It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [27]
I don’t know where the baby was. It wasn’t on her, that’s for sure. I don’t know if the baby ever came in for a landing or what. The baby was not in the general vicinity when the incident began. Maybe the baby had a GPS device implanted and this was all prep work, but I think it would have been more considerate if she had a visual of the baby before I had a visual of her. And the boob sat there, and sat there, and sat there. It actually behaved very quietly for the ten minutes it was left to roam free in my field of vision before I could talk to someone else and face a different direction.
I had never been at a barbecue before in which one person was playing a solo version of spin the bottle without notifying anyone else. Frankly, I didn’t know how to react, so I didn’t. I just attempted to carry on with my conversation, though every thirty seconds or so my eyes would shoot over to see if the boob had made a retreat. It had not. Honestly, I thought I had to be seeing things, as in “I had a feeling I put too much salt on the potato salad and now I am having a stroke and experiencing horrifying hallucinations of hippie breasts,” and then I convinced myself that I simply must have gotten two pills confused an hour earlier and ended up taking a whole Ambien instead of a Beano.
And you know, I really have to say this: If your baby isn’t even in the room and you can’t bear to come equipped with a blanket, kindly put your boob away in its rightful compartment. Don’t leave it hanging out for ten to fifteen minutes at a barbecue like you’re waiting for someone to hang a Christmas ornament on it. In hindsight, maybe what I should have done was run over to stand next to her, whip out my own bewbie, and cry, “Oh! I didn’t know there was a contest! Look, I win! My boob still looks like a boob, since I can’t fold it in half like a taco.”
Now, I know that babies get hungry and babies need to be fed, but this wasn’t about breast-feeding, because there was no feeding going on for the portion of an hour that the teat got a tan. This was about pulling a private part of your body that resembles a tortilla with an eraser located randomly at the bottom edge of it out at a party and letting it sit there because you don’t know the meaning of the word “inappropriate.”
But apparently I was the odd one out here, because when I mentioned this to a group of people several weeks later, someone asked me if I was ashamed of my own body, which, honestly, didn’t have anything to do with the topic of a free-range boob at a social gathering. I wasn’t the one softly cajoling the boob out from under its tank top. And frankly, the answer to that question is that I am downright proud of my boobs; I had the best boobs at that party, because I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant, and you’d have a better chance selling someone a meat grinder in this town than you would anything with a Maidenform tag on it. There are hippie boobs everywhere, and if you like ’em lean, long, swingy, and Stretch Armstrong-y, this is your boob command center. I, on the other hand, have been devout every day since my charges popped on the scene when I was ten, and they have served me well ever since. I have a huge ass and I have a blap (hybrid of a belly + a lap), but you reap what you sow, and I have plowed a lifetime of underwire fields. Believe me, if there was anyone who deserved to be showing off that day, it was me. Instead, it was the shocking horror of that boob that made a cameo, and, to put it bluntly, in a lineup I would have definitely identified it as a Kombai of Papua New Guinea, considering that it looked like a rooty yam.
So things, all in all, weren’t working out that well for me in Eugene. I had