Nine Kinds of Naked (20 page)

For years, Elizabeth attributed her precocious and cornucopian breasts to this injury. In this way, she was able to blame every atrocity of the social estrangement that developed apace with her chest on a moment's clumsiness. And since Elizabeth's nickname was Betty, it was ultimately inevitable that Brian Berlin, the most popular boy in class, would see the alliterative light one afternoon in fourth grade and loudly dub her Betty Boobs. Betty Boobs. A sobriquet destined to stick like a hive of bees. Every sullen morning as she dressed, she lamented crashing her bicycle in the cornfield, and was for a while unable to accept that there was nothing she could do to change that fact. But gradually, as her boobs grew irrevocably larger, Elizabeth came to realize that do-overs were not permitted in life. Not in a cornfield, not anywhere.

Armed with this early wisdom, Elizabeth made it her business to ensure that every titty-twisting grope she received from some Red Rover creep in gym class would be avenged. Not immediately, but eventually, covertly. No do-overs, she reminded herself again and again. Her imagination became occupied with orchestrating the misfortunes of her miscreants, subtly manipulating them into adversity. Lying to them about when an assignment was due or what pages to read, spreading disinformation about them on the bathroom walls, even sending homoerotic letters from one tormentor to another. Every grope, every bra snap, every crudity begat further chaos. When
Brian Berlin wagged his tongue at her when they were learning about the Grand Tetons in geography, his tongue may as well have been the flapping wings of a Brazilian butterfly whipping up his own personal tornado. Her schemes were invariably successful, and as she watched the ramifications ricochet, Elizabeth gradually came to sense that the world was made of nothing but rumors and hearsay.

Once, during recess in fifth grade, Brian Berlin ran up behind her, barked, “Betty Boobs!,” and snapped her bra so hard that it unclasped. He sneered hideously as his friends hooted, repeatedly demonstrating the size of Elizabeth's chest to one another as if they were juggling invisible basketballs. Sister Half-and-Half—so nicknamed for the black-tipped silver bangs that peeked from beneath her habit—reprimanded Brian, though not so severely since she always favored the most popular students. Brian apologized to Sister Half-and-Half, excusing his harassment by saying he was “just playing.” Sister Half-and-Half told him not to play so rough, and Brian nodded, and that was that. Elizabeth might have accepted his apology, even though it was directed to Sister Half-and-Half and not to her, but Brian sneered when he turned away, and as he walked past Elizabeth, into her ear he hissed the word “sssslut.”

This succeeded in terrifying Elizabeth, taunting as it did the untamed adolescent sexuality that was then just beginning to course through her body. No one else heard his predation, and within moments any chance Elizabeth might have had of mustering a retort had passed. There was nothing for her to do but clench her teeth. Though it would be seven years before
she paid that debt, there was never any doubt that the deed would be redeemed.

No do-overs.

 

57
E
LIZABETH
W
ILDHACK
once read that Eskimos have some fifty-two different words for snow. Scholars have disputed the numerical veracity of this claim, but the point remains: Because snow is so important to Eskimo life, an exquisite vocabulary has developed to describe it. And so, Elizabeth was frequently led to marvel at the supreme importance of breasts to the modern male gaze. In her estimation, she was certain that there must be well over a thousand formal and informal synonyms for the female bosom. Is it possible, she wondered, that in the same way the Eskimo have developed an exhaustive vocabulary regarding the most fundamental aspect of their world, that men have developed their staggering lexicon of the breast for the same reason?

We will not be here pursuing a comprehensive catalog of this vernacular, although this is precisely what Elizabeth undertook. Here we will merely indulge in a brief sampling of her collected synonymy, if only to demonstrate the sheer breadth of metaphor intended to indicate the ineffability of the breast:

Thingamajugs, eyeslappers, brumskies, chesticles, and happy-fun-squeezy friends. From Bronx bombers to Boston wobblers, from the devil's dumplings to the goddamn gland canyon, Elizabeth had heard it all. Invariably, these reminders were more accusation than compliment, but Elizabeth had nonetheless developed a fondness for certain descriptives and
a bitter disdain for others. She despised, for example, any suggestion that her breasts had anything at all to do with cannonballs, hubcaps, sandbags, distributor caps, dual air bags, torpedoes, fog lights, blimps, buoys, submarines, atom smashers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, or any other grease-monkey fantasy.

On the other hand, the implication that her breasts were akin to the bounty of Mother Earth was much more pleasing to her ears. Apples and oranges, peaches and pears, lemons and nectarines, kiwis and kumquats, papayas and pawpaws, guavas and sugarplums, there was something undeniably sweet about such associations. But of course, her tomatoes soon grew into grapefruit, and graduated from there into mangoes and melons, avocados and artichokes, cantaloupes and coconuts, eggplants and honeydews. Then there were pumpkins and watermelons—totally ludicrous, she hoped. The doctor who had diagnosed her with macromastia—which is how doctors say big boobs—informed her that her breasts wouldn't stop growing until around age twenty-five. She wasn't much worried about this, though. Aside from lunar and seasonal tumescence, her breasts had more or less stabilized just after she finished high school and moved away from Normal, Illinois.

Returning to the topic at hand, gluttons were not without their contributions, either, projecting their favorite desserts onto the nearest rack: loaves, muffins, butterbags, dumplings, macaroons, cream pies, cupcakes, and Jell-O molds, to name only a few. Elizabeth had no strong feelings about these culinary comparisons, except that they were at least preferable to
the gobs of sports slobs whose beer-soaked imaginations went no further than comparing her breasts to their favorite toy ball—double dribbles being a notable exception.

Truly creative remarks, such as hug bumps, rib cushions, snuggle pups, sweater kittens, and dueling banjos, were at least memorable, though not so much as the Latin dance craze that seemed to be the latest trend. Elizabeth's breasts could dance neither the mambo, the cha-cha, nor the rumba, yet these were somehow deemed equivalent signifiers. After reviewing her collected list, she speculated that this was actually part of a much larger genre of machismo, in which any Spanish word possessed of the proper rhythm becomes an instant metaphor for breasts, regardless of whether it has anything in common with breasts or not. Thus, she had not only heard her breasts referred to as tamales, tortillas, chalupas, enchiladas, and chimichangas, but also as carumbas, casabas, congas, maracas, marimbas, muchachas, Montezumas, mamacitas, chiquitas, and Chihuahuas.

Over time, Elizabeth noticed a common denominator to this nonsense. The vast majority of these Latino derivations ended in —as, as in “ahh”—a sigh of satisfaction. Furthermore, the entire category ultimately devolved into such celebratory gibberish as gazingas, gazongas, bazoombas, bazongas, gongas, goombahs, splazoingas, chumbawumbas, mambajahambas, and lollapaloozas, not to mention hoo-has, tatas, gagas, oompahs, yayas, and wahwahs. Indeed, it occurred to Elizabeth that while no one had ever told her she had “nice Pocahontas,” she surely would have understood their meaning if they had. Elizabeth sensed there was a deeper significance at play, but it
would be a few years before it would occur to her that these might represent attempts to recollect a word, the first word, the word that no child needs to be taught, and the instinct whose repression fuels neurosis, aggression, and war.

Until that time, however, Elizabeth merely thought it ridiculous.

 

58
I
T WAS NO ADVANCE
in the arts of human expression when Brian Berlin blurted, “You have huge jugs,” to Elizabeth Wildhack one afternoon during their senior year of high school. She had been working in the school library for course credit, and Brian was returning a book—on Pocahontas, as it turned out—when he made his uninspired observation. But before Elizabeth could react in any way, she caught the whisper of a karmic impulse, an opportunity to finally return a tit for his long-ago tat. Not yet seeing what her intuition felt, she simply smiled sweetly and thanked him. Brian, flustered by her unexpected flirtation, retreated quickly. Free of his grunty presence, Elizabeth looked at his student identification number shimmering on the computer screen in front of her, and a calm alit upon her heart like a butterfly on a barbed wire, soothing the seethe of her lopsided Tao. No do-overs.

After jotting down his ID number, Elizabeth did a subject search for books on male homosexuality. There were over twenty, many with remarkably provocative titles for a high school library in Normal, Illinois, and all of them were available. She printed out the sheet, located all of the books, and then hid them behind some other books in an obscure section
of the stacks. A few days later, when she was not actually scheduled to staff the desk, she checked out all of the titles using Brian's student identification number. Then she hid the books again and went to class.

The bureaucracy took over from there. Inevitably, Brian was notified that he had a number of overdue books. Mystified and not wanting to pay a fine, he went to the library to protest, where he was informed by the freshman behind the desk that he had over twenty overdue books. Aggravated, Brian insisted that he hadn't checked out any books for weeks. Naturally, this got him nowhere, and so he angrily demanded to know exactly which books he supposedly had. The freshman behind the desk, irritated at Brian's attitude, responded by reciting, loud and lighthearted, the onslaught of homo-suggestive titles. Brian, faced with this sudden violation of his adolescently precarious masculine identity—and by some dork freshman no less—threw a tantrum, trying to land a punch and crashing the computer monitor off the desk in the process. This succeeded only in attracting even more attention to his predicament. The head librarian intervened, and Brian sputteringly tried to explain himself, but after a search revealed that none of the titles were on the shelves, Brian was firmly informed that he was responsible for the cost of all of the books, as well as the computer monitor, before he could graduate. And by the end of the day, the dork freshman had made certain that every student in the school had been told of Brian's sexual fancy.

None of this surprised Elizabeth Wildhack in the least. She had foreseen every reaction and consequence in its entirety.

 

59
“V
INDICTIVE
,” Diana observed several years later, after Elizabeth had proudly relayed her favorite story of how she'd once gotten even with Brian Berlin. “You sound like the mistress of Machiavelli.”

Elizabeth considered a moment before she licked the backstage joint she was rolling. “I prefer to think of myself as the Countess of Monte Cristo, but either way, I can live with it,” she said, giving an expert twist to her joint.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

“Fuck yes, do unto others. If I'm ever goose-stepping around, minding other people's business and harassing the innocent, I hope someone steps up and does unto me, if only to slap me awake from that sort of stupidity. And besides, I didn't do this unto some random other,” Elizabeth protested as she offered the joint to Diana. “I did this unto an other who had done the same unto me.”

“You're sure this is sativa?” Diana asked. Diana, Elizabeth had learned, considered herself something of a cannabis connoisseur, and while she held cannabis sativa in very high regard, she had nothing but disdain for the much more common variety of cannabis indica. The problem, as Diana explained it, is that most potheads don't know their grass from their granola, and indica's popularity has nothing to do with the more narcotic and less-inspiring quality of its intoxication and everything to do with the requirements of illegal indoor growing. Ever since she'd come across an ounce of Alaskan Matanuska Thunderfuck—a pure sativa variety—two years ago, she could accept nothing less. In Diana's estimation, sativa soars and indica snores.

Elizabeth nodded. “Definitely sativa.”

Diana lit the joint thoughtfully and passed it to Elizabeth. “So, you were proposing a proviso to the golden rule?”

“No,” Elizabeth insisted. “I'm not claiming it was ethical. I mean, I was also taking advantage of and thereby reinscribing homophobia. That's surely unethical as well.” Elizabeth shrugged and took a contemplative hit off the joint. “But to be honest, if I had it to do over again—which none of us ever do—I'd do the exact same thing. Maybe when I'm sixty-four and otherwise illuminated, I'll see it differently, but I doubt it. I take full responsibility for my actions, and if he'd ever guessed that I was behind his little catastrophe, I would have met his warpath fair enough. But he never did, and I knew he never would. The fact is, he'd been defining and confining my sexuality with his unwelcome words and gestures for years. Doing thus unto me, I can only assume that he would have thus done unto himself. Who are we to say which direction karma moves in?”

Taking a long drag off the joint, Diana made a face at this dubious logic. Elizabeth continued unabated. “My posture improved after that. I had been slumping my shoulders for years trying to hide the fact that my body didn't conform to the vertical plane of everybody else's, and he was a major cause of that. He cast a lot of words my way, and the way I see it, when we cast words, we cast spells—enchanting others into believing that this is and they are what we say. He wasn't minding his own magic. He tried to enchant me into thinking I was a slut because I had big boobs, and I almost fell for it. That's dark magic, as far as I'm concerned.”