The Most Flattering of Girls Bathing Suits, Until You Got it Wet

by Olivia
(Orlando, FL, USA)

When I was fourteen years old, my family had plans to take a summer vacation in France, to visit with my mother's family.

Bathing suits would be needed, as one of her brothers lived on the French Riviera.

Much to my mother's somewhat questionable embarrassment and annoyance, I refused to go native in only a bottom, and insisted on at least the minimal coverage that American girls bathing suits afforded.

I didn't care what anyone else was wearing, because I was self-conscious about MY body, not theirs.

We finally compromised on a string, triangle-top bikini made by Catalina, which I am quite certain, had my mother not been obsessing over, not sticking out like a sore thumb, I would not have been allowed to get NEAR, let alone WEAR.

I mean, it wasn't so much a girls bathing suit as a girl's set of unsown patches. The small pieces of fabric were yellow with a black pattern of small-scale leopard-print and the edging and strings were black.

It would have been quite sexy if it wasn't on a scrawny 14 year old. Nevertheless, it was shaped for a girl who knows perfectly well that she is only pretending to have already developed breasts, so I was able to get away with it.

Being able to get away with it, without embarrassing myself changed the first time I was swimming with my cousins.

When I discovered that the strings holding the top of my bathing suit on at my back and the back of my neck, did not stay in their (I thought it would be enough) double-knotted bows, once they got wet.

Those wet strings might as well have been oiled snakes, and there was no holding them into a position only you intended.

Or, perhaps I should say that they were like water snakes, because that top sure got away from me quickly, once it came off.

My mother was delighted that now I would be forced to get over my cultural foible about what an appropriate girls bathing suit was. I, on the other hand, was humiliated.




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