The store Helen Hirsh is a West Orange strip mall staple, but I'm not a native. I came to live there with my boyfriend after a near decade of directionless projects like teaching preschool, working at a college, and graduate school. I say the place is a staple because the moment the engagement ring was on my finger, old women everywhere east of St. Barnabus Hospital (West Orange natives with names like Muriel and Aunt Beatrice) firmly instructed me two things: “You need to go to Helen Hirsch on Eagle Rock Avenue for your wedding day underwear. Also, you will be fitted.” I was intrigued, mostly by their almost ominous insistence that I heed Helen’s verdict on the destiny of my breasts, my wedding, and perhaps, my life.
Helen Hirsh already had a sort of mythical reputation to me. I passed it hundreds of times on my way to the movie theater at Essex Greene; the sign’s lettering was an old fashioned curli-cued invitation, slightly sad in its 1950’s undertone of confidence: it really says: Shop here, because Helen Hirsch is all you need to know. I got a good laugh when I got closer to it one day and saw the shop window loaded with mannequins in corsets and stacks of Playtex bra boxes towering proudly, the breasts of the cover models fading in the sun. Before Victoria had a secret, there was Helen Hirsch. And she doesn’t keep secrets. She screams at you.
Helen herself did not greet me when I finally visited one spring afternoon, however. I had finally picked out my wedding gown and indeed needed a corset to wear underneath. As it turns out, there are only two or three places in the county to even get a corset, so this was finally my time to meet the ladies in the time-frozen storefront.
As soon as the bell jingled to signal my entry, two women sprang like panthers from out the back. They were shrewd and mean and just shy under 5 feet. They wore bifocals and flowing cardigans; measuring tape draped round their necks like amulets and they spoke in unison like some ancient oracle. I’m not sure we had even exchanged formalities before one said with a gleam in her eye: “What’s your bra size, honey?” Her nametag read Phyllis. I knew in that moment that this was Phyllis’s favorite game. It was like a Clint Eastwood western when the drifter enters the saloon and the cocky local cowpoke says, “Now you ain’t from these here parts, are you boy?” You know, it was like a sort of throwdown. Phyllis thinks I think I know my bra size. But really she’s fucking with me. In a grandmotherly, shop lady, sort of sweet way, but still, fucking with me.
“Um, 38 C,” I ventured, already weakened somehow. I could feel my bra under my clothes start to itch. Maybe I am wearing the wrong size. Maybe I’m a B cup. After all, I’m plump, but my breasts aren’t really that big, it’s actually just my back that’s sort of wide, like a swimmer. Except I only dog paddle.
Phyllis threw back her head and roared. “Flo! Flo! Here’s another one who thinks she’s a 38 C! Flo! Come here!”
Flo responded with total consternation: “She’s a 38 C and I’m a tin of peaches!” Then Flo grabbed my breasts. I couldn’t help but giggle. She literally squeezed them like she was pondering a melon purchase. If she could have confirmed their value by smelling them, I think she would have. Then she began plotzing: “Oh no, honey. Oh no. You need to be measured. Follow me.”
Flo and Phyllis had no qualms about following me into the dressing room—which had two rickety swinging doors with at least three missing slats—and watching me wriggle out of my T-shirt. They shook their heads in disappointment when they saw my beige, nubby bra with the floppy straps. After I described to them my wedding dress and my urgent need to make my size 12/14 frame look more like a 10 on my wedding day, they nodded, eyebrows knitted together with the cooperative power of a top secret government think tank. I felt a surge of hope. They might criticize, they might taunt, they will, and will again, squeeze my breasts. But they will make me look thin.
Out came the measuring tape. As Flo measured me under the watchful eye of her twin, I had two thoughts:
1) All the perverts in the world with their creepy internet sites and convoluted schemes to video tape women in the buff should just have lunch sitting on the carpet of Helen Hirsch, because all I keep seeing are nipples and pillows of pink and brown flesh: the dressing room doors are just an inconvenient boundary for Flo and Phyllis, who keep coming in and out, regardless of how their naked customers are.
2) I have stepped into a magical world where my lumpy nudity is just another everyday challenge for strong Jewish women to surmount. There is no chubby belly a good girdle can’t smooth; there is no slooped shoulder a good brassiere can’t wrangle; there is no size 12 Vera Wang satin gown without its secret counterpart of firm spandex and ribbing. How you look naked is of little concern. It’s what Flo and Phyllis have in the back of their store that is the challenge. And they are glorious together, like two queens solving a mystery together, speaking to one another rapidly: Maybe the Chantelle. Maybe the strapless corset with the stays. Does Playtex still make that one with the buttock rounder?
The measuring itself revealed what I secretly knew all along: I’m not a 38 C, a size easily found the back of the rack of most major retailers. I’m a weird, hard to find size, and my right breast is at least three tablespoons bigger than her inferior sister. I didn’t bother committing the actual new size to memory. Instead, Flo and Phyllis began lashing me into a complicated contraption that involved dozens of hooks and old fashioned stays, and required Flo to cheekily pick up my breasts and literally scoop them into the cups so that they are presented as luscious half-moons to the world.
“Oh yes, doll. See? You look good.” This is from Phyllis, nodding with sagelike approval, squaring my shoulders to the mirror so I could admire my Mae West curves. Several other customers stepped out from their dressing rooms to weigh in on my corset at the main mirror. They nodded like a Greek Chorus, praising my tiny waist, my flat stomach. One women, bless her heart, kindly reminded me that on my wedding day, I might consider wearing silky shorts under my dress as ammunition against the dreaded “chub rub”, the clinical term for when your thighs rub together in the heat.
The corset cost a staggering eighty dollars. But what could I do? I was terrified of defying Flo and Phyllis, whose firm authority I had come to depend on after about five minutes. As I pulled out my credit card, I found myself asking them, “Where can I get a good chicken salad sandwich around here? Why is my fiancé so weird about two checking accounts? What do you think about a cruise for our honeymoon?” It was remarkable.
Several months later I had my wedding, and it was everything a good wedding should be: stressful, beautiful, with dancing, champagne, and a night alone with my exhausted new husband at the Clinton Inn. As he unhooked the forty buttons from the back of my wedding dress and watched it pool like a collapsed marshmallow at my feet, he saw my corset and assessed it with dismay and curiosity. “Now that looks uncomfortable,” he said, and with little ceremony, merrily unlashed me like a gardener unstaking his plants after a storm.
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