2.

WHY THERE’S A LIFELESS BODY IN DRESSING ROOM NUMBER TWO

This is being written from a four-foot-by-four-foot dressing room in a Top 10 Sporting Goods store. Not written, actually. I’m dictating it to my iPhone, as I only have the use of one finger to press the little microphone icon. The rest of me is trapped in a sports bra. Not the Sexy Sports Bra of my daughter’s world. This is a normal sports bra made for normal women.

These could be my Last Words. My Audio Goodbye—just in case this is the day I actually die of strangulation from underwear. On the odd chance that my sole beneficiary, my nineteen-year-old Sexy Sports Bra Princess, doesn’t pluck the iPhone from my dead hand and sell it on Craigslist without even listening to my big speech, I’m leaving this for someone else to hear.

I’ve been stuck in this sports bra for seventeen minutes. Have contorted my body every way possible to get out of it. Tried to wrench it upward, tug it downward, pry it away from my crushed rib cage.

The bra is now lodged halfway between my chest and my chin, with my left arm and hand squashed flat under it. The lower half of my right arm is sticking up out of the neck hole, which is how I got to the microphone icon—by bending over and poking at my purse on the floor with the index finger of my right hand until the phone fell out and I could jab the screen.

Before I black out, I need to be heard. More pressing than the primal urge to scream for help is the primal urge to explain why it’s a size L in which I’m stuck. This is not the classic “If I must die, please, God, let them find my lifeless body wearing an S.” Or even the “Let the paramedics all be men, because humiliating though it will be for them to find me like this, at least they won’t peek at my size tag.” This is more urgent than all that.

I’m trapped in an L, not an S, because I couldn’t stretch the size S wide enough to get it over my head. I couldn’t have stretched it wide enough to get it over my daughter’s old American Girl doll head. The S sports bra is not made for any female, plastic or otherwise. The L barely got over my shoulders, then sprang back around my chest like a rubber tourniquet, where it will apparently stay until it’s removed by the surgical scissors of whoever finds me passed out on the Gatorade logo that’s embedded in the linoleum floor of this dinky room. I’m briefly bizarrely cheered by the fact that if someone bothered to embed a Gatorade logo in the linoleum, it must mean they planned for people, like me, to be upside down in underwear staring at the floor while speaking Last Words into an iPhone. I’m not the only one!

The cheer ends. Of course I’m not the only one. If a small person can’t get into an S and a small person can’t get out of an L, what are 99 percent of the world’s women, who are medium to extra large, supposed to do? This is why I have to speak up before my battery or I expire.

There are at least six hundred sports bras in this store—proud symbols of athletic emancipation, opening a universe of sports and exercise to women because we’re finally supposed to be comfortable doing sports and exercising when we wear one of these. This is what we come to buy when we’re committing to feeling good about ourselves. But as far as I can tell from the times I’ve shopped for one, every sports bra is only going to make the woman who tries it on feel horrible about herself.

I want to scream, but in my current condition, how much do I really want anyone to come running? I want to rally like-minded women to protest with me . . . but my kindred spirits are all stuck in their own individual four-by-four Top 10 Sporting Goods dressing rooms, trapped just like me in underwear that was supposed to set us free that we can’t get out of. Part of a huge, liberated, utterly immobile group, each member of which feels completely, half-nakedly alone.

I stare down at the Gatorade logo. It’s making me thirsty. Also it’s reminding me how much I wish I’d used the ladies’ room before I came in here. I remember the Top 10 corporate policy of “restrooms for employees only” from a previous unhappy visit. I start calculating if there’s any chance I could escape the sports bra, get dressed, apply for a job, and get hired in the next three minutes so I could qualify to use their bathroom. Frustration rises like the tide, a giant wave of discomfort and injustice rushing over . . .

I instantly regret using a water metaphor. As so often happens in the crusade for change, the urgency of the greater cause is washed away by the urgency of the needs of the moment. More water imagery. Fewer minutes remaining of anything good happening in this room. I give one last panicked, futile squirm, after which I vow to not move one muscle until I’m hopefully unconscious for the rest of the day.

I think of our foremothers in their laced-up corsets. I think of the centuries of underwear injustices, of athletics that were so out of reach they weren’t even a dream; of the millions of strong, defiant female voices that never had a chance to be heard because women couldn’t even imagine speaking up about such a thing. I think of my frostbitten ancestors, trudging to the outhouse in ankle-length bloomers and non-sports corsets in the middle of winter. I think of all the areas of life that appear to have been transformed for women, but with innovations that missed the mark just enough to leave us stifled in new and different ways. I think of how far we’ve come only to be stuck where I am right now. Mobilized but paralyzed, incensed but silenced. Incarcerated a mile away from a public ladies’ room by a puny chartreuse sports bra.

One day, I promise, someone will go to all the women’s dressing rooms, gather up the cell phones of my generation, and transcribe our voice memos. And then, finally, we’ll have ourselves a real revolution.