the post in its hide. I would apologize later with a nice green apple, but for now, I needed to beat it.
The mule would start and stop, pausing over something nasty and decomposing in its path. I could hear the hoof steps of the Mexican catching up to us. Where were those pale-assed honeymooners? Gosh, this was the ugliest countryside I’d ever seen. I thought when I signed up for this all-inclusive we’d get to ride horses on the beach like in the movies. This was the equivalent of riding through a trail of Dumpsters.
The mule wouldn’t budge and I didn’t feel right biting or poking it again. The Mexican was on my tail and sighed so heavily I could smell his sated, fetid breath.
“I just want to see one,” he said.
I turned toward him. “One what?”
“I like a mature woman. One breast of a mature woman.”
“Well, trot on up the path and find one. I’m not mature. You got that? I’m only twenty eight. I look older because I smoked when I was young and drank too much in college. I had that disease when I was born where you look eighty by the time you are three. Very sad, but I make the best of it.”
“You are spirited and I like that in a woman. American women are like my horses. Spirited.”
Your horses are two gallops away from glue, I wanted to say, but did not because he was staring a hole through my tankini top with the built-in mega bra.
“Let me see just one. Only one. A mature breast, please.”
“I will not. They are ugly. I’m telling you.”
“They are so beautiful. And mature.”
I searched the ground for a big stick to hit him with, but all I could find were scrubby vines and old plastic cups. I was truly afraid by now. Not another person was in sight.
“Just show me one and I promise I will leave you alone. I promise.”
“You will go away? You will run on up the path after the others?”
“Sí. Yes.”
“Well, all right then.”
He began to salivate and sweat. I knew he was in for a shock and the “spirited” American woman in me couldn’t wait to see his face when he got a load of the goods this tankini was certainly boosting and plumping.
As he inched his old horse closer to my la mula, I began to have second thoughts.
“Just one,” he begged. “The left one.”
“Why the left one?” Oh, why was I even asking?
“It looks bigger. More mature.”
Thinking I would be raped if he didn’t get his peep show, I lifted the left side of my top and out flopped a long, eel-like tit that fell somewhere near the mule’s saddle. His eyes squinted. His mouth curved downward. He nodded, kicked his horse, and fled the scene like the Lone Ranger after a bad guy.
“Hey,” I yelled, offended to some degree. “What about the right side? Don’t you want to see it? The right one looks a whole lot better!”
By then he was gone. The trip was over. My mula eventually made it back, drank some water, and crunched the promised apple I had in my beach bag. I cut my eyes at the Mexican before crossing the road toward the hotel.
He stood there staring, as if he’d been hoodwinked and robbed.
“Things aren’t always what they seem,” I yelled.
He nodded and turned away. I climbed the stairs to our villa, crawled into bed with my husband, and listened to him sniff and hack until time for my next solo excursion—snorkeling on three reefs in the middle of the ocean.
I dug around for a swimsuit that would hide nothing. I would show my breasts to be what they were, those of a woman who’d lived and loved and nursed two beautiful children. Those of a mature woman.
The Grumpy Vagina
As a reporter and columnist for years, I’m accustomed to interviewing people and asking all sorts of nosy and prodding questions. I’m not used to the tables turning, as was the case when a western North Carolina magazine named me Favorite Columnist.
A reporter from the publication called and I was in no shape for an interview. I was laid up in bed, eight months pregnant, trying to hold back a premature birth. With both my babies, I had to take medicines for a condition in which my big old fickle oven of a uterus wanted to pop out kids before the center’s cooked.
“So, how does it feel to be named Favorite Columnist?” this sweet woman who sounded all of eighteen asked, as I rolled all two hundred pounds over in the bed and tried to think of something besides losing my mucus plug.
“Feels good,” I said, sounding like some stupid hick. “Feels damn good.” Oh, why is it that pregnancy has turned me into Billy Bob Thornton? Just give me a PBR and a Confederate flag, a hundred-dollar coupon to Feed and Seed, and maybe a fetus tattoo. “I’m honored,” I said, trying to redeem a few brain cells and some class. They say when a woman is pregnant, the cranial brain dries up and the placental “brain” becomes the body’s boss. I believe it. I had a feeling everything I owned or thought was stored in the placenta.
“Why do you think the readers keep giving you this honor every year?” she asked, and I was wondering the same thing.
“Hmmm. I would bet money it’s my hair. It’s my best feature and the only body part without a cartilage problem.”
“Do you have bad knees?”
“Bad knees?”
“Cartilage. You know, in the knees?”
“Nah, I was talking about my ears. They flop like a piece of cloth, not a drop of cartilage in them. People say they favor Ross Perot’s. And my nose, too. Way too much cartilage there. I have one pretty good feature and that’s my hair, so I think readers appreciate that. Most of my mail is in regards to various and sundry hairdos. I try to change the style and color quarterly to shake things up a bit. A man threatened to kill me with that last change, the do with what he called the ‘chunky skunk’ highlights. He said he was of a mind to come in with a gun to shoot me and the stylist both. He said my nose had batwings coming off the sides, that the tip dragged too low, and that overall, my new picture would singe the eyes of every man’s whose fell upon the page.”
She cleared her throat and tried not to laugh. I was having a contraction and wanted to logroll out of the bed, but the doctor said if I got up for frivolous reasons, such as the need to pee, I might as well hold a bucket under my privates to collect the new family member.
I was hungry and my husband had left to play pinball at Frank’s Pizza because he couldn’t stand my pregnancy personality. He’d slid a cooler of food by the bed and refilled my water jug.
The interviewer wanted to talk about the secrets of my success, and I told her I never thought I was successful—except in getting men to fall madly albeit temporarily in love and propose—but I wasn’t about to share those secrets with her.
“There aren’t but three of us they could have voted for,” I said to the young woman as I peeled a banana and stuffed half into my mouth. “There is Hooch McKinney, who writes about politics, but nobody wants to read about politics unless one of them’s got his jibblybob where it shouldn’t be, plus Hooch is bald-headed. Don’t get me wrong. I love bald-headed men, but readers aren’t going to generally vote for one. Then again, old Hooch should have won this thing ’cause he was the guy that broke the story on the Diapered Detective as you may recall.”
“Diapered Detective? I’m new at the magazine. Tell me about this, please.”
Ho-hum. “Well, the instigating detective had that cartoon piggy look to him and was one of those men with an unfortunate mad-baby face. You know, the kind of grown men who resemble angry infants all splotchy and puffed