A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS AT A SAMPLE SALE for one of my favorite designers. Most women I know dread communal dressing rooms more than they do the gynecologist, with their impersonal drapes, bad lighting, crowded mirrors, and female security guards watching your every half-naked move. The friend who was with me that day has been known to try clothes on over her jeans to avoid exposure. Me, I grabbed about a dozen garments for myself, handed her a dress I knew would work for her, and pointed her to the back of the room.
“I am not getting undressed,” she said.
“You have to,” I replied, grabbing another dress on our way. The room was packed, as feared, but I didn’t care. I shepherded Rachel to a slightly more protected corner and we quickly peeled off our clothes.
“What are you wearing?” she exclaimed, looking over at me while trying to keep her thonged backside to the wall. “A girdle?”
“It’s not a girdle, it’s a power slip. And instead of worrying about what it’s called, you should be asking me where to get one.”
“But you don’t need one of those—you look great.”
“I look great because I have one of these. Trust me, it’s the best diet out there.” There is nothing like the instant gratification of looking ten pounds lighter and twenty years smoother when you pull on a pair of Lycra™-infused bike shorts.
And now you know the cornerstone of my diet. There have been the most amazing, life-altering advances in technology over the past decade—the BlackBerry, Google, iPods. How did I ever research papers as a college student? Keep up with distant family members? Buy books? Friend my third-grade crush? I won’t do that last, but I could. I simply cannot remember life before broadband. These are all marvelous changes, but they don’t hold a liquid crystal display to the introduction of high-tech fabrics. A glorious cocktail of Microfiber, Lycra, Spandex, and Elastine instantly transforms my butt. I love my shapewear. Perhaps I exaggerate the degree to which I loathe my lowest asset, but I know very, very few women over the age of thirty who don’t have some body flaw here or there that wouldn’t benefit from a firm foundation. Cinch the waist, tighten the tummy, raise the rear: there is a shape shifter for every task. Women wear bras in order to lift and separate; why not wear a bra for your butt?
Speaking of the latter, I do not envy a dating woman who has to remove a pair of nuclear-powered knickers for an impromptu romp. There really is no sexy way to extract oneself. As Bridget Jones found out the hard way, those events need to be carefully planned and prepared. Happily, I’m at a stage in my life where I dress to please myself. Besides, a good girdle might be all that stands between me and baby number seven.
“Six kids! You don’t look like you have six kids.”
I have to wonder what people think a woman with six kids looks like. I suspect they mean, “You don’t look fat enough to have six kids.” News flash: having babies does not make you fat. If having babies made you fat, I would be huge. Beyond huge. Taking in more calories than you burn off makes you fat. I think women get lazy, then blame babies for the demise of their figures. I blame a lot of my problems on my kids—the fact that I have little free time, the fact that I am nearly deaf, the fact that someone came into my bed in the middle of the night and peed—but not the fact that I have a big butt.
I do have to give some credit to genetics. It’s easy to hide five pounds here or there on a five-foot-nine-inch frame. I have hardly won the genetic lottery, though, and I do contribute to staying in shape.
I am not much of an eater. And it’s not that I have food issues or a “disorder;” I simply don’t get a big kick out of great food. I’m what most people call a grazer. This does not complicate my marriage in any way, as Peter is not much of an eater himself. Every three days or so, he helps himself to a huge platter of fries and a bacon cheeseburger, and I rarely see him eat anything else. Because I don’t often sit down for a full, satisfying repast, I tend to snack my way through the day. A handful of Goldfish here, a tablespoon of Skippy there, and a half hour later you might see me squirreling a bunch of almonds into my pocket to nibble on as I turn a seam. I often have crackers and cheese for dinner. Luckily for the boys, Alicia and Nicole make sure they are provided with those things called meals.
I have a deep-seated aversion to diets. I get nervous if my eating is restricted. If I have to have an Oreo, I have to have it. I just try to keep myself from eating the entire pack. I have no idea how women follow those diets that list specifically every item you need to eat at every meal. And frankly, if I ate the amount of food that most of those diets recommend, my ass would be the size of a double-wide trailer. I suspect my distrust of restrictive dieting is rooted in my own childhood. My parents once decided to go on the Atkins diet with the kind of fervor that made the plan so wildly popular—you had a license to eat bacon and cheese at every meal! Vegans aside, what red-blooded American wouldn’t be thrilled with those instructions? Even as a child, I didn’t see how it could be healthy, but they did manage to lose weight—my mom as much as twenty pounds, which she gained back as soon as she ate a serving of green beans. The traumatizing part for me was their breath: the chemical reaction from all-protein all-the-time was so profound that it would knock me over if my parents said good morning. I knew it was the diet because they both suddenly had the exact same odor from hell. In fact, it was so bad I can still conjure the smell today; it transports me back to my childhood home in an instant. Proust had his madeleines, I have my bacon breath.
I stumbled upon another cornerstone of the Laura Bennett Diet, something much more satisfying than food. After thirty years of three packs a day, my husband wisely decided to quit smoking. He endured two weeks of cold turkey, but I sensed he was faltering and bought him some nicotine gum. Having never been a smoker myself, I didn’t understand the draw of cigarettes, but then I tried a piece of his Cinnamon Surge 2-mg coated Nicorette. It was ambrosia. I suddenly realized that nicotine is the most amazing legal substance of the twentieth century. I was immediately, happily, and willingly hooked.
I credit nicotine gum with everything from keeping me thin to saving my marriage, but I admit it has its hazards. Not health hazards—at least, not any that I know about or want to acknowledge—but child hazards. Peter shares my affection for nicotine gum, and if he sits in any one place too long, at the computer or TV for example, he amasses a small pile of chewed pieces. I want to believe that he has every intention of disposing of these properly, but it doesn’t always happen, at least not in a timely manner. Naturally all the nicotine has been depleted, so it’s not as though the children are going to get a second-hand chew if they put it in their mouths, but still, it’s annoying.
One Sunday morning I was taking a bath—my rather long weekly bath, during which I try to catch up on personal maintenance. I heard Finn crying somewhere in the house and called in vain for someone, anyone, to check on him. There were at least six other people in the house who could have checked, after all. Receiving no reply, I left my legs half shaved and got out of the tub. I found Finn in the living room, standing on the coffee table, wearing a T-shirt and no diaper, his little genitals so completely encased in chewed nicotine gum that he looked like a baby hermaphrodite.
“Oh, my God,” I said to Peter, “Look at what he has done!”
“Yeah, I saw that,” he said.
In all fairness, had the problem been easier to deal with, like, say, the two hundredth spill of the day, Peter would have taken care of it, but this was, to say the least, a sticky situation. Well, thank God for the amazing citrus power of late-night-as-seen-on-TV cleaning products. It took half a bottle of Goo Gone to detach Finn’s little testicles from the side of his leg.
Despite the downside of gum chewing, and its inevitable move into the realm of taboo, I will continue to chew nicotine gum because it is the closest I will ever get to Nirvana, and frankly, given all I go through with this circus of mine, I deserve a vice. When Peter falls asleep with a piece in his mouth, I will dutifully cut it out of his hair in the morning and thank God every day for my twelve-piece blister pack of heaven.
I WAS RECENTLY HIRED BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL GIANT Glaxo-SmithKline to design dresses for two women who had won a competition to lose weight by using a new diet pill the company had developed. I took part in the presentation of the dresses and a press conference. When the event was over, the executives invited me to dinner. I spent the meal buttonholing executives about the diet-pill potential of their other product, Nicorette.
“Oh, did you start chewing it to stop smoking?” one suit asked.
“No way,” I said. “Smoking’s for losers. I chew because nicotine keeps me sane.” I went on to regale them with my thoughts on the product, about how when I put a piece of that gum in my mouth, and I feel that spicy taste running down my throat, a feeling of calm comes over me and all is right with the world. The fact that my mouth is busy chewing gum and not rabbiting popcorn or nibbling Triscuits is an added benefit in that it cuts some calories out of my day. I was willing to admit that I am so addicted that I get nervous when my supplies are low, so I have hidden gum all over the house and in random purses for emergency situations. I even have a friend who “holds” a blister pack for me, she is so worried about my mental state should I find myself without a fix.
“Really,” I said, “I love it so much, I act like a pusher, constantly offering it to other people.” By this time, I noticed that a few of the suits had left the table and the ones who remained were eyeing me skeptically, but with a small glint in their eyes. I have been waiting for the spokesmodel call ever since, and believe me, if you are out there, Mr. Nicotine Suit, I am your girl.
ANOTHER WAY I TRY TO CONTAIN MY BUTT IS BY RUNNING. IF I TRY TO tell you that I exercise for my health, don’t believe me.
“Why don’t you just join the YMCA?” Peter asked me one night as I peeled yet another layer of Lycra off my body.
“Old people go to the Y,” I shot back.
“They have an indoor running track,” he said.
Well, it was love at first sight. If I have to exercise, I would rather not suffer. Climate control is the way to go. I don’t have to worry about freezing winter or steaming summer days. The track is small—an eighth of a mile—so I tend to feel like Hamster in his wheel, but after about fifteen minutes I zone into my endorphin high and don’t really notice. I can spend a full hour just going in circles, passing the same old guy with his walker at least fifty times. If that doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, what will? Sometimes, just to unwind, I will sit myself on an exercise bike alongside a woman with an oxygen mask, her personal video screen tuned to The Price Is Right. She’s my inspiration. She’s always there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I feel that she would be discouraged if I didn’t show up as well.
Of course, dieting is partly an attempt to retain or regain a youthful appearance, which is why the majority of liposuction is performed on women over forty. One day as I was viewing my backside for the billionth time in the mirror, I flirted with the idea. I pictured my body facedown on an operating table. Naked. Concentric circles marking zones of imperfection drawn over my butt and thighs. Anonymous men in surgical gear discussing whether to have sushi or subs for lunch. Nurses quietly judging me for being so damn shallow, but happy to get a paycheck on the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month. A long rod slides violently in and out of my flesh, pulling lumps of bright yellow fat into a tube and then a plastic Ziploc bag, to be deposited God knows where on the planet. Then there are the weeks of healing, oozing sores connected to yet more tubes that you have to measure and empty every few hours. Gack.
I am not sure who the woman is who would opt for this over a twenty-five-dollar visit to the lingerie department at Macy’s, but it’s certainly not me. The idea of having my ass removed to a landfill is just too much to bear. I’m certainly not against cosmetic augmentation, as it is in keeping with my theory that you can make yourself feel good by making yourself look great. I dye my hair; I glue eyelashes onto my lids. I even once had Botox injected into my forehead. For this I went to a fancy uptown New York dermatologist frequented by many of my good friends. They all look terrific, I thought; this might be a good step. In the waiting room, reading Town & Country magazine, I began to take quick glances at the assorted women there. I began to get scared. Most of the women had an upper lip so filled with collagen that they could have half kissed their own noses just by exhaling. Many foreheads were broad, expansive, smooth, immobile. I cocked an eyebrow just to feel my own scalp move in reassurance. A few women had a tell-tale puffiness around the eyes, an attempt at filling crow’s feet quite apparent. Was it possible these women didn’t know that they didn’t look younger? That what they had accomplished with these various procedures was turning themselves into two-bit caricatures of their mothers?
“Don’t make me look like those women in the waiting room” was the first thing I said to the doctor.
“Those women are junkies. They go from doctor to doctor. It’s their own fault they look that way,” he assured me.
Well, the Botox looked fine, and for a few weeks I felt a tiny bit younger, maybe forty-three, but I never went back.
Then one night I was watching a Bravo reality show, one of the Real Housewives iterations. There was an attractive woman, divorced with two children, working hard to support her family. She wasn’t just kicking back and relaxing on the proceeds of her alimony. By the third season, this character hooked up with a rich guy, and her looks totally went downhill. She obviously now had access to money for procedures, and also had a newfound fear of the rich guy preferring a younger version of herself ere too long. What was once a pretty face morphed into a monster of alarming proportions. Her lips puffed up, her forehead grew, and she must have had cheek implants—how else could you explain the sudden resemblance to Joan Rivers? Before she had money, she looked great. No, she didn’t look twenty, but she rocked her forties.
I intentionally lie about my age. I actually tell people I am older than I am.
“Fifty! Wow, you look great for fifty!” I may not be able to look like a girl in my thirties, but I can kick some fifties ass.
I’ve decided to forgo injections and fillers because I fully intend to become a crazy old lady who wears too much makeup, piles on all of her jewelry at once, and prances around the house in an enormous wig and a feather boa, like a redheaded Carol Channing. By the time I am wizened and wrinkled, my gay icon status will be improved upon by my greatest gift to my fans: another version of me to emulate. Young Laura Bennett, Project Runway Laura Bennett, Pregnant Laura Bennett, Crazy Old Lady Laura Bennett—the character lines will give young cross-dressers so much more range to play with. And they, better than most, know a thing or two about the beauty of shape shifters.
For the moment, I don’t fear aging at all. I will proudly walk into my fifties with my ass held high, thanks to my power panties.