Drooping Boobs

We are dissolving into a fit of giggles. I push my feet against the floor to keep myself from completely sliding off the bench and under the table. The edge of the floral oilcloth tablecloth tickling my thighs and belly.

The sunshine is bright and dappled on the screened in eating porch off of our Oma’s kitchen. It is hot and Pennsylvania humid. In our fists we hold liquorish sticks wrapped in napkins. We tear off a bites, napkin included, and laugh. “Eating paper makes you beautiful”, my cousin manages to gasp in breaths between laughs. “We are going to be very beautiful”, I respond and we take the next bite. We peek at each other through squeezed shut eyes as tears stream down our checks.

I don’t remember if we finished eating the napkin wrapped licorice sticks or if we got distracted by our laugher.

My cousin, Hannah, dark eyed dark haired. Me, blue eyed and blond. Our hair reaches down our backs.

“We are going to be beautiful”. I don’t know what we thought beautiful was. I don’t know if I thought I was beautiful or how she thought she was. I thought she was beautiful. I often wished my eyes were brown like hers, or my mother’s, instead of the pale pools that looked back at me when I stood in front of the mirror.

We move often, almost constantly. I am homeschooled. I have younger brothers and sisters.

I live a continent away. We cross the pacific almost annually to spend the summer visiting extended family, and in between, living out of the car in campgrounds across America. For a brief while each year, I get to spend a few weeks with someone who is a girl and close to my own age - my cousin. She is older, but not by much.

Our time together loosely supervised – children of the eighties. We take her dogs, explore sections of the Appalachian Trail, jump in ponds, climb trees, stare up at the sky. Sometimes at clouds. Sometimes at stars.

What did we envision as beautiful when we tried to trick the future for ourselves? I don’t exactly know. But, instead of long legs, thin waists and blemish free skin we borrow our Oma’s clothes. We wobble around in pumps relying heavily on canes to keep us on our feet. We push back the brim of giant floppy hats and lean into the droop of our fabric stuffed boobs. We grin. We are going to be old ladies. We wanted to be just that, beautiful, like our Oma.

She tucks us into bed, the same bed. We are snuggled under the covers on a narrow twin bed in the corner bedroom. The house has long been quiet and everyone else is asleep. We toss and turn. It is so dark we can barely see each other. We talk all night – about everything – about nothing. Our final mission to learn how to burp the A-B-Cs like that boy at her school. We try and try again. My chest hurts from laughing, quietly, in the dark.

I don’t remember if we made it through the alphabet or if we got distracted by our laughter or if we finally just fell asleep.

Today, we rarely see each other. Long gone are our unplanned and unsupervised summers. We live on the same continent and even in the same time zone. We have busy days that make busy separate lives. I don’t know that either of us have ever figured out what it is to be beautiful. She is beautiful. My Oma is still beautiful. Every day I stare in the mirror and worry I’m falling short.

On more than one occasion in our adult lives she or I have looked at each other with a twinkle in our eye and said: “Remember when. Remember when we thought eating paper would make us beautiful?” We don’t mention the burps.

Maybe, I wonder, I am really just waiting for the day when our knees start to wobble, our boobs droop past our waists, and we can grin out from under the brims of a wide hats. I can grin at her and say: “We are finally beautiful”. And we can both dissolve into a fit of giggles.

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