Yesterday while shopping for my 8-year-old son, I noticed a bodice-hugging turquoise top in the displaywindow of Wet Seal, a popular teenage clothing outlet. Without thinking twice, I slipped inside, grabbed a size small top and a size 3 pair of matching turquoise hip-hugging jeans and asked the sales clerk if I could try them on. She enthusiastically agreed, even allowing me to go inside the fitting room with my Sears bag full of boy shorts for my son.
Underneath the tiny fluorescent lights, I dumped my business suit on the bench and pulled the turquoise top over my head. It fit perfectly, hugging my breasts and ribs and waist just like the mannequin. I wiggled into the jeans and they snapped over my hips without me having to suck in my gut, as I no longer had a gut after losing 25 pounds on my five-foot-two frame.
Although the clothes fit, my face above the young-looking body was 25 years too old. I remembered a song Cher sang a few years back, “If I Could Turn Back Time,” and wistfully, I wished for this same body on the head of my 15-year old self. Disgusted with my age, I changed back into my sleek black business suit and opened the fitting room door.
“They fit,” I announced to the sales clerk, a robust 20-year old Mexican girl wearing a frilly white blouse and hip-hugging jeans. “But I’’m too old to wear them.”
She tried to suppress a laugh. “You’re not too old,” she teased.
I nodded. “I couldn’t fit into these types of clothes when I was a teenager, and now I can, but I’m afraid I look more like Christina Aguilera’s mom than Christina Aguilera.”
Oh, c’mon. You can wear them.”
I held the turquoise outfit close to my chest and sighed.
“Hey, Monica,” the Mexican sales clerk shouted, “thislady thinks she’s too old to wear our clothes.”
Monica, an anemic blond with a pierced ear and tongue, glanced up from folding a table full of T-shirts and clucked, “Ohmigod, you’re not like 80 or something. That would be like gross.”
“See,” the Mexican sales clerk smiled.
“I’d have to think about it,” I said, handing her the clothes and stalking out of the store.
I glanced back through the display windows at the tiny mannequins with their perfect teenage bodies wearing clingy knits and denim and wondered what had happened to my face.
It’s not that I needed a face-lift, but the woman staring back at me in the fitting room mirror didn’t look young. She had a wizened maturity in the crinkles around her eyes and the creases around her mouth, a subtle wisdom about her that could not be erased with countless moisturizers or layers of foundation. It was the face of a woman who had weathered 10-plus years of marriage, 2 abortions, 2 childbirths, 2 extramarital affairs, childrearing a special needs son and a hyperactive 3-year old daughter, and 2 careers that were both going nowhere.
That’s not something a tube top and low-rider jeans could mask.
As I ascended the escalator to the parking lot, I consoled myself with the fact that I had already purchased a bikini. “I look fabulous in that,” I said. “Isn’t that all that matters?”
But some part of me was mourning. For the loss of youth. For the loss of innocence. For the loss ofthe face that could sport a teeny-bopper outfit and get away with it!
