I start trying on clothes–a short skirt, a stretchy top. “You see how you’re doing that?” Kurland asks. Without even thinking, I’ve begun standing up straighter with my chest stuck out. “It looks good,” he says. “I’m getting used to it. It’s working.” When I put on a navy blue turtleneck, he gasps. “I’d be hard-pressed to know that wasn’t you in there,” he says.
Now that I’m in there, Kurland reminds me, I’ve got to sell it. He recommends high heels, to shift my weight forward. “You want to exude the confidence that you think big, breasted women have,” he says. “You don’t want people looking at you because you’re feeling uncomfortable. You have to drop that and walk through the day like this is really you.”
I’m taking this in when he tells me to look at the floor. “You can’t see your feet,” he says triumphantly. Fields laughs. To be seen beneath my breasts, she estimates, “your feet would have to be size 18.”
I CALL THEM “THE GIRLS.” THE GENERIC NICKNAME works on early on while I’m getting accustomed to having my breast precede me. But as I get to know them, I decide that the girls need no names. They are separate entities with their own identities used to commanding attention, not paying it.
“Nice rack,” says a drag queen named Kiki, who I meet on my firs evening out. His own breasts are an ingenious contraption consisting of two condoms, filled to near-bursting with birdseed and then knotted together so they hang around his neck. He’s curious about my girls, so I invite him to touch them. Kiki says the girls are a little hard but but have credible bounce.
That first night the girls move, but I don’t. At least not the way a bombshell would. “Imagine yourself as a string of pearls,” says my friend Scott, who has worn women’s clothing himself. It’s not just about the headlights, he tells me. It’s about the head. “Think pink,” he says, pushing my shoulders back and urging me to relax. “Think soft.” After watching Kiki perform at the Atlas on Wilshire Boulevard, I consider naming the girls after his lounge act, Kiki & Herb. But I hold off.
The next day I study “A Few Words About Breasts”–a list of more than 300 synonyms, from “angel cakes” to “zingers,” that Playboy published in 1986. There are some humdingers on the list: “humdingers,” for one. I try a few of these on, but decide that I can’t in good conscience refer to anything attached to my body as “sweater meat.” I seek inspiration elsewhere, rereading Nora Ephron’s famous 1970s Esquire article about being flat as a board. I watch topless women discuss their chests in HBO’s 1996 documentary Breasts. I sign on to a Web site called ImplantForum.com. I wade through a 352-page treatise, A History of the Breast.
Then I remember a famous Hollywood snapshot taken at Romanoff’s, the swank Beverly Hills restaurant, in 1958. When I dig up a copy, it’s just as I recall it. Jayne Mansfield is on the right in a tight white slip of a dress that serves up her nearly naked breasts like a couple of ripe papayas. Sophia Loren–no pancake herself–is on the left. She wears something revealing and black, but it’s her eyes, not her outfit, that get you. She’s looking down and to the side, sneaking a peek at Mansfield’s decolletage.
I’ve always loved this picture. It’s a stolen moment that would have been lost forever had the photographer not opened his shutter precisely when he did. It is also a reminder that men do not have a monopoly on scrutinizing the female form. My search is over. I look down at my impostors and pay homage to the real thing. Hello, Sophia and Jayne.
WHEN I’M SPORTING MY 38DS SOME WOMEN LOOK ENVIous. Some skewer me with disdain–the kind they reserve for a brainwashed sister who willingly suffered to fulfill a male fantasy. Women look, but they don’t ogle. Ogling–that boldly desirous, aggressive way of seeing–is primarily the domain of men.
To the extent I’ve been ogled in the past, it has never been site-specific. I’m tall–five feet ten inches–and in heels I sometimes get noticed. But never have I experienced the breast-focused eyeballing that Sophia and Jayne invite.
