The run begins at the toe. Maybe pantyhose were invented for women who don’t have toenails, or maybe the girls missed some vital pantyhose tutorial, but there is not a single pair that lasts more than a couple of wears without tearing. A little nylon ladder to the ankle, or back around the heel. The knee, occasionally, especially if worn to church. The girls don’t know the clear nail polish trick, because nobody here wears nail polish. Except for that one summer when the younger ones stayed with a relative for a week. They came home with candy pink polish on their little chewed hands and the mother said it was poison. The girls tried to stop biting but mouth habits are hard to break and so they worried about the poison. But they also felt a dark dash of glee every time another pink fleck made it down their throats.

Throat hunts in the hamper for the least ripped stockings. She is going to a funeral, or a dance, and bare legs are inappropriate, even though pantyhose are meant to look like bare legs. In the 40’s, when the mother was a child, there was a nylon shortage because of the war. The material was needed for ropes and parachutes, for tying knots together and for falling from the sky. And so women would cover their legs in makeup instead, to give the illusion of nylon, including a seam up the back. Maybe the grandmothers knew this trick. Maybe they asked their children for help. Maybe the mother and father, when they were little, each stood behind their half-dressed mother, with a sharpened eye pencil, and drew a convincing line in one go. And this made the grandmothers feel put together, stitched up, ready to leave. And this made the children feel that they had drawn the mothers into existence, that time worked in any direction.

Throat finds what she needs, although the pantyhose sag and are not the right shade. No Nonsense is only available in three colors at The Village Pharmacy.

Nonsense refers to the claim that, according to the television commercials, wearing other brands of pantyhose on your body is exceedingly difficult. Your limbs go out of sync; you have to brace yourself on the furniture to shimmy into them. Other brands are so bad that, even if you get your legs inside, you can only last so long. Midday, you must go into your private office at your nonspecific job and wrestle them off of your body. If your co-workers gaze at your frosted glass door, they will see your silhouette, in a crouch. You are tearing them off, desperate to be free.

In G. Fox, all the way in Danbury, the hosiery section features a chorus line of women’s right legs, hacked off at the thigh. There is no indication if they are wearing the Sheer to Waist or Control Top because they have no waist or top to control. There have no runs because there have no toenails, or funerals. The hose disappear into the legs, are indistinguishable from legs, are the legs. But Throat never forgets she is wearing them. And Sash never forgets. Nor do the other sisters, digging now, too, in the hamper, and taking turns in the one full mirror in the house. Measuring the cling, hoisting up the waist, trading Smalls for Queens, Nudes for Fairs, still warm from one another’s failed attempts to fit into these skins.