Short and Stocky

Dan had a business proposition.

"Grace! I have an idea!" Such enthusiasm, such enthusiasm. He rarely gets that excited about something that's not a perfectly-rare, disgustingly-bloody restaurant steak.

"OK, you know how you don't fit into any clothes? What if, if you had more money and more people skills, you started your own clothing store? You could call it Short And Stocky. You could even get Chevy to market the Short and Stocky Built-Like-A-Truck line!"

I didn't speak to him for at least three days.

But he does have a point (kinda). I really am built like a truck. I have wide shoulders, wide thighs, wide hips, wide calves, and wide feet. I was created in the mold of my Italian peasant ancestors, who were all short and stocky and wide and did hard work in the fields all day long. I am not fat, I am just thick and very dense (physically, just so we are completely clear on the implications of that word). I am short, my legs are short and my arms are short. In short (how funny I am!), I live in clothing hell.

In order for me to not look like I am totally drowning in my clothing, I need to shop in the petite section. The pants kinda fit me, the shirts kinda fit me, and I can sometimes get away with not looking like a hobo. But I have two major beefs with the petite consumer assumptions that the overlords of the petite clothing sweatshops dictate upon us all from up high. When I shop for petite clothing, I am expected to fall into one of two types of petite consumers.

First, there's the petite grandma section. Since the population is getting taller as the years go by, and since older people generally shrink a few inches when they start getting up there, designers and Yemeni production line employees both assume that if you're five feet tall, you must be over the age of fifty. Department stores are especially guilty of this particular urban myth. Poor little me has spent many hours desperately scouring stores for basic long-sleeved tees that are not three inches too long at the bottom and not two inches too long at the wrists, and all I can see are racks upon racks upon racks of sweatshirts that say things like "I Love My Grandkids" and "Proud Grandma" and "No One Spoils Kids Like A Grandma" and "My Grandkids Think I'm Awesome". It's almost like the store is trying to tell me something about the years I have left on this earth.

And it's no better when I try to find some basic jeans. We've all heard of mom jeans, but there are grandma jeans out there that nobody ever talks about because even grandmas are too ashamed to admit that they voluntarily purchased grandma jeans. While mom jeans can be baggy, have weird washes, and are otherwise not fashion-forward, grandma jeans push the envelope even further, sporting elastic waistbands and created out of material that's not actually jean but comfort pseudo-jean. And they actually want my money for this stuff. Dude, I am not going to pay you thirty dollars of my own money to be the laughingstock of my twenty-something cohort. Besides, that's like four or five meals at McDonald's.

And then there's the petite hott skinny section, commonly found at short-and-stocky-unfriendly stores like Banana Republic and Loft. I can seriously walk into a store and tell you how I'm going to fail to fit into their clothing by the type of music that's playing. Is it breathy hott girl music with twangy guitars and a message? My stomach has way too much bulge for those shirts, thank you very much. Because if you're not a petite grandma, you must be a petite fashion-forward Asian with a metabolism exponentially greater than mine or a petite hott skinny babe who lives on weight-loss shakes, salad, and Chobani. And because petite hott skinny people are perfectly proportionate and beautiful, just a scad shorter than the rest of us humans, they fit beautifully into thirty-inch inseam Addie or Madison or Jackson pants or whatever trendy naming scheme Banana Republic is currently marketing to its hott consumer base. But I confess: I don't fit into the petite hott skinny clothes, but I keep trying on those stupid Madison trousers in the hope that I have magically become hott and skinny in the previous six weeks.

But let's be real. I'm not a grandma. I have too much pride to wear grandma jeans. Loft Sunwashed tees have a neckline that hits around my ankles and shrink in three dryer cycles. Madison trousers threaten to rip at the thigh every time I try them on.

So what to do?

Well, there's always a tailor. That's what I usually end up doing with my jeans. I spend a couple months looking for a style that doesn't fall off my non-existent waist to rest upon my more-existent hips and then slog half a mile down Easton Avenue to the drycleaners. Then I try to communicate my specifications to the Chinese lady who owns the place and hope that she doesn't try to chat me up in Mandarin because my last name is Huang. Twelve bucks a pop for making my normal petite jeans Grace petite jeans rankles me, but at least it's a fix.

There's always places like Ross and TJMaxx. Every once in a while, malformed clothing finds its way into a TJMaxx and somehow happens to fit me. I once found some nice Donna Karan jeans at Ross that fit me perfectly. Once I wore them to pieces, I made a point to go over to the Donna Karan outlet store and ask where I could find those jeans.

"Oh," apologized the hott skinny petite cashier. "Sometimes our clothing rejects end up in close-out stores. You probably bought a pair of jeans that was made incorrectly."

Crud.

There's always three-quarter length shirts. These shirts are not too long on my arms, but then again, the sleeve length makes my arms look even shorter than they already are. But at least it's something.

And there's always other options. Like that time my mom gave me some hand-me-downs from a friend of hers. There was a plain grey t-shirt in the mix that fit me perfectly. I needed more. I asked my mom if she had been told the size of the shirt, since the tag was no longer attached. And once again my hopes and dreams of becoming fashionable were dashed to the ground: the shirt had originally belonged to my mom's friend's eleven-year-old son.

Crud.

So the search continues to this very day. At least I only have twenty-two more years until I could probably get away with faking my procreative abilities with "I Love My Grandma" cozy sweatshirts.