Return to
Bust Out Magazine Home Page

Too Too Perfect

by Taylor Teegarden

She wore the perfect stockings, this petite twentysomething dappled blonde. Her scruff-cut hair was caught here and there in enameled butterfly clips. The effect was not unlike some perky little terriers you see tucked under the arms of perky petite blonde twenty-somethings.

We picked up our latte orders at the same time, but she was hauling umpty-ump pounds fewer than I and walked faster toward the entrance to the bus center in San Rafael. Not everyone her age could pull off the jeans jacket with the burgundy skirt. I mean this skirt had a scalloped oversewn hem, the end of the bolt. It’s the fabric they used to make slips out of in the fifties. Only this was burgundy, stitched in white. Way not the fifties.

I had a hard time keeping up with her. Usually I look at what kind of shoes people are wearing when they walk at that quickquickquick pace, hopping up the step, down the curb. But it was her legs that fascinated me. Centered on both shapely calves were incredibly straight stocking seams. Tattooed stocking seams. From the crease of the back of the knee to the top of the ankle —an inky-blue seam that began in a flourish at the bottom and ended in a flourish at the top.

Or was it the top? There were no garters evident, tattooed or real. Was that the point? I wondered if this was the new tease. Would she rest her foot on some man’’s thigh, inviting him to remove the stockings? What would he do when he found no garter there? Would there be other, more private garments to be removed that also were not there? Would she walk the walk that she was inviting?

My latte froth had deflated. The twentysomething got on the #78 toward the City. This is now, but I wondered about then, forty years from now, how those stocking seams would look walking the walk of a sixtysomething-year-old.