SAVAGE BREASTS

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I really don’t believe in feminist fiction, and certainly not in the fields of fantasy and science-fiction. If a male writer can put us into the mind of a six-armed Legamoth from Canopus, he can sure as hell show us what Shirley McNulty from down the block is thinking. James Schmitz, for one, built a whole SF career on the antics of strong female protagonists (come to think of it, if you’d ever met Mrs. Schmitz, you’d understand why). Other male writers have done as well or better at putting themselves in the minds of members of the opposite sex, and of course the reverse is true.

On the other chromosome …

There are some stories that a man simply would not write. Not because being male renders him incapable of so doing, but just because he’s unlikely to think of certain themes, or at least to approach them in as, well, personal a fashion.

After you read Nina Hoffman’s story, you might want to think twice about approaching them at all.

I WAS ONLY a lonely leftover on the table of Life. No one seemed interested in sampling me.

I was alone that day in the company cafeteria when I made the fateful decision which changed my life. If Gladys, the other secretary in my boss’s office and my usual lunch companion, had been there, it might never have happened, but she had a dentist appointment. Alone with the day’s entree, Spaghetti-0’s, I sought company in a magazine I found on the table.

In the first blazing burst of inspiration I ever experienced, I cut out an ad on the back of the Wonder Woman comic book. “The Insult that Made a Woman Out of Wilma,” it read. It showed a hipless, flat-chested girl being buried in the sand and abandoned by her date, who left her alone with the crabs as he followed a bosomy blonde off the page. Wilma eventually excavated herself, went home, kicked a chair, and sent away for Charlotte Atlas’s pamphlet, “From Beanpole to Buxom in 20 days or your money back.” Wilma read the pamphlet and developed breasts the size of breadboxes. She retrieved her boyfriend and rendered him acutely jealous by picking up a few hundred other men.

I emulated Wilma’s example and sent away for the pamphlet and the equipment that came with it.

When my pamphlet and my powder-pink exerciser arrived, I felt a vague sense of unease. Some of the ink in the pamphlet was blurry. A few pages were repeated. Others were missing. Sensing that my uncharacteristic spurt of enthusiasm would dry up if I took the time to send for a replacement, I plunged into the exercises in the book (those I could decipher) and performed them faithfully for the requisite twenty days. My breasts blossomed. Men on the streets whistled. Guys at the office looked up when I jiggled past.

I felt like a palm tree hand-pollinated for the first time. I began to have clusters of dates. I was pawed, pleasured, and played with. I experienced lots of stuff I had only read about before, and I mostly loved it after the first few times. The desert I’d spent my life in vanished; everything I touched here in the center of the mirage seemed real, intense, throbbing with life. I exercised harder, hoping to make the reality realler.

Then parts of me began to fight back.

I reclined on Maxwell’s couch, my hands behind my head, as he unbuttoned my shirt, unhooked my new, enormous, front-hook bra, and opened both wide. He kissed my stomach. He feathered kisses up my body. Suddenly my left breast flexed and punched him in the face. He was surprised. He looked at me suspiciously. I was surprised myself. I studied my left breast. It lay there gently bobbing like a Japanese glass float on a quiet sea. Innocent. Waiting.

Maxwell stared at my face. Then he shook his head. He eyed my breasts. Slowly he leaned closer. His lips drew back in a pucker. I waited, tingling, for them to flutter on my abdomen again. No such luck. Both breasts surged up and gave him a double whammy.

It took me an hour to wake him up. Once I got him conscious, he told me to get out! Out! And take my unnatural equipment with me. I collected my purse and coat and, with a last look at him as he lay there on the floor by the couch, I left.

In the elevator my breasts punched a man who was smoking a cigar. He coughed, choked, and called me unladylike. A woman told me I had done the right thing.

When I got home I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror. What beautiful breasts. Pendulous. Centerfold quality. Heavy as water balloons. Firm as paperweights. I would be sorry to say good-bye to them. I sighed, and they hobbled. “Well, guys, no more exercise for you,” I said. I would have to let them go. I couldn’t let my breasts become a Menace to Mankind. I would rather be noble and suffer a bunch.

I took a shower and went to bed.

That night I had wild dreams. Something was chasing me, and I was chasing something else. I thought maybe I was chasing myself, and that scared me silly. I kept trying to wake up, but to no avail. When I finally woke, exhausted and sweaty, in the morning, I discovered my sheets twisted around my legs. My powder-pink exerciser lay beside me in the bed. My upper arms ached the way they did after a good workout.

At work, my breasts interfered with my typing. The minute I looked away from my typewriter keyboard to glance at my steno pad, my breasts pushed between my hands, monopolizing the keys and driving my Selectric to distraction. After an hour of trying to cope with this I told my boss I had a sick headache. He didn’t want me to go home. “Mae June, you’re such an ornament to the office these days,” he said. “Can’t you just sit out there and look pretty and suffering? More and more of my clients have remarked on how you spruce up the decor. If that clackety-clacking bothers your pretty little head, why, I’ll get Gladys to take your work and hers and type in the closet.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. I went back out in the front room and sat far away from everything my breasts could knock over. Gladys sent me vicious looks as she flat-chestedly crouched over her early-model IBM and worked twice as hard as usual..

For a while I was happy enough just to rest. After all that nocturnal exertion, I was tired. My chair wasn’t comfortable, but my body didn’t care. Then I started feeling rotten. I watched Gladys. She had scruffy hair that kept falling out of its bobby pins and into her face. She kept her fingernails short and unpolished and she didn’t seem to care how carelessly she chose her clothes. She reminded me of the way I had looked two months earlier, before men started getting interested in me and giving me advice on what to wear and what to do with my hair. Gladys and I no longer went to lunch together. These days I usually took the boss’s clients to lunch.

“Why don’t you tell the boss you have a sick headache too?” I asked. “There’s nothing here that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

“He’d fire me, you fool. I can’t waggle my femininity in his face like you can. Mae June, you’re a cheater.”

“I didn’t mean to cheat,” I said. “I can’t help it.” I looked at her face to see if she remembered how we used to talk at lunch. “Watch this, Gladys.” I turned back to my typewriter and pulled off the cover. The instant I inserted paper, my breasts reached up and parked on the typewriter keys. I leaned back, straightening up, then tried to type the date in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Plomp plomp. No dice. I looked at Gladys. She had that kind of look that says eyoo, ick, that’s creepy, show it to me again.

I opened my mouth to explain about Wilma’s insult and Charlotte Atlas when my breasts firmed up. I found myself leaning back to display me at an advantage. One of the boss’s clients had walked in.

“Mae June, my nymphlet,” said this guy. Burl Weaver. I had been to lunch with him before. I kind of liked him.

Gladys touched the intercom. “Sir, Mr. Weaver is here.”

“Aw, Gladys,” said Burl, one of the few men who had learned her name as well as mine, “why’d you haveta spoil it? I didn’t come here for business.”

“Burl?” the boss asked over the intercom. “What does he want?”

Burl strode over to my desk and pushed my transmit button. “I’d like to borrow your secretary for the afternoon, Otis. Any objections?”

“Why no, Burl, none at all.” Burl is one of our biggest accounts. We produce the plastic for the records his company produces. “Mae June, you be good to Burl now.”

Burl pressed my transmit button for me. I leaned as near to my speaker as I could get. “Yes, sir,” I said. With tons of trepidation, I rose to my feet. My previous acquaintance with Burl had gone further than my acquaintance with Maxwell yesterday. Now that my breasts were seceding from my body, how could I be sure I’d be nice to Burl? What if I lost the company our biggest account?

With my breasts thrust out before me like dogs hot on a scent, I followed Burl out of the office, giving Gladys a misery-laden glance as I closed the door behind me. She gave me a suffering nod in return. At least there was somebody on my side, I thought, as Burl and I got on the elevator. I tried to cross my arms over my breasts, but they pushed my arms away. A familiar feeling of helplessness, one I knew well from before I sent away for that pamphlet, washed over me. Except this time I didn’t feel my fate lay on the knees of the gods. No. My life was in the hands of my breasts, and they seemed determined to throw it away

Burl waited until the elevator got midway between floors, then hit the stop button. “Just think, Mae June, here we are, suspended in mid-air,” he said. “Think we can hump hard enough to make this thing drop? Wanna try? Think we’ll even notice when she hits bottom?” With each sentence he got closer to me, until at last he was pulling the zip down the back of my dress.

I smiled at Burl and wondered what would happen next I felt like an interested spectator at a sports event. Burl pulled my dress down around my waist.

“You sure look nice today, Mae June,” he said, staring at my front, then at my lips. My breasts bobbled obligingly and he looked down at them again. “Like you got little [joy] machines inside,” he said, gently unhooking my bra.

Joy buzzers, I thought. Jolt city.

“You like me, don’t you, Mae June? I can be real nice.” He stroked me.

“Sure I like you, Burl.”

“Would you like to work for me? I sure like you, Mae June. I’d like to put you in a nice little apartment on the top story of a real tall building with an elevator in it.” As tit-talked, he kneaded at me like a kitten. “An express elevator. It would only stop at your floor and the basement. We could lock it from the inside. We could ride it. Up Down. Up. Down. Hell, we could put a double bed in it You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Mae June?”

“Yes, Burl.” When would my mammaries make their move?

He bent his head forward to pull down his own zipper, and they conked him. “Wha?” he said as he recoiled and collapsed gracefully to the floor. “How the heck did you do that, Mae June?”

I decided Burl had a harder head than Maxwell.

“Your hands are all snarled up in your dress. You been taking aikido or something?”

“No, Burl.”

“Jeepers, if you didn’t like me, you shoulda said something. I woulda left you alone.”

“But I do like you. Burl. It’s my breasts. They make their own decisions.”

He lay on the floor and looked up at me. “That’s the dumbest-assed thing I ever heard,” he said. He rolled over and got to his feet. Then he came over, leaned toward me, and glared at my breasts. The left one flexed. He jumped back just in time. “Mae June, are you possessed?”

“Yes!” That must be it. The devil was in my breasts. I wondered what I had done to deserve such a fate. I wasn’t even religious.

Burl made the sign of the cross over my breasts. Nothing happened. “That’s not it,” he said. “Maybe it’s your subconscious. You hate men. Something like that. So how come this didn’t happen last time, huh?” He began pacing.

“They were waiting to get strong enough. Oh, Burl, what am I going to do?”

“Get dressed. I think you better see a doctor, Mae June. Maybe we can get ‘em tranquilized or something. I don’t like the way they’re sitting there, watching me.”

I managed to hook my bra without too much trouble. Burl zipped me up and turned the elevator operational again. “Do you hate me?” I asked him on the way down.

“Course I don’t hate you,” he said, shifting a step further away from me. “You’re real pretty, Mae June. Just as soon as you get yourself under control, you’re gonna make somebody a real nice little something. I just don’t want to take too many chances. Suppose what you’ve got is contagious? Suppose some of my body parts decide they don’t like women? Let’s be rational about this, huh?”

“I mean�you won’t drop the contract with IPP, will you?”

“Shoot no. You worried about job security? I like that in a woman. You got sense. I won’t complain. But I hope you got Blue Cross. You may have to get those knockers psychoanalyzed or something.”

He offered to drive me to a doctor or the hospital. I told him I’d take the bus. He tried to get me to change my mind He failed. I watched him drive away. Then I went home.

I picked up the powder-pink exerciser and took it to the window. My apartment was on the tenth floor. I was just going to drop the exerciser out the window when I looked down and saw Gladys’s red coat wrapped around Gladys My doorbell rang. I buzzed her into the building.

By the time she arrived at my front door I had collapsed on the couch, still holding the exerciser. “It’s open,” I called when she knocked. My arms were pumping the exerciser as I lay there. I thought about trying to stop exercising, but decided it was too much effort. “How’d you know I’d be home?” I asked Gladys as she came in and took off her coat.

“Burl stopped by the office.”

“Did he say what happened?”

“No. He said he was worried about you. What did happen?”

“They punched him.” I pumped the exerciser harder “What am I going to do? I can’t type, and now I can’t even do lunch.” I glared at my breasts. “You want us to starve?”

They were doing push-ups and didn’t answer.

Gladys sat on a chair across from me and leaned forward, her gaze fixed on my new features. Her mouth was open.

My arms stopped pumping without me having anything to say about it. My left arm handed the exerciser to her. Her gaze still locked on my breasts, Gladys gripped the powder-pink exerciser and went to work.

“Don’t,” I said, sitting up. Startled, she fell against the chairback. “Do you want this to happen to you?”

“I�I�” She gulped and dropped the exerciser.

“I don’t know what they want!” I stared at them with loathing. “It won’t be long before the boss realizes I’m not an asset. Then what am I going to do?”

“You … you have a lot of career choices,” said Gladys. “Like�have you ever considered mud wrestling?”

“What?”

“Exotic dancing?” She blinked. She licked her upper lip. “You could join the FBI, I bet. ‘My breasts punched out spies for God and country.’ You could sell your story to the Enquirer. ‘Double-breasted Death.’ Sounds like a slick detective movie from the Thirties. You could�”

“Stop,” I said, “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I’m sorry,” she said after a minute. She got up and made tea.

We were sitting there sipping it when she had another brainstorm. “What do they want? You’ve been asking that yourself. What are breasts for, anyway?”

“Sex and babies,” I said.

We looked at each other. We looked away. All those lunches and we had never talked about it. I bet she only knew what she read in books too.

She stared at the braided rug on the floor. “Were you … protected?”

I stared at the floor too. “I don’t think so.”

“They have tests you can do at home now.”

I thought it was Burl’s, so my breasts and I went to visit him. “You talk to them,” I said. “If they think you’re the father, maybe they won’t beat you up anymore. Maybe they’re just fending off all other comers.”

Between the three of them they reached an arrangement. I moved into that penthouse apartment.

I shudder to think what they’ll do when the baby comes.

Administrivia:

Version 1.0 (from UC) by Monica

Formatted/spell-checked/fixed broken paragraphs/page numbers removed

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From “Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves” edited by Alan Dean Foster

2003.06.29

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