Last night , I watched my sons on the O-line of the football
field , S(> distant in their grown up bodies, so far from
mOlher's mi lk, To remind them now of the meals they made of me
would mOrlify and unmJn them, so I keep that silence. Afterwards, I
embraced them in their helmets and their pads, and leaned hard into
the rank, crotic fragrancc they emitted, yearning to return to our
early years together, when I was hardly more to them than a
universe of approdching odor, a twin-hulled, human spaceship
rocketing across a galaxy with my burst ing, squirting cargo of
warm, sweet milk ,
I loved the smell inside my nursing bra_ I used to dip my face
imide, dnd bn.'athe, and pull away, feeling drunk solidarity with
my hungry baby.
I loved the sodden rllll'lk of soaked nursing pads Aung to the
Aoor.
I loved the o ily, thin taste of my own milk.
I loved my husband's m outh, in the dark, relieving the
pressurt".
I loved the mounting. My baby mounting his objects of desire,
and making them run with milk, sucking Out the cream, raising the
heat and falling hack, drunk and gluttonou" post-coital, on the
sweaty, smelly pil low of my Aesh.
Now that it'sal! over, now that my breasts arc diminished and
dried out and will never run with mi lk again-
N ow that my nipples arc like those of a b>Tammar school
virgin, and look like raisins desiccated past their prime-
Now that the specter of cancer of the breast is stat istically
more than a d istant possibility_ N ow, that twO empty bott les in
the window above my wri ti ng desk, once filled and refilled with
Holman's D;liry milk, permanently remind me of my former glory and
gleam straight through with absence r need only touch my chest to
imagin~'-
Now r walk through the radiance ofViC\o ria's Secret, drunk with
the ghostly, concave images of all those rohust hreasts, waiting to
he suckled and cupped .
In her bardy lite rate way, my mother's mother must have
meditated on the dua l mysteries of en'ry womdll 'S bR'dsts tlldt
Freud, in his genius, almost ruined: the sweet delight of a baby's
nursing, and the harder edges of the pleasure delivered by a
moaning lover's sucking mouth. Far back in the previuus n:ntury, I
have eunjured Victuria. I can see her after supper, kaningovcr the
dishpan in the ki tchen sink, her mind bksscdly free of
psychodnalysis, She pumps a basin full of cold, clear Wdler, and
opens the fro lll of her gingham dress, and lifts her beauties from
Ihe thick white bindings of her homemade brJ . Leaning awhvardly,
she dips them down and dabs them with a roughened, dripping cloth_
All day, her man has labored in the fi e lds_ In a corner of their
room, his dung:.rees crouch in cruS!('d piles of slench as 11{' fa
ll s,
exhausted on their bed, Even so, tunneling at the very edge of
sleep, he moves towards
h" for a tiny sip of sweetness, a sugary luzenge of buttery
candy, he pulls into hi s
mouth_ N ow ('Il
