Raising the Piano Player's Bustle

The lovestruck merchant gave a soft-knuckle knock on the piano player's door. "One chair, one table, one lamp, one bed," the lovestruck merchant whispered the password.

"Washboard and lye basin...come in, 'fore the hang us dead," the piano player answered, quite knowing her bustle was about to come up.

The red velvet floral wallpaper matched the fine couch the piano player received free for spending fifty dollars in profit sharing certificates from ordering merchandise from Sears Roebuck and Company.

Theirs was a cliffhanger serial affair---picked up where it left off. The piano player's wicked sensuality drove the lovestruck merchant wild. At thirty, the piano player was an exceptionally built woman with a voluptuous bosom and a small waist, sparkling green-blue eyes and long chestnut hair she wore in a lesbian knot at the nape of her neck. She bathed herself in Milk of Roses and powdered herself with La Dore's Powder de Riz made from fine rice flour, both toiletries from France, available through Sears Roebuck and Company mail order.

Raising the piano player's bustle, the wire frame she wore to puff out the back of her dress, the lovestruck merchant purposely took the hem out of the piano player's dress to disguise their affair. This was the lovestruck merchant's bustle of a plan to meet up with the piano player in the wee hours of the morning after the saloon closed. She carried with her, merchandise from the General Mercantile; gold-filled thimble, silver sewing scissors, pins, needles, needle emery, and spools of assorted threads. To ease the sexual guilt, she bought and paid for the sundries out of the modest salary she paid herself even though she was the proprietor of the General Mercantile. Simply, in those years, this is all it took---a traveling sewing kit to masquerade lesbianism through the seamstress. It would be quite believable to modern-day "hemmed-in" closeted lesbians that "the hem was being snagged" on the piano bench when the piano player rose from her seat.

Each affair began first with either undoing the hem or sewing it back in so the piano player could wear the floor-length dress downstairs to the saloon in the morning, giving her an excuse if they were ever caught as to why the lovestruck merchant, "seamstress" was making afterhour visits to the piano player's room. Alternately, the lovestruck merchant laughingly sewed the hem back in to make it look like it had been repaired, otherwise the piano player walked with her hands at her waist, hoisting her dress up so she didn't step on it and trip. Hem in, hem out, hem in, hem out, hem in, hem out. It was doubtful that the men in the saloon looked at her hemline, but were rather interested in her bustline. Centuries of cleavage...bosom full and fantastic.

Copyright Ms. Sage Sweetwater, Celebrity firebrand lesbian novelist