A short story by Jane Hamilton ’79
When I was a girl I collected Hummel figurines, troll dolls, and the Madame Alexander dolls, a hobby with a significant sticker price range. At every major holiday a relative could take her pick, buy something low end or go berserk, depending on her circumstances — my gift to them, the easy child to shop for. No judgment from me. I loved the Spanish doll with the black lace fan, the gold hoop earrings, and the ruby silk dress as much as I loved the butt-naked grinning troll with the tufty green hair. My father built me a cabinet that went the length of my bedroom wall: five shelves with two sets of glass doors, a piece of furniture I still own and which continues to house my girlhood treasures. To this day my husband and I live in that same old neighborhood, the southerly end of a solid suburb, not far from Chicago, our location reserved for the suburban poor and the rag-tag Mafiosi. I had one much older brother, many aunts and uncles, several boy cousins, and so I, the only girl in the crowd, was fawned over — all a happiness until I turned thirteen.
I developed an enormous bosom. In the space of eighteen months I went from ordinary girl to freak. The boy cousins became afraid to look at me, and the uncles in the perpetual presence of their wives always made a point to gape unblinkingly into my large brown eyes when they spoke to me, as if one little glance south and they’d get eaten alive. My own father seemed to have this trouble, too. My name is Violet June and you can imagine how many times “June is busting out all over” was sung in my honor, supposedly out of earshot, the singer thinking he was original. You may not be able to picture the magnitude of this problem. I didn’t just have big knockers. They were like national monuments, like something the earth had heaved into being out of her molten self on a turbulent day of the creation. Standing straight, I couldn’t see my feet. I couldn’t run quickly, never went swimming, and sometimes wished to cripple myself so I could ride around in a wheelchair, done with the effort of hauling the bazookas everywhere I went. They had surpassed their function, larger than a full-term baby, each one, so that an infant trying to latch on might assume that he was number three of triplets, his siblings capable of providing him with food.
The training bra that my mother had carefully purchased lasted for about two weeks. No one else on either side had ever had such a pair and, although she tried to be cheerful, I think she believed that I had cooked up this mischief to dash her own glee at having the only girl in the extended family. We were forever chasing back to the store until I stabilized at 34L. This size does exist in our galaxy, a special model my mother had to get from a mail-order company in South Dakota, a state that had nothing better to do than outfit girls of monstrous proportions. How much better to have grown up now, in the new century, so that I could have shared my grief in chat rooms with my sisters in freakdom across the globe.
As it was, I was alone; the girl with the outrageous kettledrums, unique in a high school of nearly four thousand students. Because of the strain on my back, I always wore The Contraption, which is what I called the bra, my poor tatas night and day in bondage. My aunt, trying to give comfort, assured me that it, the chest, they, “the . . . the . . . the . . . the capacious satchels,” she finally burst out, would surely someday be useful in some other part of the world, as if in Brazil I could — what? Roll tortillas in my cleavage? Or in China steam wontons in the same place? My bosom had affected her brain. I don’t think she was clairvoyant, don’t think she imagined what use I would make of them, and even if she were still living I suppose I couldn’t to this day tell her.
After high school I took a job as a guard at the art museum. We were to wear navy blue pants, a pinstriped shirt, and a navy blazer. Sensible shoes. I had been to the museum on field trips but the place wasn’t in any way my cup of tea. I liked playing cards for cash, and I had allowed myself to enjoy the attentions of the boys who were transfixed by my figure. They considered themselves brave, heroic. My uncle got me the job at the museum through a neighbor of his, as if he thought that being on display would be a kick for me, and the patrons. Or that standing around all day long in front of pictures of proportional nudes, and Jesus in torment, and flowers in vases, and French persons on slick wet streets in Paris would somehow bring me up in the world.
At first I entertained myself by imagining the lives of the patrons as they walked reverently through the galleries. Those two ugly women, leaning into each other, discussing the mother bathing her child, were about to fall in love, a last resort. Those two little girls despised their grandmother, the powdery woman with the wattly throat, and would forever hate the Impressionists because of this very day. That husband with the sunken chest and sketchy moustache was going to go home and chop up his wife with a steak knife. The daydreams got progressively darker until even the murderous dramas were no fun.