I found that the faster I ate, the more rapidly my desires pushed my fears away, and the faster the image of Margaret and my other bullying classmates faded. So I picked up the pace and sprinted to the finish, licking my fingers to make sure no morsel would go undigested. I ate until I didn’t remember that I was a reject, or at least until I didn’t care.
My stomach and heart swelled with satisfaction, and I felt full of life. The irony, of course, is that it was death I was full of—but I didn’t see it that way for years. At the time, I was simply awaiting the cosmic high I received from the buttery bun, the smoky patty, the smooth shake that tingled as it slid down my throat into my soul and grounded me at my foundation.
—
One place where I was already full was my bosom. I had developed fast and early—getting my period for the first time at just nine years old. I had been visiting my father when it first arrived, and I thought that perhaps I hadn’t wiped my butt properly (they never tell you that one’s first period is usually a gross brown). When I showed my mother later that day, while I was complaining of a stomachache, she gave me a maxipad and called my grandmother, who, perhaps overcompensating for her distress that her nine-year-old granddaughter was, at least physically, entering womanhood, inexplicably gushed and kvelled, shouting “Mazel tov!” over and over. And then my mother proceeded to explain to me what a period was. I was only in fourth grade at the time, and sex ed didn’t start until fifth.
Though girls are menstruating earlier and earlier every year, nine was still highly unusual. And so after my first cycle, Mom took me to my pediatrician, Dr. Lorn, to see if everything was okay. Dr. Lorn, a short, middle-aged man with a Hitler mustache, asked Mom to leave the room and then told me to undress. Though I was only nine, I was already very protective of my body and knew all too well that the parts that I should be shy about—maybe even ashamed of?—were the parts I hid with clothes. Dr. Lorn became impatient with me as I simply stared at him, failing to answer, until I finally started to slowly take my clothes off. He told me to lie back on the table—so I did. He told me to inch my butt down to the bottom of the table—so I did. And then he told me to spread my legs so that he could take a look.
Instead, I decided to get lost inside my brain.
I pictured my Saturday morning cartoons, which I had watched just a few hours earlier, and I lingered on a mental image of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Alvin was so mischievous! Always getting into trouble! But I thought Theodore was by far the cutest.
“Jasmin, do as I say,” Dr. Lorn ordered—not raising his voice exactly, but remaining firm in his request.
Was this normal? I actually still don’t know the answer to that. Plenty of pediatricians examine their little patients naked. So why did this feel so fucking horrible?
My body was my body. I knew that I had control over it or, at least, that I was supposed to. I didn’t let my brother pinch me just as I didn’t let my stepfather tickle me, so why would I let Dr. Lorn force my knees apart so that he could inspect a part of me that nobody had ever seen that way—not even me?
And yet he did anyway. When I lay down on my back, completely naked, refusing to “let my knees fall to the sides,” he pried them apart for me. He pushed my legs open and started to touch my vulva. He got close and looked at me for far too many seconds, or minutes, or eons—I’m not sure which.
For years afterward, on bad days—when I would grab my stomach by the fistful and scream, when people on the street would call me a cow, when I would be so tired of living that I would become physically numb, and the only recourse would be to dig my sharp nails into my wrists and arms just so that I would feel something—that memory would intrusively creep back in without my consent, and once again, Dr. Lorn was right there looking.
As I lay there on my back, I was absolutely, completely mortified. I knew that my mother was just outside the room waiting, and yet even though I desperately wanted or needed an out, the very last thing in the world I wanted was for Mom to see me that way. And so I held my breath and let Dr. Lorn examine me in this incredibly inappropriate way that decades later still perplexes and infuriates me.
When he was done, I noticed a very tiny but undoubted half smile on his face. Dr. Lorn told me to put on my underwear, and that I obeyed. My mother was invited back in the room, and Dr. Lorn promptly told her that it was impossible for me to have gotten my period yet. My mother protested—she had seen it herself, for five days as I menstruated and she patiently worked with me as I figured out how to use and dispose of a maxipad. Dr. Lorn reiterated, “Not possible,” then explained to my mother precisely how much pubic hair I had, the still-soft texture of it, and that I was only at the very beginning of puberty.
I sat motionless, looking down, in a purple undershirt and pink underwear. In a moment of silence, as my mother was busy shaking her head because she still didn’t accept what he had to say, I meekly asked if I could please change back.
Dr. Lorn shocked both Mom and me when he guffawed. “No, honey, you can’t change back.” He had thought I was asking if my body could change back. Could my “soft pubic hair” ungrow and could my “breast buds” pop back into my chest?
Mom was finally at the end of her rope at that point. I could hear it in her voice. “She means, can she change back into her clothes, Dr. Lorn?” Mom’s eyes were slightly squinted, her lips pursed.
When we got into the car a few minutes later, I sobbed and drooled. I told my mother that I would never go back to see him. She asked me what had happened, but I refused to speak—I just wept, as Mom rubbed tiny circles on my back and whispered, “Shhhh . . .”
Puberty was not off to a great start. It was fast and maniacal and took hold of my body with determination and gripped my heart with confusion.
—
Although my breasts had already begun budding at the time I got my first period, I could never have imagined what was about to happen to them. By the time I was thirteen, they had exploded into a nightmarish triple D. There was no hiding them, but I did my level best, insisting on wearing two “minimizer bras” at a time, in an effort to keep “Mork and Mindy”—my tongue-in-cheek names for my new constant companions—at bay as much as possible.
Then, one day in eighth grade, hope appeared on the horizon. I had gotten a teen fashion magazine and, thumbing through it right before English class, I found a story about a high school student who had had a breast reduction. My heart leapt. You can make them smaller?! I had to put the magazine away when class started, but later, after I turned in my quiz—which I rushed through willy-nilly—I took the magazine back out, desperate to read about what this new-to-me surgery entailed.
Of course, English class was probably a poor time to read about something so provocative, with my taunting classmates sitting around me in each direction. When Bob, who sat behind me, caught a momentary glimpse of the words “breast” and “surgery” in the article, he of course deduced that I was planning breast augmentation surgery—which was completely hilarious to him and the other kids he quickly whispered to. “Your tits aren’t big enough already, Jazz?” they taunted.
But even their jabs couldn’t repress my excitement at ridding myself of my mammary burden. My breasts were most certainly big enough, and then some. My mother—a modest 32B—was just as perplexed as I was by my overly endowed chest. It was a source of concern to both her and Grandma, who were pained by my enormous breasts and witnessed how they kept me separated from the kids at school in yet another dimension.
By the time I was in ninth grade, men started noticing, too. On one particularly warm September afternoon, I decided to walk home from school instead of grabbing a ride with one of my classmates who lived nearby. I was wearing a sleeveless, form-fitting denim shirt with a collar, and—naturally—black palazzo pants. There was, as always, a quarter-sized space in between the second and third buttons of my shirt. Nothing ever seemed to fit. My army jacket was
tied around my waist, my backpack draped on one shoulder, and my thick hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. I chewed my Bazooka and hummed show tunes to myself as I walked the mile and a half home.
As soon as the royal blue Honda on the usually busy Grove Avenue started to slow down, I somehow knew there was going to be trouble. I looked around and, alarmingly, there was nobody in sight—nor any other vehicles anywhere to be seen. The Honda was going the same pace as me now, and so I sped up, as if that would make a difference. The unkempt, middle-aged man driving it rolled down his window and tipped his giant sunglasses a bit so that he could look over them. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said. I ignored him, spotting out of the corner of my eye some woods that I knew reached to the other side of my house, popping out near my backyard. “Nice tits for a little girl,” he continued, as I bolted for the woods. He promptly drove off, but in retrospect, I’m not sure if running into an even more desolate place as I was being ogled by a perverted, older man was my smartest maneuver of all time.
And they just kept growing.
By tenth grade, angry red stretch marks lined the sides of my breasts, welt-sized proclamations that Mork and Mindy didn’t want to be there any more than I wanted them. By the end of each day, my entire back ached, and my shoulders had pink, bra-strap-shaped creases that were tender to the touch. The skin under them never had space to breathe, and so I would apply baby powder twice a day in hopes that it would help the chafing, though nothing really seemed to. The skin there was raw and warm, frequently dotted with painful blisters.
Though I hated them, there was no escaping them, ever. Morning, noon, and night, there they were. Nevertheless, I did my best to find ways to get along with them. One way was by finding mentors and idols who had a similar affliction but didn’t let it hinder them. I wanted real evidence and validation that one day, when I got out of this small-minded, horrid place and time, I could maybe, perhaps, learn to be comfortable in my own skin. Did this possibility exist?
It existed in Bette. Gradually, as I got older and my chest got bigger, my bedroom transformed from a pink, doll-laden wonderland to a shrine dedicated to my favorite star, Bette Midler. I was truly infatuated—obsessed, really—with Bette. In addition to being in complete awe of her talent, and wanting nothing more than to grow up to be just like her, I was fascinated by the way she used her own big breasts to her benefit. As I worked my way through memorizing the lyrics and melodies to my entire collection of albums, movies, and bootleg VHS tapes of old shows, I found myself particularly infatuated with her Sophie Tucker impressions—in which she repeatedly joked about her breasts in such a way that she was in on the joke, which was something I longed to be. (“I was in bed with my boyfriend Herbie, and he said, ‘Soph, you’ve got a flat chest,’ and I said, ‘Herbie, get off my back!’”)
And then I watched in awe as Bette’s boobs became the stars of the show when she flamboyantly performed the song “Otto Titsling” in the movie Beaches—about the fictional character who invented the brassiere—which was precisely when I knew that I was her biggest and best fan, and always would be. (Her rendition of “Pretty Legs and Great Big Knockers” from her concert, Art or Bust—which I owned on VHS—pretty much gave me a seizure.)
Still, being a chubby teenager with enormous breasts is harder to pull off than being a movie star with them, and real-life New Jersey was not kind to me—or to Mork and Mindy. My TM was distressed, and her concern grew as I did. When I passed her bedroom one night and heard her on the phone chatting with Grandma, I detected that her voice was notably soft—proving to me two things: (1) she was trying to be secretive, and (2) it was my mission to find out what she was talking about.
“She’s so matronly,” I heard her say as I pressed my ear to her door in the spot that I had previously determined (with loads of practice) was the easiest to hear through. “I really don’t know how to handle it,” Mom continued. “She’s much bigger than the other kids at school—which they never stop reminding her of. And she’s so unhappy all the time.”
Admittedly, everything Mom said was entirely accurate, but hearing my mother, size four her whole adult life, call me “matronly” absolutely stung anyway. It wasn’t that I didn’t sense her discomfort about my body size, and it also wasn’t as if she’d really said anything wrong or insensitive. But “matronly” was just not a word that I wanted associated with me, regardless of how true it was. I wanted to rip my flesh off my skeleton and put it through a shredder.
—
It was my TM who first brought up the possibility of my having a breast reduction. I was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream with Cool Whip and gummy bears when she came in and sat down beside me. For the Boys, starring, of course, Bette Midler, was playing (once again) on the nearby VCR. “What?” I asked curtly, with a mouthful of ice cream, and a chocolaty chin.
“Jazz . . .” She momentarily hesitated, eyeballing my heaping bowl. “I thought maybe you would want to consider having a breast reduction.”
My spoon fell into my bowl. Bette’s rendition of “In My Life” faded into the background, and immediately I was as present as I could be—this was suddenly my life.
I thought back to the article I had read a few years prior, about the teenager who’d had a reduction. It had never occurred to me that getting one was an actual real possibility—I thought it was just for people in magazines. Even though Mom’s suggestion stunned me, it occurred to me that I should have seen it coming. She had long been concerned about my “situation” and was craving a solution almost as much as I was. And since putting my body through a shredder was off the table, at sixteen, during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I went through with the surgery.
It turned out that getting that breast reduction was the best thing I could have possibly done. It was my first foray into understanding how relatively simple it was to permanently alter my body and establish my ownership of it. In the years to come, I would continue to gain and lose weight over and over, and then, eventually, lose nearly one hundred pounds and keep it off. I would get one tattoo, then another, and end up with more tattooed body parts than not. I would pierce things and shave my head. I would do whatever I could to alter, hide from, and, ultimately, reclaim and liberate my body.
Perhaps getting a breast reduction was my first taste of that reclamation. Because when I returned to school in the fall, as a senior, things were very different. I busied my brain solidifying my plans to become a legendary actress—a plan that required quite a lot of thought and daydreaming. I had one foot out of the door already—I desperately wanted out. I joined Future Teachers of America for the sole purpose of missing a day of school each week so that I could student teach, and I applied for—and received—the privilege some seniors get of “early release,” making my school day a lot shorter than that of most kids. During the few times when I was actually in school, I would simply cut—whenever and however possible.
As far as I was concerned, I was already out of high school. I was already independent. In my head, I already had my own apartment in the city, and—just like Bette—the world already understood and accepted me. In this fantasy, my body became a nonentity and people saw me for my talent instead. In my daydreams, I got parts, and I got boyfriends. In my head, I was already somebody.
During my senior year, it wasn’t just my fantasy world that changed. The real world changed, too. My body was radically different and it was difficult for even me to recognize myself in the mirror. Motivated by my smaller-seeming frame, and physically weakened during recovery from the surgery, I had managed to shed a few pounds that summer, too. Just having a smaller chest gave the impression that I had lost weight, and my relatively minor weight loss on top of that made me look like a different girl altogether. My classmates simply stared, stymied by how different I looked, unable to pinpoint the exact cause of it.
And while my peers didn’t exactly sta
rt to be nice, their attitude was one of the things that changed that year. When that same Margaret from my history class suddenly and vehemently changed her go-to insult to me from “Fat-Ass” to “Ho,” I stood a little straighter and smiled, just a bit, to myself: I knew that it meant I was a tad less of a pariah than before. “Ho,” after all, was a way more desirable gibe. Finally, I was getting places.
I remember that afternoon I was called a “ho”: It was the first time I was degraded in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with my size. That same night, I memorialized what I felt was a huge accomplishment with a celebratory milk shake and a tub of icing. The future was looking sweet.
FOUR
you couldn’t ignore a girl in green overalls if you tried
When I went off to college, I gained back all the weight I had lost the previous year. Hardly a unique story for college freshmen, who often taste independence for the first time just as enthusiastically as they taste late-night diner food and cheap beer. Even Mork and Mindy reappeared for their “Where Are They Now?” special, growing back to some extent, as the rest of me filled out to bigger than I had been before.
In an act of complete ludicrousness, my TM would not allow me to go to college in New York City, feeling it was “too dangerous.” So she sent me an hour and a half in the opposite direction instead, to Philadelphia (which, for what it’s worth, has way higher crime rates than New York). When I received a substantial scholarship to study for my bachelor of fine arts in acting at the University of the Arts, the choice was really made for me anyway.
I remember standing on Anna Lane retrieving the mail from our wooden, house-shaped mailbox at the end of the driveway when I got the notice of my scholarship. I stood there and opened the envelope: Dear Miss Singer: We are pleased to inform you that . . . I let out a little scream, no doubt startling everyone on my sleepy street, then decided to sit on the curb until Mom got home so that I could tell her the news immediately. When I spotted her Saturn coming down Anna Lane, I ran toward it as if the house was on fire, which, when she saw me, she thought it was. “I got in! I got a scholarship! I got in! I got a scholarship!” I kept yelling, until she was able to decipher my slurred, screeching words.
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 5