Siren Tits
Bex O’Brian
Naomi Koffman
Smallish in size, good nipple to breast ratio, nothing inverted, no hairs sprouting, no need for a bra. Siren tits. My calling card.
I didn’t have children, so they were never anything but my tits. I put them to good use. If I had set my sights on some boy but wasn’t getting enough attention, flashing my tits usually sealed the deal.
I remember the first time I saw a real flasher, a man behind a tree exposing himself. Too bad you don’t have tits, I thought, you might have better luck.
Friday nights and time to go clubbing; besides the choking hair spray and the smoky eye make-up, the final touch before entering the throbbing dance floor was to give my nipples a hard squeeze, putting them on high beam.
Gosh, it’s fun to remember all the tricks of the trade. After a decades-long marriage, there really isn’t much need to put my breasts through the paces. In fact, come summer and T-shirt season, I use nipple guards, which effectively keeps my tits’ mood undercover. Maybe too much. Forgetting they are on, it’s always profoundly disconcerting to pull off my top and find my nipples deleted, my breasts alien, and cockeyed.
If all my youthful flashing, heaving and jiggling, had the desired effect and I was about to get laid, my breasts seemed to be the second stop after a bit of necking. I was ok with that though it didn’t particularly interest me. No, that’s wrong. It did interest me but more from an anthropological viewpoint than the opening strains of arousal.
Latch on, boys!
Still, I could never quite understand the fascination with sucking tits. Maybe if I had had a lesbian experience, I would have been illuminated. My breasts are just a tad too small to pull off that move of licking one’s own boobs — something I’ve only ever seen in porno movies. My chin extended, my neck straining, my poor breasts being wrenched up to meet my probing tongue would not be a good look.
And, I can’t help but feel, seeing a grown man at my breasts, that there’s some nursery memory going on there, a suckling infant with a raging hard-on.
Maybe if I had been nursed, I would have a better understanding. I certainly might have been healthier. But I was denied that famed burst of good juices that boost the immune system and turns one’s baby into a super survivor. Instead, it’s been a lifetime of allergies and eczema, of being prone to colds, and god knows what else I can blame on being nurtured on nothing but formula. And, who insisted I forgo what nature intended? My father. Now, this was the sixties, and my parents had abandoned their previous partners, not to mention their previous children, and were still in the midst of a hot and heavy affair when I came along. My father, cloaked in his imperious Britishness, proclaimed, “We did not come down from the trees to have a child perpetually clamped on.” What he was really saying — a child, no. Him? Hell yes!
My mother’s breasts as object of desire? I didn’t see it. The whole marriage was a bit of a mystery and, judging by the fights, they too were in the dark. Nothing about my mother made one think of sex, which is weird because she had no trouble talking about it. Right now, in the forefront of my mind is the image of my mother licking her lips, telling me that one day I will love giving blow jobs. After an introduction like that, it’s amazing that I had anything to do with penises. But that’s off-topic. My mother’s breasts horrified me. Big. Pendulous. Dark, flat nipples. There must be a god because the minute I felt that first itch, and knew absolutely that I wouldn’t be spending any more summers a bare-breasted scamp; I started praying for small tits. I kept a keen eye on my swelling chest and only breathed a sigh of relief when I hit sixteen and the itch stopped, along with the surreptitious scratching, which at times was so bad I was often sporting two bandaids across my poor raw nipples.
I think my rough birth made me want to be in constant contact with my tits; in times of stress, in repose, lost in thought, I have them cupped in my hands.
My mother died last year. I wasn’t there but was given a blow-by-blow by my kid sister, Sophie. “She just died. The men have come to take her away. She’s waiting cremation.” The saga stopped there for a few days. We weren’t sure of the hold-up, but it left us plenty of time to imagine her lying on the slab. Whenever I thought of her, I imagined her breasts, the form, the meaning of womanhood, all somehow still vital. When Sophie called and said mother was next up for the fires, I found myself pulling my arms through my sleeves, finding my breasts, and hanging on for dear life.
Bex O’
Brian
Bex, who lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog, is the author of the novel Promiscuous Unbound and the recently-published Radius, excerpted here. Both books are publish under the name Bex Brian
