The woman sat gnawing at her underwear. We all wondered at what she was thinking, or, better yet, what it tasted like. We did not know how she got the underwear off of her body with no one seeing her do so, though Jess says that she saw the woman scoot her butt around a lot in her chair during dinner. Perhaps she was extracting them then.
We wanted to stare. Nothing was stopping us from staring.
The woman—who no one at this party recognized nor knew how she got here or who she came with—sat at the side of the room on a metal plastic folding chair and continued to chew at her underwear. Her petite teeth were not so much voraciously digging into the white cotton weave, as they were nibbling a bit here and a bit there, steadily pecking at the crotch of the childish-looking Hanes underwear. I remembered when I was a child I used to wear underwear like that. They each had a name of the day of the week printed on the elastic band and across the hip. Monday written in pink. Tuesday in purple. Wednesday was in red. Sometimes I would wear the green Thursdays on what should have been the yellow Sundays just to feel rebellious. I didn't see anything printed on this woman's underwear, though I could see the white tag sticking up in front of her nose. Size six.
After a few long dreadful moments in which the air swelled with the need to do something, Jess leaned over to me and whispered, Do you think she'll eat the elastic?
I had seen my dog eat my underwear once. Something about the smell she must have been after, as she also used to fetch my tampons out of the trash. When I returned home from class, I would find white puffs of cotton, some bits of it stained with red, littering the floor. Then the next day, a green string would come out in her excrement. I never saw bits of my underwear in my dog's shit, but I would wake up to the ripped-up underwear lying next to my bed on the floor, the crotch completely devoured.
I wondered if this woman was trying to get at something. Did she have a craving for that taste? Was she just curious? Was she doing this on a dare? Or was she simply insane?
When I pulled my stare away from her pale, delicate hands and tiny incisors that nibbled away at the underwear, I glanced at the rest of her body. She had on a ridiculous hat that covered most of her dirty blonde hair. The hat was a fedora of sorts, a red feather sticking up from its left side. A pair of matching red silk gloves laid in her lap, her lap that was dressed in a deep purple chiffon skirt. Her breasts, what I could see of them through the cross-section of her skinny, pale forearms and the underwear hanging limply from her grasp, were in a black corset, a tight contraption that pushed her breasts up and in. She wore tennis shoes on her feet. Keds. Little green sneakers with white polka dots and white rubber toes. She looked childish almost, and I wondered briefly if her parents were here. But the woman must have been at least forty years old by the look of the crows feet wrinkles that were starting to spread out from the corners of her brown eyes.
A man across the room rose from one of the round dining tables. He was the man who had recently been up on the stage receiving some award for such-and-such book I hadn't ever heard of. But apparently he was a psychologist and had written something about troubled teens and how to talk with them. The category for my award was up next. But the ceremony paused at the sight of this woman eating her underwear. The host held his microphone limply in his hand, not able to—or perhaps not wanting to—bring the attention back to the front of the stage.
She had not finished eating her underwear, as the rump of it was still untouched. But she soon set the underwear back in her lap, pulled one glove slowly back on her left hand as the award-winning man approached her. He had on a tweed brown suit,and looked like a psychologist with his wire-rimmed glasses and short peppered-gray hair. He strode up to her just as she finished slipping the other red glove over her right hand.
“Can I help you, ma'am?”
What else could he have said?
She looked up at him, her eyes holding a sparkle from the chandelier that hung above her head.
“No, I'm fine. I was just leaving.”
Her purple chiffon skirt rustled as she slowly raised from her seat. She stuffed the half-eaten underwear into the space of her cleavage, and walked out of the room, all eyes trailing behind her. She accidentally left her purse behind. It sat slovenly underneath the metal folding chair, knowing the denouement of the situation had arrived.
~
“Did you win your award?” You ask this me later on in the night, after I returned home from the awards ceremony. You are trying to penetrate some form of a conversation, trying to incite some other words to come out of my throat, but the only thing filling my mind and, consequently, my mouth is the sight of the woman in the fedora with the red feather and her underwear.
“Did you not hear what I told you? A woman ate her underwear.”
“Yes. I heard you. And I don't know if I believe you or not.”
“I'm telling you she ate her underwear. Ask Jess.”
“Your agent would collude with you on this story, telling you that you should write about it or something.” Of course you were right, because my agent was always pushing me to write another collection of essays about absurd things that stretched the boundaries of nonfiction.
We went to sleep without another word on the matter. I laid next to you in bed, your breasts slightly heaving up and down against my own. A small snore slipped out of your nose. I couldn't sleep. I was worried about the woman's digestive tract, if she would have to go to the hospital tonight in order to have the cotton removed. What if she clogged her stomach? I could not push myself into sleep, as I worried too much of what became of the woman.
I got up and stumbled in the dark to my desk, lighting a candle so as not to disrupt you with the bright living room light. You had to be at work the next morning, and needed all of your rest in order to save your energy for the kindergartners with their endless questions.
The candle blared across my page, my pen casting long shadows across the curious paper as I laid it all out, bared everything I couldn't say to you—the things you didn't believe—onto the page.
~
The woman sat gnawing at her underwear. She knew everyone was watching her, but she did not care. She had her task, had the urge to do this and so it must be done. She was looking for something, trying to find out the source of her bestiality.
Earlier in the night she had been dropped off at the awards ceremony by her partner. It was her lover who was up for a fiction award, but who didn't want to attend the ceremony as she was too anxious about not winning. She didn't want to show her face if she wasn't going to win.
“Go for me.” The lover said. “If I win, then just pretend to be me and say some words about thanking god and my mother.”
“But you don't even like your mother.”
“Yes, but that's what everyone wants to hear when you accept an award.”
The woman got out of the car, ducking her head so her fedora wouldn't hit the top of the car, and stood up to adjust her corset. She was having a hard time breathing, and couldn't understand why she agreed to wear this outfit to the ceremony. It was her partner's idea. Her partner wanted to look outrageous, wanted something to take away the attention from the fact that she was out in public with her lesbian lover. There had been rumors going around. She didn't want anyone to believe in them. So she told her partner to wear an absurd outfit in order to draw attention to herself and away from this closeted writer who would most likely lose.
Now, the woman sat at the table where her lover's name was. The grand ballroom was full of writer types that she couldn't stand. People with their chests puffed out because they were authors, or poets, or worse, researchers. As she took her place at the round table with her lover's name printed in white on a small black card sitting on top of a white china plate, she could not resist the thoughts that had been stomping around in her head all day.
She had found a pair of underwear that belonged to neither of them stuffed between the cushions of their tattered brown couch. It was the underwear a younger woman might wear, something that proved to her that her lover was dating the eighteen year old again. She thought about their last fight from a few months ago, thought about the screams over how her lover had to really, truly end the affair with the younger woman so that they could move forward with what little bit of love they had left for each other. Her lover promised two months ago that the affair was over with, that the young woman was now a thing of her past.
Now, she sat at the round table with her lover's name staring at her from the placard and the underwear in her purse weighing her down. She hadn't approached her lover about finding the underwear, but stashed them in her purse in order to have some power over the situation. She owned something of the young woman now. She sat, wondering what was so horrible about herself that her lover would choose that silly young woman to go after, again. She sat, wanting to show to the world how she was better than that eighteen year old, that she had some control over the whole affair, because now she knew of it, again.
She sat. She heard the awards being called out. She heard the muffled speeches about thanking god and mother. She sat, then in a moment of applause she raised her body and sashayed over to a metal folding chair on the side of the room to remove herself from the stuffy air of the writers surrounding her at the table. Here, she stripped off each of her red silk gloves and laid them in her lap. Then, she pulled out the underwear hoping no one would notice. Or, hoping everyone would notice. She wanted that, wanted them to know that she was about to devour the secrets of her lover.
She sat.
~
“Sweetie? What the hell are you doing up so late?”
You woke up because of the light flashing into the bedroom, the reflection of the candle flickering off of our mirrored closet doors. I set my pen down.
“Nothing. Just thinking. Just writing.”
“Are you going to be awake in a few hours to drive me to work?”
“Of course,” I said with a yawn.
“You never told me, did you win your award?”
“Yeah, I did actually.”
“What did you say in your acceptance speech?”
“That I was thankful for all of the people in my life, and for the encouragement my mother has always given me.”
“But you hate your mother.”
“I know.”
We wanted to stare. Nothing was stopping us from staring.
The woman—who no one at this party recognized nor knew how she got here or who she came with—sat at the side of the room on a metal plastic folding chair and continued to chew at her underwear. Her petite teeth were not so much voraciously digging into the white cotton weave, as they were nibbling a bit here and a bit there, steadily pecking at the crotch of the childish-looking Hanes underwear. I remembered when I was a child I used to wear underwear like that. They each had a name of the day of the week printed on the elastic band and across the hip. Monday written in pink. Tuesday in purple. Wednesday was in red. Sometimes I would wear the green Thursdays on what should have been the yellow Sundays just to feel rebellious. I didn't see anything printed on this woman's underwear, though I could see the white tag sticking up in front of her nose. Size six.
After a few long dreadful moments in which the air swelled with the need to do something, Jess leaned over to me and whispered, Do you think she'll eat the elastic?
I had seen my dog eat my underwear once. Something about the smell she must have been after, as she also used to fetch my tampons out of the trash. When I returned home from class, I would find white puffs of cotton, some bits of it stained with red, littering the floor. Then the next day, a green string would come out in her excrement. I never saw bits of my underwear in my dog's shit, but I would wake up to the ripped-up underwear lying next to my bed on the floor, the crotch completely devoured.
I wondered if this woman was trying to get at something. Did she have a craving for that taste? Was she just curious? Was she doing this on a dare? Or was she simply insane?
When I pulled my stare away from her pale, delicate hands and tiny incisors that nibbled away at the underwear, I glanced at the rest of her body. She had on a ridiculous hat that covered most of her dirty blonde hair. The hat was a fedora of sorts, a red feather sticking up from its left side. A pair of matching red silk gloves laid in her lap, her lap that was dressed in a deep purple chiffon skirt. Her breasts, what I could see of them through the cross-section of her skinny, pale forearms and the underwear hanging limply from her grasp, were in a black corset, a tight contraption that pushed her breasts up and in. She wore tennis shoes on her feet. Keds. Little green sneakers with white polka dots and white rubber toes. She looked childish almost, and I wondered briefly if her parents were here. But the woman must have been at least forty years old by the look of the crows feet wrinkles that were starting to spread out from the corners of her brown eyes.
A man across the room rose from one of the round dining tables. He was the man who had recently been up on the stage receiving some award for such-and-such book I hadn't ever heard of. But apparently he was a psychologist and had written something about troubled teens and how to talk with them. The category for my award was up next. But the ceremony paused at the sight of this woman eating her underwear. The host held his microphone limply in his hand, not able to—or perhaps not wanting to—bring the attention back to the front of the stage.
She had not finished eating her underwear, as the rump of it was still untouched. But she soon set the underwear back in her lap, pulled one glove slowly back on her left hand as the award-winning man approached her. He had on a tweed brown suit,and looked like a psychologist with his wire-rimmed glasses and short peppered-gray hair. He strode up to her just as she finished slipping the other red glove over her right hand.
“Can I help you, ma'am?”
What else could he have said?
She looked up at him, her eyes holding a sparkle from the chandelier that hung above her head.
“No, I'm fine. I was just leaving.”
Her purple chiffon skirt rustled as she slowly raised from her seat. She stuffed the half-eaten underwear into the space of her cleavage, and walked out of the room, all eyes trailing behind her. She accidentally left her purse behind. It sat slovenly underneath the metal folding chair, knowing the denouement of the situation had arrived.
~
“Did you win your award?” You ask this me later on in the night, after I returned home from the awards ceremony. You are trying to penetrate some form of a conversation, trying to incite some other words to come out of my throat, but the only thing filling my mind and, consequently, my mouth is the sight of the woman in the fedora with the red feather and her underwear.
“Did you not hear what I told you? A woman ate her underwear.”
“Yes. I heard you. And I don't know if I believe you or not.”
“I'm telling you she ate her underwear. Ask Jess.”
“Your agent would collude with you on this story, telling you that you should write about it or something.” Of course you were right, because my agent was always pushing me to write another collection of essays about absurd things that stretched the boundaries of nonfiction.
We went to sleep without another word on the matter. I laid next to you in bed, your breasts slightly heaving up and down against my own. A small snore slipped out of your nose. I couldn't sleep. I was worried about the woman's digestive tract, if she would have to go to the hospital tonight in order to have the cotton removed. What if she clogged her stomach? I could not push myself into sleep, as I worried too much of what became of the woman.
I got up and stumbled in the dark to my desk, lighting a candle so as not to disrupt you with the bright living room light. You had to be at work the next morning, and needed all of your rest in order to save your energy for the kindergartners with their endless questions.
The candle blared across my page, my pen casting long shadows across the curious paper as I laid it all out, bared everything I couldn't say to you—the things you didn't believe—onto the page.
~
The woman sat gnawing at her underwear. She knew everyone was watching her, but she did not care. She had her task, had the urge to do this and so it must be done. She was looking for something, trying to find out the source of her bestiality.
Earlier in the night she had been dropped off at the awards ceremony by her partner. It was her lover who was up for a fiction award, but who didn't want to attend the ceremony as she was too anxious about not winning. She didn't want to show her face if she wasn't going to win.
“Go for me.” The lover said. “If I win, then just pretend to be me and say some words about thanking god and my mother.”
“But you don't even like your mother.”
“Yes, but that's what everyone wants to hear when you accept an award.”
The woman got out of the car, ducking her head so her fedora wouldn't hit the top of the car, and stood up to adjust her corset. She was having a hard time breathing, and couldn't understand why she agreed to wear this outfit to the ceremony. It was her partner's idea. Her partner wanted to look outrageous, wanted something to take away the attention from the fact that she was out in public with her lesbian lover. There had been rumors going around. She didn't want anyone to believe in them. So she told her partner to wear an absurd outfit in order to draw attention to herself and away from this closeted writer who would most likely lose.
Now, the woman sat at the table where her lover's name was. The grand ballroom was full of writer types that she couldn't stand. People with their chests puffed out because they were authors, or poets, or worse, researchers. As she took her place at the round table with her lover's name printed in white on a small black card sitting on top of a white china plate, she could not resist the thoughts that had been stomping around in her head all day.
She had found a pair of underwear that belonged to neither of them stuffed between the cushions of their tattered brown couch. It was the underwear a younger woman might wear, something that proved to her that her lover was dating the eighteen year old again. She thought about their last fight from a few months ago, thought about the screams over how her lover had to really, truly end the affair with the younger woman so that they could move forward with what little bit of love they had left for each other. Her lover promised two months ago that the affair was over with, that the young woman was now a thing of her past.
Now, she sat at the round table with her lover's name staring at her from the placard and the underwear in her purse weighing her down. She hadn't approached her lover about finding the underwear, but stashed them in her purse in order to have some power over the situation. She owned something of the young woman now. She sat, wondering what was so horrible about herself that her lover would choose that silly young woman to go after, again. She sat, wanting to show to the world how she was better than that eighteen year old, that she had some control over the whole affair, because now she knew of it, again.
She sat. She heard the awards being called out. She heard the muffled speeches about thanking god and mother. She sat, then in a moment of applause she raised her body and sashayed over to a metal folding chair on the side of the room to remove herself from the stuffy air of the writers surrounding her at the table. Here, she stripped off each of her red silk gloves and laid them in her lap. Then, she pulled out the underwear hoping no one would notice. Or, hoping everyone would notice. She wanted that, wanted them to know that she was about to devour the secrets of her lover.
She sat.
~
“Sweetie? What the hell are you doing up so late?”
You woke up because of the light flashing into the bedroom, the reflection of the candle flickering off of our mirrored closet doors. I set my pen down.
“Nothing. Just thinking. Just writing.”
“Are you going to be awake in a few hours to drive me to work?”
“Of course,” I said with a yawn.
“You never told me, did you win your award?”
“Yeah, I did actually.”
“What did you say in your acceptance speech?”
“That I was thankful for all of the people in my life, and for the encouragement my mother has always given me.”
“But you hate your mother.”
“I know.”
