A single, shining bikini moment

“The bikini is over sixty-three years old,” I announced in the Nordstrom dressing room to my lithe, young daughter. She paused in her attempt to secure the thread-like strap around her back, her eyes wide at my reflection in the full-length mirror. Despite the recent Mervyn’s survey of customers that revealed that 68% of the women shoppers would rather clean bathrooms than try on swimsuits, we were enjoying ourselves—or I was, since I wasn’t the one trying them on.

“Reeeally?” As she tightened the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny bows anchored on her hips, I caught that look—confounded and a bit concerned. Might this potential purchase not be on the cutting edge, especially if her mother had worn one?

“We’re at Gap Body,” she reassured herself, “so it’s still in style, right?”

“I had one exactly like that,” I smiled to recall, and chuckled to witness her horrified reaction. I considered the cyclical nature of the moment we were sharing even though every young woman’s goal when purchasing the OC summer uniform is to be in sync with her own generation’s bikini coda.

“And I looked so good in it!” Such uncharacteristic braggadocio was, in part, vanity as I grasped for yesterday. The rest was rightful claim to ownership—I had been there, born just five years after the bikini’s birth.

I sat behind her, my nipless and tuckless, midlife long-torso having long ago surrendered skimpy and embraced full-coverage under the umbrella.

“It was bright yellow—when I was 17.” A very good year—the August when I loved 19-year-old John, the Newport Beach tennis player and infamous, daring Wedge body surfer. He would show up at my front door dressed in either brighter than white court clothes or bold, blue swim trunks—stunning. Even my mother had to hold her breath every time she answered his knock.

In the Polaroid picture his older sister sanpped of us on the ocean front, there I stand—tall, tan, young, and lovely. That girl from Ipanema had nothing on me. In that one, glorious instant captured on film, I am at my peak (the month-long one that I thought would last forever)—my hair spills down my back like spun, sun-kissed gold, and my skin is so bronzed that I don’t recognize myself for my pale-faced, Irish nature. Brain Wilson wrote songs about me.

This was the single, solitary summer when my stomach was magically concave. My back flat on the beach towel, my hip bones would lift the bikini edges, ever so enticingly. John was quite the gentleman when he averted his gaze and rescued me with a towel and tee-shirt after an exceptionally tumultuous wave washed my flimsy top to shore, ahead of me, in with the tide.

“Shouldn’t you tie a double knot?” I asked my daughter as she pranced around the dressing room to achieve the best angle on every possible view.

“We don’t wear them in the ocean, Mom.”

It was true; I’d also read that 85% of swimsuits never touch the water. It must have been different during those Beach Boys summers. Either that, or I was one of the other 15%, and clueless.

After we returned home with our handled bags, in an effort to prove to my doubting daughter that I, too, had once enjoyed my moment in the sun, I searched high and low for the photograph. It must have been lost to some overstuffed drawer or discarded when John couldn’t last, like the moment I was made for a bikini. It’s just as well, I tell myself.

Ever since her sister, at two years old, had told it like it is when I had wedged myself into a one-piece high-leg designer slenderizing tank that I thought looked not altogether unattractive, I vowed never to take bathing suit season too seriously. One should never measure attractiveness on the outside, especially this late in the game—although in this sculpted culture, that’s no easy resolution. I should save such deep thought for somewhere other than the shallow end.

“Mama,” she had remarked while gazing from her seat in a stroller at my reflection in the dressing-room mirror, “from the front you would never know about all that stuff going on in the back!”

So instead, I remind myself that everything, including how you look in a bathing suit, is relative. Not long after that enlightening episode, when I walked into the kitchen dressed for my daily exercise regime in black lycra shorts to my knees and a three-quarter length sleeved shirt to match, my 89-year-old father looked up from his cereal.
“You look nice; are you going for a swim?”

I realized that he had lived many years before the bikini was baptized, and in his youthful reverie, my outfit was the revolutionary, alluring answer to bathing apparel.

Hmmm. I wonder if Gap Body and the Beach Boys would buy that.