In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)
January 31, 2025
Image credit: homegets
Bra Shopping
By Dawn Tasaka Steffler
It’s your 23rd birthday, and I suggest a girls’ lunch at the fancy mall, followed by an afternoon of shopping. We hug when you arrive, and I gush over your loose, beachy waves, as gorgeous as any white girl on TikTok. You give me a bashful smile. Once we’re seated, you tell me how classes are going, and your hands play with the silverware. You’ve painted your nails a blue that’s almost black, and the polish is chipped and growing out at the cuticles. The server approaches with our cocktails. “Enjoy your lunch, ladies,” she says, and your brows arch with pleasure. Over the rim of your glass, you wink. See?
You want to be a woman so badly.
After lunch, we roam the mall. The rarified air smells of perfume, pressed powder, and shoe leather. While going through the racks at Anthropologie, you sidle up so close our purses touch and ask in a low voice if I can help you buy a bra; your current ones are from Amazon, and they’re falling apart after just a few washes.
I know exactly where to take you. My mother took me to Nordstrom for my first bra, and I had taken your sister. The diffused light of the dressing room, the gentle hands of the sales lady as the tape measure barely skims the body, the soft knock on the dressing room door when she delivers a heap of lace and cotton—you would probably think you’d died and gone to heaven.
But when we get off the escalator, I am confronted with reality: too few sales ladies handling too many customers, everyone middle-aged and white. No one here will want to fit you. So, I pivot: I guestimate your size, select some pretty bras, and lead you to the fitting room. Thankfully, you don’t see the sales lady’s face—perplexed at first, and then disapproving—when I’m the one taking a seat on the sofa and you’re the one entering the dressing room. You don’t see her freeze and stare at your closed door. I lean back and cross my arms. When the sales lady turns around, I raise my eyebrows and tilt my head at her: Do you have a problem with my daughter?
Two weeks ago, while I was washing dishes, you approached me, your anxiety high. “Do you think when people see me, they see a woman?” And you lengthened your neck, pulled your shoulders back, and turned your chin this way and that. I tried to de-focus my eyes, to see only the features, not the face. But I couldn’t not see the toddler-little boy-teenager-young man I’ve known my whole life. And you said, “It’s okay, Mom. I understand.”
While I wait, I pop a piece of gum, and the bright mint swirls in my sinuses, clearing out the last of the heavy olives and garlic we had at lunch. I’m suddenly exhausted and feeling sorry for how I behaved with the sales lady, who probably doesn’t earn much over minimum wage. I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wall. I know this isn’t my fight. But you’re only becoming more sensitive, more soft-spoken. And this world likes to break fragile things.
In the background, I hear the sales lady knocking on doors and checking on her customers. I notice she doesn’t knock on yours. I am about to text you to see what’s taking so long when you emerge from the room with a disappointed shrug and leave the ill-fitting bras behind.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the October 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award, and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 long list. Her work appears in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Iron Horse Literary Review, Moon City Review, and more. She is working on a collection that explores the challenges and joys of parenting transgender kids. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler.