CHANGING ROOMS
Have I told you how I
was the last in the class
to get one; how I was teased
for a year; how I knew
when I got one the teasing
would only get worse;
how I longed for and dreaded
it in equal measure.
My mother’s whispered lie
she needs a bra;
the Misses O’Reilly’s dextrous eyes
sizing me up:
30 their damning verdict
A A
cup.
From under the counter
little by little
five plain boxes
stacked and floating
flat on my upturned palms.
Our procession facing
the shuttered changing
room; my mother & Miss O’Reilly
hovering; the prickle of white
padded nylon, the deep pink rose
sewn on where the cleavage
should be. A pink fog
closing in, its crimson pall.
*****
And did I ever tell you about my friend
who, furnished with a bra,
in another town,
in a family of sisters,
never having seen one on the line,
wore her new bra for months
before her mother spotted it,
black on the bedroom floor?
Her mother, it transpired,
hung them at the back
of the airing cupboard.
*****
The same friend’s sister,
kissing a boy
and feeling his hand
flutter at her chest,
turns on the light
and puts her glasses on
to help him find
the thing he has mislaid.
*****
My sister, her first son
at her breast, felt her shirt sodden
under one arm,
how she balked at the prospect
of underarm milk: an aberrant
nipple, common enough,
covert until called upon,
there in the bathroom mirror
true to type.
*****
And my friend’s South American friend
who adopted a child
and bottle-fed
using a tube
which was fixed
to her nipple?
How after a couple of weeks
her milk came in.
(And how her breasts held sway
in the bedroom
hosing her husband
drenching the marriage bed.)
*****
My mother’s mother
made a pact with cancer,
whose chop and change concession
cost her breast, returned
to the consulting room
and gravely pressed the surgeon –
lopsidedness felt loathsome –
to remove its blameless fellow;
how gamely he’d obliged.
And how she lived well
past her ninetieth year,
robust of bra
and girdled
to the last.
FICTION
Too many books spoil the
my mother her head in a cliff
again, searching for gannets’ eggs
to assemble the blackcurrant soufflé
she swears had been served at her wedding,
my father making a show of licking the cream,
his glee as he needled the priest
with talk of their passionate life.
But you, she cried, with your head in a book
Look out or you’ll scramble your eggs.
Today my teenage godson stretched cling-film over the toilet bowl to repay the mother who had pissed him off. He quickly applies the film and puts the lid back down. The ends he smoothes along the toilet’s neck. My friend, his mother, cops on right away. (He never puts the seat down; besides, the boy’s ham-fisted, and a wrinkle in the skin has caught the light.) She peels the film off but doesn’t say. She finds that she no longer needs, no longer wants, to go.
My friend talks more than me; she always has. She never touches her coffee till several minutes after I’ve drained my cup. She claims to like the skin. She eases it back with the back of her spoon and sprinkles sugar in. A skin has formed across the eager space I cleared for you. While I have been distracted, the cup has somehow filled itself again.
When perfect strangers call her love she can feel homicidal. In the taxi Mary Madden wrings her fingers. She tells herself, as she’s learned to do, that maybe love’s their only word for woman.
When the lady with the buggy in the mirrored hall in Wellworths called her lady as in ‘give the lady your money pet,’ she looked behind and bumped against her gaping too-young self.
When squaddies came for Yorkie bars and asked what time d’you finish love? she’d duck and get the married girls to serve them. One boy’d a lovely smile made Mary blush; he’d come most days and mooch around the aisles. The only girls she’d seen who went with soldiers soon had prams, and Catholic girls could turn up tarred and feathered. She thought of that boy every single night.
When Tommy Curran babysat she often thought of genies. He’d call her my wee lady while he rubbed her. Mary’d shut her eyes and do her six-times tables.
When a boyfriend in her twenties called her woman, (he used it interchangeably with wench) as in ‘bring me my breakfast woman,’ ‘kiss me wench,’ or ‘woman you taste so fine do you fancy a shag?’ she laughed, as she was supposed to, and acquiesced.
When im-ur-man at Lovestruck.com texted hey gurl ur luvly id luv too fuck ur brainz out, she arranged to meet him out at Helen’s Bay. Mary Madden booked a taxi. It was April the first 2010, her fifty-second birthday. She packed a picnic, whiskey and a knife.
Paula Cunningham
Paula Cunningham lives in Belfast. She works part-time as a dentist. Her chapbook A Dog Called Chance was published by Smith/Doorstop in 1999. She has also written drama and short fiction. A short story appeared in Faber’s Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-2005. In 2011 she won the Hippocrates Poetry Prize; she placed third in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition in 2013. She currently holds an award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her poetry collection Heimlich’s Manoeuvre is due from Smith/Doorstop this summer.
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