Salon.com > Alicia Rebensdorf

In defense of a double D

Mon, 11 Dec 2000 19:08:00 +0000

My roommate's bra hangs quietly on the bathroom doorknob. It's a placid little thing. All lace and skinny straps, it lingers as lingerie should. Even her black brassiere is an innocent item. Its sheer fabric whispers only sweet nothings. I look at the monster I've just pulled off. The cups smile, huge and gaping. Instead of hushed secrets, my bra shouts out big words: mammaries and maternalism. Its attempts at coy femininity -- an off-pink shade, a wee bow -- are utterly unconvincing. I've seen less fabric in a sweater.

I survey my naked assets. There really is no good name for them: "titties," "boobs," "bosom," "chest," "breasts" -- all these monikers are either too clinical or too comical. Although generously sized, mine are not the fantastic pneumatic spheres possessed by comic-book heroines, but neither do they sag near my navel. Their tops slope down and the bottoms curve up from their resting place on my rib cage. Most of the middle is dominated by my nipples, which usually spread out wide and relaxed but with a mere touch of the bathwater perk up to attention. As I ease my way in, my breasts bob up, floating to the surface like bath toys. Today, I don't feel like playing. Today, I'm considering lopping them off.

The other Scotland

Tue, 07 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

We walked into a myth. This could not be Scotland. Irvine Welsh's debunking bestseller "Trainspotting" was hitting Hollywood, I had seen Glasgow's techno-scene firsthand and the only visible signs of tartan were in the tourist shops that crowded Edinburgh's Royal Mile. No, this came from the pages of my childhood oversized atlas or the ancient nostalgia of a Burns poem. This was a Disneyfied clichi, not Scotland for real.

Several days after landing in Glasgow, I boarded a northbound bus with my small student group. Although I was in the midst of my pre-graduate days/daze, I stridently refused to be swept into a rose-hued view of Scotland's much-mythicized past. I watched the post-industrial tenements fade into the Highland's lochs, mist and mountains with skepticism. OK, so maybe a small part of me succumbed to the grandeur -- the terrain looking like the backdrop to "MacBeth" or sea monsters, huge and foreboding -- but I was still attentive to the corner shops with their Budweiser signs. I heard the American pop hits blaring from cars with Scottish plates and noticed those bucolic homes crowned with TV satellites.

Navigating Nairobi

Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The puddle is formidable. I've already trekked a block to scout a crossing, and it's beginning to defeat the purpose. My shirt sticks to my back and the wet hems of my pants swat my bare ankles. Car horns, matatu music and vendors shout, a cacophony barely audible over the rain banging in my ears. I'm on the corner of Moi and Kenyatta avenues at 3:15 p.m. in the rainy season. Nairobi is at its crescendo.

I've been in Kenya long enough to know that the afternoon showers are one of only two things in Africa that are punctual. The other was not my lunch date. I had planned to be back at my hotel by the time the rain hit. It comes fast and hard, and smears the city gray. Dirt spreads from unfinished sidewalks and rivers run brown down the non-drained streets. As I try to navigate a way across the murky moats, I count unclogged drains as No. 23 of the things I take for granted back home.

Rain falls fat like the drips off awnings and I search for some temporary shelter.