Way back in the effluvia of my mind, I can recall a sanitary napkin company that sent out a pamphlet in a plain brown wrapper called: You're A Young Lady Now which did the job for mothers too embarrassed to discuss sex.  At ten years of age, I was an early bloomer, but the moment is frozen in time. It was raining and the windshield wipers were on outside my grandmother's house where we lived after the divorce.

"Never let a boy put his hand higher than this," my mother said, after handing me the booklet to read, planting her hand on my knee. "And if you come home pregnant, you won't be any daughter of mine. I'll disown you."

My mother told me she had been disowned by her parents for marrying outside her culture, how when friends came to inquire, her father would say that Henrietta was dead. That was my mother's name, conjured by a teacher on the first day of school when she arrived with a =

Greek name CHADA LAMBIA pinned to her blouse, not speaking a word of English. Roughly translated, that name means Light of Joy or Happiness, but no name could have been further from the truth. For her many friends she effervesced. For me, she was inaccessible, her eyes filled with the darkness of sorrows. I learned to keep my problems to myself when  I got the idea that I was expendable. The threat of being disowned filled me with abandonment issues, so that even when she sat me on the edge of this huge vat of chemical soup at the soap company where she worked as a chemist, I was afraid she might push me in.

Round about my sixth grade of school, when all the girls in gym were showing off their cute little training bras with rosebuds and a lot of foam, or stuffed with tissue, we moved out of my grandmother's house into an apartment of our own and I became a little boy crazy.  It should have been clear even to the untutored eye that I was having sexual identity issues. "Call me Billy," I would say, tucking my hair up into an Army Navy fatigue hat. Billy the Kid was my personal hero because he stole from the rich to give to the poor.

I wore a black turtleneck jersey as if I were in the Simbionese Army, blue jeans, and a Garrison belt that you could wrap around your fist, using the brass buckle to defend yourself if ever you were attacked.  I had aspirations of being a short stop in Little League and I wanted nothing to do with ribbons and bows and girly girls who read books by Louisa May Alcott. I had a photo of Roy Rogers and Trigger in my wallet and I got into fights with boys in the schoolyard, boys who, no doubt, ended up with their pictures on the post office wall. Those proud protuberances, growing all the while, under my buckskin jacket, bouncing whenever I slid into third base during practice kept me off the team

I was inordinately shy, (couldn't even say the word BRA well into my high school years.) I could spell it, but not say it. "I need new underwear," I said, one night to my mother, about the time it was decided to send me to an all girl school, showing her the shredded T-shirts I had craftily ripped with a razor blade beforehand so that they appeared to be nothing but rags. "Everyone is making fun of me."

The next night my mother came home with a package of T-shirts. Looking at that little cellophane package, I lost it, flying into a rage, screaming and hollering until my face was a mess of hives, my eyes, mere slivers squinting out of puffed-up lids. How could she not have noticed?

"I want," I said, hiccupping, when the worst was over. "A B-R-A."

Mother got out the old Singer with the wrought iron legs and began to sew hems in these ghastly yellowed-with- age- over- the- shoulder-boulder-holders, as they were called. I can still remember the whir of the treadle, the churn in my stomach, the itchy hives spreading to the delicate parts of my body. Even if my breasts were to fall as far as my waist the way hers did, I couldn't put on one of her ugly discards. Somehow,even though I didn't want to be a burden, I found the courage to say: "I want a store-bought one!"

The next night when my mother got home from work, she took me to the local Woolworth's, where everything was displayed on long wooden counters. It was a long walk to the back of the store to the "unmentionables" counter.  The woman selling lingerie was a blustery, matter-of-fact, matronly type, wearing a plain cotton flowery dress. Her nylons were rolled around her ankles in old lady style.

"What size is she?" she asked.

My mother was wearing white cotton gloves, every inch, the lady. She had about her an air of severity though she was beautiful with thick short black hair, finger waved under infra- red lights at a salon. Out of one corner of my eye appeared a boy from my class, a few feet away, taking it  all in, leaning on one of those push-pull brooms, with a small pile of what looked like sawdust or chopped up erasers in front of it. The stuff had a sickly sweet smell. I wanted to die, fall straight through the pale wooden floor, drag my mother away, but I was too paralyzed.

"I don't know," answered my mother, oblivious to my embarrassment. "She's never had a bra before."

So, in full view of everyone, I had to raise my arms like a seagull about to fly as the woman slipped one of those yellow cloth measuring tapes across my back and around my chest until her thumbs came to the front of what was to be my most prized possession, my womanhood.

"Lady," said the woman, as loudly as she could, which would have shamed any woman who wasn't a narcissist like my mother. "I can't believe you haven't bought her a bra before this. Your daughter is a 34-B.”