I’m guessing stretched-out titties, the children who stretched them cold and alone at home waiting for mama to get off work. Or maybe the women have no children and they eye every man who comes in through that darkened glass door as a potential future, a ticket to a better, cleaner existence. Men, for instance, like my spouse, Bill, who is college educated and should know better, and his sidekick, Ed, an old fraternity brother who has flown in from Atlanta and who chooses to spend part of his day this way while his wife and newborn are back at home.
I voice my sadness at this scene. I politely question Bill’s participation in this event and ask how he will explain such a place, should the question ever arise, to our son and daughter, who are on the threshold of adolescence. And still the conversation in the room turns to breasts. Ethan—former college fraternity brother from Winston-Salem—just can’t get over the whole scene. He is imitating, swinging his pathetic khaki-clad body side to side. He discusses ta-ta size like you might a pumpkin, while his wife stands there and giggles. I catch her eye and she stops cold. She knows better but like many of us she has learned that it’s easier to look the other way, pretend that you really did not see or hear what you thought you did.
You can learn a lot on a weekend like this. I look around the room—my dining room—as they gather here for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, and I might as well be on another planet even though it’s a scene I have lived through for over a decade by now.
There is always at least one man going through the motions of separation or divorce. That one normally arrives with a woman twenty years younger or comes alone and flirts with all the wives. This year it is Dennis, from D.C., who grew up in this very town but has gone to great lengths to rid himself of any traces of his native origin. It is as if he has no memory of a mother or a childhood or an education here. He would have the world believe that he simply sprang forth in a business suit with a fat wallet boasting membership in the NRA, a Rolex on his wrist, and a BMW parked by the curb. Right now he seems to be checking out everyone’s cleavage. I watch him and keep thinking that before the night is over, I will go and get my high school yearbook and pass it around so everyone can check out when he was a Future Farmer of America and a Teen Dem and a relatively decent guy. I will ask how his mother—a woman who put in forty years as a receptionist at the courthouse and who raised a child all by herself—is faring out at Turtle Bay Nursing Home, which he visits only at Christmas if then. He keeps trying to catch my eye and wink like the two of us are somehow in on something. My glance back at him says You suck.
I TELL EVERYBODY that I think men who are attracted to breasts in a major way are still yearning to suckle their mamas. Isn’t it true there’s a whole generation of formula-fed men who never had that opportunity and now they are suffering? They want to latch on; they want to make their mothers draw sharp breaths in with the tight wrench just before that glorious letdown. I say that knowing that they are all Enfamil men with mamas who claim they couldn’t nurse when the truth is nobody taught them how. I don’t think evolution would have allowed a whole generation to die out; it certainly hasn’t happened that way in the animal kingdom. You don’t see animals making fun of teats and udders. I doubt if it happens among humans in Third World countries either. But maybe this was the period in history when society began to look at the breast in a whole different way. Maybe this is when the breast went from a source of nourishment for the young to something for men to pinch and make jokes about.
I can tell that they are tiring of my lecture; I can feel the tension rising so I choose to sink back and away. I ask them to tell us all about their games that day, no one even noticing that this is a way of defusing the situation, a way for me to sit and sip my drink and fade off into my own thoughts. Like the time I accompanied my son and his third-grade class to the science museum where we stood before the model of Lucy— our first woman—her thumb visible, her body emerging from a previous simian form. She was only three and a half feet tall, her head the size of a softball. She was only in her twenties when she died and already her backbone was deformed; she suffered a terrible form of arthritis. She was found at the edge of a lake and scientists are unsure if she drowned or if she simply died of an illness. Did anyone even consider the possibility that perhaps she grew so tired, her heart so heavy, that she simply lay facedown on the shore and waited for the water to carry her into an eternal sleep? Did such a desire even exist in this early human form or was it the result of years of domestication, demands that went far beyond what life out in the wild would have required? Lucy’s breasts were not huge; they were thin and stretched. The kids pointed at her nipples and butt crack. They were children and had that right. They still had every opportunity to grow up and imagine the infant kept alive by Lucy’s milk—a whole world’s population nourished by Lucy’s milk.
THE DISCUSSION OF golf comes around to the old story about Johnny Carson asking Arnold Palmer what he did for good luck before a match. Palmer replied, “My wife kisses my balls,” to which Carson said, “Bet that makes your putter stand up.” No one in the room actually saw the interview so we’re not sure how much if any of it is true. The discussion of Ethan’s swing leads right back into the swing of the hips of the woman who was clearly attracted to him at Cafe Risqué. Then the swing of her breasts, which Ethan said made him think of Loni Anderson. “Not the face, of course,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Can you give it a rest?” Ethan’s wife finally says. She is on her third cosmopolitan and feeling strong if only momentarily.
“So men like breasts,” Dennis says and looks around to get moral support. “Is that news? What’s the big deal?”
I say that if there were a disease the cure of which required men to have their penises removed they would be a bit more sensitive to body parts. I say this knowing that Dennis’s mother had a double mastectomy when he was still in high school; there she was, a divorced mother, not so common at the time, working a forty-hour week, with a disease no one ever mentioned. There were no support groups, no magazine articles in which other women told their stories.
Ethan, who is lounging back on my sofa with his shiny little loafers propped on one silk-upholstered arm and who has had one too many, tells us, apropos of nothing, that he takes Viagra. There is absolute silence. Ethan’s wife, Joyce, who had gone to the bathroom (she said, though I know that really she slipped by the liquor cabinet to freshen her drink), now returns to silence.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Ethan apparently,” I say, and after the roar of laughter dies down, I continue. “He was just telling us about how he takes Viagra.”
“Ethan!” There is horror all over her face. I am horrified just to imagine the man tuned up like an Eveready. Horrified that poor Joyce has to live with him. And now horrified at myself for making a joke at her expense as well as his.
“Do you see blue?” one man asks. “I’ve heard it can affect your vision.”
“Temporary,” Ethan answers smugly. Mr. All Knowing. Mr. Thinks He’s Big. Nothing can slow him down.
“And it works?”
“Oh, yeah, it works.” Ethan is enjoying his five minutes in the sun as he and Joyce knock back the liquor for very different reasons.
“So this was for a medical reason?” I ask.
“You mean impotence?” Dennis yells.
“No,” Ethan spits. He wants to call me something really really bad, but he thinks better with Bill there beside me. He can’t call Dennis anything because Dennis is a rung or two higher than he is on the man’s man ladder. “I was just curious.”
“Oh,” I say. “Curious.”
Bill catches my eye and I can’t tell if it’s to apologize or to say Give me a break, I only entertain these guys once a year, let us act like boys. Let us have some fun. I’ve heard it all before. And there were the years when the women thought the way we could compete was to act just like them, to go to clubs and drink too much and watch men strip. Scream out things like Wooo wo
oo woo, shake it baby yeah, whistle wolf calls, salivate like Pavlovian dogs. You know, you never really do get into that and you sure get tired of trying to. Personally I’d rather be watching old movies—Bette Davis, Charles Boyer. I’d rather be in my nightgown with a mug of hot chocolate and my children snuggled under a down comforter watching reruns of Andy Griffith or Leave It to Beaver. I can’t imagine Andy Taylor or Ward Cleaver going to Cafe Risqué. The long and short of it (no pun intended) is that very often at the end of a day, I am tired. My breasts are tired. My legs, back, brain. I would like nothing better than to stretch out and close my eyes, disappear, if only briefly.
THE MEN, IN spite of everything that has been said, return to the Cafe Risqué topic. Apparently there was one sexy waitress who was considerably overweight. (Ethan: “See? We aren’t prejudiced against fat ones. The one that really liked me was the fat one.”) Another skinny Asian one, Dennis informs us, needs a good orthodontist. (Plus her G-string was nasty looking; her thighs had purple stretch marks.) The one pouring coffee had a tattoo of a snake wrapping around her throat. A really fat ass. I am about to comment about how they all must have left nose prints on the glass of her cage when I walk over and stand next to Bill just in time to hear Ethan deliver his punch line about how to screw a fat girl: “Roll her in flour and look for the wet spots.”
“What a hoot!” I slap him on the back as hard as I can. “Aren’t you funny?” I avoid looking at Joyce, who I have known for a very long time. She was in my wedding. Bill is the godfather of their son. She drinks a little bit more, I notice, at each gathering.
“I’ve got one for you,” I say. “Where do men go after they go to Hooter’s?”
“Where?”
“The Hootel. And why don’t women date Woodpeckers?” I emphasize the last two syllables.
“Why?”
“Always boring.” The women like that one. “And why does a dog lick his balls?”
“Wait, I know this one,” Ron says. “Because he can.”
“And did you hear about what happened when the woman showed her size 36C breasts? No? None of you guys have heard this one?”
They all shake their heads, Bill included, as they wait for the punch.
“God, this is an old one. I hear it at least once a week. And I can follow it with the one about the 36B and the 32A and the 48DD.”
“So tell us already,” Dennis says. He and Ethan are standing there nudging each other like prepubescent boys.
“Well, they all had cancer. They all had to have their breasts surgically removed.” The women look down at my rug, the lovely intricate pattern of color. I’m sure there’s at least one bad Pap smear in this room. One lump that has caused fear and worry. “Like your mother, Dennis.”
They are all quiet now. The women are moving toward the warm yellow glow of my kitchen, where I have promised them a comfortable seat and a glass of good wine while I finish preparing the meal. “Maybe this is the reason the women go to the kitchen,” Ron’s wife, a relatively new wife, says quietly. “I wish we had done it sooner.”
Now you can hear a pin drop. Now you can hear the cars passing on the highway, a rise and fall like ocean waves, and my mind is there by the highway with those women walking around inside Cafe Risqué. And wouldn’t any one of them give everything she owned to be standing in this very room, in this privileged life where people actually have hobbies and children fuss about the full plate of good food you put before them and men take for granted the women they married, the bodies they like to roll on top of in the middle of the night, the breasts they pinch and knead like dough.
“Honey,” Bill says and calls me back to the doorway. “Let it drop, okay? This is a party, not some New Age awareness group.”
Tears spring to my eyes and I have to look away. I look out the window into our backyard at the array of Little Tikes apparatus that no longer gets used. He looks over at all of his buddies, especially Dennis, and laughs as if to apologize for the interruption. I can tell he wants to whisper all of the choice words—hormones, premenstrual, girl things—but to me he says, “I’m sorry. It was all a joke.” He grips my hands in his. “Truce?”
THE MEN ARE talking in low cautious voices. They are talking about birdies and bogeys and woods and irons, which in many ways is the same conversation with different nouns. The women have sprung to action and have begun setting my dining table with crystal and silver and Wedgwood china, all wedding presents eighteen years ago. They are laughing now about things their children have said and done. They are talking about their perennial beds, knowing that soon enough I will have to join in. The peonies are just on the verge of bursting into full bloom and Joyce knows that next to the first breath of autumn this is my very favorite time of the year.
WHEN MY SON and I stood in front of the model of Lucy, it was as if the world stopped for just a second, just long enough for us to take note of how far we had come and how far we had to go. He waited until his classmates ran off in hysterical laughter and then—could he have sensed my great respect for this ancient little hominid?—took my hand and whispered, “I bet she was real pretty for her time.” My heart leapt forward a couple of millennia. This boy, this future man, was evolution in action. I tell this story and the women all smile; they relax in a way that they haven’t all night long. It begins a whole ring of conversation around topics of love and warmth, desire and longing. I am easily drawn into the circle but a part of me is still thinking about bare breasts and day-old coffee, empty bank accounts and biopsies, neglected children and scar tissue. I am thinking of Lucy as she limped her way to the water’s edge seeking rest; I am thinking of her as she lay there millions of years ago staring out at this world for the very last time.
Cats
ABBOTT IS OUT there again and when Anne hears his feeble attempts with his key at a lock long changed, she freezes, holds her breath, hopes that this time something will occur to him, some glimpse of something will snap him back into present time and his life with the woman he left her for one April afternoon twelve years ago. The kitchen was blue then, Wedgwood blue, the place mats were straw, a wedding present from a friend in her college dorm, someone she hasn’t seen since the day she married Abbott and everyone threw rice and blew kisses. As he told her the news “I’m leaving,” she thought of the friend who’d given her the mats all those years ago, and about how she had no idea where she was living or what she was doing. How we let people slip from present to past, rarely looking back.
“Anne,” he said. “Did you hear what I just said?”
She remembers nodding as he told her what she had been waiting to hear. There was someone else. Though, he added, the someone was not, of course, the reason he was leaving. Their marriage would be ending even if there weren’t another woman. She wanted to ask a simple then why? but couldn’t get the words up and over her tongue. Their sons had been at school and the noon sun streamed through the very window that had made her want to buy the house to begin with, a big bay window—big enough for hanging plants —casting a warm patch of light in the center of the room. The boys were eight and ten then, and when they got home that day, they found her sitting in the kitchen, a pile of unraveled straw on the table in front of her. They told her she looked just like the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” and then they made awful faces and begged her to guess their names. She missed their big fat cat, who used to curl up in the sunshine and sleep through the day. She missed the ease with which she could pacify the boys when they were babies, how she had once had the power to make everything in their lives okay.
NOW THE BOYS are twenty and twenty-two, both in college, both with girlfriends. Now the divorced CEO of the hospital where she works as a physical therapist occasionally shares her bed. He would move in if she invited him. He would marry her in a second if she gave him the go-ahead, and her friends all issue warnings that she better not keep him waiting too long, that he is bound to give up one of these days and find another house in which to take up residence. Everyone
thinks she is holding out so that Abbott has to keep sending money. The new wife tells anyone who will listen how Anne is intentionally bleeding them dry. That’s not true. Sometimes she isn’t sure what is true.
THOUGH SHE LIVES on in the same house, she sleeps in a different room, an addition she worked and saved to build after Abbott had left and moved in across town and started a whole new family. Anne herself had been the new younger wife and the newest was even younger.
SHE TURNED THEIR old bedroom into a rumpus room and let it evolve along with the boys: puppet theater and LEGO blocks, pool table and stereo speakers. She painted it azure; they painted it black. And during each incarnation she remained aware of its original status; her mind never released the position of the bed, the way the light bathed the room in the late afternoon, a time they had often—whenever life permitted—allowed themselves the luxury of a nap. It was during those times she felt—if only for a second—the satisfied reassurance that she had made no mistake when she agreed to marry him.
People from far away who loved her began calling as soon as word reached them that Abbott had left. They called to say come home come home, and she was tempted. The home of her childhood was waiting just a few hours down the interstate. Sometimes at night she got herself to sleep picturing the town—flatland and tobacco barns, billboards calling her to the coast. She thought of those summer nights when she was a kid and had nothing to do but ride her bike through the streets of her hometown.
But by then home needed to be where her children were at home. Home had become the Japanese maple she planted when they bought the house and the roses she had trained up a trellis by the garage. So she had changed what she could afford to change. The sheets. The paint. She adopted a kind old yellow Lab to replace the cat in their marriage, Possum, on whom she had completely doted until Abbott was ready to have a child. The cat’s death, twelve years after their wedding, coincided with Abbott’s straying, and the two events were forever linked in her mind. The old Lab lived long enough to help her through the transition.
Creatures of Habit Page 6
