In the Flesh by Lynne Van Luven

Author:Lynne Van Luven
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-926972-38-1
Publisher: Brindle & Glass
Published: 2012-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

Life with My Girls

Lynne Van Luven

I have everything I had twenty years ago, only it’s all a little lower.

—Gypsy Rose Lee, dancer, writer, and agente provocateuse

“Just stand still, let me measure you.” My mother ran her frayed cloth measuring tape around the middle of my chest, right where the tender points had started to sprout. “Now breathe naturally.”

Two weeks later, the brown-paper package from the Eaton’s catalogue centre in Winnipeg arrived at the post office, addressed to Box 166, Dysart, Saskatchewan, and my dad brought it home from town with the rest of the mail. Like many farm families of the late 1950s, we ordered most of our clothes from the catalogue. But I wouldn’t be showing off this purchase the way I did new shoes or a sweater. You couldn’t really call it . . . clothing. And I certainly didn’t want my pesky brother, Raymond, four years younger, to know what was going on. Even though the small, soft rectangle seemed to glow red from the corner of the kitchen cupboard, I ignored it until after supper.

“Come on upstairs,” said Mom. “Let’s see how these fit.”

Inside the package were two cheap white cotton bras (Charmode, two for $3.95) with narrow elastic straps and a row of three hooks and eyes that fastened at the centre of the back. Top-stitched in concentric circles, the cups culminated in sharp points. Grumpily self-conscious, I tried one on. I felt strung up, harnessed more tightly than Paint, my pinto pony. The pointy tips collapsed inwards on my chest, sort of like deflated volleyballs, only conical.

My mother patted me briskly on the shoulder. “You’ll grow into them.”

Not if I can help it, I thought. I’d already tried sleeping on my stomach to squash my growths. I’d also attempted plastering bands of adhesive tape over my chest to starve the buds of air so they would fall off, the way warts eventually did after you suffocated them with Band-Aids. Or maybe if I took a few loops of that black electrical tape out of my dad’s garage . . .

When I lay awake in bed that night stewing about my breasts, I folded my hands flat over them and pressed down, hard. The way I saw it, their uninvited presence thrust me directly into the ranks of the animals on the farm, the ones with udders and teats—the cows and the sows—all of whom were relegated to two stark roles in life: producing food or becoming it. Sometimes they did both, one right after the other. Even mother cats, as they lay on their sides to let their kittens suckle, signalled abject passivity to me. First they screamed horribly when the tomcats jumped them; then they pumped out half a dozen kittens of varying hues and patterns; finally, the nursing kittens rampaged all over them. And their milk was never enough: they also had to hunt rapaciously, dragging birds and mice and rats back to the barn to feed their progeny.

Breastlike appendages, as far

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