Hips

In Paris, at a dress shop, the saleswoman urged me to buy a dress. It was a size 26 and was the right color, but it was snug, like a second-skin.

"I need something bigger," I said, "I feel...hippy."

"No," she said sternly. "How old are you?" she asked. At the time I was 29.

"You are a woman," she said. "You have hips. You must embrace zees. Zee dress...it is made for you. Straight women (at this, she made an up-and down gesture with her hands to indicate skinny rather than heterosexual, I guess) try zees dress on and it does not look good on them. It is made for a woman, not a girl."

I laughed at the salesmanship. This dress would be an adjective wherever I wore it. And although I don't like to admit it, I know that I curate my identity. All of us do, to an extent. The prospect of this particular adjective being attached to my identity was scary territory. Too much hippiness feels offensive in some way. Hips are threatening. To you, maybe to me. I don't know. They must be kept under cover. They must try to pass by unnoticed. This is the philosophy I had lived with for 29 years. Hips are even more suggestive than boobs, and they tend to speak for you, even when you don't mean for them to. This is a problem. You constantly feel (and by you I mean me) that they need to be reigned in. It is even a little terrifying talking about them on a blog on the internets. But they must be discussed, because they exist and can no longer be denied or ignored. They must finally be integrated.

I always wanted to be beanpole thin, Audrey Hepburn thin, like my sister. Beanpole thin girls, they can be whoever they want. They can move in and out of spaces with a kind of minimalist elegance. And they don't need to have everything taken in at the waist. It's troubling to think how much my tailor has made off of me in the years since adolescence.

But the dress did fit perfectly. It was maybe the first dress that wouldn't need to be taken in at the waist. I could tell it liked me more than the other people who had tried it on. I bought the dress. I wore it out. That is to say, I wore it at my 30th birthday. No one seemed offended by the show of hippage. No one shrieked in terror, and by no one, I mean, I did not shriek in terror. I was calm and composed. This was ultimately a test of self-acceptance. "You are a woman," I told myself in a French accent. "Not a girl. Zees dress must be worn by a woman."