“Yes, ma’am.” No, I didn’t understand her at all, and I desperately wanted her to let go of my breasts, but she was holding on for dear life, as if she needed them for balance. There was an inch of ash on the tip of her cigarette, and I worried it was going to fall into my cleavage. We stood like that for a while without talking, and I wondered if she had fallen asleep on her feet or had had a little stroke.
Hudson found a chair and straddled it backward. He took his phone out of his pocket and began reading. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I tried to work up the courage to extricate my boobs from her claw-like hands. But suddenly she let go and shouted.
“40DD!”
Startled, I jumped back. “What? No! No, no, no, no, NO!” I cried. This time I did cover my chest before she could get at them again. “I’m a 36C.”
“Ha!”
“I’ve been a 36C since I was fifteen years old,” I insisted.
The old lady turned around to look at Hudson. “Denial is a terrible disease when it comes to bosoms,” she told him. “I’m only one woman. I can only right the wrongs of two bosoms at a time.” He nodded, as if she was Eliot Ness and my boobs were Al Capone.
“I’m wearing a Maidenform from Nordstrom,” I said with as much pride as I could muster. She ignored me and riffled through a couple boxes, taking out handfuls of bras.
“Come on,” she ordered and pushed me toward the back. She was surprisingly strong for such a tiny, old woman. We walked behind a small curtain into a small dressing room with two floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a blinking fluorescent light overhead. “Off. Off,” she said, pulling at my shirt.
“Could you leave first?” I wasn’t a naked person. I was a cover up at the beach person. I was a sex in the dark person. I had never tried on bras with another person in the room.
“I’m the bosom lady. Your bosoms have been waiting for me.” I had never heard the wordbosomspoken so many times in my life. She tugged my shirt up and unhooked my bra in one movement with only two fingers. My breasts sprang free with wild abandon and flopped downward. I turned red from my head to my toes and everything in between.
“I’m a 36C,” I insisted.
She laughed. “And I’m Angelina Jolie. Don’t I look like Angelina Jolie? Don’t I have Angelina Jolie hair? Don’t I have Angelina Jolie legs?”
She looked like she had starred inTales of the Crypt. Her skeletal frame and giant boobs were wrapped in paper-thin, translucent skin, with a roadmap of veins that seemed to have been drawn on with Sharpies. There wasn’t much Angelina Jolie happening there.
The bosom lady pushed and prodded me until I had stripped off my shirt and bra, and she had put a new one on me, manipulating my breasts into the double-D cups.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said, as she adjusted the straps. “It’s the wrong size. Believe me, I know…”
Then, I shut up. The bra was in place, and the old lady stepped back. She tossed the cigarette on the floor and crushed it with her sensible square heel. I lifted my arms, put them down by my sides, shrugged my shoulders, and then released them. I felt free, comfortable, light as a feather. I was in heaven. Paradise. The bra was better than chocolate or happiness ice cream. My boobs had blossomed into bosoms. I had graduated to a higher level of mammaries.
“See?” she said. “40DD. I’ve never been wrong in fifty-seven years.”
I hated the number. I wish she would shut up about the number. But I loved how I looked in the mirror. Even though the bra was bigger than my old one, I looked thinner. Younger. Maybe even attractive. Maybe closer to the original me. Hudson was a genius, and the bosom lady was the guru of lingerie, the Einstein of spandex and lace. I loved her.
An hour later, she had sold me ten bras of different colors and uses and fifteen pairs of the most comfortable and flattering underpants I had ever owned. There was also a distinct possibility that I had contracted lung cancer being in the same room with her, but it was a trade-off and well worth it. Besides, she agreed to cut out all the tags, so I could be a 36C in my mind forever.
She tossed my old bra in the trash, and I wore a new one. The bosom lady rang up my purchases, and I handed her my American Express. “Declined,” she said, looking at the credit card machine.
“What do you mean?”
“Declined.”
“Try it, again,” I said.
Hudson walked over to the counter. “Declined, again,” the bosom lady said.
“That’s impossible. Try this one.”
She tried all seven of my credit cards, and none of them worked. A feeling of doom crawled up my body, like a fog settling in at the beach. Luckily, she accepted a check, but the excitement of my new undergarments was clouded with the fear that Steve had canceled my cards.
“He couldn’t have,” I told Hudson when we left the shop. He looked at his shoes and shrugged. “He wouldn’t. He… Would you take me to the bank?”
Hudson sat on a chair in the waiting area, while I sat at the branch manager’s desk. Mr. Philips typed a bunch of stuff into his computer and shook his head. “Mrs. Farris, it looks like your husband canceled the credit cards two days ago, and…” He stopped and sucked air through his teeth.
“What? He did what?” I urged him to continue.
