The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club (14 page)

Revenge of
the Bra Girl

I was searching for a slip in a major department store not very long ago, perfectly content to mind my own business. In the lingerie department, two teenage bra girls were busy rehanging a mountain of bras they had culled from the dressing room fifteen minutes before closing.

They were working as fast as they could, making small chitchat between them as they tucked straps back onto plastic hangers.

“You guys are having a clearance sale, huh?” I asked, as they nodded with something of a scowl. “I know all about it. I used to be a bra girl myself.”

As a former bra girl, I have seen more mammary glands than Larry Flynt.

When I was a lass and got thrown out of college for the first time, my parents came up with a plan: I had to get a job.

I applied at a large department store, got called for an interview, and instantly had visions of myself parading through the dressing rooms dispensing invaluable critiques to malnourished, size-six fashion junkies: “Lose that caboose!” “Are those your upper arms or honey-baked hams?” “That little paunch tells me you’re in the wrong department, mama. Maternity is on the second floor.” But instead, the human-resources director looked at me and said, “What luck! We have an opening in lingerie!”

Bras and girdles. My vision switched gears and reminded me of my first bra fitting when I was ten and my mother felt that my “lentils” (a scientific term she used for not-yet-developed bosoms) were beginning to sprout. Before I knew it, I was in a dressing room with an elderly saleswoman’s hands cupped over my niblets, categorizing my size as a “grape on its way to a lime.” As I tried the bra on, she scooped her fingers inside the cups to make sure that the grapes had ample room to mature into big jugs of wine.

“And one other thing,” she garbled as she opened the door to the dressing room. “You’ll be a woman before you know it, and if you leave all of that black spaghetti under your arms, it will give you cancer!”

After I was hired at the department store, however, I discovered that when adult women enter a lingerie department, they become primitive, unbridled beasts. They see it as a sanctuary where they may absolutely unbutton their shirts, feeling no shame or reserve, and flash a salesperson while saying, “Do you have this bra?” They feel that it’s completely acceptable to bring twenty bras into a fitting room and leave the nineteen that don’t fit on the floor and draped over doors, none of which are on a hanger. They also find it appropriate to approach an eighteen-year-old bra girl while they are practically naked and ask, “Can you hook me up?” “Do you think this is a turn-on?” and “This tummy tucker is too tight, and I need help getting it off!”

I also saw men purchasing lurid, sexy teddies in a 36DD and a petite-size flannel nightgown at the same time, saw women leave their dirty bras and panties for me to find while they walked away wearing new ones, and once I even caught a trailer-park couple diddling in a fitting room and got to call security.

The lingerie department, in short, was like the devil’s playground. All morals melted away like chocolate as soon as the customers spotted an Olga tag. Probably the very worst part of the job was that I always got in trouble for chitchatting while I was rehanging a hill of bras before the store closed for the night, and explaining that I was working at the same time put me on employee probation.

All of that psychological damage was brought back as I watched the fingers of the two bra girls fly furiously between straps and hangers. I was paying for my slip when, like a bear charging through the woods, a short, stocky woman with a silver pageboy shoved a rack of body slimmers out of her way and pointed at the girls. “Maybe if you’d stop talking, you’d get some work done!” she roared at both of them, and then narrowed her appetite down to one. “YOU! Come with me! I’ll give you something to do!”

The poor bra girl put down her current project and followed the bear into the maze of robes.

“Now we’re never going to get this done,” the surviving bra girl sighed. “That manager, Eileen, is so mean! She made a girl cry last week because the Wonderbras weren’t hung in alphabetical order.”

I felt sorry for the bra girls because I understood only too well. I nodded. Then I had an idea.

I grabbed my bagged slip and headed out into the forest. I circled the entire sales floor twice with eagle eyes, finally stopping at the Fashion Passion department.

“Have you seen a mean rhinoceros of a woman with a silver pageboy haircut scurry through here?” I asked.

Both of the salesgirls shuddered. “You mean Eileen,” they said. “We just heard her howling in Fancy Pant-sy, but we’d stay away from her if we were you. Word has it that she bit a salesgirl in Houses of Blouses, and she hasn’t had her shots.”

“That’s exactly why I’m here,” I said, and headed off in that direction.

I saw the silver goblin turning a corner, and I couldn’t let her get away. “EILEEN!” I shouted, and she immediately stopped and turned around.

“Can I help you?” she asked with a sudden smile.

“Yes, you can,” I said in my best adult voice. “I was in lingerie when you yelled at that salesgirl.”

“Yes, well, those bra girls can sure chat up a storm,” she laughed. “All play and no work! Ha-ha-ha!”

“You’re wrong,” I said sternly. “Bra girls are hard workers. Every last one of them. They see horrible things, are forced to touch the inhuman, and have to be nice to fat, near-naked women and their breasts. They are faced with insurmountable odds every day, because they all know that bras NEVER hang themselves up. As soon as you hang one, someone else tries it on and leaves it on the floor. It’s like working in a sweatshop!”

“Well—” Eileen started.

“I’m not done,” I interrupted her. “And those two girls were talking, but they were working at the same time. Some people are talented enough to do that!”

“I—” Eileen tried.

I held up my finger.

“Still not done,” I continued. “Because you were wrong, Eileen. You were wrong to accuse them, and you were wrong to yell, and as a customer of this store, I demand that you go back to the lingerie department and give those girls an apology!”

“I didn’t realize,” Eileen said, obviously shamed. “I will do that.”

Eileen turned to go.

“And one more thing, Eileen. Do you have this bra?” I asked, pulling open my shirt.

A Hole in One

I’m pretty sure that it had been my favorite tooth.

It was a solid tooth, white and strong and sturdy; a squat little tusk, located perfectly as the last in a line of other squat little teeth in the upper right side of my mouth.

I thought the tooth liked me, too. I did everything I could to be kind to it, I bought it chocolate and gum, and rubbed my tongue over it every now and then to express my love.

But being kind to something doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t revolt someday, and may do so in a manner that causes blood to spill until it’s dripping down your chin onto a bib.

I wasn’t doing anything particularly nasty when the revolution began; I was eating gummi bears and watching TV when the tooth decided to liberate itself and broke off in several sharp, thin splinters. At first I didn’t understand what had occurred—it felt like I had bitten into a dirt clod or a piece of gravel—but when I spit out the candy, I saw the carnage right away.

My heart skipped a beat, and the first thought that popped into my head was, A splinter of glass in a gummi bear. That means early retirement and a life of leisure for Miss Laurie Notaro after the personal-injury lawyer takes his cut.

But as I looked closer to see exactly how solid of a case I had, and if I’d be living in a villa in France or a mobile home in Branson, Missouri, I noticed something heartbreaking. The shard of glass was white and ridged. As I began to recognize it as a former body part, I understood that half my tooth was broken, split, and embedded in the orange-and-red chewage, and I was in trouble.

I’ve had dreams like this, dreams in which my teeth felt loose, and with one poke of the tongue, the tooth dropped out of my gums like a brick from a rotted foundation. I’ve had dreams in which numerous teeth fell out so quickly that I collected them in my pocket and kept my mouth shut to prevent more dental abortions, though my mouth eventually felt like it was full of small pebbles.

I panicked. With my most horrible nightmares coming true, my anxiety level started to rise, making my skin cold but my insides burning hot. So I decided, quite quickly, that my plan of action would consist of what I do best.

I was going to ignore it.

There’s a simple reason for this, as my mind flashed back five years, back to the last time I had visited the dentist. I had possessed a molar that rocketed straight through the cavity stage and lodged itself in pure and total decay, which ultimately resulted in a nasty abscess that froze the left side of my head in a throbbing ache.

I went to my mother’s dentist, who examined the tooth briefly and told me I had one option: the tooth needed to be pulled, and as he stuck his hand back into my mouth and took a firm hold on the tooth, I understood that he meant NOW.

I didn’t have time to actually think about it, let alone give an answer before I felt an enormous pressure on the lower half of my jaw, where the doctor—who I now believe did his internship at Auschwitz—was yanking.

He was pushing so hard that I really thought my jaw was going to snap in half, and as I tried to be brave, a baby-sized tear rolled out from beneath each closed eye. The pressure stopped.

I opened my eyes.

The doctor was looking at me, his hands on his hips, and his mouth twisted in a grin.

“So,” he said with his head cocked to the side, “we feel like being a crybaby today, do we?”

I was in such shock after this comment that I didn’t even bite down when he plunged his hand back in my mouth and pushed even harder.

“Well, we’re halfway through!” he taunted.

I decided right there and then that I’d rather pull the tooth myself with a steel-link chain and a trailer hitch and was ready to shoot out of the chair when he laughed and tossed something in front of me on the silver tray. When I looked down I saw it was my tooth, covered in blood, roots and all, and I realized that the animal had ripped it out with his bare hands.

I had been orally manhandled.

I gasped then but laughed six months later when I saw on the evening news that the bastard had signed a lease in the state pen for five to fifteen for tax evasion, substance possession, and intent-to-sell charges. Sticking his entire hand in my mouth and wrenching a tooth out of my head was kitten’s play compared to the talents of his new neighbors.

So, by ignoring my newest dental/gummi bear catastrophe, I was following my own best advice, and I followed it faithfully. I stopped chewing altogether on that side, didn’t drink on that side, and was very careful with my toothbrush.

I ignored it for quite a while, until it started to pinch me every now and then, until the pinch evolved into a pulse, the pulse into a throb, and the throb into shooting knives of pain. I knew I had to do something and most likely do it in a hurry. I mentioned the situation to a coworker, who suggested that I might need a root canal to save the tooth, and then went on to document the procedure, which included drilling, screws, needles scraping the inside of my tooth, and, finally, some type of molten lava.

It didn’t sound pretty. In fact, it sounded worse than having my tooth ripped from my jaws by the bare hand of a convict, but when the ache reached my eyes and my neck, I called my mother’s new dentist.

They rushed me in immediately, offered me headphones for a CD player or for the TV, which was turned on to
The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show
. This is a dentist’s office? I thought to myself. I didn’t hear anyone moaning or sobbing in pain, and I finally came to the conclusion that I must be at the rich folks’ dentist.

The two dental assistants, Mimi and Gigi, dressed in identical outfits and wearing name tags in the shapes of molars, introduced themselves and began taking X rays. The doctor finally came in and started poking around. He looked at the X rays and gave me my options, which I already knew. I could have the tooth pulled, which naturally brought back horrible memories, or have the combination platter of root-canal-and-crown procedure, which might require some additional surgery to some bone in my mouth.

“Which one do I get knocked out for?” I asked, trying to weigh the pros and cons.

“Neither,” the dentist said. “But I’ll give you nitrous oxide if you get it pulled.”

“I hope you have an Incredible Hulk grip!” I decided. “Get that thing out of my head!”

So I opened wide, the doctor positioned his tooth-puller tool, and I breathed in deeply from this artificial-heart-looking contraption that Gigi or Mimi put on my nose. It made me happy, though I could feel my tooth sliding downward. Meanwhile, Sally was interviewing a man who accused his ex of being a tramp, telling the audience that “she had more things stuck in her than a porcupine has stickin’ out,” but before the ex even had a chance to respond, the dentist stuck something in my mouth and told me to bite down.

“All done,” he mentioned happily.

As happy as he was, I was ecstatic.

“Ah duh?” I reiterated defectively, due to my gauze-packed mouth and my novocained lips that made me feel like I had just had a stroke.

The gentle dentist nodded and showed me the shell that used to be my tooth, all cleaned up and tidy, to which I burst forth in a spray of indiscernible gratitude babble which meant, “You, my dear sir, are no dentist! You are an artisan! A magician! A wizard! And if you give me pills that I need to show an ID to pick up at the pharmacy, I will totally be a character witness at your trial!”

He looked at me oddly, half-smiled, and handed me a prescription.

“It’s codeine,” he told me. “And with codeine, you need to take it with—”

“Wee-wee!!! Wee-wee!!!” I said, in my best attempt at
whiskey.

“—food,” he finished.

Well, I thought to myself, no one’s funny with a yard of gauze in their mouth and the lips of a dead woman.

“Give this girl some oxygen,” he said to Mimi or Gigi. “I’ll be financing her early retirement if we let her drive home like this.”

So Mimi or Gigi made me sober up by inhaling a lot of oxygen, which I really didn’t want to do. In fact, at that point, I didn’t care if they had torn out every tooth as long as I could keep breathing from the tank. I’d even get my legs waxed if that stuff came in the kit.

When I got home, I waited a little while before I dared do it. I waited until the blood clotted a little and, more important, until the double dose of codeine I had taken kicked in.

I ran my tongue along the gum where the tooth used to be, above and behind, and finally, in the fleshy, wet hole that used to be the nest of my favorite tooth.

“Let that be an example to you,” I said to the surviving teeth. “If any of you has any ideas about acting up, just look at the hole. Any more bad behavior and you’re
out.
No second chances.”

That’s
how we treat revolutions around here.