My Body, Myself
February 2006

The other day I had an out-of-body experience. Well, no, I was actually in my body; there's no place on Planet Earth that makes a person more excruciatingly body-conscious than in a department store dressing room staring into a speckled mirror under a cold flourescent light while some teenager jabbers away on her cell phone inches away on the other side of the wooden partition, and happily shrieking kids run up and down the hallway. So I was in a body, allright, but it didn't seem to be mine.

I was trying on jeans that were too big.

This was practically a first in my entire history as a clothes shopper, trying on pants—especially jeans—that were too big. (And I hadn't even smuggled them out of the Plus Size section just to make myself feel better.) These were regular Misses jeans at the wide-load end of the size chart: Size 16, the size I've worn since birth. (Once, as a teenager, I almost bought a fairly hideous A-line dress that fit me simply because the tag said Size 11. Odd-numbered sizes are for Juniors, the unattainable Holy Grail for us lifelong Misses sizes.)

Step into the Junior department and what do you see? Sexy, strappy tank tops festooned with lace and gold lurex, skimpy hoodies, see-through embroidred blouses, hi-rise T shirts in sherbet colors, fur collars and boas. Life is a cabaret over in the Juniors department. Across the aisle in the Women's department you get structured polyester business-suit jackets, tunic T-shirts, sweats and "relaxed-fit" blue denim with elastic waistbands, all for maximum coverage. The Misses depatment is the demilitarized zone, with some pretense to Juniors pizazz in colors and styles (usually the styles so awful, even the Juniors won't wear them), but still cut for the woman with plenty to hide. The Misses and Women's depatments are tabernacles of grim utility. Hunkered down there, across the aisle from Juniors, I feel like Woody Allen on that melancholy train in Stardust Memories staring out the window as the party train of laughing, singing, champagne-popping revelers passes him by.

I wasn't exactly born to shop. When I'm at work, I'm either at home in front of the computer or sitting in a dark movie theater, so nobody has to see what I'm wearing. I don't care if my fashions are out-of date; my old clothes have to actually start disintegrating like scrambling molecules in a Star Trek transporter before I grudgingly drag myself to the mall. And when I do, I know exactly what will happen: either I'll stumble across something fabulous that doesn't fit, or I'll know exactly what I want and it doesn't exist.

It was worse when I was a kid. Back in those days the all-polyester, elastic-waist look now relegated to the Women's depatment was all you could find in Misses sizes. So when my skinny peers were strutting around in tight bell-bottom cords, Carnaby Street hats and psychedelic Peter Max colors, I had a choice of polyester knits in three "slimming" colors: navy blue, chocolate brown, or black. As high school dragged on, I embraced the rumpled hippie look I favor to this day. I bought my jeans at the men's store, where a size 32 waist was considered sort of svelte.

So there I was shopping for jeans at the one-day all-denim sale, the last one-day sale of the old year. Shortly to be followed by the first one-day sale of the new year, not to be confused with the various pre-holiday, post-holiday, early bird, sneak preview and end-of-season-blowout sales that had been going on for weeks. Now that everyone shops online, retailers are desperate to lure you, the public, into their stores on any pretext for a sale they can concoct— which is cheaper than actually improving the quality or variety of what they sell. For me, it's only adding insult to injury to have to pay a lot of money for clothes I don't like that don't fit anyway, so I sucked it up and shopped the sale.

And that's where I had the disorienting experience of Size 16 jeans that were too big. Granted they were "low-rise" (what we geezers and geezettes used to call hip-huggers), the navel-baring cut which is the only way jeans come these days, even in the Misses department. Since the navel is only one of the many parts of my anatomy unfit for public exposure, I wasn't intending to stuff myself into this style at all, so it was a shock to discover the jeans weren't too tight; they were huge.

In fact, the only jeans I could find that fit me, low-rise or otherwise, were Size 14s. This may seem like a small step for mankind, but in the Misses department it's a giant leap in self-esteem. Every time I wear my new jeans, I get compliments. Even Art Boy noticed.

It could be the stretchy denim. It could be that since virtually all clohing is now assembled in places like Sri Lanka, standard sizes no longer apply. Or it could be that those head-clearing walks around the harbor Art Boy and I take every other day have actually shrunk me down a size. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

(Lisa promises never to bare her navel on www.lisajensenonline.com.)