I was finished with my paper route by eight o'clock that Sunday morning, and had a little extra cash in my pocket. I thought I'd just stop at the Roundhouse for a piece of strawberry ice box pie, hoping that Sam would be working. He always gave me two pieces for the price of one – and it was good pie, too.
But Sam was not there anymore. In his place there was a woman whom I had never seen. No free pie, I thought. Anyway, I was there so I'd go ahead and sit down.
She was taller than I, which was not saying much in those days. I was still in high school, and I didn't really start growing tall until I was eighteen and in college. This woman was maybe five feet ten.
But the thing I noticed first was the dark color of her stockings and the thick black seam down the back of them. Her leg muscles were well-developed, and as she walked back and forth behind the counter I couldn't help following her movements with my eyes. (I noticed that Pastor Inkfingers was looking, too!)
She smiled at me when she took my order, and I decided then and there that she was going to be my fantasy woman that night. You see, every night before going to sleep, I went to visit a fantasy woman for a short time. In my mind. You understand.
This woman's smile was so warm that I almost felt guilty about looking at her legs. But when she bent down to pick up a short pile of dishes from a shelf next to the door, her legs opened up just enough for me to catch a glimpse of something pink and satiny with white lace along the edge. It was tightly wrapped around each of her legs, up under her skirt, and at the edge of it her flesh bulged out just a tiny bit. Enough to indicate just how tight this thing was. I knew it must be a girdle.
At the edge of it, the dark part of her stockings went up underneath the tight lacy edge, so that it looked as though the stocking was actually fastened to the pink garment. Then, just as she began to get up from her bending position, she looked up with the dishes in her hand, and caught my eye.
Instead of a frown, which I might have expected, she smiled again and I could have sworn that she winked at me – although I doubted it. After all, she was obviously several years older than I. Maybe ten years! Why would a grown woman flirt with me?
With that glimpse, my guilt vanished and was replaced by a strong desire to know more about this woman's mysterious underwear. I decided to do some research. While paying for my icebox pie, I read her name tag: it said "Ilse."
As soon as I could get home, I took my mother's Sears catalog upstairs to my room and locked the door. Thumbing through the pages, I found a section labeled "Foundation Garments." There were bras, garter belts, girdles and panty-girdles. Some of the pictures were in color and – yes! – several of the girdles were in pink! I feasted my eyes on every page, trying to find exactly which one matched the garment Ilse had been wearing.
That night Ilse was waiting for me in fantasy-land. She showed me her girdle, and I touched it. Soon I was asleep.
Do you know how it is, when you never heard of something or thought about it, but when it finally comes to your consciousness you see it everywhere and think about it a lot? That's what happened to me after that Sunday morning when I saw Ilse's girdle in the Roundhouse Diner.
I looked in the fashion magazines and saw beautiful full-page ads showing ladies in long-leg panty-girdles. My eyes were always drawn to the crotch of the girdle, as if I would discover something fabulous there. Something new. Indeed, it was all new to me. I noticed how the tummy panel on a girdle often had a rising triangular shape so that it seemed to be a continuation of the shape underneath… kind of like a female version of the codpiece.
In the department stores, I began to look for the mannequins wearing girdles and bras – they did in those days, you know. Oh, the displays were usually off to the side, but they were there.
I also began to notice the girdles hanging on the clotheslines in people's backyards. Yes, the magazines told ladies not to hang their girdles in the sunlight, but they did it anyway, thank goodness. Sometimes I saw three or four girdles in a row, often in different pastel colors.
Girls sitting in class or in the library became the objects of my frantic search for glimpses of tight powernet and lace. I began to go to basketball games so that I could look. It was usually the mothers, not the students, who rewarded my efforts. I would walk up and down the aisles, pretending to be searching f someone. One time I caught a full, well-lit glimpse as a mother sat down with a hotdog in each hand and almost fell backwards. I burned into my memory the sight of the crotch of her girdle, stretched tighly against the soft mound of her body.
Another time, I had to pick up paper out in the schoolyard. I was walking right by the window of the principal's office and looked in as I did. The principal was Miss Caldwell, a large, big-bellied and big-breasted woman.
I was surrounded by bushes, and no one saw me. I saw Miss Caldwell lock her office door, then hike up her dress and expose her long-leg girdle. She pulled it down, exposing another girdle underneath! This second garment was a black brief with a lacy gray tummy panel, which she pulled up at the waist and down at the legs, after which she pulled the long-leg back up, and then pulled her stockings up and re-fastened them. Then she let her dress back down and smoothed it, unlocked the door and walked out of the office.
Ilse, though, remained the mother of my fantasies. I would go to the Roundhouse, always hoping to catch another glimpse of her girdle, but for a month or two it didn't happen. I would sit in the right place. But there were no glimpses. At least she always smiled at me and gave me big pieces of pie, although not quite as big as Sam had done. But Sam was gone now. He was working across town.
Ilse's rather tight, thin white waitress dress always revealed the presence of a girdle underneath, however. Sometimes I could see the outline of it clearly, and other times it was veiled and indistinct.
The garter buttons were usually visible when she walked. When a leg was moved forward, the skirt material was stretched across it so that the garters and the edge of the girdle would be briefly visible. It was tantalizing to see those split-second glimpses of what was hidden in that magic world of Ilse's skirt. It was positively tormenting to think about the rest of it, the panties, the seam across the front where the panty shield was sewn on. The bulge of the female shape underneath, and the sweet scent which I could only imagine because I had never been close enough to any woman to know it.
My mind became a maze of interwoven images and fantasies, and closely woven into that disorganized fabric were the satin, lace, garters and powernet. When I turned eighteen I was a totally different person from what I'd been just a short time before. I was dedicated to the discovery of sex. And women's underwear were a strong part of it. Especially you know what.
Then came the day Ilse opened up the universe.
For starters, she gave me two whole pieces of strawberry icebox pie for the price of one, just like Sam had always done. I was in heaven, digging my spoon into the rich custard bed beneath the strawberries, trying to balance a blob of whipped cream on top. Ilse stood watching me.
"Good?" she asked with that wonderful smile on her face. Her hand rested on the handle of the Seltzer spout, with the other one on her hips. She had long, red fingernails, and her hair was up in a net as usual.
"Oh, yeah! You know I like this stuff," I replied. She laughed because I had whipped cream on my upper lip, and I wiped it off.
"Listen," she asked, "what's your name?"
"Charlie," I said.
"Well, Charlie, you ride a bicycle. Can you fix mine?"
"Sure. What's wrong with it?"
She frowned and thought for a moment. "I think the chain came off where it's supposed to be. Anyway, the pedals won't turn."
I swallowed a big bite of pie. "Sure, I'll do it," I said.
"Come here at five, and I'll take you to my place," she said. "Do you have tools?"
"Yeah, I can bring some."
"Good."
The rest of the day went by very slowly for me. I rode down to the park at the point, and sat watching the barges and yachts go by on the Intracoastal Waterway. I told myself it would be just a quick little job, repairing the bike. I already knew basically what was wrong. It was always happening to my bike, too.
But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking arousing thoughts about what could happen if things went a certain way. But no, I realized, she was older than I was. She probably had a boyfriend. And then, it wasn't right for me to want something that was forbidden. And make no mistake about it, what I wanted was a forbidden thing!
And that, I think, was a large part of the fantasy.
At five o'clock I was there. She told me to lock my bike up and get in her car, but I insisted on following here. She only lived a few blocks away.
"Okay," she said. "if you want. I'll drive slow."
It was a cool day, with the first signs of winter blowing in with a northeaster from across the bay. Dry leaves flew up behind her car and I rode through them as they drifted about in the crisp air. What a day for a daydream, I thought.
Her place was a little duplex with a magnolia tree in front and a tiny garage with a double door – the kind that you don't see anymore. She opened the door and I could instantly see that she was a very tidy person. Her garage was clean and neat, and her bike stood against one side with a sheet over it. I took the sheet off.
I had been right. It only took two minutes to loosen the rear hub nuts and move the axle back so that the chain would stay on. I snugged the nuts down and looked around. Ilse had gone inside. I went to the door.
"Come in!" she called from the back. She showed me to the bathroom so I could wash my hands.
And then I saw them. They were hanging on a little rack in the tub. There were two girdles and three pair of panties. A bra hung there also, from the corner of the rack.
I slowly washed my hands, looking at the girdles. I wanted to touch them. As I dried my hands, I thought about feeling the fabric. The crotch part of the each girdle was made of a thin, very smooth white nylon tricot cloth.
Finally, I gave in and, sitting on the side of the tub, took one of the girdles into my hand. After all, I thought Ilse was in the kitchen. The girdle felt a little heavy and thick, and I liked the way the fabric felt as I rubbed it between my thumb and fingers. Then the thin crotch – oh, how sweet it was! The seam was sewn with a stitch I had never seen before. The thread was shiny. I lifted the garment to my face and felt it against my cheek. Then I smelled it! The scent of the rubber in the fabric filled my being and aroused me as nothing else had ever done.
I was trembling with excitement when I noticed that Ilse was standing in the hall, watching me with a beautiful smile on her face. My excitement was obvious along the upper part of my leg, and I saw her notice it. Her mouth opened and hung that way just a moment while she looked. And then she looked into my eyes.
"You like girdles?" she asked me.
"This is the first time I ever touched a girdle."
"Doesn't your mother wear them?"
"No. I have never seen one up close." It was true. I held it up to my face, feeling extremely daring to be doing that while she was standing there. "It smells so wonderful!"
"It smells better when a woman is in it," she said. Her voice was low and husky. I had never heard a woman speak that way before, and it caught me by surprise. I looked at her. Her hand had moved to her stomach, and her splayed fingers held her dress fabric down, with a finger lingering pretty far down toward the place where her legs met.
Her eyes were once again on my leg. Not really on my leg, but on that which tried so urgently to push its way out and into the open.
Now her lips closed and the tip of her tongue appeared briefly to wet them. She came closer to me. "Do you want to see the girdle I'm wearing? Want to smell it?"
I couldn't speak. I just looked up into her eyes as she lifted her skirt. Then my eyes went down to feast on what was there to see. The tummy panel of white satin, with a tiny pink bow in the center of the top, where a two-inch elastic band encircled her waist. The fabric of the powernet, taut as a drum against her legs. The garter buttons sticking out proudly through the net.
And then the crotch. She took my head in her hands and gently fondled my ears, then slowly pulled my head toward her while she arched her pelvis forward. My mouth and nose were an inch from her, so sweetly ensconced in the tricot fabric of the girdle. I breathed in the mysterious, magic scent and almost fainted with excitement and wonder. I bent forward and kissed it, breathed it in some more and kissed more, more urgently kissing through the fabric until it was wet and her hands more tightly pulled me to her.
I didn't want to stop, and she could not, and so we moved down to the thick rug on the floor where placed a knee on either side of my head and lowered herself onto my face, still girdled and needful. The kissing continued until… I loved the violence of it at the end, knowing that she was going to come. And she did.
Then she knelt and freed my urgent need and did for me what I had done for her. She told me to lie relax and watch her, and I did. At least, I watched.
I would rather not tell all the details of what followed. Suffice it to say that we met and dined again and again, not only that day but on days that followed.
She fed my fantasies, then took them up and blew them away like bubbles, and replaced them with a very real and active relationship that lasted about six months. Why she chose me, I never really knew. Why someone so young? It was not for me to question.
It was only for me to show up. It was like going to a secret part of a hidden garden together. And she always wore one of her girdles, knowing that I would want it.
Until finally the day came when she left Georgetown because her father was sick and needed her. Somewhere up north. She had everything packed into her car and the trunk tied almost shut. She came by my house to say goodbye.
My parents wondered what it was about, but I only told them she was a friend. We did not kiss on the street. But she took my hand, and handed me an envelope with something in it like a shirt or a pair of socks. Somehow my parents did not ask me what it was.
Then she was gone and I went up to my room. I sat on the bed, opening the envelope.
It was my favorite girdle, the one with the pink satin and powernet, with white lace around the edge.
It was that first girdle.
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Orginally Posted April 20, 1997