Chapter 3

Just act normal. That’s what Danny had told me to do as we pulled up to my house. We carried in two big cardboard things with all kinds of ice cream packed in them. The women were all watching a movie. Even Grandma.

They made all the appropriate sounds of pleasure about the ice cream, but then ignored us, and went back to watching the movie, which was about halfway over. Danny sat down by Aunt Christy, who kissed his cheek and snuggled up to him. My mother patted the couch, between her and Aunt Vanessa, but didn’t say anything. I sat down.

You know that saying about a nervous cat in a room full of rocking chairs? That’s how I felt. I noticed Tabby kept looking over her shoulder at me. She was lying on the carpet, right in front of the TV. Her fifteen year old butt was showing, encased in a pair of pink panties that clung to her like a second skin. She had a look on her face that I recognized. It was her “I know something that you don’t know ... and I’m not telling!” look. I began to think Danny was right. They had talked about ... me ... the newest problem in their female lives ... and what to do about it.

What I had no clue as to, was what they had decided to do about me.

I finally got a clue when the movie was over and Aunt Christy got up and told Danny it was time to go home. That was unusual, since they usually stayed until early in the morning. He didn’t ask any questions, though, merely shooting me a look with a grin attached, as if to say, “Buck up, little buddy, I know I’m right.”

All the other women sat there. When I started to get up, my mother put a hand on my thigh, keeping me there.

“We want to talk to you,” she said, as Aunt Christy and Danny closed the front door.

“Me?” I asked, trying to play dumb.

“Yes, you, mister researcher,” she said, her voice flat.

“Oh ... that,” I said, still trying to play dumb.

Tabby sat up and swung around, sitting Indian style on the carpet. Her panties clung to her camel toe, and she paid that no attention whatsoever.

Grandma took the floor, verbally.

“Randi explained your project to us all,” she said. “It seems quite unusual.”

“I guess so,” I admitted.

“Let’s say that, just for the sake of argument, you got to do your project. What would the photographs actually show?”

It was odd, but suddenly I was feeling lots better. Danny had been right so far - they had discussed it. I still didn’t know if they would sign on, but nobody had yelled at me any more, so I tried to think like a researcher.

“Well, I’d have to crop the photographs so that the only part of the trunk that showed was from the navel to the collar bones. There would be a background, of some kind, the same in each photograph. I don’t know if color, or black and white film would be better. That might take some experimentation.”

“So, there would be no chance that the ... models ... could be identified?” asked my grandmother.

“Only if there was some identifying feature ... a mark or a mole or something ... that someone had already seen,” I said. “In real life, I mean.” I looked around. “It’s possible that somebody like that might recognize them.”

“Who, exactly, would see these photographs?” she went on.

I didn’t have firm numbers, so I winged it. “I don’t know how many men I’d have to use to get a viable test bed,” I said. “I also don’t know where I’d get them yet, but they’d have to be a group that included men of various ages. For the sake of argument, I’d have ten teenagers, ten twenty-somethings, ten thirty-somethings and ten forty-somethings.”

“None older than that?” she asked.

That seemed like a strange question. But I had an answer.

“Well, the idea is to see what attracts a male of breeding age. I don’t think men older than fifty or so are still in that category ... are they?”

My grandmother stared at me. “Breeding age,” she repeated, as if that were interesting. “I suppose you’re right, but men stay interested in sex almost all their lives.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but that doesn’t have anything to do with evolution. Men above viable breeding age don’t affect the population any more.”

“How old would the women be, then?” she asked, leaning forward a little.

“That’s different,” I said. “Age doesn’t matter with women, in the sense that, if a woman beyond breeding age attracts a male, she actually pulls him out of the gene pool. She can have an effect on evolution. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that suddenly, the only attractive women were all in their sixties. All the men would be drawn to them, and the women of child-bearing age wouldn’t have any children. That would have a tremendous effect on that society.”

My grandmother stared some more. I was looking at her so much, I had no idea what the other women were thinking. They were all quiet as mice, though, so maybe that was good.

“You really have thought this through quite a bit, haven’t you?” asked my grandmother.

“Yes,” I said. “It isn’t a joke.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Now, why don’t you go get ready for bed. We women have some more talking to do.”

I slept in my jockeys, which meant that “getting ready for bed” meant taking the rest of my clothes off, which would take what, maybe ninety seconds? But it was obvious they didn’t want me around while they decided, as Danny had predicted, whether to be my models or not. I wasn’t surprised my grandmother was there. She was the matriarch of the family, and still wielded a lot of power. What did surprise me was that Tabby was there. At only fifteen, I was amazed they’d even consider letting her take part in the conversation, much less the project.

I went to my room, stripped to my shorts, and lay down to read a comic book. Nobody came, either to tell me what they’d decided, or to put an ice pick quietly through my temple.

Eventually, I fell asleep.

The next day was Saturday, so I slept late. I didn’t get up until nine, when my stomach drove me to the kitchen. It seemed awfully quiet, which is probably one reason I was able to sleep so late. When I went looking for people, Mom was sitting, curled up in an easy chair, in the living room, reading a book. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.

“Where’s everybody else?” I asked.

“They decided to give us some privacy,” said my mother, looking up at me.

“Privacy? What for?” I asked.

“I’m going to be your first model for your project,” said my mother. She didn’t seem to have any emotion about it at all. It was as if she were announcing that the light bulb I needed to replace a burnt out one with, was in the cabinet.

“Wow!” I said.

“You sound surprised,” said my mother.

“I am surprised,” I admitted.

“You think we wouldn’t support you in your studies?” Now some emotion crept into her voice.

“It’s not that,” I said hastily. “It’s just that it was such an unusual thing to request...” I shifted from foot to foot. “I guess I just thought nobody would go for it.”

“So,” she said, standing up. “Where are we going to do this?”

Now, if they’d have warned me that they were actually going to go along with my crazy idea, I’d have thought it out a little better. I had a camera, and I knew I had some film around somewhere, left over from last year’s vacation to Colorado. I didn’t have a tripod, but when I was dreaming all this up, I figured I could get one of those pretty cheap at Wal-Mart or somewhere. I guess what I’m saying is that I had sort of half ass planned this, but the women had whole ass agreed to it. That’s a weird way of saying it, I know ... but ... well, you’ll see.

“I don’t know,” I said, unthinkingly, while my brain tried to speed up.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” she asked, in mother tones. “I thought you had this all planned out.”

I thought about backgrounds. My mind picture had cloth as a background. Don’t ask me why. The only place in the house that had lots of cloth was my mother’s bedroom. She had drapes in her room, instead of curtains, like all the other bedrooms. There was a bay window in her bedroom, six feet wide and five feet tall, with a bench you could sit on, if the drapes were open.

“Your bedroom,” I said, voicing my thoughts.

“My ... bedroom,” she repeated.

I explained about the drapes.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay, then.”

Imagine yourself as an almost seventeen-year-old kid, who has just been told that, in a few minutes, you’re going to be taking pictures of your mother’s naked breasts. Kind of puts a different perspective on it, huh?

My legs unfroze, and I went to get my camera. I tried to think of where I’d left that extra film, and got a little panicky, until I got lucky and found it in my junk drawer. That was the top right drawer of my chest of drawers, where I stashed stuff I couldn’t figure out where else to put. It had all kinds of stuff in it ... a screwdriver ... a medal I won at a cross country meet ... five or six foreign coins I’d gotten here and there ... an extra cable for the VCR ... stuff like that. And two rolls of film.

I got them out and looked at them. 400 ASA black and white. Not the best thing to take portraits of anything with. Great for taking quick shots on vacation, as the car sped along, but for boobs? It was all I had, though, and I couldn’t see me going back to my Mom and telling her we needed to run down to Wal-Mart before she showed me her boobs. By this time, I don’t think I was actually thinking about this quite like a research project. In that room down the hall were some naked breasts, and I was going to get to look at them. If I didn’t actually do that, quickly, it would all disappear in a puff of smoke. I would have known better, if I’d have stopped to think about all this, but my hormones wanted nothing to do with stopping and thinking.

I grabbed my camera and hustled down to my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t to see her just sitting on the edge of her bed, waiting for me. She had this funny sort of look on her face, like she was a little confused, or something.

“I have to load the camera,” I said, stupidly. She just looked at me.

Two minutes later I was standing there, waiting. She was sitting there, waiting too. There was a powerful lot of waiting going on in that room.

“What do I do?” she finally asked. She sounded nervous. Why that surprised me would make a nice philosophical discussion, but the fact was that I was surprised.

“Well, I guess you have to take off your shirt,” I said, wisely.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I suppose so.”

Her fingers went to the buttons, and I felt eyestrain already as my eyes tried to climb out of my head, watching skin come into view as each button was undone. Her bra kind of ruined the anticipation, but then I had stared at pictures of women in bras for hours, in the catalogues around the house, so that wasn’t too bad either. She had on a sturdy, plain white bra. Her hand went behind her and the bra lost it’s tension. It didn’t look all that different. I mean it looked like a bra full of breasts, but it was more relaxed or something. I swear it caused me to relax a little bit too. My knees quit shaking, anyway.

She did some kind of shoulder shrug, and the bra fell forward ... and...

There they were.

Just like magic.

Now I know that you women out there think that boobs are boobs. You wouldn’t put it that way, and I probably shouldn’t have either, but that’s what some of you think. You think every woman has them, and they’re no big deal. They’re there. You either like yours, or you don’t, for whatever reason.

But the fact is, that each pair of breasts is as different as fingerprints. Fingerprints all look pretty much the same, unless you pay attention to all the little lines and stuff. Fingerprint experts are fascinated with all those lines, and whorls and ridges and stuff. I was no expert, but, looking at my mother’s breasts, I suddenly knew that I could become a breast expert, whatever they are called, and I’d never tire of examining a pair.

By the way, I found out later there was a guy named Timothy Burr, back in 1965, who came up with a whole system claiming he knew why various features of women’s breasts reveal their character. He wrote a book about it titled “BISBA”. I keep meaning to get a copy, but never have.

Anyway, back to my Mom’s breasts. Hers were round and full. Imagine putting a cantaloupe in one leg of a pair of panty hose. It would drop to the bottom, and stretch the leg material tight. Her breasts stretched her skin like that. That skin sloped down to two cantaloupe sized orbs that hung there on her chest. Other breasts push the skin away from the chest, but this wasn’t like that. They didn’t sag, exactly. That’s not the right word for it. But you could hold both of them in your hands, and make them wobble up and down, or back and forth. You could make them bang into each other, and lift them up. If you did that, and just let them go, they’d fall, bounce, and hang there.

I heard later about what women call “the pencil test”, where they put a pencil under their lifted breast, and let the breast drop. If the breast keeps the pencil there, they have “saggy breasts”. That’s about stupid. My mother’s breasts would have held a Cuban cigar, easily, but there wasn’t anything saggy about them. They were just big, beautiful, full breasts. They looked perfect on her.

I noticed the nipples, which were a muddy kind of brown color, set on larger circles the same color. I knew about nipples, of course, but, like most people, I thought they all looked pretty much the same, like women think breasts look pretty much the same. Nipples are very unique too, though, most of the time. My mother’s had fed three babies. I don’t know what they looked like before she did that, but now, they were very sturdy looking things, just a little smaller in diameter than my own little finger, and maybe as long as the fingernail on the same finger ... about a third of an inch, I suppose. There was nothing delicate about these breasts. They were eminently functional. Everything about them screamed for a hungry baby to be present in the room.

My stomach growled. My mother blinked, and I could feel a blush on my face, even though a growling stomach is quite common.

“Where do you want me?” asked my mother. She was a little pink herself.

I suddenly realized I wanted her pressed to my face, and felt a hysterical giggle building inside. I clamped down on it and concentrated on trying to act professional. That only brought the giggle closer to birth.

I turned away, fiddling with the camera.

“Over by the window,” I said. I had to clear my throat. Somehow every bit of saliva had been sucked out of my mouth into the surrounding air.

She got up and I watched as she walked to the window. I had seen her walk from this place to that at least ten thousand times, but it had never been like this. Those breasts swayed and bounced.

I suddenly realized that I was in my usual sleep attire ... my jockeys. I looked down and, in horror, saw that it looked like I had taken a wooden dowel and jammed it in my underwear, with one end against my body and the other against the fabric of the shorts. Of all the superheroes in the world, I had always wanted to be Superman, until now. Now I wanted to be the invisible man.

I looked up to see my mother calmly looking at me. She didn’t say a word. I don’t think I ever loved her more, in those few seconds, than I had ever loved her in my whole life. She didn’t even smile.

“Do I just stand here?” she asked, quietly.

“Uh ... yes...” I croaked.

I pulled the camera up and looked through the viewfinder. Her whole body was visible. I knew I had to get closer if all I was going to get were the breasts. I stepped closer and closer until they filled the view. I had my other eye closed, and wasn’t aware that I had stepped to within two feet of her. I had a variable length lens on the camera, 28 to 70 millimeters, and it was adjusted to wide angle. If I’d have been paying attention, I could have stood six feet away and zoomed in on them. But I wasn’t paying that kind of attention. Not then.

I pressed the button and the breasts went white as the flash went off, a split second before the view went black, and then returned to normal. I let the camera go down a couple of inches and looked over it. That’s when I realized how close I had gotten. I knew there would be nothing on the film but a blob of light, that close to reflective skin, and backed up.

“Is that it?” she asked, moving.

“No!” I yelped. “I ... ah ... need to take them from different viewpoints,” I managed.

I backed up and started paying attention to the camera. I ended up taking ten or twelve shots, to get what I wanted. What I wanted were two from the front, one each from an offset position to each side, and one each from off her shoulder, beside her. I forgot to have her move around, so that the drapes were always in the background, which is why I had to expose a dozen shots to get six pictures.

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