It’s Time to Throw In the Towel

I was relatively new to the YWCA locker room and still struggling with the notion of getting naked in front of all these women I don’t know--or, perhaps more so, in front of women I do.

The Y has little cubicles with curtains you can change your clothes behind, but I hardly see anyone in those. It seems rude, dressing behind a curtain. What about sisterhood? What about loving your body?

So I dress by my locker, but I do it fast.

I was raised in the Ozarks. The body was meant to be clothed and worked hard and then, when you die, abandoned to the worms while you go collect your eternal reward.

As girls, our skirts--this in the days of minis--were measured while we knelt on the gym floor at school. Anyone with skirts shorter than an inch above the knee was sent home.

At church camp, they taught us to change for swim time behind towels we held in our teeth, and then we put our clothes on over our suits and marched down to a spring-fed pool to an all-girl swim session. The thought was that our scrawny and swimsuited bodies would drive those good Christian boys wild with passion, a possibility I clung to until I was deep into my 20s.

This sort of upbringing informs your choices, if you can call them that. There at the Y, I only hold the towel in front of me figuratively, while all around me are totally together women prancing from shower to locker with nary a concern that they’re entirely uncovered.

I avert my eyes and wish I were them.

*

One day, I’d wandered into the Y before the lunchtime herd, when an older woman, a pleasingly round, pink woman, stepped up to me and asked in the most proper tone possible if I could possibly hook her girdle.

It was new, she said, and she was having a hard time closing it. I wanted to say, “Oh, sister, you haven’t read the literature. You don’t have to stuff your body into a girdle anymore.” But she was my mother’s age and I was afraid she’d ground me. Instead, I told her she’d have to talk me through it, as I’d never worn a girdle, different generation and all.

She let out all her air with a whoosh, and I pulled those two gaping hooks into those faraway eyes, and then worried that it would cut into her pinkish-blue flesh. She thanked me and then asked me to zip her up, too.

“Oh, thank you,” she said when she was zipped. “I hate myself when I eat.” And then she walked off.

I doubt that she had ever wandered anywhere near Green Valley Bible Camp, or my high school, but there she was, one more woman unhappy with her body.

So here’s the deal: I weigh 135 pounds. I’ve weighed it since eighth grade, except for full-bloom pregnancy, when I weighed 186. I’m telling you this because I figure it’s time to step from behind that towel. In fact, maybe women would feel better if we all wrote our weight on a piece of paper, taped it to our shirts and wore it for a day. Say, tomorrow.

After zipping that girdle I have the notion that Yankees and hillbillies--while separated by miles in everything else--grow up with similar body issues. So get those pens and paper ready. Use red ink. Write big.