I love bras and I love taking them off and that’s about all I love about them. That’s my favorite part. Not the sudden liberation when I pull the dreaded garment from underneath layers of clothes—literally unburdening breast—and slingshot the scrap of cotton-spandex across the room where it will land, defeated, on a couch. No. Mine is the moment when a man removes the garment during sex, and I watch the earth of his movements, fiercely, coolly, my heart clawing through my chest.

Otherwise I don’t want to wear a bra ever—despite my breasts.

Ultimately, bras are problematic. Not just because many have had trouble removing them. The ads, our mothers, sisters and girlfriends, saleswomen, the world—they all tell us breasts need support, lift, a certain amount of coverage. These are the same words my best friend Alma used last week, when she tried to make me feel better about my doctor finding an abnormal, dense lump in my breast.

“I’m not that old,” I’d said to Alma on the phone, “I’m 33, no genetic risk factors, what the fuck could be wrong with my breast?”

Alma’s great art is her optimistic spewing, combined with a fervent belief in the redemptive power of shopping. I needed her optimism to outweigh my shock, my despair, a machine that would grind my consciousness into brain dust until I was a wad of reactive, sticky energy and pure feeling. Listening to her was like having my thoughts whisked away on a high-performance speedboat. That’s when she said: “Look, age has nothing to do with it, and besides, I’m here to support you. I’ll come up and visit. We’ll set a date and go to Julia’s Closet. They’ll be running a sale. Waiting is the worst, and Julia’s always lifts your spirits. I got you. I promise. I have this whole thing covered. I got your back.”

Yes, well my breasts are fine.

Unless they are not.

It’s actually just the left breast, the one with the inverted nipple. The one always causing me a mild self-consciousness, during sex, or even when I’m alone. I’ve always felt as though I’m leading with my right breast, and my left limping, sagging behind me—defective. It has never felt stimulation in the same way. Sex with the lights off—every time. 

Well, since my marriage anyway. My ex-husband once asked if I’d had surgery on my left breast because of the nipple.

“It’s not a big deal,” he’d said, implying that I’d had botched surgery. “We can get it fixed.”

Then, he turned over to sleep, as he often did, leaving me with my feelings. I curled to the far side of the bed, cupping my breast—weeping.

As Alma spoke on the phone, her reassurances were like one long receipt, providing the satisfaction of acquisition and bulk, curving upward into a ribbon. But all the while, I inspected my nipple under my shirt, my left breast. I heard myself thinking, What would one breast feel like without the other?

Alma kept talking: “And full disclosure: don’t even ask me if you should buy something. Just buy it. If you ask me, I’ll just say yes and explain how regret works.”

◆

Maybe I’m mistaken, but it’s not like you see expensive boxer briefs in ads while reading an article about the wildfires in California. You don’t see jock straps while swiping on dating apps or reading about some soccer team that was awarded a golden trophy with a giant globe. Trophy, an object to make a huge accomplishment smaller by compressing it into a brass cup. Trophy, the same word to describe a wife with great breasts.

How many hours go into scrolling through pages and pages of bras? People who wear bras spend more time looking at breasts than anyone.

I didn’t want to wait for Julia’s Closet. Alma’s visit was a few weeks away, and between now and then I’d have another doctor’s appointment. Time in which a bunch of other things could go to shit. I wanted to be converted and transformed that minute.

At home, depressed, I messed around on my computer. I canceled my hookup date and tried my hand at online shopping. You can get bras made in China, Italy, France, bras made with organic cotton and dyed with marigolds in California, sans-wire bras with soft, Italian lace. Plain Jane bras. Padded, cross-backed, or compression. I ordered a navy sports bra and beige cotton bikinis, imagining myself running in the sports bra, my ponytail wagging behind me, my breasts flattened into invisibility (and so therefore, the lump).

I don’t run. I barely practice yoga. Could a bra make me run? This bra will make me a better version of myself. This type of thought was one I’d had many times before. That possession can change your fate.

In fact, it was how I had made sense of the world, my fate bound by objects of transference. A diploma opened a door to my job → a ring brought forth my wedding → a napkin with a logo of a satyr and a handwritten phone number led to my affair → a few pieces of paper and a gavel enacted my divorce. The scratch ticket purchased last week invited a $50 prize, money that I used to buy my running bra and beige bikinis.

There are bras that cost a person close to a thousand dollars, readily available on the internet. I know, because two days later, I received one by mistake.

In the package with my boring bra and undies—all tucked and folded in tissue—was a $900 bra. I don’t have $900 for a bra. My receipt and bank transactions did not reflect any additional charge. There was no evidence of its transit to me on the packing list.

This very expensive textile had little slit openings at the nipples. Italian lace. Thin, rose-colored bows at the sides. Three long strings. Two of them appeared to crisscross around the waist and tie in the back. The third was elusive. It led nowhere and had a tiny leather tassel on the end of it.

Immediately, I considered sending it back. This was not something I would purchase for myself even if I could afford it. I felt a mild fever. If I wore it, would I once again be that woman?

After my divorce, my ex and some of our friends referred to me as the slut. Notably, his family—who were wealthy, spoke in euphemisms of the elite and acted with rancor—referred to me as the tart. His mother had the gall to send me a home STI kit with TART DEVICE written on the box with a Sharpie.

I couldn’t respond to her. I was devastated to be so hated. Before that episode, in the throes of grief and remorse, I had begged my ex for forgiveness (but not reconciliation)—emails, handwritten letters. Then TART DEVICE appeared like an injunction, shooing me off to the beds of other men.

I swung the string with the tassel around. I knew I wouldn’t return it, and the real issue revealed itself: the shame that this bra would be a garment only I would see. Me, or some guy during casual sex who would consequently make assumptions about the kind of woman I was. Tramp forever! Or not. Maybe the bra could live next to a bar of soap in the purgatory in my underwear drawer.

I wondered if another person out there in the ether had opened their box and, What the fuck, where is it?

Stitched on the bra’s tag was a logo made of circular rings, practically olympic.

After this close inspection and self-mockery, I decided to try on the stringy bits. I had never known lace could be so supple, oddly soft. Not constricting, just my size, and surprisingly flattering, sort of, in a pony and lollypop sort of way. For a moment, I thought that maybe I looked sexy.

Where had that lace been before it reached me? Did it live a thriving or suffering life? Did it enjoy the company of the silkworm? Or its own spiritual transformation as spandex made from recycled plastic collected from the ocean or the body of a whale? Did an Italian seamstress cast a spell upon it as she tatted the delicate fabric? Her ancient knowledge of aristocratic hobbies had almost been lost in the age of industrialization.

These seem important questions in retrospect. Because like other objects I’d believed in, I felt the bra had powers to bring forth my fate.

I considered a new profession. No, not as a stripper or a sex worker, but as a wrapping paper consultant tying a satin ribbon on a gift box.

I pinched open the slit on my left breast. I thought, Could my inverted nipple be the gift? Honestly.

◆

At the doctor for the second appointment: a mammogram. 

A mammogram lab is a Russian doll of rooms. A patient waiting room smelling of latex and antibacterial soap; a smaller, private, windowless waiting room with quaint landscape paintings; a changing stall like the ones they have at the beach. Even in this sterile environment, I didn’t want to touch the walls. This lab where talking about breasts happens all day long, where countless bras will be removed, all with trepidation.

A nurse called my name and led me to a patient room. I held my left breast as she asked about and typed up my redundant life story, one made up of bits of data that would undoubtedly be used by tech companies for whatever they wanted. Anatomized, they could belong to anyone:

Surgeries: Appendectomy, age 9.

Allergy: to nickel (since childhood).

Medications: Vitamin C, 1000mg, 1x daily.

Date of my last period.

“I’m here about my breast,” I said.

“So…” The nurse clicked through a calendar. “September 15 about?”

We had already had this exact conversation at the first appointment, which was not for my breast but for a routine exam and birth control. I wanted more peace of mind in my dating life and I was having some casual sex. My doctor, Dr. Vasquez, was matter of fact, no emotion. She said she’d send over a prescription, and then she performed an examination. But at one point, she’d taken my hand and placed it on my left breast. She’d said, “Do you feel this? I want you to understand what unusual breast tissue feels like. I’m sending you in for a mammogram.”

She was the first doctor I’d seen in eight years.

Unless you’re at risk for cancer, you do not need regular mammograms until you’re forty. A screening thing. I didn’t know this until Dr. Vasquez explained it to me.

Before Dr. Vasquez, I saw Dr. Brock for ten years. A man. Ten years. And in all this time he didn’t know he hated his mother, his sister (if he had one), and most undoubtedly his wife. Why else would such a resentful man have become a gynecologist? He was always telling me there was something lumpy about my left breast, but that it was probably nothing, just “bad genes.” See what I mean? This man tried to murder me.

But at the time—I was in my late teens—I’d believed him when he said bad genes. How was I supposed to know? I let him examine me, from age 15 to 25, as he frowned and massaged his fingertips on me as if I were a wad of dough. I felt so entirely inferior and apologetic. My breast is ugly! I will stow it away in my bra! Bad genes!

The last time I saw him—eight years ago—I was twenty-five, and had contracted chlamydia. I was still married at the time and Dr. Brock found it appropriate to express suspicion: “Well, you got lucky this time. Usually, only poor girls get low-risk STIs. That’s been my experience. Regular girls, middle class, you girls are always the ones that end up with the life-long problems. That and breast cancer.”

Really.

I’d sat across from him at his enormous desk and stared at his cast iron paperweights. Behind him his degrees floated in large gilded frames. I have since met women who have had doctors like this, adept at eroding a woman’s self-worth under the guise of healthcare. Astonishing: they chose to live their lives as practitioners. Dr. Brock scowled at me as if inspecting my vagina had been a great disservice to him, a great pain in his ass. 

It was a pain in my vagina. 

He leaned over to one side and shook his head.

“How does a good, married woman like yourself contract chlamydia?” he’d said. Then, he promptly handed me an antibiotic prescription and said goodbye.

I hadn’t gone back to any doctor, for any reason, until now.

Dr. Arnold P. Brock. Someone should sue him. He works at 1224 Belleview Ave, Suite 109.

◆

My thoughts live out dramatic lives of their own, jumping time and history. At the mammogram lab, I was convinced that the nurse, the one who took my blood pressure, who smiled and clicked her mouse, was Dr. Brock or my ex-husband or his mother. Anxiety. I could only toy with my hospital gown like a sad child. If I could just figure out this gown, maybe my problems might disappear. The closure was stupid; it tied at the neck.

The smock. A diamond pattern with yellow and pink colors. In another context, the gown could’ve been a lovelorn garment to wear while forming pots from clay. The wheel turns, the primordial smell of earth, hands cupped around cool clay. A time when my life was simple, before my short-lived marriage, before my divorce, or a lump. When was my life a clean slate and full of hope?

Instead, the gown was degrading, and had been worn by countless other vulnerable people—young ones, elderly ones, ones with or without plump breasts, some who would die because of lumps. Surely others had also hated the simple diamond pattern for the way it made you feel both infantile and mortal—at the mercy of a fully dressed person operating machinery. I knew the gown had been laundered, but somehow I still sensed all the sweat of frightened patients, their fears, all so close to my chest, mingling with mine.

The nurse led me to the machine, which I could hear murmuring, warming up. There was a small hole in the smock near the stomach. I pushed the tip of my pinky through it.

The nurse asked me to untie my gown and insert my breast into a clamp. She instructed me to hug the machine with my left arm—cold.

“Most women tolerate the pain well,” she said, smiling.

She adjusted the machine so that it mashed my breast like a pancake, as if I was just that, a pancake that cries.

“Try not to move,” she said. Then she left the room to take my x-rays.

How terrible to be left alone, weeping silently, and hugging a machine. Shivering and suffering in discomfort. How are women in their forties strong? I wondered. Maybe they’re weary but know how to conserve their energy, having done all one has to do to get to forty—they submit their breasts without question. They tolerate pain well. They easily accept this as part of life until they reach their mid-seventies. The incessant protest against small and large injustices must accumulate in them by forty, an age in which one might be preoccupied by small children and suckling babies, microaggressions, mid-career bureaucracies and administrative duties like compliance meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and dry cleaning—life. One pancaking experience after another. 

Please, I whispered to the machine, take my breast.

Afterwards, I asked the nurse, “Am I sick?” But they weren’t allowed to tell me anything. 

◆

So that day was bad. My breast was sore and developed a small bruise. It started to hurt. I was desperate. Needing to do something for myself, I wore the $900 bra. I committed to wearing the bra every day for a week. I wanted the bra to be the one object that wouldn’t lead me astray, that would take me towards a happier life. A talisman for my lucky future.

To my surprise, it gave me great pleasure. Wearing it was like being in on a secret, and not the bad kind. The kind which, if you told someone, they would love you more.

Walking down the street to the post office, I saluted a stranger. At the pharmacy, I fed the tassel through the top of my shirt and placed it in my mouth like a whistle. At times, there was sensuality in my steps, in the way I carried my body. I inspected my outfit in store windows and smiled at myself.

After a long day of spreadsheets at the office, I kept it on, lounging in it just to feel what it would be like to be this woman. I swung the tassel in the air, petted my nose with it.

I found myself bending over carrots at the grocery store and receiving compliments from women about my shoes (this never happened). In line at my coffee shop, I spontaneously broke out into laughter. Full and unselfconscious. I made two women in front of me laugh too, just with my laughing, even though neither knew why.

“It’s just one of those days, right?” One of the women said. “Life is just too funny.”

I thought, IT’S BECAUSE OF MY BRA.

Afterward, I felt I could dance on the street. So I did. For the first time, perhaps ever—or in a long, long time that felt like ever—I enjoyed myself.

◆

A few days before Alma arrived, the bra summoned a man. He just appeared there in my life, first at the coffee shop, and then on Western Avenue near the river. He waved.

“I recognize you,” he said. “You have a beautiful laugh.”

He seemed kind and talked with me at a comfortable distance. Good butt, great smile, big feet. He was really hot.

You know what I’m talking about. These are the moments that jettison you where you want to be, far away. It made me forget my lump, and everything before. And so, I believed he knew I was out here, and that hidden under my shirt, my sexy $900 bra, my heart was beating.

We wasted no time. Dinner and back to my place.

And for the record, there’s no such thing as a tart. Or a slut. 

When he took off my shirt, he said, “What is this?”

I was so excited I forgot to turn off the lights.

“My nipple. It’s inverted, I’m deformed,” I said. I’d also forgotten I was wearing the expensive bra.

At first I couldn’t tell if he was horrified or excited. He peeked at the slit of each nipple opening. Finding the string with the tassel, he took it in his hand and made funny gestures. He lathered his beard for a shave, washed his armpits. He pulled me closer with it, and I took it from him, and brushed the tassel on his hard cock.

Maybe the bra meant the beginning of a new story. I was ready for one. I had become something impossible, a woman in a short, lonely marriage, a woman who wore an ugly staticky thin gray rayon dress to her divorce hearing. These things had happened to me; I did not want to be responsible for my participation in them. I became the woman who hid in shame from everyone she knew, drank quietly, and slept around. Her story went: Well, time’s up. You had a good run and then you fucked up by getting married to cure your emptiness. Then, you fucked it up again with the guy at the neighborhood bar, who you thought loved you, but who really just had an instinctual gift for detecting loneliness as a means to get laid. Now you’ll be alone indefinitely.

She settled into a life. She gave up on partnership, but not pleasure. There was fun, but then it ended again. Enough. How about this: you straighten yourself out. A friend arrives, and another. You take the cake out of the mold by flipping it over, standing it right side up. All that time—it was just incubation for the good stuff that would finally arrive.

Then, a few days after the bliss with my man, everything came crashing back. My mammogram was inconclusive. A bluish black and gray web of tissues that looked like cosmic debris seen through a telescope. My left breast. A tiny cyst, a nodule, or a mass (or not). Was I still being punished? Maybe my crimes of the heart were simply unforgivable. And so they stuck with me like a rusty anchor. Or microplastic. Or cancer. I still might be sick, I thought. Give me a chance. I’ve just begun again. I promise to be good to him. I am good. I don’t even understand it yet.

I was pleading. But who was I pleading with? If you’ve lived your life the way I’d lived mine, you get used to the relief of passivity, like entrusting your fate to the magic of a talisman. It also protects you from knowing you possess an openness to love, to your life.

Up until that point, I hadn’t wanted to believe that life gives and takes. I hated that sometimes it just takes. What if I continued to lose the good things I found? Would I still show up for my life?

◆

Julia Closet’s is an upscale clothing boutique, housed in a brick building with copper casements around oval shaped windows. It always feels more like a house than a store, giving a person the uncanny sense that it is their house and they’ve woken into a life filled with designer clothing.

Cashmeres, silk, poplins, and wool gabardine garments hang from pine clothing racks, and knits are neatly folded on white tables. The salespeople are never rude. They gave Alma and me space to be with our friendship. They know a friend is a better salesperson.

We took our time with the curated racks. Much of it was beyond our price range, but that was why Alma insisted on this place.

“The more you spend, the more it wipes out the agony,” she said.

Felted coats, loose weave ivory and slate sweaters, trousers the color of moss.

At first, I felt forlorn. Maybe I just wanted to feel the comfort of being dressed by some maternal force, as if it could say, I love you and this love is now on your body, here to protect you. But these clothes could not love me and protect me from anything. I unfolded a turtleneck and its neck fell toward me, limp.

In our dressing room—we shared it at her insistence—Alma admired a long, black, spaghetti strap evening gown on its hanger. She stripped down with carefree ease. Kept on white socks and a pink thong that revealed her tan ass. Her pale blue jeans and chocolate loafers in a puddle on the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra under her oversized alpaca sweater, and as she excitedly slipped the dress up and over her head, perfect breasts, the fabric shimmied down her body like a tube. Lovely love handles. She stepped out to see herself in a bigger mirror.

In the dressing room, I took off all my clothes and stared at my nudity. I turned to look at my backside. In the sharp dressing room light, I saw the cellulite on my ass, circles under my eyes. And my breast, the inverted nipple. The breast that could harbor a toxic cellular disease.

I took a pair of wide wale corduroy trousers off the hanger. In between the clasp of the hanger and the pants was a silicone pad to protect the fabric.

The night before, I’d had a dream in which my breast had been removed. My new man is not in the dream. In the dream, I have a gel boob in my bra. I’m with Alma. We bend over to say hello to a dog and my boob falls out. For some reason, I woke up laughing. If that dream was prophetic, I realized I’d need to wear a bra if I wanted to appear as if I had two breasts. It wouldn’t be my $900 bra, that’s for sure. Would I remove the other breast for the sake of symmetry? Would my earth movements man leave me? I dreaded asking him, Will it make a difference? I didn’t know if we would really love each other. And why ruin something so easily begun? It had only been a few dizzying days. No, I wouldn’t tell him. I had a say.

“That looks fantastic on you,” Alma said, peeking her head through the curtain. “Step out and look at yourself in the big mirror.”

And I did. But I’m not sure what propelled me to do it topless. 

The store clerk smiled and bit her lip—eyes widened. I stood in front of the mirror and placed my hands on my hips and slid them into the trouser pockets. I spun around.

“Get it sis!” Alma said.

I charged the pants to my credit card.

“I mean, if I’m dead, it won’t matter if I can’t pay it off, right?”

“You’re not going to die,” Alma said. She side-hugged me and our shopping bags collided. She kissed my head and held it briefly with her hand.

Afterwards, we went out for frozen yogurt at one of those places where you buy the cup, fill it up with whatever you want. We kept things simple. Alma, vanilla, and me, strawberry. I told her about my upcoming biopsy.

“Everything will be okay,” she said. There wouldn’t be any way to know though, not really. She looked a little worried. But I was only aware of my body, still welcomed by the mirror where I was topless. The yogurt had a sharpness at first. I touched my lips.