By Stephanie Shaw

It is bathing-suit weather, and we have just fended off an attack from our sister-in-law. She is breaking our balls because we refuse to wear a bikini. Our sister-in-law wears a bikini. We point out our age, and our childbearing body, as an excuse. We mention that the super-elastic bubble plastic that once held our abdominal wall together has long since mutinied. We mention that our belly is not the sort of belly one shows off in public. And she says “So what?” And we say, “People will take one look and think that it’s been in a fire. Or some sort of arcane industrial accident out of Stephen King, like it got caught in a laundry mangler, or put through a diabolical sieve.”

Our belly is remarkable. It has accommodated, at various times, an array of infants. Now it hangs loosely from its moorings and it is soft and crinkled and shiny, like a chenille sweater that should be hand-washed but was mistakenly put through the clothes dryer. Our sister-in-law’s brother tells us that it is like velvet, that he shares an important history with it, that it feels good against his belly. He regularly puts his lips on it. We think this is fine, and we tell our husband so, but we tell his sister that we are not prepared to share our remarkable belly with the municipal pool-swimming public, and she tells us that it’s our body and we should glory in it and never mind what anyone else thinks and we think this is a peculiar philosophy, spouting as it does from the pie hole of someone who clearly visits the salon every six weeks to get hot wax poured onto her pubic hair. Read the rest of this entry »