wasn’t even allowed to chew Doublemint gum) I had a $99 stereo system that came with two petite speakers. I kept them side by side in the front of the living room.
Whenever a man would venture into my life, one of the first things he would say was, “Why do you have your speakers together? Why don’t you separate them? You’re missing out on the whole concept of the stereo experience.”
I had them positioned together for a good reason. I liked the sound to be in front of me. I lived in New York; I didn’t want anyone singing at me from behind the couch. It made me nervous then, and it makes me nervous today. When I’m in a movie theater and I hear footsteps running on the ceiling in the back-right-hand corner of the auditorium, I automatically reach for my pepper spray.
Last year my husband decided our stereo system was out of step with our lifestyle.
“We hardly ever listen to music at home, and whenever we do, the phone rings and we have to turn it off,” I argued.
“Exactly. That’s why I’ve ordered the phone interrupter. When the phone rings the music will automatically cut out. You’re going to love it. I’m having speakers installed in all four walls in the living room. We can have the radio on all day.”
There you have it: a man who seldom listens to anything I say wanted to hear strangers talk to him from four different angles.
“You should have decided to do this before you moved in. It would have been much easier,” the stereo expert explained, stating something so obvious even our goldfish rolled her eyes. “Do you still have this color paint?” he asked, pointing to the gash he had made on the wall.
“Sure,” my husband answered, not taking into account that it wasn’t paint but Venetian plaster that had taken approximately ten days of layering and five layers of scraping.
“I’ll have to cut some holes in the bathrooms and the television room,” he commented, dollar signs appearing in his pupils.
“Not the television room! Nothing will ever again be drilled in the television room,” I cried out. (Please refer to “Television Envy” to comprehend the intensity of my response.)
“Rita, you don’t understand. This will increase the resale value of our apartment.”
“Are we moving and you haven’t told me?”
“I’m just thinking ahead,” my husband replied. “People like powerful stereo systems. They have big parties and they like to play music.”
“Who are we going to sell the apartment to? P. Diddy?”
The stereo expert turned to me.
“You’re making a mistake. You’ll look back and wish you had speakers in the television room.”
“I don’t look back. I’m like a shark—I only look forward.”
By reverting to that old familiar female tactic, crying, I got my way and holes were eventually drilled in every room in the house except the television room. Holes were also added to our balconies so our upstairs and downstairs neighbors could enjoy our choice of music as well. I wondered how our stereo system would affect their resale value.
A week later, the stereo components in place, the speakers inserted into the holes, and paint carefully applied to mask the woun
ds perpetrated on the walls, my husband summoned me, our baby, and our dog into the living room.
“Listen to this,” he crowed.
He twisted a knob on the wall and out burst a track from The Best of Van Halen. The sofa began to vibrate, the dog ran out of the room, the baby burst into tears, and the phone rang almost immediately. The music ceased, courtesy of the phone interrupter.
“It works,” my husband exclaimed, picking up the receiver. “My phone interrupter works.”
“No, no,” he said into the receiver. “We’re all right…No, the building isn’t exploding…No, we won’t have it that loud again. My wife just wanted to test the system. Sorry about that. You have a nice nap.”
“Who was that?”
“Our upstairs neighbor. Plastic Lady. She bothers me too. I don’t tell her to get breasts that match.”
“Well, at least we know the phone interrupter works and we can play music, but maybe just not as loud,” I said reassuringly, attempting to make the best of the situation.
“That’s negating the whole stereo experience,” he said.
“We’ll always have the resale value,” I added.
“Not without the speakers in the television room.” Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes.
“All right, you can have the speakers in the television room,” I acquiesced, walking out of the room.
The speakers were installed in the television room, begging the question of why anyone would sit in the television room and listen to the stereo. Isn’t hindsight annoying?
We haven’t used the updated stereo system recently, but we do turn it on from time to time just to make sure it works. And if Mr. Diddy ever wants to move to Las Vegas, do we have an apartment for him!
* * *
My husband won’t let me sunbathe topless. He says he’s afraid I might poke someone’s knee out.
* * *
Shake, Rattle, and Rebuild
THERE HAVE BEEN FEW THINGS MORE FRIGHTENING in my life than the 1994 California earthquake. I’d been through tremors before and thought they were kind of exciting. They consisted of a gentle roll followed by a startled look followed by the question “Was that an earthquake?”
