“Get a henna tattoo on your belly that says ‘I hate my breasts.’ ”
“Hate? I thought we were aiming for love and acceptance.”
Dr. Rosen shook his head. “First accept the hate. Stop trying to outrun it.” He gestured to my shoulders and the bras. “Take Jeremy with you.”
19
Jeremy and I pulled up to a crumbly industrial warehouse building on the corner of Racine and Grand. I pressed the buzzer that read Big Ernie. Big Ernie advertised himself in the Chicago Reader as a magician, dog walker, and henna tattoo artist. He buzzed us up, and we took the stairs to the second floor, where a man with a long black ponytail dressed in black genie pants greeted us from the doorway of his apartment. He could have been thirty or fifty years old—it was impossible to pinpoint. His warm smile soothed me, and the fifteen-foot ceilings in his loft made me feel like a prop in a dollhouse. The brick walls had been painted a lacquer white. He told us to take a seat in his living room while he prepared the henna. I took the couch and Jeremy crouched by the fireplace, where one hundred Pez dispensers were arranged in perfect order, like colorful, cartoon versions of white crosses in a military cemetery.
I’d called Big Ernie right after my second group the morning I made the mistake of wearing two bras to group. I’d told the ladies all about my prescription. They all nodded when I described my lifelong hatred of my breasts and shared their own stories. A man had recently grabbed Nan’s breast while she shopped for lipstick at Marshall Field’s. Zenia’s dad had commented on her breasts all her life. Mary was ashamed her breasts were so small. Emily described a fight she’d had with her husband after he’d grabbed her breast playfully while they were watching The Daily Show. That was when I covered my mouth with my hands and started to cry.
I was sixteen. Junior prom. I wore a size-ten Laura Ashley strapless black dress that had a sweetheart neckline and a spray of giant pink gardenias across the front. I’d been going to the tanning salon every other day for four weeks, so my skin was an unnatural shade of brown-orange and tingled with almost-pain from staying too long in the coffin-shaped booth. My date, Matt, and I barely knew each other; we’d been thrown together after everyone else had coupled up. He was a few years from announcing he was gay. After the corsage-boutonniere exchange and dinner, a caravan of us stopped at a park to pound beers and wine coolers pilfered from parents’ bars. The sweet fizziness of berry wine cooler sloshed in my stomach and made my head go fuzzy. The ground under my feet felt pleasantly unsteady, like trying to walk on a water bed. I remembered standing next to Jared Meechum’s black Cherokee, surrounded by ten guys.
We were all laughing. Slurry clouds drifted by, hiding the moon every few minutes.
Jared approached me with a dare in his eye. My hands were at my sides—one clutched an empty Bartles & Jaymes bottle, one had gathered a handful of dress to keep me steady. I smelled the beer on his lips and saw the mound of dip bulging in his lower lip. I was midlaugh when he reached two fingers down the front of my dress between my breasts. I finished my laugh as if nothing happened, because I wasn’t sure it had.
Had it? He’d stepped away quickly so it was easy to blame my sloshy stomach, my fuzzy brain. My breasts were so smushed into the dress that the sensation was muffled, and the memory easily dissolved.
I upended the bottle in my hand and licked the last drop from the rim.
Spencer was next. He did it quick-like and avoided my eyes. He had the decency to blush. But shame didn’t stop him from whispering to P.J. and Tad, both of whom seemed to tower over me as they slid their two fingers between my breasts. I watched the tops of the trees, swaying just so in the breeze even though the night was still and thick with late-spring humidity. My hands gripped harder at the dress and the bottle. There was nothing else to reach for.
The clouds continued to skate past the moon.
Where were the other girls? Where was my date? Why was I still laughing, acting like I was having the time of my life with these good Catholic boys I’d known all my life? I’d been longing for any of them to ask me on a date, to invite me to dance, to call me, kiss me, want me. Each of them was dating one of my friends. This was the first time any of them had ever touched me.
Jared appeared for a second time. On this pass, he stuck his whole hand between my breasts. Only then did I step back. Only then did I feel the crush of shame slamming through the buzz, the dress, the laughter. Only then did I let myself understand that they were laughing at me.
I continued to laugh.
Laughing, laughing, laughing. The sound of it covered so much—it covered the whole Texas sky with its false notes that disguised my terror.
My group sat quietly as I said the names of those tall Catholic boys and how their clammy hands felt down my dress.
Now Big Ernie’s soft wet brush on my exposed belly
