Crazy Salad Read Free Page A

I let him get his hand under my protuberances and onto my breasts. He really didn’t seem to mind at all.
    “Do you want to marry my son?” the woman asked me.
    “Yes,” I said.
    I was nineteen years old, a virgin, going with this woman’s son, this big strange woman who was married to a Lutheran minister in New Hampshire and pretended she was gentile and had this son, by her first husband, this total fool of a son who ran the hero-sandwich concession at Harvard Business School and whom for one moment one December in New Hampshire I said—as much out of politeness as anything else—that I wanted to marry.
    “Fine,” she said. “Now, here’s what you do. Always make sure you’re on top of him so you won’t seem so small. My bust is very large, you see, so I always lie on my back to make it look small, but you’ll have to be on top most of the time.”
    I nodded. “Thank you,” I said.
    “I have a book for you to read,” she went on. “Take it with you when you leave. Keep it.” She went to the bookshelf, found it, and gave it to me. It was a book on frigidity.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    That is a true story. Everything in this article is a true story, but I feel I have to point out that that story in particular is true. It happened on December 30, 1960. I think about it often. When it first happened, I naturally assumed that the woman’s son, my boyfriend, was responsible. I invented a scenario where he had had a little heart-to-heart with his mother and had confessed that his only objection to me was that my breasts were small; his mother then took it upon herself to help out. Now I think I was wrong about the incident. The mother was acting on her own, I think: that was her way of being cruel and competitive under the guise of being helpful and maternal. You have small breasts, she was saying; therefore you will never make him as happy as I have. Or you have small breasts; therefore you will doubtless have sexual problems. Or you have small breasts; therefore you are less woman than I am. She was, as it happens, only the first of what seems to me to be a never-ending string of women who have made competitive remarks to me about breast size. “I would love to wear a dress like that,” my friend Emily says to me, “but my bust is too big.” Like that. Why do women say these things to me? Do I attract these remarks the way other women attract married men or alcoholics or homosexuals? This summer, for example. I am at a party in East Hampton and I am introduced to a woman from Washington. She is a minor celebrity,very pretty and Southern and blond and outspoken, and I am flattered because she has read something I have written. We are talking animatedly, we have been talking no more than five minutes, when a man comes up to join us. “Look at the two of us,” the woman says to the man, indicating me and her. “The two of us together couldn’t fill an A cup.” Why does she say that? It isn’t even true, dammit, so why? Is she even more addled than I am on this subject? Does she honestly believe there is something wrong with her size breasts, which, it seems to me, now that I look hard at them, are just right? Do I unconsciously bring out competitiveness in women? In that form? What did I do to deserve it?
    As for men.
    There were men who minded and let me know that they minded. There were men who did not mind. In any case,
I
always minded.
    And even now, now that I have been countlessly reassured that my figure is a good one, now that I am grown-up enough to understand that most of my feelings have very little to do with the reality of my shape, I am nonetheless obsessed by breasts. I cannot help it. I grew up in the terrible fifties—with rigid stereotypical sex roles, the insistence that men be men and dress like men and women be women and dress like women, the intolerance of androgyny—and I cannot shake it, cannot shake my feelings of inadequacy. Well, that time is gone, right? All those