Never ask a question unless you're sure you want to know the answer.The affair of the strange pair of underwear began one recent Saturday morning as I was sorting through the laundry. I had dumped all the
contents of several hampers in order to sort the clothes and found an unknown pair of panties. When the person who buys the clothes and does the laundry doesn't recognize underwear, something is amiss.
Of
course my children have friends who sleep over all the time, so finding a foreign pair of panties would normally not bother me in the least. But we'd had no houseguests in the past weeks and these were
flowery and in a size much too small for me and too large for my daughter. These were strange and suspicous underpants.
My husband, who sauntered into the kitchen for a drink of water, didn't even
react when I showed him the panties.
"I wonder where these came from?" I asked, holding them aloft.
"Search me. Did we have any pizza left over from last night?"
That ruled him out. I've
seen guilt on my husband's face before, like the time he forgot our anniversary and I casually wished him a happy one halfway through dinner. He's easier to read than a pre-school primer. There aren't too
many men who, when confronted with a strange pair of women's underwear, would continue to root in the refrigerator for food. And I was able to rule out my son by default since he's at an age where girls and
everything associated with them are considered "icky". That left my daughter and, much to my embarassment, she promptly solved the mystery.
It all started when Elizabeth was invited to a sleepover at a
friend's house. As she was preparing her stuffed animals and pajamas for the trip, she asked whether I attended sleepovers way back at the dawn of time when I was a little girl. I told her I did. And what
did you do at sleepovers, Mom?
The truth of the matter is we did anything but sleep and pulled some pretty silly practical jokes involving the telephone and the refrigerator, just to name one. Naturally, I
didn't tell her this. I want her to do as I say, not as I did. So I reached back in my memory to my childhood, which my children believe is located somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the first
World War, and told a mild truth: we used to freeze each other's underwear. I told her how we would wait up and then, when the others caved in and went to sleep, we'd put their underwear in the freezer.
Don't ask me why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time.
When I picked up Elizabeth the day after the sleepover, I asked the hostess's mother how things had gone. Fine, she told me. Except they
wouldn't go to bed. They were waiting for someone to fall asleep so they could put her underwear in the freezer. It created a dramatic stand-off.
"I finally put a stop to it by telling them they'd better
not put any underwear in my freezer," she said as I tried to wipe the guilty look off my face. My daughter eventually cleared up the circumstances surrounding the strange panties: her friend had loaned her a
pair in the event hers were frozen, so she'd have something to wear home.
I've confessed my role in the underwear escapade to the other mother and I'm sending the panties back where they belong. I'm not
sure I want to know what she thinks of me. But it could have been much worse, you know.
I could have told Elizabeth about how we would wait until the others fell asleep and put their hands in a
dish of warm water to make them wet the bed.
