Chapter 8 - The Setup

"There's no doubt that she's my daughter, is there Mom?"

Mom called me her Daughter?

DAUGHTER???

"Well, you were a little more developed up top, weren't you Booberly?"

"Did you have to remember that nickname?"

"Kind of hard to forget, girl. I don't think any amount of tissues would pad Connie out enough to be reasonable, though."

"Not without a bra, I guess."

"Remember when your cousin Sara wrapped up some rice in a handkerchief to fill things out?"

"Quite vividly. She should have been a Boy Scout so she learned to tie knots better."

"If she was a boy scout she wouldn't have needed the rice."

"Every time a few grains fell out and hit the wooden floor you could hear the tippity-tap quite clearly."

"So could her boyfriend."

"Good thing Connie is a Boy Scout. She ought to be able to tie a knot that won't come undone."

"She'll need a bra, then."

What the heck was going on?

"I suppose so."

"Let's see if this one will do," said Grandma as she handed me a shopping bag.

I recognized the name of the place where Mom went for some of her clothes when Woolworths didn't have what she wanted at her employee discount. A place that was filled with bras and slips and other stuff for women. A place where I had to try really hard to act bored while waiting for my mother to finish shopping.

I was just beginning to realize that I had been set up. Self-centered little twit that I was I hadn't a clue.

"You're kidding!" I managed to squeak out. Under other circumstances having my voice break might have been good news that I was finally going to be a man. Or at least that would have been good news until recently. Now that squeak was pure, adulterated disbelief.

"You aren't going to tell me you don't want to try it on. We aren't blind, you know."

"But… I…"

Incoherence, thy name is Conrad - or should that be Connie?

"Do you think I hadn't noticed the torn-out catalog pages in your wastebasket? Or the longing looks at the ladieswear when you see me in the store? I was pretty sure when I told you you would look cute in a tutu and you practically went off into dreamland before you could answer.

"Then when Mrs Corley at the Post Office mentioned you had bought a money order and sent an envelope to Sears, what else would you have been ordering without telling us but something from those lingerie pages?

"Some tools for Dad?" I tried weakly.

"Shopping for Christmas in April? First time you've ever thought that far ahead. When we gave you that clothing allowance, we didn't tell you how you could spend it. Of course, we didn't think you would be buying bras and panties with it. I assume you couldn't resist the ones with the stars and moons on them, being a space nut.

"Remember when you asked if you would look good in a short skirt? That pretty much gave it away, you know."

"Connie, you can't hide anything from your mother, just like she couldn't hide anything from me," smirked Grandma.

"There was the weekend camping with Charlie when you thought I was with Gail and Cindy. I don't think you found out about that one."

"I stand corrected. Speaking of standing, are you just going to stand there holding that bag or will you go and try it on, Connie?"

Not that I was ever interested in watching the so-called professional wrestling on TV, but by then I had a pretty good idea what Hulk Hogan must have felt like when he was double teamed in a match. That brings up some interesting speculation on my part as to just how badly those macho morons would do if my immediate female ancestors teamed up and jumped into the ring. Gran's impressive breasts would probably distract any macho moron so much that Mom would have them hog-tied and pleading while they drooled over Grandma Gladys.

I shudder to think what they would consider appropriate costumes for a faked-up wrestling match. And just how would Grandma keep her wig on her head if she started spinning someone around before she tossed them over the ropes?

But back to the costume I was wearing that day and the bag I had just been handed. I went off to the bathroom and discovered a package of panties, yellow, blue and white, just like the catalog page I had ordered from. Did Mom get them to match my yellow bra? Since I didn't need them with the skating outfit I wondered why she had bought them for me. Likewise the garter belt, the stockings and a pair of black women's flats. (I now had two garter belts!) You see where this is going, don't you? I sure didn't in my euphoric state. It's a damn good thing pot wasn't legal back then or someone would have busted me thinking I was high on something illegal.

I put on the bra. It was plain white but had a little pink bow between the cups. I can remember almost all of my bras from that era had a bow or flower between the cups - since blouses back then were much heavier fabric, the little nubbin didn't ruin the lines of the breast like it would now. In fact, the unibreast was still a common look, no way the blouse would even get near that bow.

By this time I was practically and expert and had it snapped and adjusted in a flash. What surprised me was two squishy inserts for the cups. I wasn't sure what they were made of, but it seemed obvious that real girls sometimes need a little help in filling their bras. I guess I wouldn't have to practice my knot tying after all. Compared to the silicon marvels, complete with nipples (something not to be contemplated in the early sixties!) that were available a decade or two later, they were lumps of formless jelly. Compared to cotton batting they were outrageously feminine. It was also obvious how they went in.

It suddenly occurred to me that Mom must have spent some serious money on these things. I knew the prices of most of the girl's underwear from studying the ads or surreptitiously checking the prices while Mom was helping a customer at Woolworths. The falsies were something new to me, but they had to be expensive. I knew that these weren't the low-end things from Woolworths, but the quality stuff from her favorite store. She must have spent maybe thirty dollars on all that stuff!

You have to account for inflation - remember my first bra cost $1.49? Google has a handy Inflation Calculator that tells me that $30 in 1963 works out to $251.94 in 2020 dollars. Of course, that $1.49 bra would be $12.59 according to the calculator, so I wonder how accurate it is in calculating women's fashions. There is no way in god's green earth I would wear a $12.49 bra these days. I do have my standards.

That's not trivial, but while my younger self was impressed that my parents would be so generous, I wasn't that impressed. Selfish little brat. It wasn't until years later, just before I went in for my final surgery, that Dad admitted they hoped that by overwhelming me with feminine everything I might realize how much simpler being a man was and abandon all this nonsense. I can say that none of us were really aware just how much I wanted to be a woman back then, but obviously drowning me in feminine clothing and accessories didn't have the desired effect.

Glowing with satisfaction at my new figure, I returned to the bedroom where the conversation stopped abruptly at my entrance.

"Ah-ha!" crowed Mom. "You must have gotten a bra or you would still be in there figuring out how to put it on. Out of curiosity, just where did you hide your goodies? They weren't in your drawers."

"So you were snooping?"

"You bet! C'mon, give!"

"Uh, I may want to use it for something else I don't want you to find."

"Told you she wouldn't tell," smirked Grandma.

"I didn't raise a dummy, it seems."

"You haven't been raising a boy either, it seems. That should make the feminists happy."

"It makes me happy that my child is willing to experiment and not just go along with the crowd. I think your experiment is looking rather successful, Connie. If you still want to learn to skate in my old costume then we can give it a try. I never thought I'd be teaching a daughter to skate."

"Can I?"

I couldn't keep the enthusiasm out of my voice.

"I think the rink is far enough away that we shouldn't meet anyone who knows you. If you're willing to take that chance, then let's do it."

"But what will Dad think?"

"You'll know in a few minutes when he gets here. I know he's been very curious as to how you'd look in my old clothes."

"Oh…"

"Don't worry, we both agree that we can live with you experimenting with this. It's not something people talk about, but a lot of boys your age are curious about girl's clothes. Your dad and I think the ridiculous ideas about sex that most people hold on to are well past time for a change, and we are going to do our best to put that into practice in our family".

I was well into my sixties when I read Gorg Huff's Volga Rules, a book in the wonderful Ring of Fire series. In it there is the character of Father Yulian, a very horny priest whose mantra is the best cure for lustful thoughts was satiating them. It appears my parents espoused that philosophy long before Father Yulian made the scene, even if lust wasn't precisely my issue. I have to say I rather go along with that philosophy to this day.

Mom continued: "You'll still have to be careful, even if we go along with this, you could get into some serious trouble from people who think their way is the only way to do things the right way. People like religious nuts and jocks at school. I don't want you getting beaten up or ostracized if your interest in girl's clothes gets to be too public."

"Neither do I. I can hardly believe this!"

"Well, it took some heavy thinking on our part before we decided what to do with you. And now you have a decision to make yourself."

"What?"

"You can either choose to stay in my skating costume and we ladies will cook dinner or you can put on a dress that's a little less flamboyant and we can take a drive into the city and eat out."

"I don't know…"

"Which is a good answer until you have some time to think about it. Since Grandma won't want you clomping around in your skates, I brought over a pair of your sandals."

"Thanks, Mom. Barefoot doesn't exactly go with a skating outfit."

"Wow, she's developing a fashion sense already," Grandma looked amused.

"You said there were other dresses I could wear?"

Even if I weren't going to go out to dinner I was curious about that. I had absolutely no idea how lucky I was at the time. I've met many of my sisters who started out with nothing and wore scraps and rags for years until they could afford something decent. For that matter, I know how much fashionable and well made skirts and dresses cost for me now.

That doesn't even include the cost of those spiffy suits my husband wears. We've worked hard to get to the place where we can enjoy life and dress well. That naive kid in my past just took it for granted that the wardrobe of pretty dresses in her grandmother's attic was almost hers by right.

Of course, faced with all those clothes hanging there I just had to decide we should go out. With the confidence of a teenager who had never faced a real crisis in her life, I blithely forged ahead and got dressed to go out to dinner with my family. I even thought I was ready once I had my wig, stockings, panties bra and dress on my body.

OK, I was a novice at this dressing stuff. I was also completely wrong.