Читать книгу Julia's Chocolates - Cathy Lamb - Страница 7

Sometimes life is better when you’re woozy. Very woozy. My shirt and bra were still off, discarded somewhere behind the couch, the candles flickering between me and the four other women.

We were still examining our boobs, trying to understand their psychology. Well, all of us except for Lara, who was on her sixth brownie and fourth glass of wine and laughing hysterically on the couch as she mimicked the voices of various people in her church’s congregation.

At one point she stopped, yanked her boobs up so she could see them well, and said to me, “Still young. Still happy-looking. What happened to me?” She kept laughing, the sound getting more high-pitched as the evening went on.

I glanced down at the Mammoth Melons. I had always felt completely detached from my breasts, as if they were another appendage, an appendage that I didn’t need and didn’t want. 35 DD. And they had been that big and bouncy since eighth grade. I almost needed a harness to rein the things in.

The women in our family line for as far back as we could remember had all had huge boobs. Huge, protruding breasts. We’d all tried to hide them. Even in old family portraits the women are sitting ever so slightly hunched, their shoulders pulled inward, as if they couldn’t stand for future generations to know what lived on their chests.

Yes, we all tried to hide our top halves, except for my mother, who wore them like a giant come-and-get-me banner.

And it had worked. Many husbands. Many boyfriends.

My whole childhood was filled with Creeps Who Liked Large Breasts. Even on children. I groaned as an avalanche of memories started to cave in on me, black and dirty and horrifying, and I fought them off, knowing how they bended what little sanity I felt I had left.

Robert had liked my breasts, but really nothing else. He had played with them, squeezing them until I’d cried out, pushing them together, then back out. Massaging them as one might massage bread.

“Come on, baby,” he would whisper, “arch your back for me.” He’d push me onto his king-sized bed in his bachelor pad, insist I strip, then make me pose in various positions.

At first I had liked it. “You look hot, baby. Open your mouth. Oh, yeah.” I thought it was kind of sexy. I had only been with one man before Robert, a hurried and somewhat drunken affair, and that a man like Robert wanted to be with me at all, that he was willing to risk seeing me naked, well, that in itself was sexy.

He’d straddle me and play with my boobs with his hands, his mouth, then he’d flip me over and do the same thing. It was as if my breasts were the only thing about me he really liked. He rarely kissed me at all, even less so on the lips, and the second after we’d finished having sex—and he’d never noticed that I’d never orgasmed—we were out of bed, and he would start in on his complaints and demands…

“We’re going to my mother’s tomorrow night…. I know your cooking class is then. You’re going to have to skip it. I already told her and my father we would be there. My mother wants to talk to you about your clothes. It’s about time, too.”

Or, “Those pants, well”—a mean laugh—“they don’t quite look right, do they? On someone who was built thinner than you, they might, but Cannonball, these aren’t made for you.”

And the worst, “Would it kill you to show a little enthusiasm in bed? What is wrong with you? I think it would be easier to have sex with an icicle.”

And still I stayed. I tried to please him. That didn’t work. I tried walking away. He came after me. I tried to fight back, but he squashed all my efforts. By the time I took off on our wedding day, I realized I hated him for making me hate myself.

“There is power in your breasts!” Lydia boomed. “Sit up straighter, Katie! Look for your power!”

I watched Katie struggle to sit up straight, her eyes at half-mast. Her face was more relaxed now than it had been, the wine having worked its wonders, her red hair only loosely held back by a rubber band, but even in the candlelight I could see her exhaustion, and I sensed her profound unhappiness, as if black charcoals had settled on her soul.

“I think my power was lost the first day I gave birth,” she said with a groan. She picked up the mirror that Lydia handed to her and held it up to her large, tired-looking breasts. Her bra, I had noted, was tattered and frayed, a dull beige. Her bra and her sweatshirt were folded neatly behind her.

“I have nursed four children. One still reaches for me as soon as I walk in the door. Sometimes I think it’s like having a pet leech. Oh, God. Did I just call my child a pet leech?” She groaned again, dropping the mirror.

“He’s not a leech,” she muttered, tears pooling in those dark eyes. “He’s so adorable, I could cry. Yesterday he climbed on my lap and kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I love you better than the cat, Momma.’ Better than the cat! And he loves that cat.”

“You must regain yourself through your breasts, Katie!” Lydia admonished although I noticed that her voice was softer. “You have to make some choices.”

“I’ve made a choice to sit in this house, on this floor, and drink a lot of vine. I mean wine. It’s the perfect choice.” Katie lay back down and giggled, balancing a mirror on her breast. “There are no children to take care of. I am doing no housework in my home right now, or anyone else’s. I am not dealing with Mrs. Nunley, who told me today I wasn’t a good grout cleaner.”

“You’re not a good grout cleaner!” Lara laughed, taking a break from her drunken mimicking. “Horrors. I am sure you will be going to hell for that! I will pray for you.”

“That would be helpful, Lara,” Katie said. “Pray also that I don’t try to grout Mrs. Nunley’s face.”

“How many houses did you clean this week?” Aunt Lydia asked.

“Fifteen so far. Fifteen houses in Golden are bright and spanking-clean because of my vacuum cleaner and dust rag. See?” she declared, sitting up again and wobbling just a bit. “I have become what I wanted to become. A business owner! Whooo hooo! Katie’s Cleaning.”

But the whooo hooo came out weak, tired.

I knew something was up with Katie, and I knew the other women knew, too, by the way they looked at her, but no one said a thing.

“Mrs. Nunley said she is not going to recommend me to any of her friends unless I whiten the grout. ‘Make it as white as my teeth’ she told me. ‘As white as my teeth.’ Then she pulled back her lips with those wrinkled hands of hers and showed me her teeth, sticking out her tongue so I could see right down her throat.”

Katie started to laugh. I noticed the slight pitch of hysteria. “They weren’t white! She had rows of those silver fillings, and her front teeth were yellow. And there she is, with a sick grin on her face, her fingers pulling her lips back to her ears and telling me to make her grout as white as her teeth. At least I have my won-der-ful husband to support me.”

I did not miss the looks that Caroline, Lydia, and Lara exchanged.

“Oh, gag me,” Lara said. “Just ggaaaagggg me.”

Katie’s laughter filled the room, but none of the other women seemed to think this was the slightest bit amusing.

The lights were still low, the candles burning, but the Breast Power Psychic Night group had broken up a bit. Lara had passed out on the couch after declaring that she could hear the state of New York calling her name through aliens. Lydia had pulled a sweater over her head and sat embroidering a pillow that read, “Sex is good for the skin. Men aren’t.”

Katie had wrapped an afghan around herself and was in a rocking chair by the window, staring straight out, not moving, not reading, just staring.

And Caroline and I were huddled on the floor, sitting across from each other. Caroline and I had both put our shirts and bras back on.

I had heard nothing from my boobs except that I was fat, with no job, almost no money, and had a Dread Disease and a sicko ex-fiancé I had had to escape from.

Caroline the Psychic didn’t ask to see my hand to trace my lines. She didn’t ask for my favorite number. There were no fancy-schmancy teacups or tarot cards, only a flickering candle between us and Lydia’s quiet humming. I think it was a southern song, one the slaves would have sung in the fields. A song with an upbeat tune but words so tragic, so hopeless you wanted to cry.

Caroline stared at me. “Let me look at your knees.”

“My knees?” She nodded. “Okeydokey. You’re the psychic. If you can read knees, all the better.” I pulled up my skirt. My knees were scarred in several places from childhood.

“What’s this scar from?” Caroline asked, pointing to the smallest scar, shaped like a half moon.

“I was hit by a car.”

“Hmmm,” Caroline said, her shiny brown hair surrounding her head like a veil.

I thought I heard wisdom in her “Hmmm.”

“And this one?”

“That one I got when I was a baby.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. It looked like the wing of a blackbird.

“My mother said I was too fussy that day. She put me on the patio of our apartment when it was raining. I stood up in my high chair and fell over the top.”

I didn’t tell her the rest of it. Aunt Lydia had told me later what happened. She got the scoop from the neighbor next door, who heard my pathetic cries. The neighbor had rushed over and untangled me from the tray of my high chair.

There was a gash on my head where the tray of my high chair had hit me when it slipped off in the crash. My hands, elbows, and knees were also bleeding messes. The gashes required nineteen stitches. The new scrapes and bruises simply added to the old scrapes and bruises and two old breaks in my bones.

The neighbor had banged on the sliding glass door, but my mother didn’t answer, being passed out in bed, upset and drunk because another boyfriend had walked out. So the neighbor had called the police, who called Children’s Services and an ambulance. I went to the hospital and had eleven stitches put in my head and eight on my knees. I still have the scars.

Children’s Services picked me up for the third time that year and deposited me in a foster home until Aunt Lydia found out about it and came and got me. She petitioned the court for custody, for the second time, but lost when my mother, Candy, who is very petite, except for her breasts, and can look like the most harmless, lovely woman anyone has ever seen, convinced the judge that she had mended the error of her ways, wasn’t drinking anymore, and had found Christ. She was born again, praise the Lord. She was walking with Jesus and felt blessed to have this second chance at living a holy life.

The judge, a devout Christian, believed her, and back I went with my mother. Aunt Lydia was furious, she told me later, but my mother was careful from then on out. Not because she wanted me, but because she didn’t want Lydia to have me. Then Lydia would have won. Candy couldn’t have that. Ever. Even if her child’s life was a miserable, terrifying mess. Lydia was quite a bit older than she was, they shared only a mother, and they had never, ever gotten along. “I don’t get along well with sociopaths,” Aunt Lydia had told me once.

I know Aunt Lydia lived with a massive amount of guilt for not rescuing me from my mother, but there was nothing she could do. She tried again and again, when she could find us, or when I could secretly send her a letter, to convince Candy to let me come and stay with her. But except for summertime, Candy always said no. And yet, I think my mother often hated me, especially when I became a teenager.

“Hmmmm…” Caroline said again. “It looks like a scar of inner pain. Of betrayal. The pain is still in you, isn’t it?”

I nodded, but wasn’t too impressed. It’s not hard to discern from that story what really happened.

“That’s one of the things you’re running from, isn’t it? Besides the fiancé?”

I swallowed hard.

“In fact, you have another scar here that was caused by your mother, wasn’t it?”

I looked down at Caroline’s little hand. She was tracing the largest scar on my knee and was studying it, as if looking through a microscope.

“Well, that one isn’t exactly from my mother,” I hemmed.

“Yes, it is,” she insisted, rubbing it softly with her finger. “Your mother caused this one. Again, it was neglect. Not the same sort of neglect, but neglect, right? Yes, I can see that I’m right. I’m very sorry.”

I wanted to burst into tears. Sometimes a kind voice, a steady look, and a touch will make you cry, and this was it.

Yes, that was the worst scar, the tunnel to more scars, all of the same sort, all emblazoned on my heart as if I’d been branded by a cow poker.

“So.” I tried to bluster my way out. “What kind of fortune do you see in my knees? What’s my future?”

Caroline laughed. “Oh, I can’t see a thing in your knees for the future. They were the door to the past, to your pain. I’ve already seen your future. I saw it when I walked in the door.”

“You saw my future?” That was alarming.

“Yes,” said Caroline. “And no. I saw a purplish haze around you and—”

“A purplish haze?”

“Yes. That stands for change, and for choice.”

“What else?” I knew there was something else. She was pleating her fingers together and the eye-twitching was getting more intense.

It would be melodramatic to say that the candle between us flickered and went out, but it is the truth. That candle died. Just died, the wax swallowing up the wick, and though other candles burned in the room and Aunt Lydia had her embroidery light on, it was dark between me and Caroline.

“Julia, honey—” she began.

“Just tell me. It can’t be worse than what I have now.”

“I see blackness. A rim of black around the purple. All around you. It’s a warning.”

“A warning?” Fear danced its way from my toes to neck, and I felt my heart start to palpitate again, my hands filling with blood that was filled with chunks of ice. My unknown disease, triggered by stress.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get a breath.

“Someone hates you.”

I nodded.

“Be careful.”

I nodded again. “But what about the purple you’re seeing?”

“It has something to do with chocolate,” Caroline said seriously. “When the chocolate comes, your whole life will change. It’s the impetus.”

Suddenly my breathing stopped, then started again. Had she said “chocolate”? My heart stopped rushing, stopped racing, the ice melted in my veins, the curious blackness that often obscured the edges of my vision when this mystery disease attacked started to clear.

“You’re on the road to chocolate,” she told me, her mouth grim. “And there is no way to veer off course.”

“Got it,” I breathed, trying not to laugh. “Watch out for chocolate.”

“That’s right,” Caroline said, holding my hands in hers, her eyes serious. “Watch out for chocolate.”