Two summers ago, I bolted up in the middle of the night, flaming hot, like the depths of my belly were on fire. I can’t identify precisely where, in my body, the burning began. I knew it was in the vicinity of some scorched molten core where my babies had once grown, a formerly fertile, blooming field, now charred and blackened. The next night, it happened again. And again. A week later, I made an appointment with my doctor.
“There’s a furnace,” I said. “On full blast. Inside my stomach.”
“Oh,” she said gravely. “Welcome.”
“Welcome to what?”
“Menopause.”
The doctor asked when I’d had my last period. I didn’t know. Maybe six months ago? Life was full — I’d recently bought a house, my business was thriving, and I was trying to keep up with my increasingly active tween daughters. My period was the last thing on my mind. Plus, I’d never paid much attention to it anyway.
My period arrived for the first time in the passenger seat of my dad’s car — one hour into a three-hour drive to overnight camp. I remember staring out the window, bleeding all over my Guess cutoff jean shorts and the seat, stunned into silence, too scared to say a word. (My mom playfully slapped me on the face when she found out — an old Jewish custom, look it up — then gave me, unceremoniously, a box of Tampax.) There’d been a lot of talk about female anatomy in middle school, and it had seemed very complicated. We’d recently learned in Latin that the etymology of a woman’s genitalia was derived from the Latin verb pudere: to be ashamed. That the word hysteria is derived from the Greek: uterus. Both womb and heart trace back to the same root.
I wasn’t into any of it. The deep back aches and double-palming aspirin, the acne and swollen abdomen. Then, when I got older, the awkward exchanges with randos in my 20s, mid–fooling around: Um … is it cool if I free-bleed on your penis?
This news of menopause shocked me. I’d always associated menopause with a flummoxed, sweaty housewife fumbling for reading glasses and osteoporosis pills. But I’d never felt better. I’d just turned 45. I’d recently beat both my kids at a one-handed cartwheel contest. At my last checkup, the nurse commented I had the blood pressure of a “14-year-old runner.”
I was mad at my body that summer. Where had it gone? I wanted it all back, the eggs and the estrogen, the collagen and progesterone, my dewy uterus and ability to conceive. Instead, I was up all night, rubbing ice cubes over my eyes, feeling my fertility being burned right out of me. One night, I dumped all my tampons in the trash. Next went the thongs, the cotton briefs, all the ghosts of underpants past. I decided to go commando, free as a bird, let the wind blow where she may. If my period didn’t want me anymore, I didn’t want anything to do with it either.
My relationship with underwear has always been fraught. I always knew its main goal was to act as a protective barrier, safe from germs and prying eyes. But I’d also internalized, at a very young age, that its secondary, more salient purpose served as a performance. In second grade, my mom and I watched Marilyn Monroe, her white dress blowing up in the subway grating exposing her white underwear, in The Seven Year Itch. In middle school, my big sister’s walls were papered with Guess ads featuring Claudia Schiffer in Bardot hair and black smeared eyeliner, slinking out from a doorframe in a pink bra and panties. Underwear was something to court desire with: both a magnet for the male gaze and an object that could be mocked at any moment. Remember the scene in Sixteen Candles when the geek holds up Molly Ringwald’s panties to a roomful of losers as proof they had sex? (Spoiler: they actually did not.) In The Breakfast Club, John Bender hides under Claire’s desk, stares into her crotch, wedges his head between her legs, and — although we don’t see it onscreen — touches her without consent. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Hugh Grant rummages his hand around Bridget Jones’s “silly little dress” and “absolutely enormous panties.” These grannylike underwear are a symbol of her single cat-lady life — frowsy, floppy, a blur of dust bunnies and clumsy blunders. Sharon Stone did not wear underwear in the famous Basic Instinct interrogation scene, claiming that a member of production tricked her into removing it. That scene is what made the movie.
When I was 19, I crossed paths with an English musician, a dozen years my senior, at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. He looked like every front man on the Britpop mix tapes my big sister made me: fried dandelion fluff of hair, full lips, black leather pants. This was 1996. My own look was greasy alien waif. Bleached choppy fringe and oily eyelids — you’d smear Vaseline on your cheekbones and then use the rest to slick back your little ponytail.
It was summertime. One hundred degrees. The musician wore a sweater made of black feathers. I was desperate for him to believe I’d been born and raised in Hollywood, that both my hair color and ennui were natural. The sad truth is only a month earlier I’d been canvassing for Greenpeace in the suburbs of Chicago. Also: I was wearing Barney underwear. Not Barney like the store. Barney like the purple dinosaur. My mom had bought the underwear for me at Big Wheel — a big-box store in Michigan, a kind of precursor to Walmart — and they were big and cotton, and they came in a pack of 12 and were printed with row after row of the giggling Tyrannosaurus rex. It felt important, if not dire, for the musician to believe I was an L.A. “It” girl, full of bubbles and mildly famous for an unclear reason. The Barney underwear was not part of this plan.
But after the third bottle of wine, everything came undone. Back in his hotel room, as the musician’s black sweater shed all over my body and bed, I realized that no matter how hard you tried on the outside to perfect your identity, your underwear would always give you away — your truth, your roots, the home you were trying to run from.
That next morning, woozy with remorse, standing at the podium of my restaurant job, pulling feathers from my hair, I vowed to never get drunk and naked with a stranger again. But, of course, I did.
After that night, I understood underwear differently. I put it on every morning anticipating that at any moment it could be removed. You never knew who you’d bump into or hook up with, whose home you might do the walk of shame from at sunrise, your undies bunched up in your pocket or palm. I went on to work in fashion for a while, and these things mattered: your shoes, your hair, your underwear. (I once heard my boss say she’d never hire an assistant who didn’t have a pedicure.) This was during the advent of the thong, made popular by Sex and the City, Sisqó, and low-rise jeans. A girl who showed her thong straps was a cool girl — she’d drink beer until she blacked out, she watched dial-up porn with her boyfriend, she liked the Strokes and Britney Spears and strip clubs. The Thong Girl didn’t have a routine or prescriptions for eczema cream or panty lines. Her ass was free of fabric, free to be ogled, free to be fondled. I first moved to Manhattan in the very early aughts, and the women around me, occupying the same blurry nights of bottle service and Bungalow 8, were always waxed and gleaming, absent of body hair, their toes and fingernails lacquered and long. Back then, a Brazilian wax cost close to $100. At the time, my salary was $25,000 a year; the math was not on my side. Neither were the mechanics. I have very sensitive skin, and dancing all night to Daft Punk, post-wax, lace thong rubbing against my reddened, raw perineum, felt like trying to floss a tooth, vigorously, in the same tender, raw spot where a molar had just been pulled.
Finally, the first underwear I ever really loved were placed gingerly on my body by an elderly nurse with liver-spotted hands and two long braids. I was laying, semi-conscious, on a hospital bed, sweating and sipping apple juice from a box, two hours after the birth of my first baby. These underwear were made of polyester and spandex; they resembled both an adult diaper and baggy biker shorts constructed from stretchy, soft mesh. Basically, an N95 mask for my vulva, which had been put through a meat grinder. My unmedicated childbirth had given me third-degree tears, 17 stitches, inflamed tissues. Several times throughout the day, I had to squirt myself between the legs with a plastic water bottle, then douse a frozen maxi pad in witch hazel and aloe to soothe the burn.
And yet, I’d never been more horny in my life. The underwear made me feel hot. The body I’d spent 35 years starving and drugging and trying to make beautiful had suddenly revealed itself to be a wild and magical beast. I was drunk on its power, its capacity to mold and make, to supply and deliver. I strutted around my maternity leave wearing only the mesh granny panties, bouncing my newborn, leaking blood and breast milk, blasting Beyoncé, pouncing on my husband every time he walked through the door.
Motherhood made my relationship to underwear confusing. My lingerie drawer became a mixed bag of bikinis and boy shorts, hipsters and high-briefs, butt floss and retro. There was the cringey white thong with the blue rhinestones that said “Just Married” I wore under my wedding dress, the black lace G-string from my first post-divorce date, a weird cadre of thongs I’d acquired from a long-ago paid Instagram partnership that required me to do handstands, in bra and underwear, from my own living room. I was grieving and skeletal six days after my father’s funeral. On my own feed, the algorithm served me a relentless deluge of ads for nontoxic underwear, periodproof underwear, breathable underwear, organic underwear, Kim Kardashian underwear, moisture-wicking underwear, underwear not made in overseas factories, and all the while I was buying different kinds of underwear altogether: Pampers and Pull-Ups, disposable and cloth, diapers to swim in and diapers to potty-train in, diapers that my daughters would eventually grow out of in the pursuit becoming young agential people who could eventually buy their own underwear, while I stood behind them, waving good-bye.
One day, when I was in Duane Reade buying diapers, I saw the musician from the Viper Room standing at the register. He was now balding and gaunt, holding an armful of toilet paper, The heaviness of time — its cruel weight, how quick it all kept moving — felt so unbearable that I stood in the aisle and wept. I was not buying diapers for my daughters that day — I was buying for them for my dad, who, at the age of 74, was hospitalized in the bone-marrow transplant ward, his dignity and his white blood cells draining from his body daily. This was pre-COVID, but his condition demanded I protect him from germs at all costs — booties on my shoes, mask over mouth, plastic cap and paper robe, and still he died anyway, my gloved hand resting on his.
My father’s death and my divorce — two seemingly unrelated events — crashed into each other at the same time, leaving me to pick up the shattered bits of the two most important men in my life, littered all over the cosmic highway. There was something about these losses, the loss of the man who raised me and the loss of the man who is raising my children, that forced me to reckon with the fact that, even in deep adulthood, my relationship with both of them felt rooted in teenage insecurities, by the hope that their love would one day make me feel whole. These two vital people had disappeared from sight, but the desperate teenage craving, the desire for their affection and approval, remained. Frankly, I wanted that young woman to go away. I wanted to rip her up like a paper doll, stamp on her shadow so she’d stop following me around. By the time my hot flashes began, it wasn’t the underwear I was throwing out. It was her.
Except. When I was finishing up this essay, my period returned. With a vengeance. It appeared for weeks at a time, then disappeared, then came back again, heavier and more painful than before. An ultrasound showed a thickening in my uterine lining, a large cyst on my ovaries — perhaps cause for concern, perhaps not, we’d follow up in four weeks. I was distracted, packing my daughter for sleepaway camp, and mostly annoyed. Having to buy and wear underwear after a two-year hiatus felt like a defeat. Like having to get braces for a second time after being told that your teeth are perfect and straight.
I was also packing for my own trip, a journey to Poland I’d been planning to take with my dad before his death. I wanted to walk the streets of Warsaw, where my ancestors fought the Nazis; I wanted to eat their smoked fish and see their sky; I wanted to wander the forest of Treblinka, where they died.
A few days in, I was in a car heading back to Warsaw from Auschwitz, close to a five-hour drive. At some point, I became aware that I was bleeding again, heavily, that I would need to ask my guide to stop at a bathroom. It was a simple ask, but for some reason, I didn’t do it. I felt like I did back when I was 12 years old, in the car with my dad, terrified and timid, at odds with my own body, too scared, for some strange, unknowable, tragic reason, to ask a man for what I needed. Instead, I stayed silent. I stared out the window.
Back at the Airbnb, I scrubbed my underwear with cold, cold water. Afterwards, I draped them over a rack on the courtyard patio. Across the way, an older woman was hanging her damp clothes. I imagine there was some underwear in the mix. I tried not to look too closely. The whole thing felt very intimate, two strangers, such close proximity, handling their most intimate garments.
But as I wrung out the fabric, I wondered what the woman’s life had been like. Where she came from, what she’d seen. Maybe if we traced our history back far enough, we’d find our great-great aunts in some darkened woods, scrubbing their smocks side by side in a stream. Maybe they’d stood, battered and broken, on opposite sides of the same wall. It didn’t matter now. She was someone’s daughter and so was I. She’d been birthed and she’d bled. We were two women, drying our underwear under one moon, new and old, colorful and faded, threadbare and barely hanging on and blowing in the breeze.
She looked up and caught me staring. I said hi.
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