Ch Ch Ch Changes!

Sarah and I climb into her 10year old Prius and drive to the La Encantada mall, far up on Tucson’s northwest side. I’m still armored in my sweats and hoodie, though Sarah warns me that after we are done shopping she’s taking all my old clothing home with her and will only return items she thinks are appropriate to my new body.

As we are driving up there I get a text from an unknown number, “Hi, I’m Sadie. Dr. Finch gave me your number and thought we might have something important in common. I won’t text again unless I hear from you. Just know that everything will be OK! :)” My eyes grow wide at the message and it makes me feel really good to see it. I tell Sarah about it as we drive.

“Dr. Finch is the best. Honestly, she’s helped me with a lot more than my annual coochie check!”

“Really? You call your va-jay-jay a coochie?” I ask… mocking her.

“You just called it a va-jay-jay! Why not call it a coochie? It’s cute, non-threatening, and not at all sexy.” Sarah replies as we turn into the mall entrance and she starts to look for parking.

“Fair enough. You think I should text this Sadie chick back?” I’m not sure, so I’m hoping Sarah will support me.

“Fer sure, Aussie. I can tell you about how to take care of your new stuff, and help you with dating stuff and clothes, but I haven’t had the experiences you have, and I’m betting Sadie can help you with that.” She says as she slides into a spot.

I quickly dash off a text… “Hi Sadie. I’m Austin. At least I was. Could we meet sometime soon for coffee, maybe down on fourth avenue?”

I’m reaching for the door handle when Sarah stops me. “No.. I’m sorry. You can’t keep wearing that hoodie for even another minute Aussie! It’s ninety-eight-fucking-degrees out there and you actually look really good without it on. So off with it!” She seems pretty serious.

I look at her… twisting my lips into a knot as I struggle with the notion of being in public and being readily identifiable as a woman. “Ok… but you have got to be close the entire time. I have no idea of how to act as a woman!”

She starts to laugh, “oh, that’s right, god-damn, you didn’t get to take the class in high school that the rest of us took… ‘how to be a woman’! It’s really too bad, you’d have learned the secret handshake and everything!” She gestures for me to take off the hoodie.

I fake groan and pull it off. I’m wearing an old Wilco tee-shirt that used to fit me really well, but when I stand up outside the car I can feel that it’s a bit tight over my breasts and because of that it shows off a bit of my belly. It also hangs out, away from my belly as my breasts push it away from me. Sarah looks at me in the bright Tucson sun, a smile comes to her lips.

“Damn girl!” she winks, “you got some nice ol’ titties!” She takes me by the hand and we walk into the mall, after I slip my old wallet in the back pocket of my sweats, as I’d done a million times as a guy. I’ve noticed how my boobs giggle when I walk, and to be honest had pretty much gotten used to it, but that was when they were more confined and weighed down by the heavy cloth of my hoodies. Now with only the light tee on I can feel them moving quite a bit. Sarah clearly notices this as well.

“Ok, first stop is Soma Intimates. If we don’t strap those babies down we’re going to end up needing to use a baseball bat to keep the men off you!” As hard as this is to contemplate for me I agree. The pearl of male awareness awakens inside my mind reminding me of those occasions when I’d pass a woman who wasn’t wearing a bra and how my attention was completely captivated by the movement of her breasts.

We walking into the store and Sarah tells the wise looking lady who greets us that I need to be fitted for a bra as my ‘weight’ has changed a bit recently. I almost laugh out loud at that, thinking that it’s completely true. My chest never weighed anything before three weeks ago and now I’ve got several pounds of boob there. She takes me back into the fitting rooms and pulls out her tape measure, finding my ‘band’ size to be a 36, and after a bit more assessment declares me to have c-cup breasts. I’m a 36c! Not that it means anything to me.

She’s about to go and get a bra for me to try on but pauses, “Will you be wanting any panties today?”

I nod. “Oh, yah… I will.”

The assistant pulls the tape across my hips at their widest point. “36 as well.” She pauses and looks at my tummy, and I notice that my boxers are peeking up just a bit over the top of my sweats.

“ummm. My apartment got broken into and some perv took all of mine and left me with a bunch of his old boxers!” I lie.

“Fucking perverts!” Sarah chimes in, the assistant laughs, and goes out to find the lingerie for me.

She brings me a white, pretty ‘balconette’ bra that she says is supportive, pretty, and very comfortable. I nod as though its the bra I’ve been looking for my entire life while Sarah pushes me into a changing booth, telling the the sales assistant “She has anxiety problems when she’s alone, so I’m helping her out.”

She draws the curtain behind us and looks at me, “well, you certainly have grown a pair. Off with the shirt dude, let’s get you fitted.” I pull off my tee shirt and my ‘girls’ are on display.

I hold up the bra, aligning the ins and outs of it with my body and slide the straps over my shoulder, pulling the cups down over my breasts. I try to reach back to hook the strap and quickly realize that this is so much harder than women make it look. The pearl of my maleness laughs at me mockingly, ‘you could barely unhook them when you looked over a girl’s shoulder!’ I keep fiddling with it for a long while, Sarah looking at me and finding it increasingly difficult to stifle the laughter about ready to burst from her.

“Listen, it’s a skill, you’ll need to practice and it’ll become second nature soon enough. For now, just do it this way.” She takes the bra from me, pulls the band around her chest (but over her shirt), with the cups behind her so that she can look down and see the hooks, fastens them, spins the bra around her body, and then slides her breasts into the cups and then her arms into the straps.

“Ta da!” Sarah bows like a circus escape artist.

“This is exactly why I need you in my life Sarah!” I smile, performing the same feat on my chest and voila, after living 25 years as a man, I’ve got my new boobs in a bra!

The assistant speaks to us through the drawn curtain. “How’s it fitting, may I take a look?”

In for a dime… I open the curtain and stand in front of the diminutive woman who is helping me. She quickly adjusts the straps and I feel my breasts sort of elevate and lift up a bit, it’s not at all unpleasant. She tugs on the band and seems satisfied. “Well, it certainly fits you well, though with your figure I think you could make cinder blocks work for you.” She winks at me and I smile back.

“I’ll take it. Perhaps I should get another one, maybe for like special occasions?” I look at Sarah questioningly.

Sarah nods, and the assistant replies, “I think that’s a great idea! I have the perfect one in mind! I’ll be right back.”

She returns to us quickly, handing me another bra, though this one is black and doesn’t have any straps. “This is my personal favorite, though strapless means that it works best on women with firm breasts that ride higher on their chests. It’s our ‘Halo Lace Strapless’ and I think it’ll look fabulous on you!”

Sarah pulls me into the changing room and I fiddle again, this time trying to remove the first bra. I have no luck and have to get Sarah to help me or we’ll be here forever. Once removed i do the putting-it-on-backwards trick and slide myself into this lacy garment. I look at myself in the mirror and smile. It looks good on me, really good and I’m actually kinda enjoying this experience.

Sarah shakes her head, “For fucks sake. You’ve been a girl for three fucking weeks and already you got better tits than me!”

“I guess I finally grew a pair!” I say, as I put on the first, strapped bra, and put my tee on over it. We walk back to the assistant.

“I’ll take them both. Is it ok if I just wear one home?”

She nods, “Of course. I’ve found these panties for you. As you know, you can’t try them on, but if one doesn’t fit, then just bring them all back, unworn, and we can exchange them.” She hands me a stack of five panties from the “hipster” line in various colors. I’m amazed at how light and airy they feel in my hands – years of living in boxers or men’s briefs had led me to believe that underwear’s primary quality should be durability – not comfort.

Sarah suggests I look for a nice dress for when we go out for dinner or to a bar, so I look around the shop, finally finding a quintessential little black dress that the assistant refers to as a ‘yummy smoothing dress’ and finds that I fit into the medium size almost perfectly. When I go to the fitting room I quickly remove my clothes, including the old boxers I’m wearing and slip into a pink pair of the new panties. I then slip into the dress and exit the booth to look at myself in the big wrap-around mirror in the fitting area I’m shocked – truly shocked at how much my body has changed. I look amazing and am not at all surprised when the pearl of maleness whispers into my psyche, ‘I’d totally tap that!’. I roll my eyes at the boorish nature of my male-pearl and somewhat happily throw the boxers into the trash. So I’ve got the beginnings of my new wardrobe when we walk out of the store about $300 lighter.

We start to stroll through the mall, chatting about the clothes I’ve just bought and what else I need. Sarah says, “You’ll need a pair of heels with that dress, but we need to find the right pair. If we put you in any heel that is remotely sexy or elegant I’m sure you’ll break your ankle trying to walk in them. Let’s try Anthropolgie, they’ve got a great selection.”

We walk into the store and I’m sorta overwhelmed by all the shoes they are peddling to assist in helping women feel attractive. In my few years as an adult man I’d never worn anything beside hiking style shoes, although I did have a nice pair of wingtips for special occasions, I never really wore them. So when I see a wall full of shoes that vary in every conceivable way I whisper to Sarah, “What the absolute fuck are you doing to me?”

“Don’t worry, I already see the pair you need. They’ll be perfect and they are short enough that you can think of them as training heels.” She smirks at me… elbows me, “Get it… training HEELs.. like training wheels?”

I sigh in exasperation. Sarah is having so much fun though, and I’m sorta delighting in how close we are becoming through this entire process. She calls the assistant in the shoe department over and points to a pair that the assistant describes as ‘jam heeled sandals’. The assistant measures my feet after I remove the ratty hiking shoes and dirty white tube socks, both of which are too big for me now. Both the assistant and Sarah shake their heads in disbelief.

The shoes Sarah picked look like very simple black sandals, with two simple narrow straps and heels that are just shy of 3″ tall. As the assistant slides them on to my feet I see her sorta frown when she sees my toe nails. I instantly realize that I’ve been taking care of them the way I always had.. cutting back the nails with the tiny, dull scissors on an old Swiss Army knife my grandmother had given me years ago. I then think about any of the rare moments in my life when I’ve noticed a woman’s nails and realize that I’m not passing this particular test at all.

With the shoes now on my feet, the assistant asks me to stand and I do so, feeling like I’m about to pitch forward on them as my weight gets distributed differently with my heels almost 3″ higher than my toes. I grab Sarah’s shoulder to steady myself and pray that I won’t have to walk in them. Naturally, the next thing the assistant says is, “Why don’t you walk around a bit, they look great and seem to fit you perfectly.”

“Umm… can you give my friend and me a moment?” I ask, smiling and trying to be nonchalant about this new task. She nods and attends to another customer.

“I’m going to break my ankle Sarah! It feels like my boobs and butt are all pushed out and i’m so off balance!”

“Woah girl. Slow down. Take a deep breath and I’ll coach you through this. And be glad that I didn’t put you in those!” She adds, pointing to a pair of heels with what is probably 5″ of lift and a surface area on the heel that’s probably about the size of a dime. “So, take very very short steps, keep your weight over your feet, and hold my arm.”

I take my first, tentative step and my ankle wobbles over the heel. I’m gripping her arm so tightly she has to touch my hand to remind me that she’s breakable. “By the way doofus… they are supposed to make your butt and boobs more prominent. That’s the entire point!”

“I feel like I”m as tall as I used to be!” I smile as I take another step.

“You actually seem taller… you’re probably closer to 5’11” now!” Sarah replies, prying my hand from her forearm. “Try a few on your own.”

I do, my ankles threatening to go sideways with each feeble step. I manage to walk a short loop around a display stand and enjoy falling onto the chair, my ankles unbroken.

“I need to practice walking too? Who’d have thunk I’d be learning basic skills at this point in my life?” I ask rhetorically.

Sarah and I plot for a moment and decide that the heels will make a great pair of going-out shoes for me. As I’m removing the sandals I see the coolest pair of pink Dr. Martens on the shelf – they are labeled as ‘Oxford Flats’ and look a bit like the old wing-tips I had, but are clearly a woman’s shoe. I try those on and decide to continue wearing them barefoot, asking the assistant to throw out the old hikers and tube socks I’d been wearing.

“Do we need anything else here Sarah?”

“Oh Aussie, you need soooo much more.” She scans the store and pulls me towards a selection of one-piece outfits labeled ‘rompers’ – something I thought was a clothing item exclusively for children, but apparently not. She points to a manikin wearing a dark green romper that is fashioned a bit like a vest on top and shorts on the bottom. “Wouldn’t this be perfect for when you are shooting in the desert? And you can just buy a few cheap, matching tank-tops to wear under it.”

So we find one of those that fits and continue our spree. I end up finding a several different casual outfits there, spending more than $500. So when we walk out of Anthropolgie I can claim to have a decent, albeit incredibly small wardrobe. Sarah tells me that I’ll need to spend time at Buffalo Exchange, a used clothing place in town, to further expand my wardrobe. I’m wearing the dark green romper now with a tight-fitting, pink tank top on underneath, and the Dr. Martens with a pair of newly purchased pink ankle socks.

Sarah glances at her watch and tells me that she has a surprise for me, but that the appointment isn’t for about an hour, and suggests that we go get a glass of wine and hang out till then at the Italian restaurant in the mall. I agree quickly. The experience of shopping for me has been a bit overwhelming – my modus operandi for clothes shopping until now had been a trip to REI or the Summit Hut, with occasional internet orders when I couldn’t find what I needed. What makes shopping now particularly difficult for me is that I don’t really know what suits me as a woman, what I like, or even how to use some stuff (like bras and heels) and trying to figure all that stuff out ‘on the fly’ extracts considerable energy.

Multiple bags in hand we parade into the Italian restaurant and ask for drink service on the patio. Though it’s only about 3pm there are quite a few people around and the day is beautiful. The waiter who serves us is about our age, tall, thin, and bearded, presenting himself as ‘Roy’. He takes our drink order and seems exceedingly friendly when we ask him a few questions about the appetizers. When he leaves Sarah punches me in the arm!

“Did you freakin’ see that Aussie?” She exclaims.

“Ummm… see what?”

“Roy was soooo checking you out. Totally looked you up and down the entire time he was here, and all the smiles and agreeing with you about everything!”

I contemplate that for a moment. I hadn’t even noticed his behavior, though I had sorta registered his face as being attractive. “Really? He was flirting with me? I had no clue Sarah.”

“Oh my god, Girl! You are going to have to start paying attention, if for no other reason than to be safe. I mean I’ve been aware of the way men look at me since I got my boobs at age 12 so I’m pretty practiced at noticing. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do!” She pauses, then asks with some glee, “Did you like him?”

“Errrr… well, he has a handsome face. I’m not sure I would say I like him. Do you? Would you give him your number if he asked?”

I’m realizing that my threshold for being interested in a potential romantic partner has changed too. When I was a guy, if a woman met my minimal standards for attractiveness and paid even a bit of attention to me I’d try to move ahead and get her number, ask for a date, or up my flirting with her. Now however, I’m not feeling like the waiter’s appearance and pleasant demeanor are enough for me to want to flirt with him. I wonder if he is a kind person, if he’s intending to be a waiter for the rest of his life, if he treats puppies well.

Sarah responds, “Me? No. He’s a beanpole and way too far away from downtown where we live. He’s cute, but honestly cute is easy to find. Plus, it was very clear that he’s into you, not me.”

He brings our drinks and an order of bruschetta. I try to take more notice of the way he interacts with me and am surprised to see just how astute Sarah’s observations were. Roy is completely checking me out and smiling a lot more than he needs to. He’s vociferous in his desire to accommodate any of my requests or needs. Now that I see him the way that Sarah sees him, I find the age-old flirtation to be endearing, flattering, and just a bit humorous – was I so obvious when I was a guy; is this just how guys need to be to get noticed?

We enjoy the wine and food, ordering second glasses that are delivered more quickly than I’d ever been served before. Sarah asks Roy for the check and when he comes back he tells us that the appetizer is gratis – I notice Sarah roll her eyes as she takes the check away from where he’d placed it in front of me.

“Wow… quite an attempt by Roy, eh?” She says after he walks away. “Look, he’s even given you his phone number on the check! And comping our appi? Good grief! I’m going to have to hang out with you every time I want free food!”

“Ok, pack up Sista… we’ve got a date at the spa!” She says, gathering our things after leaving him a nice tip of the good Doctor’s cash, but also making sure that I see her wad up the check and toss it onto the dishes. “You’ve gotta make them work a bit harder Aussie. The easier you make it for them, the more they expect from you, especially at the beginning.”

“Spa? Really?” I ask, wondering what sort of esoteric feminine stuff I’ll be learning about there.

“Yep! You need to do something with those nails of yours, clean up your face, and get a hair cut. While you’ve got some seriously good building blocks, but you are about as polished as a manhole cover.” She laughs at her own joke.

“Seriously? A manhole cover?” I ask, lumbering along beside her in my Dr. Martens and feeling quite nicely attired.

“Yah, don’t get used to it. This place is expensive but you need a good start as you are like… 13years behind me on being a hot girl.” She winks at me, touches her thumb to her tongue briefly, then touches her thumb to her bottom and makes a sizzling sound. “And be serious, you can’t wear your hair in a pony tail for the rest of your life. It’s way too thick and curly to be hidden like you are doing.”