Seconds And Irregulars : 5

A Fit-4-U Tale
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

Despite the night-long rumble of distant trains, Camille slept very well. She woke refreshed, although with a definite aftertaste of irritated indignation. She hoped Ozzie had forgotten or gotten over his pig-headed disbelief in the Fit-4-U jacket's guarantee.

She dressed quickly and quietly, and armed with her car keys and wallet, tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen to fetch a grocery bag. Bag in hand, she stealthfully climbed the stairs and entered the bedroom she shared with Ozzie. Camille fully expected he'd still be sleeping off last night's bout of overeating and excessive drinking. Instead, she found her husband standing at the bedroom window, holding the curtain open just enough to peek down at the woman next door as she stretched before her morning run. At the sight of Camille, Ozzie made the face of surprised innocence, pretended to look at the sky, and let the curtain drop.

"I didn't expect to see you up," she commented.

"Yeah, the sun woke me," he explained. "Hit me right in the eye. I might need a nap later."

She nodded and held up her prop, the grocery bag. "I'm going food shopping," she lied. "Do you need anything? Anything from the store?"

He thought for a moment, then replied, "Naw."

Scratching his lower belly, he wandered into the hall, on his way to his bathroom.

Camille took the opportunity of his absence to grab Laura's jacket and stuff it into her bag. She wanted to get it out the door without Ozzie seeing it. She was in no mood to restart last night's fruitless discussion.

In the garage, before getting into her car, she took Laura's coat from the bag and once again held it against her shoulders. It was clearly too small for her. The shoulders were too narrow; the sleeves were too short. She tried it on, and once again it fit as though it was made exactly for her! Camille shook her head. It was the strangest thing. Inexplicable. And yet, undeniable.

Undeniable to anyone but Ozzie, that is!

On her way to Laura's house, Camille came very close to blowing through a stop sign and colliding with another car. She hit the brakes just in time; her car screetched to a neck-snapping stop. The other motorist, frightened by the close call, honked his horn vigorously and excessively.

The event made Camille realize how tense she was: her jaw was clenched; her fists were tight, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel. Why? Because she was angry with Ozzie! Why did the man have to be so obstinate? So obtuse? So condescending? So insensitive?

Honestly, Camille had the same questions about the jacket as Ozzie had, but his know-it-all insistence and his demeaning attitude made it impossible for her to agree with him.

Now that she was alone, without his belittling, pointed tone to offend her, she began to wonder whether, in the end, Ozzie was right. Was this business with the jacket some kind of prank that Laura was playing on her?

Even so, even if it *was* a trick, how on earth did it work? It couldn't possibly be an optical illusion, as Ozzie suggested. Virtually everyone at the party had seen Camille wear it. The jacket fit her; it had nothing to do with her eyes. It was all about her body. So what was the trick?

When she arrived at Laura's house, Laura put on a pot of coffee and set out some light biscuits. The two of them sat in Laura's sunny kitchen and talked about last night's party, trading gossip, observations, and anecdotes that began with Did you know... or Did you see... There were plenty of exclamations of surprise, revelations of who slept with whom, and who might not know what their wife or husband was up to...

Finally, when they were done skirting the issue. Camille produced the jacket from her bag.

"Oh, yes!" Laura acknowledged. "My jacket! Did you like it? Or did you love it?"

"I love it!" Camille replied, "but what's the trick?"

"Okay," Laura began. "Here we go. Hang on to your hat, Camille, because there is no trick."

"Then what? Then how?" Camille turned up both hands, bewildered. "It fits you, it fits me... I tried to get Ozzie to try it on, but he wouldn't!"

Laura laughed. "If he had, the jacket would have fit him, too."

"But that's impossible!"

"I know," Laura replied, with a shrug. "But what can you do?"

"But no! What kind of answer is that? Come on! Is it some kind of joke? It's like a magic trick, right?"

"Magic?" Laura repeated. "If you mean like stage magic, then no. And it's not a joke. I mean, at the prices they charge, it's not a joke that could go very far."

The two went back and forth for a bit, until finally Laura opened her laptop and showed Camille the Fit-4-U website.

At first, Camille was distracted, entranced by the clothes themselves. They were exquisite; current fashion or timeless looks, and the more she saw, the more she wanted.

"But this is just like any other website that sells clothes!" she pointed out. "See? Right here, there's a dropdown where you pick your size. I mean, why bother, if all of it would fit anybody anyway?"

"Okay, so, the answer to that is, I don't exactly know. I have some ideas, but what I *do* know is that the fit is guaranteed."

"And how does that happen? Do you get unlimited free returns until they send you the perfect size?"

"No, not at all. See, the fit is guaranteed. If you buy something from them, it will fit you. There are two ways it can happen – well, three, actually. It might fit you, right out of the box. That *has* happened to me."

"And the other two ways?"

"One, the most common one, is that the outfit changes to fit you, the way this jacket does. The other, which you pay more for – sometimes quite a bit more for! – is that the outfit changes you, to make *you* the perfect fit for the clothes."

"Come on, Laura, that's impossible!"

"Both of the things I said are impossible, if you think about it."

"Okay, but then how does it work? I don't get it."

Laura hesitated. She drew a breath and paused before answering. At last she said in a low voice, "I don't like to think about that."

"What do you mean? What's that supposed to mean, that you don't like to think about it?"

"What do I mean? I mean that I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. This works for me, so I'm not going to ask questions that I might not like the answers to."

"Like what, for instance?"

"Listen, Camille. When I was a little girl I saw this cartoon on TV. There was a centipede walking along, with big, goofy cartoon shoes on all hundred of its feet. Then this ant comes up and stops him. He asks, How do you keep your legs from getting all tangled up when you walk? The centipede thinks for a bit, and finally he admits that he doesn't know. He never thought about it! The ant runs off, and the centipede tries to take a step, but now that he's thinking about which foot goes first, he starts tripping all over his own feet."

Silence followed.

Camille wanted to object, but she was puzzled and unsure how to follow up. So Laura did. She touched Camille's hand lightly, and in a quiet voice said, "I don't want to use the M word."

"The M word? Magic?"

Laura sidestepped the question, and said, "Do you remember how you commented on my still being able to fit into a size four? I have a couple of Fit-4-U outfits that do that for me. After the kids, my hips got kind of wide – do you remember? You must have noticed... Anyway, I have a pantsuit and a dress that... correct it for me. I put them on for a day or so when I need to tune up my figure."

"You're joking."

Laura made a motion of crossing her heart with her finger. "I swear that I'm not. Look – I have a Fit-4-U bathing suit that I don't dare wear. It turns me into a bimbo: huge breasts and ass, teeny-tiny waist, toothpick legs... It's unbelievable. I don't dare wear it."

'Why not?"

"Because as soon as I take it off, the effect vanishes, and it's so dramatically different from how I really look... it would raise too many questions."

Once it was mentioned, the bathing suit proved too strong a temptation, and soon the two women trooped upstairs so Camille could give it a try.

The suit itself was a heart-stopping design: a one-piece electric blue outfit with a bold white stripe. The cleavage was cut very low, and the two strips that covered the breasts mainly covered the wearer's areolas, leaving the sides of the breasts bare.

Camille was astonished and delighted at how easily the suit slid up her legs, over her hips, and onto her shoulders. So far, it seemed no different from any other well-fitting bathing suit in her size.

But when she turned to look at herself in the mirror, she gasped. She stumbled. Her jaw dropped.

Her breasts had grown so large, it took two of her hands to cover one of her breasts. They were enormous, but not comically so: they were firm, with zero sag. She wiggled her shoulders to make her breasts sway. Then she bounced on her heels and watched them bob.

Her derriere, too, was far larger than that of the average woman, and it shifted, jiggled, and swayed as she walked.

"The only thing it's missing is the blonde hair and the swollen lips," Camille commented, not realizing that she'd already moved past her questions of is it real? and How does it work? She was enchanted by the effect.

Laura carefully chose a pair of four-inch heels (making sure they were the type that only caused a temporary alteration). Camille slipped them on, as easily as if they were her very own pair of house slippers. Then, the jacket from last night.

"It all fits me like a glove!" she exclaimed. Then she stripped, and Laura put the identical items on her smaller frame.

"Now they fit me like a glove!" she pointed out.

After a few more experiments they returned to their ordinary clothes, and went back downstairs to the kitchen to give more study to the catalog.

"Okay, so sometimes the clothes change to fit you, and other times they change you to fit the clothes..."

"That's right."

"Where do you find that in the product description? How can you tell which is which? I don't see any indication of the different effects."

"Well," Laura admitted, "there are a few little clues, but they aren't 100% reliable. What I do is I try to make my best choices. I put them all in my shopping cart, and then I call customer support and go over my order with them. That's how I make sure I'm buying what I *think* I'm buying."

As she spoke, she pulled up the page for the jacket. "See? This one just gives you a size. Usually when it's like that, it comes in the size you ordered, but it will change to fit whoever puts it on.

"On the other hand, if it says desired size or something like that, it will come in that size, but it will change you, if need be."

"And how do you know if it's a permanent change or a temporary one?"

Laura thought a moment, blew out a breath, and called up the bathing suit page. "Look here at the description. If you read carefully, you can make an educated guess. See? Here, when it talks about the bathing suit, it says while you're wearing it, you'll feel like a sex goddess...

"It's kind of a code. Get it?"

"I guess so."

"Also, the cost is a clue. Like I said earlier: The ones that change you cost more. So if you find yourself balking at a price, it's probably one of those."

"Why all the guessing games? Why don't they come right out and say?"

"I don't know. I don't know. Probably it's for legal reasons. Oh! That reminds me! One thing to keep in mind that when you're on the phone with customer support: you have to be careful what you ask and how you ask it. If you're polite and if you pay attention to what they say and how they say it, you CAN find out what you want to know."

Laura closed her laptop. As she did, one more thought occurred to her. "There's one more thing to keep in mind: sometimes the support people themselves don't know."

Camille's jaw dropped open. She didn't have any more questions, but she had a lot to take in.