Another client, Mayme, is a whore who receives corsets from Ester and becomes her friend. Throughout the play, Mayme repeatedly thanks Ester for never treating her with disrespect like the rest of society. Even when Ester discovers her husband is leaving every night to visit Mayme, she still treats Mayme friend with respect and does not condescend her, but instead blames herself. These differing snapshots of women's lives show that in this time period, women held the responsibility of keeping her husband interested and keeping them from straying.
Loneliness follows Ester throughout her various circumstances. As the play opens, Ester is a lonely seamstress who has lived in Mrs. Dickenson's boarding home for eighteen years. When she receives a letter from a stranger named George who asks permissions to write her, they become friendly and George eventually proposes marriage, which Ester accepts. After they are married, Ester discovers George had not written the letters, but had instead paid an old man to do so. Ester thought she was lonely because she lacked love in her life, and is ecstatic when George enters. However when she discovers he is not the man she envisioned, she is thrown back into her lonely, love-lacking world. While paying a call to Mrs. Van Buren, Ester expresses her loneliness at night when George leaves to sleep with another woman, later discovered as Mayme.
The women of this play seek love to solve their feeling of being lonely, however even after they find men, they discover their loneliness has not gone away, but has only morphed into another type. Ester lives her life alone until George, but even after she marries him, he leaves her alone, causing her to feel rejected. Although married, Mrs. Van Buren confides to Ester many times that her husband might stray if she does not find methods of keeping him interested. Although the corsets make her feel insecure and self-conscious, Mrs. Van Buren is willing to take desperate measures in order to maintain a “healthy” marriage in the eyes of society. Mayme, the whore, does not have a steady man in her life, and her occupation fuels her loneliness, as she is with a different man each night, none of whom stay or truly love her. When George begins visiting Mayme, she explains to Ester how she has met a man who is different and finds happiness in his lies of running away with her. When Ester unveils to Mayme that the man she is so happy with is Ester's husband, Mayme's loneliness returns because she realizes again her occupation, and that men will say anything to gain their desires.
The search for love as a cure to being lonely is a major theme throughout Intimate Apparel. Each woman's journey through the play somewhat reflects Ester's potential journey to cure her loneliness . Mayme's life shows Ester's loneliness being single and unloved, and her fear of becoming a spinster. Her life at present displays George leaving at night to visit another woman, leaving Ester alone in bed. Mrs. Van Buren displays Ester's potential future as the wife who is willing to do anything to keep her husband. Some of which is already shown in the play. When George asks for Ester's nest egg in return for love, Ester rips apart the quilt where she hides her money and offers the sum to her husband in hopes that this will make him love her again. This play women's roles regarding marriage during this era, and also portrays their main fear of remaining alone their entire life, with no man to love them.
