My first pair of breasts or, A seasonal mystery revisited

I’m sitting on the floor before a television set, one of those old black-and-white boxes with the rabbit ears on top, propped upon a small table. My parents, brother and I are visiting friends or family, I don’t know who, or where. In my memory I am alone in the room, which doesn’t mean there aren’t other kids there, just that they are not part of this story. The adults are in another room. I don’t know what I’m watching, but I know what I see, because the scene has been seared on my mind for most of my life: two women — one petite and professional, the other taller and elegant, with a fancy hat — walk up a large staircase and into a small room. The hat and the clothes are old fashioned, which could mean anything before 1970. The two women are followed furtively by a young boy, a bit older than me, perhaps; he waits until they have shut the door of the room and then peers in through the keyhole, or maybe a small window. Once inside the room, the taller, more stylish woman begins to undress. She is there to try on a new bra. She removes her top and undergarment, and bares her breasts.

That’s all I recall: the foreplay of the women mounting the stairs, then the boy watching wide-eyed as the woman slowly bares her magnificent breasts.

And me: watching as the boy watches, unwittingly complicit in his juvenile voyeurism…