Flesh and More Flesh

Rereading this last post underneath here makes me remember that I actually prayed that my family would move, because of this same kind of 'exposure." It was after my big sister Nan pulled down my pants in front the neighborhood boys. A few weeks before that, she’d told them I didn’t have a bellybutton and then tried to get me to prove I did by showing it. I wouldn’t though: everyone knew bellybuttons were sex organs and anyway of course I HAD a bellybutton. You just couldn’t SEE it, hidden in the folds of my fat little tummy, so yes I was also chubby but Nan was working with me on that too: “Here’s what people do to lose weight,” she told me: “Every day they peel down a stick of butter and eat the whole thing.”  And I was doing it - of course I was doing it.

Maybe these things seem mean on Nan's part but were they no meaner than what I did to her a few years on, locking her out of the bathroom while she was trying to bleach her hair behind Mom's back. With me locked in there she couldn’t get at the neutralizer ha HA! And her hair would be just crazy bad straw tomorrow I thought from my perch on the closed toilet and was all the while reading from her diary in loud mocking tones.

The diary was all about boys, natch. As was the bleaching. As was, for me, a whole high school career spent worrying that I was so homely the very walls at the CYO dance would have to look away when I showed up.

Well there’s more to be said about boys, and flesh and girdles but too, but right now it’s time for me to go to the hospital so that a needle can be sent into three places a hair’s breadth away from that crucial tube the spinal cord. My cervical vertebrae are gonna be starrin’ in their OWN little TV show in just about two hours so I’d best jump into my pantyhose and get on over there. If the procedure doesn’t kill me I’ll be back with even more deep insights - and maybe, if I’m feeling jaunty enough, the tale of the fancy foundations lady who told me I was a 32F, then sold me the bra to prove it.

"GAD!" as Mom used to say, "What's next?"

 haha (this is not me by the way)