BUSTED

The Year I Was a Bra Model

Water bra, padded bra, bralette, no bra

Ainsley, a woman who I met in grad school, believed the trajectory of our lives was determined by the size of our breasts. She told me she would have been an entirely different person if her boobs were bigger.

Who? I asked.

I have no idea, she said. But I’d like to find out.

Ainsley donned a sexy soothsayer witchy vibe. Even though I knew she invented herself out of a composite of everyone she stalked, I listened to her the way I read my horoscope. Could be true. Who knows who owns the keys to reality?

She said I’ll buy you new bras. You walk around in them. Let’s see how people react?

I met Ainsley on the first day of school. She sized up the orientation room and then sidled up to me. Most humans do some version of this. We enter a room, scan it, and make a guess as to where we belong or where we stand on the totem pole.

Ainsley wasn’t subtle. She sat next to me and said, “I know you got the scholarship. I googled everybody. You’re my competition.” I froze.

I’d had a similar experience at boarding school when the most popular girl in school adopted me after seeing her ex-boyfriend introduce himself. I knew about these territorial girls but I hadn’t figured out how to fight’m yet. Their conviction subdued me like a dog.

After a couple of months of grad school, Ainsley asked if I wanted to do a project with her. I froze again. I swear she wore a chemically regulating scent that muted my frontal lobe.

Be my subject, Ainsley pleaded. She was a hard woman to say no to, especially with that chemical compound she’d created that turned me into her lap dog.

I wanted to like her because she was always around. It would have simplified things, but she made me feel like I was standing on the edge of a cliff in oily boots. I found her compelling in a Single White Female type of way. She was both covetous and volatile.

Sometimes she growled or snapped her jaw like a crocodile when she got angry. I might have made that up, but she was definitely someone who wanted to blow me up or bite me.

Ainsley was an ear-to-the-earth poet, precise and psychic. Like many poets, she submerged herself into her obsessions. She’d get stuck on a word and repeat it all day long, shaping her mouth around the vowels and consonants in various ways each time she spoke it, as if weighing its location.

Once Ainsley started obsessing about breasts, she dropped anchor. She said her obsession came from a lifetime of having small breasts.

My life would be entirely different, she told me, if I had bigger breasts.

How? I asked.

I don’t know, she said. That’s why I want to study them.

In grad school, we were all looking for an obsession that would fill a book. Breasts seemed on the money. Of course, they did. Ainsley was brilliant.

If I study breasts, she told me, I‘ll understand their power more definitively.

I was jealous Ainsley had honed in on a topic. I felt creatively infertile without an obsession of my own. Acadmia breeds envy because the stakes are so low and vague.

Ainsley said everything in her life had led her to this obsession, but nothing more than her stint in L.A. The story that defined her obsession began in Los Angeles. Before that experience, she had only been a smart girl from a small town who ended up at Stanford University.

After graduating with a B.A. in English and a minor in Science, she moved to L.A. Having only ever lived in Nebraska and Stanford University’s pocket of Palo Alto, L.A. made her feel like Starman.

Ainsley graduated with weighty loans. An affluent classmate with family in the Industry hooked Ainsley up to a well-paying job. She’d be a nanny and tutor for a famous divorced Hollywood couple’s brood.

It was a weird job —both cush and yet subservient. She lived in a beautiful pool house, but she was also on call 24/7. Ainsley was a hard worker who had no desire to return to the wasteland of highway signs and the endless dust roads of Nebraska.

She was the perfect employee for famous narcissistic multimillionaires who expected nothing less than a beautiful, educated mule. Ainsley was grateful she had finally met people who inspired her to transform. The couple possessed the blueprints she’d been searching for.

Her affliction for absorbing and mimicking personalities had finally found its home. Ainsley picked up accents and mannerisms like a method actress. She worked for this strange Hollywood couple for over a year before she got fired, but that was all the time she needed. She understood fame.

Her termination wasn’t because of something she had done wrong at work. It was because she looked too much like the husband’s current lover and he kept mixing up their names. The only difference was the lover had bigger breasts. Everything else about her and the woman were identical. I could have had her life, she said, but my breasts are too small.

The famous man’s lover was already threatened by having to share him with his equally famous and seductive ex-wife. Firing Ainsley was something the lover had control over. The bombshell ex-wife wasn’t exiting stage-left anytime soon.

It was exactly the kind of job an Ivy League graduate got when they first moved to L.A. Nannying and tutoring famous people’s children. The stars got cream of the crop tutors for their kids and the recent grads got good money to help alleviate their college loans. Ivy ain’t cheap.

Ainsley’s proximity to fame, although brief, transformed her. That’s what she told me. You should have seen me when I left Nebraska, she said. I looked like a scarecrow.

Stanford hadn’t transformed Ainsley as drastically as she’d hoped. You could still smell the cow pie on me when I set my tassel to the side, she said.

In L.A., she found her raison d’être. She’s seen the rich and famous eat breakfast, fight, fuck and fail and she now believed anyone could be famous. She claimed the only thing that kept her from that life was her tiny tits.

Why don’t you get a boob job? I asked her, thinking it was the obvious solution for someone who walked around all day obsessing about her boobs.

You don’t get it, she said. I was given these breasts for a purpose. I just don’t know what it is yet.

I couldn’t decide if hers was an optimistic or pessimistic point of view. I told her I thought her breasts were great. She didn’t need a bra. They turned up like bells ringing. They were pretty cool. I was such a good dog.

They’re too small, she said, there’s no point to them, yet.

Ainsley me if I wanted to go bra shopping with her. She struck a deal with me. She said my boobs were big enough to be real boobs, but it would be interesting to see how their shape changed how people saw me.

She said I’ll buy you new bras. You walk around in them. Let’s see how people react?

How will you know what people think of me and my boobs? I asked.

I’ll know, she said. Grad school is filled with maniacs trying to attach meaning to madness. We were like fishermen in a dry lake.

I don’t know why I agreed. Probably because you say “yes” when you’re getting your MFA. Who knows what experience is going to turn you into a real writer? Saying no is like saying no thank you world. I’d rather be an accountant.

Ainsley took me to places that sold bras stores all over Chicago. Victoria’s Secret, Neiman Marcus, Marshalls, JC Penny, Nordstrom, Marshall Fields.

I tried on all sorts of bras for her. Balconettes, full cups, t-shirt bras, half-cup bras, bralettes, front fastening bras, back fastening bras, plunges. I wore them under translucent white t-shirts that showed the bra’s fabric and the shape of my breasts. We’d walk through various Chicago neighborhoods and she’d assess people’s reactions to me, scribbling in her little notebook.

Once, when she felt like we weren’t making any progress she said, let’s put some bright red lipstick on you and see if it distracts people from your tits. I have a full mouth. She painted my lips a rich red and glazed on some sort of shellac gloss. They looked like a shiny new red car.

Everywhere we walked, Ainsley scribbled observations in her notebook. Occasionally, she burst out observations. They’re looking at your lips like they’re tits! Amazing. The lip experiment was when I knew we had veered off the breast path.

Growing up with a scientist, I was acutely aware her breast studies were not scientific. There was no control group. There was no dependent or independent variable. No specific theory or hypothesis that could be measured accurately. She was just buying me bras and we were exploring Chicago.

I wondered what her poems were actually about. She never showed me. She ended up writing a book called Kazakhstan because she liked the feel of the word in her mouth, how her tongue couldn’t stay away from the roof. The word made her feel like a lizard.

Looking back, the only time I saw a measured reaction to my breasts in one of her bras was the water bra. It was heavy like I was wearing an extra pair of weighty breasts. I wore the bra to a reading I was doing in a small art gallery. I felt like the entire room was crawling into my shirt. My breasts were magnificent, but my back hurt.

I wonder now if the breast studies changed Ainsley’s trajectory? I don’t know. Maybe they changed mine more. I am no longer the lap dog of other people’s obsessions. I have my own.

Disclaimer: Names and specific details have been changed to conceal identities

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