So here I am, just minding my own business, folding yet another load of laundry and putting some clean underwear in my eight-year-old daughter's dresser drawer when this....THING caught my eye. A thong, to be exact. A black lace thong, with a tag that said "Sweet But Sexy."
I stood there probably a full minute looking at this thing, trying to wrap my mind around it. Ooookay. My eight year old doesn't wear thongs, much less black lace thongs. Hell, I'm doing well to get her into underwear, period (she's been known to go commando). My 12-year-old doesn't wear thongs. I sure as hell don't wear thongs. (I've always thought of them as butt floss, to tell you the truth.) My husband doesn't...well, okay, you never really know the person you're married to, but if he has some sparkly dresses and a few pair of high heels stashed away somewhere, over the course of 15 years and some pretty strenuous closet cleaning, I've never found 'em. Which leaves one possibility, right? The obvious one.
Nope. My husband would never do that. Tracy, a voice in my head says. If you lined up all the women whose husbands have wandered off the reservation and who said the same thing, they'd circle the globe. Oh, come off it, said my other self. You found this in your daughter's dresser, for pete's sake. This indicated to me that in fact my husband my PUT it there, since a) the kids have to be threatened at gunpoint before they will put away laundry and b) my husband's ability to detect whose panties belong to who around here is precisely nil. And what cheating husband stashes the evidence in his eight-year-old's dresser drawer?
Still. So I did what any normal, neurotic, middle-aged wife would do in this situation: I searched his dirty clothes hamper. No evidence. I went through his jeans pockets. Nuttin'. Not so much as a stray blonde hair, much less a lipstick-stained handkerchief or unfamiliar address.
In moments like these I go to my deepest, most inner self, the one who is connected to all the cosmic energy flows out there. I call her Perfect Tracy, because while she doesn't say much--in fact, our contact is very limited--she steers me right when she does talk. So I said, Perfect Tracy, what do you think?
Not your husband, she said. Yeah, I said. I didn't really think so, either.
So I stuck this black lace thong in my jeans pocket and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how in hell it had materialized in my eight-year-old daughter's dresser drawer. A playmate who'd spent the night? Maybe had mistakenly packed a piece of her mom's underwear...? Nope. Picturing any of the moms I know in a black lace thong was almost as bad as picturing myself in a black lace thong, and that made my eyes roll clear to the back of my skull. So what, then? Hmmm. Well, there was the playmate from down the street; she and my eight-year-old were back and forth to each other's houses all the time, and who knows what they may have been poking their noses into. And while I definitely didn't want to spend more than a nanosecond imaginging my neighbor in a black lace thong, it was safe to say that at least I could, fleetingly, without a SWAT team from the League of Decency rushing across the foreground of that mental image. But still: didn't seem likely. Besides: "Sweet but Sexy"? Kinda girlish for a married lady, don't you think? Then there was the church retreat my 12-year-old had been to the previous weekend. Maybe one of the girls in the dorm? Well....maybe. But, overall, the United Methodists are not known for their loyal patronage at Victoria's Secret, if you get my drift.
The day passed. I almost forgot about the black lace thong in my pocket, and then it was late afternoon--the time of day when the kids come in and dinner has to be gotten on the table, and the husband rushes home and the crisis du jour erupts, usually with screaming involved. I did forget about it, actually, for about an hour while I got things organized for supper, and then, just as we were all sitting down at the table, I felt this thing in my jeans pocket and pulled it out.
"Anybody here know where this came from?" I asked.
Pandemonium. "ARRRRGHHHH!" screamed my eight-year-old, covering her face. "EEEEEEEEKKK!" squealed my 12-year-old, while blushing furiously. "NOT ME," said my husband, with this look on his face that said, I know what you're thinking and don't even think about thinking it.
And right then it came to me: the babysitter. My husband and I had gone away for one night the previous weekend, just a quick get-away, and we'd asked our long-time babysitter to come spend the night with the girls. They'd had a blast--staying up late watching movies, cooking something or the other in the kitchen, just hanging out--and we'd come home to an immaculate house. It'd been great. But there was that one thing that slipped out from the eight-year-old, about how Nancy, I'll call her, had called her boyfriend from here, only he'd been busy and couldn't come over after all--a mention I'd decided not to pay attention to, because overall Nancy is extremely responsible and besides, she's practically an adult and it is not my job to inquire into her extracurricular activities unless they involve my kids, which this didn't. But would Nancy wear a black lace thong? Yeah, I could see that. It still didn't explain how it wound up in the laundry, but....what the hell. Must be Nancy. Yeah, that was probably it. But what now? Call Nancy's house and say to her mom, Oh by the way, when Nancy gets home from school today would you tell her she left a black lace thong at our house last weekend? There was absolutely nothing good that could come of that conversation. And what if Nancy said it wasn't hers? What then?
A few days later, I told this whole story to a group of moms over coffee. There was a silence when I got to the end of it, and then one of the moms, who I didn't know all that well, said, "You know, I think you ought to just throw that thing in the trash and move on down the road."
Good advice. And that's what I did.
