Excerpt: Up the Trellis

Ivy Adams rarely wore pantyhose anymore. Who did? But the only clean skirt she could find was a little clingy and Ivy’s belly was more than a little bulgy. She was in need of some heavy duty control-top action. If her memory served correctly, there was a pair of nylons in the closet somewhere. She rummaged across the shelves, pushing aside rumpled scarves and dusty costume jewelry, peeking in empty shoe boxes and used gift bags. Frustrated, she turned her attention to the cluttered closet floor. Kicking through the dirty t-shirts and undies scattered around the overflowing hamper, she made a vow to do a load of laundry after work today. She wouldn’t be in this predicament now if only she’d tossed a pile of clothes in the washer during a commercial last night, for heaven’s sake!
In desperation, she ran from the closet toward the dresser on her side of the room. A big pair of undies! That would have to do! A big pair of undies might hold in the bulge. Ivy yanked open a drawer and ran her hand across the smooth inside. Dang it!! Why didn’t she ever put laundry away? This was crazy!! Frenzy growing, she glanced at the bedside alarm clock. Seven-fifteen! She had to leave in ten minutes and she wasn’t even dressed.
Aram’s underpants!! She would have to make do with a pair of borrowed briefs. Ivy dove onto the bed, rolled off the other side like a stuntman in a Jason Bourne movie and tore open Aram’s top dresser drawer. HE did his laundry in a timely fashion. HE folded and put away his clothing. His t-shirts were stacked and smoothed into neat piles. Well, at least they were when Ivy had yanked open the drawer. She left behind crumpled clothing carnage when she violently shoved the drawer closed and frantically ripped into another. Ivy felt a twinge of guilt as she did this but the first bell would ring at 8:25 and she couldn’t be seen by the principal slinking in only minutes before the students.
She gave up on another drawer and yanked open the bottom one. She was shocked but pleasantly surprised to find not only a whole arsenal of neatly folded men’s briefs but there, too, was the pair of missing pantyhose. Well, now she didn’t need the briefs, did she? She stood immediately and began to shuffle the sides of one nylon leg up into deep folds along both of her thumbs, then shoved her pointed toes in and slid the nylon up over ankle, calf and thigh. She repeated the action on the other side, this time while hopping back toward the bathroom to simultaneously brush her teeth and iron a top. Something was wrong. The pantyhose felt strange. They were not tight. She didn’t feel as if they were hugging her all over as pantyhose do. She glanced in the mirror. They were slightly baggy all over. It’s the weirdest thing, she thought to herself. But she had to hurry to get out of there in time.
As she squeezed Crest on to her toothbrush, something disturbing was pestering her in the very back of her brain. She didn’t have time to pay it any attention.
**

It was much later in the day when that thought came back to haunt her. During a math lesson. Twenty-four first graders were crowded around her feet. McKenna Scott was absently running her hand up and down Ivy’s ankle, fascinated by the texture of the pantyhose. Ivy was using a furry shark puppet to explain that the less than/greater than symbol always wants to eat the bigger number. Travis Jones had his red Transformers t-shirt pulled up over his skull, looking as if he were about to give a “back-by-popular-demand” repeat performance, live from his mother’s cervix.
Ivy paused with the shark puppet grinning foolishly in mid-air and said, “Travis, get your shirt off of your head. You’re going to stretch the neckline out.”
She caught her breath suddenly and the shark puppet stared at her, his jagged felt teeth agape, plastic bug eyes bulging out at her, amazed that she hadn’t put the many clues together before this.
Her new husband had been wearing her clothes.