Is there anyone else in Austin who sees ghosts on Main Street? I don’t mean Halloween ghosts or even the dead people kind. I mean the building kind of phantoms; apparitions of old businesses and the doppelganger crowds who frequented them. Why, on a Friday night our city’s main drag used to vibrate with activity! That’s because the stores stayed open until 9 p.m. Husbands were home and the housewives finally had their chance at the family car. It took them straight to Main Street.

The 1940s and ‘50s were good to us and we passed that vitality onto the businesses. Wallace’s was one of them. You could tell by the zinging of their mechanical doohickeys that streaked across the store every time a sale was made. I envied the clerks being able to show off like that. And for folks who shied away from math, well, they could work there, too because the only one who did any arithmetic was the person entombed in that vault on the second floor.

Ask yourself, did you ever see who that mysterious cashier was up there in Wallace’s clouds? I just knew he/she was showing off big time. And why not? He/she was Command Central. I can still see those tinny canisters zipping across Wallace’s walls and ceiling, always precisely directed onto the right tracks. It got your attention alright. Makes me wonder if the banks copied Wallace’s speeding trajectories for they use the same idea now minus the gallantry of rising and falling two full stories. Also makes me wonder about drones. Were Wallace’s capsules the forerunners? Imagine how the free-spirited drones of today would pity their early cousins being tethered to those metal arteries. Poor doohickeys!

Wallace’s was the site of my first ever world’s-most-embarrassing moment. When I was 13, I decided I needed a bra. Actually, bandaids would have done the job, but what girl wanted to be seen in the locker room wearing two pieces of tape stuck to her chest?

I thought my sister, at the sophisticated age of 15, knew everything in the Western World. In particular, the bra Western World. Thus, I went to her for counsel. The name Mary gave me was Bestform. Boy, did that sound impressive! I was on it like ants on a ham sandwich!

On Day Zero, I practiced the word Bestform all the way from our house to Wallace’s, a mile walk away. “Bestform, Bestform, Bestform,” I repeated so it would casually slip off my tongue when the clerk asked. No way was I going to appear like a bra dope.

We entered Wallace’s. The clerks there were sensible. Sensible ladies in girdles. One spotted us and made a bee line across the lingerie department. (Translated: “Lingerie” at Wallace’s meant Warner’s fortified long-line corsets and knit undershirts.)

Unnerved to the max, the moment of truth was upon me. What I did in the next moment would seal my teenage fate. Trying my 13-year-old best to look polished, I opened my mouth. “I’d like to buy a … a … bra. A … Bustform.”

A what? Oh, my gosh! I’d just said “bust!” Out loud! At that moment I prayed the floor beneath me would open up and swallow me whole. How could I go on living? I’d spoken that word in public! And to make matters worse, I wasn’t even sure Presbyterians were allowed to say it.

Is there a term stronger than “mortified?” And is there anything more pathetic than an adolescent trying to not be an adolescent?

The clerk gave me one of her syrupy understanding looks and gestured over to a counter. Behind it was a wall of boxes. I’d never seen anything like it. It looked like the Berlin Bestform Wall.

Then she professionally eye-balled my chest, an excruciating experience, searing into my tender psyche. Then as gracefully as a woman in a fortified Warner’s long-line corset could be, she climbed upon a ladder up, up, up to the very top rung. That’s where size 00 was kept. (I knew if she handed me a Johnson and Johnson Bandaid box, I would die on the spot!)

She didn’t. Instead she opened the Bestform box and pulled out something that looked like a harness. “Would I like to try it on?” she inquired. You’ve got to be kidding, I was thinking. Here in this public place? Such an event could only be carried out in the privacy of my own bathroom—with the door locked and bolted!

I paid for it, sending the steel trajectory up and over our heads, disappearing into the supernatural depository in the sky. Minutes later, like a miniature Amtrack engine, it returned with my receipt. With parcel in hand, Mary and I walked the mile home.

I wasn’t sure how I felt. Certainly victorious over achieving my delicate mission, but at the same time feeling the wretched degradation of inadvertently switching those vowels. Who knew the power of a simple “u” could so alter my life? Holy cow! Was all of pubescence going to be like this? Maybe I should just freeze-frame my life.

At home I looked around. My brothers were nowhere in sight. Good! I’d have the bathroom to myself. I rushed inside, fortifying the locks behind me like some CIA agent on a clandestine operation. If it hadn’t been bolted to the floor, I would have pulled the bathtub in front of the door.

It was High Drama City when I opened the box and pulled the “thing” out. What a contraption! I could understand the two straps, but what were those rigid cup-like things? Were they supposed to cover some part of me? And did I have any parts like that? Laying the twin peaks across the sink, I was shocked to see them standing on their own like twin pyramids. At their bases tight stitching circled around and around in maddening revolutions, spiraling up in incrementally smaller circles to eventual sharp points. I was pretty sure my body didn’t have any sharp points. I looked. It didn’t.

Gingerly, I slipped it on. I can tell you it was no easy trick fastening the thing in the back. And, how dumb was a design that required me to contort myself so? Clearly, I’d have to practice that maneuver. Then huffing and puffing, I finally felt the job was done. I looked in the mirror.

Where was I? Only minutes before a slim 13-year-old girl had been there. Now I was looking at Brunhilda, the royal Visigoth bride! The only thing missing was her horns and shield! For crying out loud, I was wearing Brunhilda’s bra … minus the hand-crafted bronze. (Wallace’s probably didn’t even carry that model.) Talk about stupefication! Talk about how was I going to exit this bathroom wearing this flumadidle thingumabob? Talk about despair.

It was a guarantee my brothers would have the time of their lives ridiculing my new figure. Left with only two alternatives I could bite the bullet and be mocked and decried by them (my own living flesh who were supposed to support me through trials and tribulations, even though they were my trials and tribulations!), or become an instant hump-backed, conspicuously slumped-over teenager for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t like I could poke in the points on the peaks of the promontories. No, that would leave twin dents looking exactly like dormant volcanoes. And just how were those, I’d like to know, going to look under a sweater?

The truth is that in order to live a normal contented life thereafter, I have blocked the experience. Only Paul Harvey knows the rest of the story for it was too much for me to handle. Any girl going through puberty should not be given more than her plate can handle. Bustform caused mine to spill over. I’m not sure what the cost of my ensuing therapy was, but I’ll bet it was expensive. Bustform should have paid!