The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Page B

mother-in-law! What you need for literary inspiration is a joint,” Celia counseled. She had never smoked marijuana, but she was dying to try.
    â€œPot clouds your mind, it won’t inspire you at all.” Tabra’s opinion came from experience. She was on her way back from such experiments.
    â€œWhy don’t we try it?” asked Abuela Hilda, to put an end to our doubts.
    And that was how the women of the family ended up smoking marijuana at Tabra’s house, having told everyone that we were going on a spiritual retreat.
    The evening began badly, because Abuela wanted Tabra to pierce her ears and the ear-piercing gun jammed and stuck in her earlobe. When Tabra saw the blood, her knees buckled, but Abuela did not lose her composure. She held the apparatus, which weighed over a pound, until Nico arrived an hour later, equipped with his toolbox. He dismantled the gun, and freed her. The bloody ear had doubled in size. “Now, Tabra, pierce the other one for me,” Abuela requested. Nico stayed long enough to take the gun apart a second time, and then left out of respect for our “spiritual retreat.”
    D URING THE PROCESS OF THE EAR PIERCING , Tabra’s breasts several times brushed against Abuela Hilda, who kept looking at them out of the corner of her eye, until finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and asked what it was she had in them. My friend speaks Spanish, so she was able to explain that it was silicone. She told Abuela that when she was a young schoolteacher in Costa Rica, she had a rash on her arm and had to go to the doctor. He asked her to take off her blouse, and when she explained that the problem was confined to one arm, he insisted. She took it off. “Woman! You’re flat as a pancake!” he exclaimed when he saw her. Tabra realized it was true, and then he suggested a solution that would benefit them both. “I intend to specialize in plastic surgery but I don’t have patients yet. What do you think about letting me experiment on you? I won’t charge you anything for the operation, and I’ll give you some knockout tits.” It was such a generous proposition, and expressed so delicately, that Tabra couldn’t refuse. Nor did she dare refuse when he showed a certain interest in going to bed with her, an honor accorded to only a few of his patients, the doctor made clear. She did, however, refuse when he wanted to extend his offer to her younger sister, who was only fifteen. And that was how Tabra had ended up with her marble prostheses.
    â€œI’ve never seen such hard boobs,” commented Abuela Hilda.
    Celia and I had to touch them too, and then we wanted to see them. No question about it, they were strange; they looked like footballs.
    â€œHow long have you been carrying this burden around, Tabra?” I asked.
    â€œOh, about twenty years.”
    â€œSomeone needs to examine you, this doesn’t seem normal.”
    â€œDon’t you like them?”
    The rest of us women took off our blouses to compare. Ours would never be spread across the pages of men’s magazines, but at least they were soft to the touch, as nature created them, and not like hers, which had the consistency of truck tires. My friend agreed to let us take her to see a specialist, and soon after there began what we in the family called “the odyssey of the boobs,” a series of unfortunate mishaps, the setting of which was the office of a plastic surgeon and the one advantage the fact that it solidified my friendship with Tabra.
    At nightfall we built a bonfire among the trees and roasted hot dogs and toasted marshmallows on sticks. Then we lit one of the joints, which had cost us no little trouble to obtain. Tabra inhaled a couple of times, announced that pot made her meditative, closed her eyes, and dropped like a stone, anesthetized. We carried her back to the house, no small job, deposited her on the floor, covered her with a throw,