Free Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle

the world believe that he simply sprang forth in a business suit with a fat wallet boasting membership in the NRA, a Rolex on his wrist, and a BMW parked by the curb. Right now he seems to be checking out everyone’s cleavage. I watch him and keep thinking that before the night is over, I will go and get my high school yearbook and pass it around so everyone can check out when he was a Future Farmer of America and a Teen Dem and a relatively decent guy. I will ask how his mother—a woman who put in forty years as a receptionist at the courthouse and who raised a child all by herself—is faring out at Turtle Bay Nursing Home, which he visits only at Christmas if then. He keepstrying to catch my eye and wink like the two of us are somehow in on something. My glance back at him says
You suck.
    I TELL EVERYBODY that I think men who are attracted to breasts in a major way are still yearning to suckle their mamas. Isn’t it true there’s a whole generation of formula-fed men who never had that opportunity and now they are suffering? They want to latch on; they want to make their mothers draw sharp breaths in with the tight wrench just before that glorious letdown. I say that knowing that they are all Enfamil men with mamas who claim they couldn’t nurse when the truth is nobody taught them how. I don’t think evolution would have allowed a whole generation to die out; it certainly hasn’t happened that way in the animal kingdom. You don’t see animals making fun of teats and udders. I doubt if it happens among humans in Third World countries either. But maybe this was the period in history when society began to look at the breast in a whole different way. Maybe this is when the breast went from a source of nourishment for the young to something for men to pinch and make jokes about.
    I can tell that they are tiring of my lecture; I can feel the tension rising so I choose to sink back and away. I ask them to tell us all about their games that day, no one even noticingthat this is a way of defusing the situation, a way for me to sit and sip my drink and fade off into my own thoughts. Like the time I accompanied my son and his third-grade class to the science museum where we stood before the model of Lucy— our first woman—her thumb visible, her body emerging from a previous simian form. She was only three and a half feet tall, her head the size of a softball. She was only in her twenties when she died and already her backbone was deformed; she suffered a terrible form of arthritis. She was found at the edge of a lake and scientists are unsure if she drowned or if she simply died of an illness. Did anyone even consider the possibility that perhaps she grew so tired, her heart so heavy, that she simply lay facedown on the shore and waited for the water to carry her into an eternal sleep? Did such a desire even exist in this early human form or was it the result of years of domestication, demands that went far beyond what life out in the wild would have required? Lucy’s breasts were not huge; they were thin and stretched. The kids pointed at her nipples and butt crack. They were children and had that right. They still had every opportunity to grow up and imagine the infant kept alive by Lucy’s milk—a whole world’s population nourished by Lucy’s milk.
    T HE DISCUSSION OF golf comes around to the old story about Johnny Carson asking Arnold Palmer what he did for good luck before a match. Palmer replied, “My wife kisses my balls,” to which Carson said, “Bet that makes your putter stand up.” No one in the room actually saw the interview so we’re not sure how much if any of it is true. The discussion of Ethan’s swing leads right back into the swing of the hips of the woman who was clearly attracted to him at Cafe Risqué. Then the swing of her breasts, which Ethan said made him think of Loni Anderson. “Not the face, of course,” he