Push Ups

With one week left in Paris, you’d think I would have run out of time to have transformative or embarrassing experiences. I managed to have both, thanks to this bra.

My daughter was at a sleepaway camp for six days. My older son was at camp, too, working as a counselor. My husband James and I were alone in Paris for the first time since our honeymoon eleven years ago. It was the last night of what my friend D jokingly called our “second honeymoon” when I called James at his office and asked if he wanted to meet me at Etam to pick out lingerie. He leapt at the chance.

James had been nudging me since we arrived in Paris a year ago buy new underwear, bras, and nighties. The entire city, with its beautiful window displays of nearly naked women and gigantic ads in the metro of scantily clad babes, had been prodding me, it sometimes seemed. I’m frugal and modest. I resisted. Until now.

James seemed to enjoy rifling through the silky fabrics. He chose a super-short nightgown and two bras. One, I realized only after I tried it on, was a push-up. It pushed way up. It pushed out, too. It had a mind of its own.

At dinner James said, “I had no idea how much difference a bra could make.” He seemed both impressed and disillusioned. All the seemingly well-endowed women on the streets of Paris might just be the beneficiaries of this marvelous technology, he mused. (But now, so was I.)

Some things in life we have to be born with. Others we can acquire, and it’s not really cheating. This is a simple, useful lesson it’s taken me a year (or perhaps my whole lifetime) to learn. That’s the transformative part of my Parisian lingerie experience.

Here’s the embarrassing part. The next day, James and I took the train to pick up our daughter Ella from camp. I had hastily thrown on a button-up V-neck blouse that I had worn many times before without incident. This time, my push-up bra pushed so much that the top button kept coming undone, revealing a lot more about myself than I wanted to show to Ella’s camp counselors and her new camp friends and their families. I would have killed for a safety pin.

When I reunited with Ella, she hugged me and said, “Your bra is showing.”  

The director of her camp, a 20-something guy with a goatee and a hoodie, whom I had just been chatting with, smiled at me as I said, “oops” and quickly buttoned up.

“It’s OK,” Ella said. “It’s a pretty one. Very sexy.”

I’m probably not the only person who has a recurring nightmare of being in my underwear when everyone else is clothed. It may be a symbol of my secret worry of revealing too much, in general, about myself.

Next time my buttons burst, I’ll try to remember the saleswoman at Etam, who was making no effort to hide her hot-pink bra behind her almost-transparent blouse. I’m still too shy to dare something like that, even in my dreams. But I’m going home a little more “push”-y than I was before.