Brian Hyland debuted the single in the summer of 1960, by August it topped the Billboard Hot 100, and I sang it a few months later. “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” The occasion was a Brownie talent show. Nine-years old, Brownie uniform, a brown shirtwaist dress, tie, matching socks, possibly a beanie; I mounted the stage. (Restaurant, basement, auditorium for amateurs? My mother sat with other mothers at a table.) I was girlish, but not domestic. Bookish. I did not bake cakes, sew, ford streams, assemble leaf collections, or put up a tent. I didn't learn how to swim. I loved baseball. My father and I watched together; I got it from him. He pitched to me, home plate was the sewer cover in our backyard. I already had breasts. In a year I'd get my period. I'd practiced my number, memorized the words. She was afraid to come out of the locker . . . In my wavering falsetto, I began.I didn't stick with the Brownies. “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” sold over two million copies after its release. It was #8 in the UK, #10 in Italy, #1 in South Africa. Jimi Hendrix covered it, Buddy Hackett (don't be a meanie, show us your bikini), Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. There was a Finnish version, Danish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Cuban (“El Cohete Americano”/“The American Rocket,” deliciously subversive). Bikini sales took off. Former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello wore one in Bikini Beach, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, a goddess or vision emerging from subtropical waters with a sheathed dagger hanging from her hip. In 1965, a 17-year-old Munich student walked across the central market in a bikini and was sentenced to three weekends cleaning hospital floors and nursing homes, as if getting down on her knees and scouring floors, wiping up human spills, would scour her as well.In 1969 Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945. The bomb was called Little Boy. Two days later, on August 8, a burlesque house in Los Angeles showcased “fiery” ATOM BOMB DANCERS. “Smash Hit,” wrote Time. Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. Four weeks later, on September 3, Life magazine ran a photo spread titled “ANATOMIC BOMB.” (Life itself noted the timing with a kind of hedgy embarrassment—“Almost before ink was dry on headlines announcing the crash of the first atomic bomb . . . ”) The spread featured a woman draped on the edge of a swimming pool in a bikini. The word bikini had not been coined yet. She's wearing a two-piece. She's bringing “the new atomic age to Hollywood.” She's a “starlet . . . soak[ing] up solar energy.” She's actually a little-known actress, Linda Christian, slightly exotic, born in Mexico, well traveled, modestly multilingual, who “can speak at least a few words in eight languages, including Arabic and Russian.” As for her own experience with a bomb, she was in Palestine during a bomb scare. Her eyes are half closed, her hand dangles in the pool, her body is inanimate. You could say she looks languid (a sunbather), but to me she looks annihilated. She's supposed to be a swimsuit-clad atomic goddess, born of the bomb, lit with energy, potentially eruptive, but instead the bomb has dropped her by the pool and rendered her lifeless.On July 1, 1946, almost a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States bombed Bikini Atoll as part of its nuclear testing program. The Navy wanted to determine the seaworthiness of ships subject to the forces of the bomb. The operation was called Crossroads, the bomb Gilda, after Rita Hayworth's character in the film of the same name. Project scientists came up with it. Rita Hayworth's performance reputedly kept them awake at night; one claimed he watched the movie sixteen times. “Gilda” was stenciled on the bomb's casing, a picture of Hayworth in a strapless evening gown affixed below. (Nose art, often featuring pin-ups, was common during World War 2. Painted on a B-29 Superfortress—the same model that dropped Gilda—was Ponderous Peg: naked, voluptuous, mounted on a missile, ready for a ride.). Gilda was “Beautiful, Deadly . . . Using all a woman's weapons,” according to the film's trailer. When Hayworth found out about it—her image used like an endorsement—she was livid, according to her then-husband Orson Welles. By that time my father, Private First Class Nathan Shinitzky, had been back from France for over a year, shrapnel in his leg; my mother, Harriet Alter, was working in a designer dress warehouse; and the French, giddy with fear and exhaustion, were holding end-of-the-world parties—eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we atomize. (When a mirror mysteriously fell off a wall in Paris the day after the Bikini bombing, a crowd gathered around the shattered glass, which, according to common superstition, presaged seven years of bad luck, and a woman muttered the atomic bomb, as if in explanation. The surrounding chorus nodded in agreement.)Nineteen years old, Micheline Bernardini was alternately called a showgirl, stripper, exotic dancer, nude dancer, burlesque artist. On July 5, 1946, four days after the bombing of Bikini, she modeled the first bikini during a contest at the Piscine Molitor, Paris's renowned Art Deco swimming pool. “A murmur of appreciation like lightening” ran through crowd. “Micheline Bernardini ambles out in what any dern fool can see is the smallest bathing suit in the world.” // “Miss Bernardini has plenty of talent just where it ought to be.” No one else would wear it, it was said. No one respectable. She won the title La Plus Belle Baigneuse de 1946, Most Beautiful Swimmer. The suit was designed by car engineer Louis Réard, who called it le bikini—thirty inches of fabric, and so small it could be pulled through a wedding ring—because he imagined the suit's impact would be explosive like the bomb's. For emphasis, he made the suit from material printed with jumbled newspaper headlines. It was as if Bernardini bore the news of the day on her person.Every year, on July 5, the story circulates. It's served up with amusement, titillation, a wink; the sheer absurdity of it, or the horror; the old names trotted out, Crossroads, Gilda, Réard; the same stock photos, Micheline Bernardini holding a matchbox. (That's how I found out about it, on one of the annual regurgitations. One of the first entries in my notebook, dated 7/22/12, reads “Nowadays Bikini itself is visited by tourists wearing bikinis.”) The story has become kitsch, a fetishized tidbit, a historical trinket, like the atomic consumables that emerged after the war: Atomic Red lipstick, flame swept and devastating; Atomic Bomb perfume, packaged in a missile-shaped bottle (25 cents); an Atomic pin called Bursting Fury; an Atomic Cocktail, at the Washington Press Club, made with Pernod and gin, an unseemly green. Bikini/le bikini. A small atoll in the Pacific depopulated, uninhabitable; a skimpy swimsuit folded in a matchbox; female sexuality conjoined with nuclear destruction. Last year marked the 75th anniversary.On American Bandstand they act it out. The scene is the shore, with a bath house, a lifeguard stand, a beach like a dull flat placemat, a wall of cardboard waves. Check out the girl in the bikini, Dick Clark says by way of introduction, whistling, shaking off his hand as if to cool it off, Whoa! And then the number begins. The hot girl, it turns out, is a five-year-old. (My guess. My partner said ten, a friend four or five, another friend six.) She's in the bath house, hiding, wearing a bikini but not wanting to be seen in one, until the bath-house attendant—black cap, long black robe, white ruffled bloomers, out-sized shoes, a cross between Mother Hubbard and a witch—brings the girl a blanket and ushers her to the shore. The attendant, in her miserable gray wig, plays both helper and enabler, and does duty as well as the voice of the chorus, two, three, four, tell the people what she wore, while Brian Hyland is the lifeguard, wearing pedal pushers cinched with a length of rope, snapping his fingers, and lip-synching.Check out the girl in the bikini.I replay the video again and again.The girl is smiling, shy, watchful, coy, or playing at being coy. She sticks her fingers in her mouth, hides her face in the blanket, to prevent herself from being seen or to prevent herself from seeing—if you can't see them they can't see you; hides her face, because isn't that where we register and feel shame? The face as mirror, as give-away.The girl is nervous, of course, that's what the script calls for, a girl in a bikini afraid of exposure. But the exposure is three-fold. There's the girl in the song, the girl playing the girl in the song, and the girl. It's the girl I'm looking at, the five or six or ten-year-old girl, whose fearful face—bashful, uncertain, trace of a tremor across her lower lip, eyes off to the side, seeking reassurance (perhaps a parent in the audience? but what parent would allow this? I remind myself that my mother allowed it, or something like it, she allowed me to go on stage and perform the song; a form of striptease a friend recently, and startlingly, called it. Was it? The word itself made me feel bared down to nothing)—shows through the fearful face she's putting on. She's on top of the lifeguard stand, where Brian Hyland has deposited her, where she can be seen, where she's meant to be seen, by everyone.It was song writer Paul Vance's nine-year-old daughter who inspired the song, he recounts over fifty years later. (A piece in the Los Angeles Times, citing Vance as the source, says she was two.). As it happened, her bikini bottom came off in the water and when he told her—his words—that her behind was showing . . . she went crazy . . . It took me like twenty-five minutes to write that song, he said, and the rest is history.Bikini is a borrowing, a theft, an erasure, a clever marketing move, and as Pacific Island scholar Teresia K. Teaiwa suggested, a symbolic and material abomination. It's been discovered, invaded, evacuated, and irradiated. The Spanish claimed it, the Germans, the Japanese, the Americans. It was renamed Eschscholtz Atoll in the 19th century, after Estonian surgeon/zoologist/explorer Ivan Ivanovich Eschscholtz, and retained that name on navigational charts for over a hundred years. Located at a latitude of 11.6065° N, longitude of 165.3768° E, 165° east of Greenwich, 15° west of the international dateline, in the Ralik or sunset chain of the Marshall Islands: Bikini Atoll, Pikinni in Marshallese, surface of coconuts.One hundred sixty-seven Bikinians were evacuated/relocated/displaced. They were given no choice about leaving and every choice about where to go. Pick your place, the Navy reputedly offered, one atoll the same as the next in the vast invariable Pacific paradise (except, of course, Bikini, the one the Americans wanted). Any atoll to the east or south, depending on air and sea currents, officials said. But what are the “safe distance criteria?” they asked. “Unless the resulting radioactivity is permanent, and experts are confident that it will not be, the inhabitants will be permitted to return to their homes when the operation is completed.” After deliberation among the alabs, community leaders, the Bikinians chose Rongerik, uninhabited, 125 miles east of Bikini, and one-sixth the size. Before their departure, they decorated the graves in the cemetery with flowers and coconut fronds and bade farewell to their ancestors, a ritual they were made to repeat numerous times for the Navy cameras. The next day they boarded a Navy LST landing ship to Rongerik, a place, as it turned out, scarce in coconuts.After the Bikinians were relocated, Navy personnel tore down their homes and built twelve 75-foot steel towers for mounting cameras, seven pontoon causeways, seaplane landing ramps, boat moorings, power-generating units, a water distillation and distribution system, a dispensary, five concrete basketball courts, ten volleyball courts, four baseball fields, a beer garden, an archery range, lifeguard platforms, horseshoe pitching courts, paddle tennis courts, a trap-shooting range, twenty-six dressing huts, a radio station (Radio Bikini), and two-thatched-roof clubs, Up and Atom and Studs Saloon: No Wine, No Women, No Nothing.There are myriad ways to measure. Rita Hayworth's measurements were variously noted as 37-24-36, 36C-24–36, and, according to Life, “35 in. around the bust and hips whereas the average model is . . . only 34.” Linda Christian was 5 ft. 5½ in. tall, and weighed 118 lbs. Gilda, the bomb, weighed 10,800 pounds and was 10 ft. 8 in. long and 60 in. in diameter. Its plutonium core was surrounded by 5,300 pounds of high explosives, and upon detonation—518 ft. above Bikini lagoon's surface—was reduced to the size of a tennis ball. A column of white smoke climbed to 20,000 feet, and a burgeoning cloud, speeding upward at 100 miles per minute, reached a height of 40,000 feet. Gilda yielded 23 kilotons of explosive energy.I was twirling a hula hoop around my waist when a neighbor stopped and said I had a good figure. She was looking at my body, sizing it up. The circling hips, raised arms, breasts beginning to show through my t-shirt. Bermuda shorts. The hoop on the ledge of my hips kept up by my gyrations. The body, available for commentary. My body. I had offered it up; the neighbor had doled out praise. Tender/evaluation. That was the nature of our transaction. You have a good figure. What made it good? The venue was the sidewalk, the street, the neighborhood, Peterson Park, Chicago, 1960. Me, shy, eager, approval-seeking, middle-class, Jewish. Even then a slight stoop of the shoulders. She, the purveyor and enforcer of community standards, harnessing her authority as a woman grooming a young girl to be a woman with a woman's body. She had standing. Some years later, I began my diary this way: To acquaint you with myself, my name is Peggy Ann Shinner, age 14, measurements 34, 24, 35.Prior to the bombing, over 20,000 fish were caught, catalogued, and then shipped back to Washington for study, but the ship carrying them ran aground near San Francisco and 98% of the fish were lost. This included some previously unknown species, unknown to Western scientists if not to the Marshallese. The observation of Grace's Paley's character Faith (Paley's stand-in?), almost thirty years later, may be apropos here: First they [men] make something, then they murder it. Then they write a book about how interesting it is.There was no name for radiation in Marshallese. The Bikinians called it poison.There are forty names for fish. “It is not believed there is any danger of the contaminated water's reaching civilized shores, and damage to fishing resources will be slight because of the remote area chosen” (New York Times). “The bomb will not kill half the fish in the sea, and poison the other half so they will kill all the people who eat fish hereafter” (Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy, head of Operation Crossroads). Fish, in Marshallese: adipā aelbūrōrō aikūtōkōd aujwe aunel autak āpil dedep didak dokweer ek-bōlāāk ekpā ikallo ikōn-ae jaad jāpek kaallo kawal kāāntōl kilkil kode kōpādel kudiil kūbur kūtkūtijet lol louj lōjjeptaktak manōt mānnōt mejeik melea mijjebwā mok maj-waan maloklok no ñoñ peekdu tōllokbōd.There was no name for it in English either, or no name that conveyed its consequences. My beautiful radium, Marie Curie said. Navy pilot John Smitherman, who, during the postbombing cleanup operation, wore no protective gear, only tennis shoes, shorts, and a t-shirt, put it this way: We were never told about any radioactive exposure . . . In fact we didn't really know what the word was.There were, however, names for the birth defects that stemmed from it: jellyfish, the Bikinians said (babies born without bones), grapes (spontaneously aborted clumps of tissue), turtles, octopuses, apples, devils.Women have long been called bombshells. Bombshell, from 1851: The vaudeville show Love in Masquerade, featuring Aurelia, alias “Bombshell,” at National Hall, Washington D.C. Bombshell, from 1917: The Burlesque Show, featuring Lilly Romaine, “The Little Bombshell of Joy.” Bombshell, from 1920: Flo-Flo and her perfect “36” chorus, “A Bombshell of Youthful Beautiful Shapely Girlie Girls,” at the Temple Theater, Ocala, Florida. Bombshell, from 1921: The Bait with “exquisite” Hope Hampton, “a melodramatic bombshell of love, romance, and mystery,” at the Please-U-Theatre, St. Johnsbury, Vermont.A bombshell that fails to explode is a dud.Jean Harlow was a bombshell—the Blonde Bombshell—but she may have died trying to look like one. For years she'd been coloring her hair with a mixture of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox, and Lux flakes, and there's speculation this is what killed her. She died, at twenty-six, of uremic poisoning.She's clean-cut but she may not be clean. She may look like your mother. She looks like my mother. Or a girl next door. That's part of her deception. Her allure. Auburn pageboy with a wave, half-formed smile, touch of lipstick, dimpled cheek, tailored white shirt collar. She's looking straight at you, but her head is angled. Her face is in shadow, suggesting the shady, the hidden, the secret, the discreet. Her expression is suggestive, but just slightly; knowing, but of what? You could call it sly. Its mystery is its attraction and danger. She's white, of course. This World War 2 poster is aimed at the white soldier. He's clean, but subject to temptation. He can be sullied by an unclean woman. (He can also be dwarfed. There are three little soldiers, toy soldiers almost, on the bottom left. Her outsized face subsumes all of them.) SHE MAY LOOK CLEAN—BUT. But. Don't be deceived by her good girl looks. Women are often dirty. “Pick-ups, ‘good time’ girls, prostitutes” (also known as victory girls, disorderly girls, khaki-wackies, good time Charlottes, grass grabbers, camp followers, and amateurs). Opportunities abound. Peril too. Syphilis and gonorrhea. The year is 1940, 41, 42. Wartime; the world is blowing up. Fascists, Japanese, Nazis. Staying clean is a patriotic duty. “You can't beat the Axis if you get VD.”Another poster addresses U.S. airmen. IF YOU WANT TO DROP BOMBS TO SET THE RISING SUN, DON'T BE A BUM! “Remember—80% of Venereal Infections Were Acquired From Pickups!” And if the rising sun reference is too oblique, there's a sketchy line drawing of Japan with a sign that says Tokyo near the coastline. The pickup in this case is wearing a blouse that emphasizes her ample yet concealed breasts, a pleated skirt above the knees, and tiny heels Cinderella might have worn if she were a slut. Strangely, she carries a folder that says OK. The business-like purse of a professional pickup? A shorthand for availability and consent? OK. Or a wry acknowledgment of the human exchange of fluids and sensation?The booby trap is often reliant on bait. In this case, the bait is a busty woman. BOOBY TRAP the poster reads over her head. The woman's got all the components. The boobs of course, which look like they could smother him. The cinched waist, the open red lips, the rouged cheeks, the voluminous hair suggesting a net of entanglement. A dark swampy sultriness. But the trap is also reliant on the victim himself. The booby, the sap. (Booby, a seabird, once thought of as stupid, because they landed on ships, where they were easily captured and eaten; bobo, Spanish, silly, stupid, naive.) She's the enticer (read victimizer), he's the idiot. If she's got the boobs, he's got a cigarette, a glass of beer, and a goofy, stupid eagerness. She's also got, the poster tells us, syphilis and gonorrhea. She is syphilis and gonorrhea. She's deadly, sabotaging bacteria. Behind the bar, the bartender looks on knowingly. He knows what she's up to. Fall for her, fall into the trap, and the once innocent soldier will become diseased, unable to fight, and thus let down his country. Her sexuality is destructive, his hapless.They are equivalencies, one meant to represent the other. Bomb/woman, woman/bomb. In a 1970s civil defense pamphlet, radioactive rays, unseen, insidious, products of the bomb, are personified as women. Meet alpha, beta, gamma—labeled polonium, radium, uranium. “Alpha's cannot penetrate, but can irritate the skin; betas cause body burns; and gammas can go right through . . . and . . . kill you. Like energy from the sun, these rays are potentially both harmful and helpful.” All three “rays” are salacious-looking women—gleeful, wily, seductive—in bathing suits draped with sashes, breasts barely contained, as if they were deranged contenders in an atomic beauty contest.So women are destroyers; not news of course. Wiles turned into snakes, bacteria, radioactivity, death. The Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake: “Put the blame on Mame, boys / Put the blame on Mame” (from Hayworth's film Gilda).But women can also be domesticators and, in turn, domesticated. They were used to give the bomb an image makeover and help render it less frightening, more palatable, contained, cool and exciting. Domesticated, the bomb's energy can be harnessed and put to good use. Domesticated, women—in a cold war, post-atomic culture—can transform the fallout shelter into a home, a place of safety and containment. In her pencil skirt and tailored blouse—her sexuality corralled and properly redirected, but still discreetly evident—a woman can descend underground into a cozy 15 by 13 by 10 ft. family fallout shelter, replete with Velveeta, boxed macaroni, Ajax, board games, magazines, flashlights, portable toilet, sleeping bags, army-issue blankets, and drink the uncontaminated water. Bomb and woman, for the time being, defused.As part of an experiment to gauge the impact of the blast, the Navy populated the target ships with 5,664 animals—204 goats, 200 pigs, 200 mice, 60 guinea pigs, and 5,000 rats. “We want radiation-sick animals, but not radiation-dead animals,” a medical officer said. They went for veracity, with live but not human actors, positioned on decks, bridges, turrets, around gun-hubs, in engine rooms, a crew ready for battle. Some of the goats were shorn and slathered with sunscreen, while others, their hair trimmed, were left uncovered and subject to exposure. Pigs, whose skin was thought to be like humans, were dressed in flame-retardant PPE and smeared with white anti-flash cream. After thousands of protest letters from humane societies, breeders, churches, and animal lovers, dogs were excluded from the test. Ten percent of the animals died at the time of the explosion and another 25% were dead three months later. The figures were soon adjusted: 18% died in the blast, and more than half died five months later.Proving ground: a place for testing weapons or vehicles, for conducting experiments, for honing military tactics; possibly borrowed from the French champ d’épreuve (field for testing).There is the Sandy Hook Proving Ground in New Jersey, the first in the United States, 1874–1919; the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, 1917–present; the Scituate Proving Ground in Massachusetts, 1918–1921; the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, 1942–present, the Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshall Islands, 1946–1963; the Nevada Proving Ground, 1951–present, where atomic tourism once flourished and local businesses in Las Vegas—known as the Atomic City—hosted atomic box lunches (eat your lunch, have a blast), dawn bomb watch parties, and crowned several Miss Atomic Bombs.Weeks after the bombing, the Americans returned to Rongerik, the new home of the Bikinians, to document their own largesse and the homesick but happy natives. All the clichés apply. Palm trees sway overhead, an American flag flies among them, waves ripple and foam, the air is aquamarine blue. Here we have the officers showing the Bikinians a globe and presumably pointing out the location of their homeland. Here the officers are handing out packages. Foodstuffs perhaps? Trinkets? Chocolate bars, soft drinks, salted nuts, cigarettes, matches, and a set of aerial photos of the explosion. Here the stoic, simple-minded islanders, with “no way of understanding what the test is all about.” Then the film cuts to the Bikinians in their outriggers, singing “You are my Sunshine” in Marshallese, a parody of Pacific happiness staged by and for the media. You are my sunshine / My only sunshine / You make me happy / When skies are gray . . . The song is sung to us, the reporter emphasizes, to you, his voice becoming more chummy, more intimate, a gift from the islanders to America, and he doesn't say the Bikinians are grateful, should be grateful (for the great men who had arrived out of the sky), but it's implied.Bikini was bombed twenty-three times. The tests have names, the shots have names, even some of the bombs have names. The names proliferate and are hard to keep track of. They confuse, obfuscate, fascinate. They're entertaining and horrifying, clever, pedestrian, nullifying. The military was obsessed with them. Naming is a power grab. The namers are in charge. That's why the unnamed woman in Ursula K. Le Guin's story “She Unnames Them” unnames all the creatures of the earth, to destabilize boundaries and to ultimately erase them. (The “She” of the title is Eve, never named in the story.)Crossroads was the test; Able was the shot; Gilda was the bomb.The islands have names too. Bikini is an atoll, a ring-shaped reef strung together with islands, and also an island in the atoll. There are in total twenty-three islands in Bikini Atoll (most too small to be inhabited, blips of coral and limestone), all of them renamed by the Americans. Bikini was an American protectorate, but language didn't fall under its mandate. Aerokojlol became Peter, Enidrik/Uncle, Lukoj/Victor, Nam/Charlie (and later Charlie referred to the Viet Cong). Iroji, renamed Dog by the American military, was hit by a bomb called Runt, and a month later by Alarm Clock (it went off on April 25, 1954). Eninman, renamed Tare, was hit by Morgenstern and Bassoon. Morgenstern, morning star, star of Bethlehem; also a weapon in the shape of a spiked mace: It was considered to be a fizzle, a failure, because its expected yield was one megaton but its actual yield was one-tenth that, or 110 kilotons.Bikini took its last hit on July 22, 1958, twelve years after the first one.The bombings spawned a whole new idiom. Phenomena never before seen combing the scientific language for description: dome (“a swelling illuminated from within”), fillet, side jets (“each as large as a destroyer”), bright tracks, cauliflower cloud (“the rising mass of water passed rapidly from the ‘hair-do’ stage to the crowned funnel stage and finally to the full cauliflower stage”), fallout (“fallout” as a noun did not appear in any of the scientific literature prior to Crossroads and didn't make it into the wider American lexicon until 1954, after the Bravo test—also on Bikini, and called by some the first nuclear disaster, because, two and a half times more powerful than predicted, it dispersed fallout over thousands square miles), air shock disk, water shock disk, base surge (“the newest menace wrung from the atomic nucleus”), uprush, after cloud.A decade later, a small group of Bikinians, returning for the first time to survey their homeland, lamented that the bombed islands had lost their bones. The islands, too, had become like jellyfish.The bikini was not native to Bikini. The women on Bikini atoll wore Mother Hubbards, introduced by missionaries from Oahu in the 19th century. (Previously, they wore skirts woven from pandanus and hibiscus leaves.) The Mother Hubbard was a loose-fitting dress with a yoked neck, so-named because of its vague resemblance to the cloak worn by Old Mother Hubbard of the nursery rhyme. (In Marshallese, the Mother Hubbard is wau, from the Hawaiian, Oahu.)The bikini has attached itself so closely to the body it's become synonymous with the body. It's now inscribed upon our person. What was once the Pfannenstiel incision, eponymously named after German gynecologist Hermann Johannes Pfannenstiel in 1900, and used to describe a surgical cut above the pubic bone, made for c-sections and hernia repairs, appeared in the medical literature, circa 1976, as the bikini incision or bikini cut. Soon there were other surgical descriptors as well: bikini line, bikini area, bikini crease. Bikini started out as a coral reef in the Pacific and, through a series of cataclysmic transformations, has become part of the scarred landscape of the female body.I didn't know the bikini's history when I wore it. At nineteen, I rode a bicycle around my Albany Park neighborhood in my tropically patterned bikini—paradise fitted on my body, gaudy green, orange, yellow, saturated—and from a deluded distance invited and feared all comers. Was I dangerous or in danger? Threat or threatened? It was like a farewell tour, a goodbye performance (no one in attendance), whose purpose was all show and show-off. I can still see myself rising off the bicycle seat and pedaling. Embarrassed, ashamed, reveling, all at the same time. The next day I was on my way to Costa Rica, 10° north of the equator. Would they have sanitary napkins in the almost-southern hemisphere? Would I need a Swiss army knife? What's the Spanish for leave me alone? I wore the bikini on a beach near Limón, along the Caribbean (and took it off there, too, for skinny-dipping), sleeping in a thatched-roof hut, picking up fallen coconuts and cracking them open, slurping the milk, biting the meat, living a fantasy.