By Adrienne Anifant

I carry these things on me, called boobs, tits, melons, titties, jugs. I call them my chest, those, or this area, so I don’t have to think about them. They’re not mine, but I’m attached to them. My high school boyfriend told me so, he said that my tits were his as he pretended they were knobs on a pinball machine. People stare and talk to them instead of me, they say “bounce, bounce” when I walk down the street and “sexy” and “yummy.”

Before job interviews I always negotiate with my chest. While a woman asks me where I want to be in five years I look out her window at the invisible stars hiding behind bulbous clouds and daylight, but she’s still in my peripheral vision. She’ll glance at them and squint with a suspicious eye, frown, then look down at her own chest, fluff the blouse a little, then look back in my general direction. But at this point she is not hearing me because, maybe, she thinks she already knows me.

A man doesn’t care if I’m looking him in the eye, he’ll look down and smile a little: he knows he knows me. I’ll take this as some hope. “Yes I’d be excited to work in this position,” I say. I sit straight, on the edge of his French antique Louis XV reproduction chair. I have so many ideas. And I do feel them, ideas and possibilities, like electric green leaves of spring. I forget for those few minutes about all that I trawled behind me walking down the street and through this man’s office door and suddenly I’m back inside myself. He withdraws and gives me a sardonic smile that he saves only for idiots and his wife. Hold on there cowgirl, he seems to say. I can’t really take you seriously enough to hire you in this office, not when you’ve got those. “I’m tremendously impressed with you, but I still have a lot of people to interview. I’ll let you know” he says, taking one last look as I turn to leave. I don’t have the job but he’s enjoyed the hour.

I place the soles of my shoes on asphalt as I leave the building. I feel cartoony, freakish, stupid, balloon-like and two-dimensional. I think of what my friend would say, “you’re paranoid,” or my younger sister, “you’re self-centered,” or my counselor, “you’re giving yourself an awful lot of credit, maybe you’re the one obsessed with breasts.” I walk pass construction guys leaning against a backhoe eating pepperoni pizza, “Wow. Those are big ones.” They laugh. I want to shout back, “They’re called breasts, you sucked you’re mothers, get over it.” But I don’t because they may punch mine. It’s true though--once those men were small only one hundred breaths old and they nursed from their mother’s breasts or at least fell asleep against them. But since mine are neither feeding a baby, nor are they sick with cancer they’re not breasts, they’re tits.

So I negotiate with my chest: I try to flatten them, hide them, push them together and squash them down using a sports bra that’s two sizes too small. I walk stiffly with my elbows tight to my rib cage because minimal locomotion causes less bounce. I curl my spine into a C, like I have kyphosis, making my shoulders round over so no one will notice them, but someone may notice my head. Because I have one.

It hurts to hide them and it’s painful but it’s the best I can do to be seen. I’m sick of lugging these things around and all that they mean.