“For someone like me, who has an African ass, it’s also a good idea to get yourself a man who likes Tinto Brass movies. Then you can eat what you want. You don’t have to have one of the boy butts that are the style these days—no hips and all the rest of that misogynist shit. You can have a real woman’s ass. And a woman’s tummy. Awesome.”
I can’t help smiling. I feel so much better—physically better—now that I know I can abandon Cathrin. I stop and take a few breaths. That way Frau Drescher can say something, too.
“Yes, Frau Kiehl, I’ve also noticed an improvement in your physical well-being. I consider that at least in part another indication of the success of your therapy.”
“So do I, Frau Drescher, so do I. As you well know, I’ve had a bad breast complex for years. We’ve already determined that this complex started back in my school years. But I actually need to begin the story much earlier. My first contact with breasts was naturally with those of my mother. She would often stand in the bathtub and take sponge baths. We all learned to do that to save water. I come from an environmentally conscious family. You didn’t bathe or shower every day—that was considered a waste of water. Not to mention bad for your skin. I was taught just to wash the smelly parts with a bit of soap and water every day. Feet, crotch, and armpits.
“I always paid close attention when my mother stood there and took her sponge baths. I was allowed. I looked at her breasts
and asked myself whether I, too, would get such big breasts. She actually had small breasts. But from my perspective as a child, with zero breasts, they seemed huge. I used to often ask if I could feel them. She let me. I weighed them—I’d hold out my hands like a beggar and put them beneath her breasts with the palms up. Only instead of coins I got a handful of breast. I would poke my finger into her breasts, too, and my mother said that it hurt and that I shouldn’t do that. But I wanted to feel those protrusions of hers. Now of course I know they are mammary glands, but back then I had no idea what breasts were. She had very dark areolas and nipples. Really dark reddish brown. I found them sometimes disgusting, sometimes beautiful. The most beautiful breasts I’d ever seen. Also the only ones at that point. I went back and forth between being afraid of getting breasts and feeling head-over-heels excited about getting them.
“Now I know both from you and because my daughter does the same thing that this is a strong point of competition between mothers and daughters. Often when Liza sees me naked in the bathroom, taking a sponge bath, she says, ‘Yuck, I don’t want to grow up, Mama. I don’t want to get breasts like that.’ And then she says, ‘Can I touch them?’ I think the worst part for me, when I think about it now, is the way people say ‘She has
no
breasts’ about a woman or girl who has small breasts. That sounds terrible.
No
breasts. Nothing, nada, completely flat. And I always thought to myself,
But that’s not true! I do have breasts. Why doesn’t anyone notice them? You just have to look more closely—there are breasts there, just small ones
. I felt robbed of my femininity. Back during my school days, no boys were confident enough to say, ‘Hey, I like small breasts,’ or ‘Forget breasts, I’m an ass man.’ These days, as an adult, I
hear statements like that all the time, said with confidence. But when I was a kid I found myself living in a dictatorship of the breast. Everyone was fixated on big breasts. It’s embarrassing to admit that it affected me so much, but even to this day it’s still important to me that men find me attractive. It’d be tough for me to become a lesbian out of protest because I can’t get past this problem. I think society and the media are more and more fixated on breasts, too. A few years ago, back when my complex was really bad, some friends of ours brought an old
Playboy
magazine to a party. It was the October 1978 issue. I was so happy to find out that not so long ago women with small breasts were considered beautiful. The woman on the cover had smaller breasts than I do. And she was on the cover of
Playboy!
Seeing those pictures really helped me.
“Obviously I know that having implants doesn’t help with the complex in the long term. It’s a problem in your head, of course, and can’t be surgically altered. You’ve taught me that well, Frau Drescher. I know now that giant-breasted woman with toothpick arms still carry around their complexes along with the two uncomfortable hard breasts up front and the back pain they eventually cause. Ha! That will never happen to me. I’m not going to have people gawking at me like an alien, a freak, with a pair of balloons beneath my throat and arms that are far too thin. My husband and I have been to couples therapy for my breast complex, as you know.”
I met Georg in a professional context. After we got together, I often visited him at his office. I looked around his office with a new set of eyes. A different perspective from the one I’d had during the relaxed getting-to-know-you phase. It was a cold, distrustful, controlling perspective. Among a bunch of otherwise
harmless images he had a B-movie poster of a woman who reminded me of Jayne Mansfield. Busted. He said it was just something he’d thrown up on the wall. Yeah, right. Uncool and inhibited as I am, I immediately asked him about it. The trashy movie had been about a giant woman. All I could see were the breasts. I could tell what was going on. There was no other possible explanation for the poster being hung in his office. Then he took me to a concert to see his favorite musician, Iris DeMent. I practically fell over when she came onstage. I was overwhelmed by hate—for him, for her, for both of them. They were in cahoots, I was sure. She was wearing a dirndl and her breasts—at least D cups—were spilling out of it. And then he tried to tell me that she was just a good songwriter and that her breasts didn’t come into it. Of
course
not! Naturally I did not believe him. I preferred to drive myself crazy with my breast envy, or, in more folksy terminology, tit envy. Of course, you don’t bitch at your husband for fun or out of boredom; it’s because of real fears. It’s not fun for anyone to be so uptight. To be so petty and pathetic. My husband couldn’t listen to his favorite music at home anymore. I just glowered at him every time until he finally gave up trying to listen to it. Before we entered couples therapy, it was simply not an option in our relationship to go against my will. There was no way he was going to get that music past me once I had concluded she was a breast peddler.
Once we were sitting with our two children at our favorite pizzeria. On a door inside was a poster of a naked woman lasciviously dangling a spaghetti noodle into her mouth. When I saw those breasts, I got furious. Because they were so beautiful. A big handful on each side. Beneath each nipple, the breast had that perfect hanging-pouch effect. The nipples and
areolas were not too dark, not too pale, not too soft, and not too hard. Horrible for someone like me, who struggled daily with a breast complex. Whenever the family wanted to go eat there I thought to myself,
No, please, not the perfect-boobs pizzeria!
I would immediately lose my appetite because of anxiety and rage. Another time we went—of course there was a table available, right near the door with the poster—and my stepson said, “Look, Papa, that woman looks like my mother when she’s naked, doesn’t she?” Aaaaaaargh! Until that moment, I didn’t know about the big breasts of my predecessor. My husband suffered for years because of that sentence uttered by his son. “Aha, I didn’t know that your ex-wife had such large breasts.” Completely insane of me. He left her for me. But when you are as riddled with complexes as I am, you actually attack your own husband for the fact that he was with someone
—anyone—
before you, and that he didn’t show you photos of the breasts of all his previous women, and that he hadn’t ripped out the hearts of all those women just to show that he loved me more than all the rest put together. How awful it must be to be together with me. Stress, stress, stress. And everything that was said during that breast-envy fight was said. Unfortunately. You can’t go back and erase it, rewind, undo it. It kills a certain amount of love when someone—in this case me—lays landmines all over the place.
“Oh, excuse me, Frau Drescher. Another breast attack.”
“Frau Kiehl, it’s obviously a major desire of yours to continue to talk about it until you have made up your mind. You’re not boring me, don’t worry.”
“Okay, but I’ve strayed completely from the topic of Cathrin. I want to get away from feeling bad about my body, and I want to get away from my friend—away from harsh, evil attitudes toward women’s bodies and back to healthy attitudes. I want to be on good terms with the actual body I have. And that’s not possible while I remain friends with Cathrin. But how can you address it without leaving scorched earth behind? I need absolution from you, Frau Drescher, the same way my husband does from me for his porn films and hookers. Because I feel so bad for wanting to abandon her. But I’m allowed. You’re allowed to leave people. It’s true, right?”
“Of course. I always tell you that. You are allowed to leave. But apparently you don’t really believe it.”
“Yes, you do say that: participation is voluntary, even when it often doesn’t feel that way. But free will played only the smallest part in that friendship. I have been mentally liberating myself from her for the last few months. Oddly enough I don’t think I will miss Cathrin for one second. No idea how I will make the break, but it will be great. As always, you are far ahead of me, just like my husband and even my ex-husband. Even the children think there’s something funny about this skewed relationship.”
“Frau Kiehl, I’m afraid I must interrupt your review of Cathrin. The time is up.”
I swing upright on the couch and look bashfully at Frau Drescher. We haven’t seen each other for the entire session. I have said everything to the painting of the devil.
She looks me straight in the eyes and assures me.
“I’ll say it again: you are allowed to leave. Every relationship between adults should always be voluntary, always based on free will.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course. Have a nice weekend.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, as I do before every weekend. “It’s the weekend again.”
For us the entire year is the weekend. I mean, as far as work goes, it seems to me and my husband as if it’s always the weekend, because we have made our hobbies into careers. Which is also why I’m so messed up—I have too much time to deal with my trauma. I think for me personally, a war or becoming a refugee or at least an apprenticeship as a bricklayer would be better. Then I’d be diverted from thinking about my parents, my husband, my psyche, my sexuality.
I drive to the notary quickly—but not so fast as to risk killing anyone. I have only a few minutes. Otherwise my husband will notice that I stopped off somewhere else. That’s the downside of being so symbiotic, of spending so much time together—you end up being a bit Stasi-like, whether or not you mean to be.
The clerks at the notary office know what to expect. I come in having already sent in all the desired changes to my will. We read it through together, I sign it, he signs it, and then he makes a copy of the new version. In the event of my death, he is the executor. Wow, that sounds ominous:
executor
. I take the original with me. I have to stash it secretly and quietly in the cabinet where all the important papers are—the wills, the long-term care insurance documents, copies of our organ donation cards, everything to do with our no doubt impending death. Somehow I have to get it in there without my husband
noticing. Otherwise he’ll look at me all worried, thinking I’m going downhill again psychologically.
Now, however, I want to get home and shower off Lumi’s scent. When you are alone at the notary’s office, smelling like sex is not as amusing as when you’re walking down the street with your husband. I had the impression that the clerks at the notary’s office were sniffing oddly at the air. Once everything’s taken care of, I drive home with loud music on in the car.
I park the car in the spot we own right in front of the building and scurry into the apartment. My husband is expecting me. He’s freshly showered. At least one of us is. He spreads his arms and I hug him. He’s in his long underwear and an old-fashioned men’s undershirt. I put my cheek on his muscular, hairy shoulder. We are a well-choreographed team. As we let go of each other, he turns around, and I am struck by the hair on his back. Once again. I’m convinced that my husband is so hairy because he’s bursting with testosterone. He has hair growing out of his ears, like a werewolf. I like it. But despite that, when it gets out of hand he goes to a Turkish barbershop where a pretty woman—I’m very jealous of her because she has great breasts—removes his hair with this wonderful threading technique. She twists his ear hair in the threads she has wound between her finger and mouth and then does something so the thread pulls out all the hair. I always beg him not to have the hair on his back removed. When he’s on top of me and inside me and I can stretch my neck just far enough to see over his shoulders, I feel tiny and flat and covered and have the impression I’m peering through a grassy landscape. I run my hands through his silverback-ape hair and know that we are all descended from them.
You also feel cold when you remove all your hair. I have a lot of hair under my arms, and once, under the bad influence of my best friend, I had it all removed. She tried to convince me women aren’t supposed to have hair there. And my husband jumped all over me for the naked-mole-rat-looking armpits I had as a result. For the first time in my life, someone told me he loved the hair under my arms above all else. I also found it uncomfortably cold without hair there. I let it grow back and made my husband promise to leave his back hair alone for me.
I can see from the hall that he’s put coffee cake on the table. He’s in a great mood and hasn’t noticed that I stopped off somewhere else after therapy. No questions and no questioning look on his face. Super. When I see he has something to do here upstairs, I’ll creep downstairs to our death cabinet and stash the notarized additions removing my soon-to-be-former best friend from the will. You can’t really hide it, since it needs to be found. Otherwise it will be like an Easter egg hunt for adults after your death. I just have to be observant and not miss the right opportunity. So I don’t get caught.