A Big-Breasted Woman Is a Hard Thing to Be

When I was a teenager, I had large breasts.

Imagine the constant “accidents”:

“Oh, excuse me. There’s a lot of people on this bus and I brushed against you by accident, young lady.”

“Oops—the hallway’s real crowded, huh? Don’t mind me standing pressed against you with this leer on my face and the eventual erection you might feel against your leg.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, madam. I didn’t see your breasts there under the water as I backstroked by and accidentally squeezed one of them in my hand. Do forgive me.”

Picture the young male hospital volunteers who kept finding excuses to walk into my room as I nursed my firstborn child like a Wal-Mart-clad Madonna. I realized what they were up to, but I just sighed and went on feeding my baby. A roomful of strangers had just seen me open as wide as a woman can be, screaming curse words as I pushed a human being out of the part of me you couldn’t pay to view in soft-core porn. If these guys wanted to sneak peeks of my tired breasts leaking colostrum all over the sheets, I didn’t really care anymore.

How many stories could there be? So many I forget them and they’re replaced and I forget those and they all become a wash—the foundation on which I stand as I strap on my reinforced underwire in the morning. The annoyances and humiliations fade like flowered lace, wear out like the hooks against my back, and I just reach in my drawer for more.

My full-figured Aunt Sylvia told me a story from her youth. She grew up in the days when teenage girls regularly dropped out of eighth grade to take jobs at factories or downtown stores, including a version of Woolworth’s where they sold elegant veiled hats and gold watches instead of the condoms and cheap candy they offered when I was a teen. I listened, fascinated, as she told of saving up for the pink, three-dollar bra with extra seams, instead of her usual plain white one for only a dollar. She had ironed the precious pink bra so it would lie smooth under her uniform blouse. Instead, the iron had snapped it into the twin cones that we see in the tongue-in-cheek antique lingerie ad reproductions today. My aunt, with no other brassieres washed or aired for that day, was forced to go to her conveyor belt station with breasts that jutted out like missiles, pointed projectiles almost too sharp for men’s eyes. She told me about the one special, kind young man who sometimes spoke to her, and of the narrow-eyed girl who painted her nails red and coveted that man for herself. She told how the mean girl, worldlier than my aunt, called the man over one morning and then asked my teenage aunt to please hop up and down a few times. My aunt—sweet, bosomy, and naïve, with soft brown eyes and billows of curly hair she couldn’t control—did as she was told, figuring there must have been a reason. Her boobs bounced. The bitch and all her friends exploded into the musical peals of laughter they probably practiced every night, and my aunt burned with shame, never to speak to the kind young man again.

Even as I listened to that story, myself the same age that my aunt was on that evil day, I was able to understand the ways of the world. I said to her, “But, Aunt Sylvia, he probably liked it when your boobs bounced up and down.” Although I was by no means powerful, girls of my generation had been lucky enough to cast off at least half the naiveté. My aunt nodded, but bitterly, remembering opportunity lost.

I imagined her reborn as a sort of superhero, walking around downtown with her pink satin torpedo breasts, wiping out injustice among sisters and causing the good strong men of the town to jerk off all night long.

After a few minutes of that reverie, I remembered that I had to be downtown, myself, to meet classmates at the library. We said goodbye, Aunt Sylvia letting me leave the house with my own missile breasts exploding in the flimsy knit top I had outgrown the summer before. If I fought for anything the rest of that day, it was for the right to walk down the sidewalk in peace.