The first soul I heard before I saw it clacked. A tongue stud against teeth, 1996, behind the counter of a pizza-by-the-slice place, back when pizza by the slice became a bougie affair the way Friends changed American coffee house culture. Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
But the packaging. I have liked boobs since I saw them with sentient eyeballs. Not admired. Not appreciated the form. I wanted them in my hands and on my breasts, and I want to be clear about the distinction, because there are women who like breasts the way people like architecture, and there are women who want to press their chest into another woman’s chest until neither of you can tell whose heartbeat is whose. I was the second kind at fourteen, in a Catholic school desk, while a woman with a laminated poster explained the Assumption. Mary going up to heaven, body and soul, assumed whole into the sky, and I sat there thinking about breasts with a focus the Church would have envied. They wanted me to contemplate the mystery of a woman’s body rising and I was contemplating the mystery of a woman’s body, full stop, which as far as I’m concerned, is the same devotion at a different altitude. I confessed a lot of things at that school. Never that. Some sins you don’t give away because they aren’t sins, they’re information, and I was fourteen and already smart enough to know the difference even if I wouldn’t have language for it for another thirty years. I wanted the weight of one in my palm, that specific weight, like holding a water balloon you’re not allowed to drop, and the small stupid thrill of a nipple deciding something on its own.
Posted 3 days ago.
