(unpublished)

 “Diane, are you wearing a bra?”

My supervisor’s tone was pointed and the answer was obvious. I had on what amounted to a tube top with straps—a snug elasticized thing that left no mystery about what was—or, in my case, wasn’t—underneath.

Up until now, as a babysitter and swimming teacher, I’d never had to think about work attire—so I didn’t. Still, I knew I was pushing it with the tube top, and my face got hot when my manager noticed. After I admitted no, no bra, her entreaty was firm: “Well then go find one and put it on!”

The skimpy nylon and lace item I found, one of about two bras in the department that fit me, didn’t really change anything about how the top looked. But I knew it was a matter of principle: One did not go unsupported when working the sales floor of Dayton’s Bras and Girdles.

Thin as well as triple-A, I needed neither bra nor girdle. I was growing up in vanilla suburbia in the time before internet, curious and naïve, with an unformed sense of my body and my powers. Yet here I was in downtown Minneapolis, in a place people went to buy lingerie (sometimes for reasons they liked to keep private), surrounded by the trappings of sex and gender.

Oddly, I was in the right place.