DEAR VICTORIA, KEEP YOUR SECRET
A few years ago, I was reading about the training of the New York bomb suspect in the New York Times one morning when I stepped out of my front door to pick up a postcard I’d received in the mail. It screamed: “Hello, Bombshell!”
I’ve been called many things, including “aunty-grandma”, by my niece’s two lovely children. But no one, not my husband, not my many male friends, no one, has ever, ever addressed me as “bombshell”.
In just a few minutes, I went from feeling anxious about the potential threat of a “bomb” blast in a public thoroughfare to feeling lightheaded about the word’s many possible extensions and their connotations.
The “bombshell” card created for me was an elaborate and, not for want of a word, revelatory booklet. It promised me that it would give me a push-up. It showed me several examples of how today’s young ladies have hydro-thermal lifted breasts powered by under-wired, electromagnetic bras. Inside the booklet, there was a surprise: a card with which I could go over to a physical store to get myself a free power panty.
Wait a minute, I thought. My body is no twin-engine Cessna. Why do I need all that propelling? I didn’t jet-set in high-octane circles. Shrugging at the many options for revving up the taxiing curve of my sensuality, I wrote a gentle “thanks, but no thanks” note to the very kind old lady who sent me the card.
My dear Victoria:
I got the card you sent me last week and I thank you for wanting to share your secret with me.
I don’t understand why all your models pose the way they do. I’m mortified that my twenty-something daughter refuses to see what I see. Don’t you see, how in all their photographs, teens and young adults now pose like girls with a hundred un-Victorian secrets? They plump up their lips, pout them just so and smolder through smoky eyes, their hands on their thrusting hip and their bodies tilted just enough so the profile of their bodies burns through the lens? The cleavage you give your girls amazes me. So much so that we, as a family, have stopped traveling. Last year, when my son suggested that our family go to Kenya to see the Great Rift Valley, I said, “Why, son. Let’s go to that store called Victoria’s Secret.”
My daughter doesn’t understand me when I tell her that the models you hire aren’t all that pretty in spite of that secret boost and all the other stuff you do for them with your underwear promises.
“Mom, have you even looked at Heidi Klum?” she asks.
“Sweetheart,” I say to her. “I don’t care how Heidi Plums looks. All I know is that I don’t like how she and all the other girls who came after her are staring out of all those big mall windows with navels that measure over an inch. Your brother is looking at those magnified body parts and thinking things.”
That same day my daughter goes into your store and comes back with something that looks like a strip of cloth.
“Cute elastic hair band,” I say. “I didn’t know they made them with polka dots now.”
“Mom…um… That’s not a hair band.”
“What is it? A cloth bracelet?”
“No.”
“Okay. I know. it’s an eye-patch. You know the kind they give in economy on Cathay Pacific so you can sleep in peace and not see any light until the Asian passengers open their land mine can of noodles.”
“Mo-om, stop!” she shouts. “It’s just a panty. Can’t you see?”
I cannot. You see, there isn’t that much to see.
Dear, dear, Victoria. I don’t understand. Just WHEN did panties downsize this much? The panties you offer look like they’ll make a face mask for the squirrel that’s scuttling down my lawn as I speak.
Here. I’m sending back your card with your booklet. I DON’T WANT my free panty. I DON’T.
If you must offer me a gift, give me one that covers a substantial bit of my skin. Now if you said you wanted a cover for an iPad and Steve Jobs sent you one for an iPhone, how do you think YOU would feel?
For now, Vic, I’m okay. Last month, I bought myself a multi-colored pack of low-rise Fruit of the Loom cotton hipster panties at Costco at $6.50 for three. You’d have made ten of those hair-bands for ten times the price with that much cloth, I know.
I have enough and more of the big aunty underwear, the kind that suppress my giggles and depress my jiggles. Yes, I have enough wide-width brassieres which won’t projectile launch me into orbiting Jupiter.
So, keep the secret, Victoria. The truth is, for a while at least, my cups runneth over.
~~~Kalpana Mohan is the author of DADDYKINS: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER AND I (Bloomsbury) and AN ENGLISH MADE IN INDIA: HOW A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BECAME LOCAL.
