SHE IS SITTING ACROSS FROM ME, ABSORBED in her book, rocking gently to the Metro car's rhythm, unaware that I'm staring at her panty hose. She's wearing a dusky designer style peppered with tiny decorative diamonds. A poor choice, I think. The dots make her look as if she's suffering from a skin disease. I'm your basic kind of guy, so I'm wearing sheer support panty hose. It's not terribly comfortable under my tropical wool suit, but it's a more conservative choice for the business day.
I could explain this to her and we could commiserate about how my control top is killing me and how I can't wait to go home and change into something comfortable, but I don't think she'd understand. She'd probably wonder why a happily married man is wearing panty hose. I had enough trouble explaining it to my wife.
It started out innocently: A couple of women friends were putting me through the Oh, You Men Don't Know How Hard It Is to Be a Woman routine. Okay, okay, I said, being a sensitive guy, I can sympathize about PMS, labor pains and unfair wages. But panty hose? Jeez, they're just underwear. If you don't like them, don't wear them.
Well, they said, we have no choice. Panty hose are part of the Washington professional woman's uniform. We're forced to wear them.
So life is hard, I said, ever so sensitively. Men have to drag razors across their faces and look purposeful while wearing ill-fitting suits. They endanger their cerebral blood supply by having ties knotted around their necks on hot days. The women sighed collectively. As sensitive and caring as you are, they said, you will never really understand a woman until you've walked a mile in her panty hose. They paused, exchanged looks, then looked back at me. A strange glint danced in their eyes.
"We dare you."
I was hooked. YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, I AGREE with my wife, Woodward and Bernstein did not start out this way. They went underground. I am going underwear. We were married only a few months ago, and I guess that she might be thinking something like "What if I married one of those guys you read about in Ann Landers' column where the wife comes home and finds Hubby dancing around in her garter belt and bra?"
Look, I say, this is straight reporting, with the emphasis on straight. Big-time journalism isn't always pretty. She seems convinced, yet secretly I'm the one who's afraid. If I were killed covering a war, I'd be a hero. But if I were hit by a car while wearing panty hose on a dare, everyone will say, "Aha, he was a sleazoid after all." I think about fabricating a Panty-Hose MedicAlert bracelet or carrying a letter explaining my investigation so emergency-room workers won't get any funny ideas when they tend to my supple but tragically broken body.
I have another fear, which is precisely what my women friends were trying to tell me -- most men know absolutely nothing about this strange world of panty hose. So reporter's notebook and pen in hand, I go to a department store panty- hose display, a maze of racks overflowing with colorful packages and plastic goose eggs. I am determined to educate myself, but I feel totally weird wandering about, an alien lost in a lingerie forest. Nobody is looking at me, but I'm sure everybody is looking at me. I might as well be wearing a slimy raincoat.
Racked by the racks, my head goes swimmy, and I break out in a sheen of sweat. Which do I choose? Do I want Silky Support, Sheer Energy, Slenderalls, Underalls, Coloralls, Silk Reflections, Sheer & Silky, Daytime Sheer or Ultra Sheer? Maybe I should get trendy and choose Givenchy's Passion Prive'e or go with the ubiquitous Calvin Klein? How about Donna Karan's New York Just Sheer or Liz Claiborne's Leg Looks? Or maybe Flash Legs, Round the Clock, Precious Moments or Nude 'N Naughty?
Sweat is running into my eyes. Do women buy this stuff with a straight face? I keep taking notes, but by this time I'm convinced everybody in the free world is staring into my soul with laser eyes. I imagine mothers are pointing me out in hushed tones.
Okay, okay. Stay cool. Deep breaths. What color do I want? Fashion Shade, SunTan, Coffee, Off Black, White, Basic White, Dove, Buff, Taupe? What the hell is Taupe? Wait. Here's a panty hose called Capitol Collection. That has a solid federal city sound. Something a guy could wear to a major policy meeting. But what size do I wear? I scan the chart on the back of the package. It resembles an instruction sheet for overhauling a jet engine.
I find my weight and height in the fine print and discover that at six feet I am neither Petite to Medium nor Medium to Tall. I'm off the scale, the story of my life. This narrows it down to only one size: Queen. Very funny. I grab the nearest package and nearly fling it at the salesclerk. "It's for my wife," I say in a voice hissing with menace.
The next morning, after my wife puts on her panty hose and goes to work, I put on my panty hose. I try to be businesslike about this, giving myself a pep talk about the social value of investigatory journalism, but I still feel vaguely deviant. I am, after all (in my locked bedroom) putting on women's underwear. British governments have fallen over less.
They slide on too easily. I had expected -- perhaps hoped -- for more of a struggle, some physical evidence that crossing sexual lines is difficult, not merely a matter of twisting a lock and ripping open a package. The hose feel like polypropylene ski underwear, only much tighter and instantly uncomfortable. I have an attack of claustrophobia from the waist down. By the time I arrive at the Metro platform, I am itchy and hot. Panty hose and my hairy legs aren't a good mix. Yet I feel a peculiar sense of power as I stand there with the other commuters. Suddenly I have a secret life. If you only knew, I arrogantly think, mingling with the crowd. Among you walks . . . Pantyhoseman!
I get to my stop, ride up the escalator and notice that the woman in front of me has a run up the back of her stockings that looks like the Alcan Highway. I probably won't get runs because I'm wearing trousers. But I'm also not going to get any air circulation. So when I start walking the warm streets, feeling as if my legs have been wrapped in Saran Wrap, I figure I'm a sure bet for heat prostration. I am amazed that women can walk around all day like this, with their legs hermetically sealed. Meanwhile, I cross the streets very, very carefully, determined not to give the paramedics a good laugh.
I wear the panty hose all day, a sausage in the making. I don't discuss this with colleagues or friends I see downtown. There is nothing unusual in this, I tell myself; I don't normally discuss my underwear with acquaintances, a practice Miss Manners would no doubt approve of.
But by late afternoon my panty hose feel as if they're falling down and I must sequester myself in a men's-room stall for a quick lingerie check. Rachel, my 12-year-old daughter, had warned me about days like this. When I told her about Project Panty Hose, she said, without a trace of irony, "Don't worry if they feel like they're falling off, Daddy. It's just the crotch slipping down." (This is one of those intimate father-daughter conversations I will always cherish. She also told me a man must have invented panty hose and high heels.) She is right about the crotch. It is definitely heading south, but I am determined to survive a bit longer.
By day's end, I am headed back to the Metro. I've learned a few things about being forced by social convention to regularly buy and wear such clingy, hateful stuff. Now I'm only thinking about getting home so I can peel this stuff off and slip into something comfortable, preferably nudity.
Then I see something crumpled in the middle of the sidewalk, on L Street just off Connecticut Avenue. It looks strange and ghostly and pathetic, like a mortal coil hastily shuffled off. Someone has dropped -- or thrown -- a pair of beige (or is it taupe?) panty hose onto the street. People walk around the diaphanous mass the way they might gingerly skirt a fallen drunk.
I pause for a moment. Perhaps they merely fell out of a purse as a woman hurried home. But I decide instead that a woman celebrated the quitting of her suffocating job by joyously flinging them into the air with a whoop of triumph, free at last from her nylon shackles.
Sister, I know just how you feel. ::