Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  The publicist was so insistent upon the suit, and so worried I wouldn’t obey, that in the end she traveled from New York to Boston, where I live and where the filming was, in order to supervise my shopping. She wanted to go with me to Ann Taylor to pick out my clothes. This I knew I could not do. One does not show one’s publicist the unpublic places, the bulges and lumps. I said I would go on my own.

  Of course, I didn’t. I went straight to Target and found a red suit for thirty dollars. I thought it looked fine. It didn’t entirely fit, the sleeves of the jacket were too long and the skirt was a little loose, but these were minor details, and besides, they usually only film from the neck up. I liked this suit. The red made me look happy; it underscored the flush in my face. It lit up my skin.

  I went home and tried it on for my husband. “You look,” he said, “like you’re about to go trick-or-treating.”

  I returned the suit. I did not want to get the publicist mad. I knew she was not after a style with any witch in it. I thought my husband was wrong, but I wasn’t going to risk it.

  The next day, a Sunday, I conceded. I went to Ann Taylor. The store was in a mall, and I try to avoid malls as much as possible due to potential terrorist attacks. I figured, however, it was Sunday, I was there first thing, the mall was relatively empty, it was not prime time in terms of bombs or aerosolized chemicals. I thought as soon as I stepped foot in the mall I would get sweaty, but in fact, that didn’t happen. The mall was nice. It smelled of coffee and had booths selling wind chimes and wigs and glass cats. It was almost whimsical.

  Ann Taylor itself had a charmed hush to it. There were a few women there, and they drifted between the racks of clothes like wraiths—angels or ghosts. I collided with cashmere. There was a white sweater and a matching white scarf, and it was as soft as snow to touch, but warm. I studied some velvet. It was satisfyingly raspy. These clothes were gorgeous; anyone could see that. They called attention not so much to themselves as to the way the light fell around their forms, suggesting the body beneath, at once sheathed and open.

  A saleslady drifted up to me. I told her my situation, that I needed a suit and I needed it fast. She was so gracious. She flicked through the racks of soft things and stylish things and held them up to me with complete confidence. If I seemed strange to her in my big rubber boots with old overalls tucked in, she didn’t show it, not a bit. I was another customer, her charge, her mission for the moment. She brought me back to a dressing room and handed me jackets and skirts and shirts. The clothing felt cool against my skin, and it all looked good. I am not accustomed to having clothes that truly fit. I have always been content with an approximate fit, tending towards the too large. These jackets enclosed my waist, and had whalebone buttons. The skirts were straight and slit. I was, she informed me, a petite. I thought of Hans Christian Andersen’s wonderful tale “Thumbelina” and the big red flower and the river and the butterfly. Petite! In fact, I was extra petite. Size six petite didn’t fit me; size four, still too large; size two, close but not quite; size zero, perfect. On the one hand, I was truly proud. For what woman would not consider size zero to be an actual accomplishment? On the other hand, a zero? It was, for sure, a mixed message.

  But here’s what really mattered: In the size-zero suit, I looked great. I looked serious and sexy. I looked like a lawyer, like someone in a high-rise, a woman with extra influence. The transformation was total, in part because of the fit. The suit at once concealed and revealed my shape. I had a shape! I had a little waist. I had a visible collarbone, which gave me an appropriately gaunt look. My throat was white and long.

  I bought the suit, several hundred bucks, and on sale too. She gave it to me in a bag with velvet handles. She asked me if I’d like shoes to go with the outfit, but I was overcome, overwhelmed, and out of money. I told her no on the shoes. I said I already had some. Then, on my way out of the mall, I snuck into Payless, a discount shoe emporium, and got a fourteen-dollar pair of pumps.

  At home, I tried on the suit in front of my full-length mirror. I was wondering whether the mirrors at Ann Taylor were rigged in some way and that now, face-to-face with the glass on the back of my closet door, I would see the truth. And I did see the truth. The truth was I still looked good: My waist was still small. My collarbone flared. I had a charming freckle on my chest.

  The next morning, when I woke up, I didn’t reach for the raveled sweater and paint-splattered pants. I put on the suit. It was slightly itchy but immensely gratifying. I went to work, which for me amounts to traveling from my bedroom to my study, across the hall. Usually I work in some version of my pajamas, but today was different; I decided to get all dressed up, as though to meet my characters. My writing was sharper because of that suit. My characters all said witty things, and my overwrought lyricism gave way to a kind of muscular minimalism. I started to think the suit was magic.

  I went on TV the next day and I was very articulate. My publicist, who herself was wearing a suit and mauve lipstick and sling-back shoes, was impressed. Huge white lights shone down on me, and behind me stood a man with a silver disc. Then it was over. I went home. The house seemed oddly quiet, in a way both creepy and peaceful. The sheer curtains billowed with sunshine. The cat wreathed around my legs. I stripped and hung the suit way in the back of my peeling closet.

  But something was different. Even with the suit off, I still felt like it was a little bit on. My walk was more purposeful. I felt aloft. I felt pretty and I liked it. I began to wonder about Botox. I pinched my lips to plump them out and, sure enough, that made me prettier still. Suddenly, there were so many possibilities. Perhaps I should get a perm, some smart, springy, sexy curls to accompany and enhance my new image. I bought a fashion magazine and went to see a stylist at Lord’s and Lady’s. She grabbed a hunk of my hair and said, “Perm, no way. You’re much too brittle.”

  “But I have hairspray on,” I said, which I did, part of my new experimentation. “I have a lot of hairspray on. Without it, my hair is not so brittle.”

  “You don’t need a perm,” she said. “You need color.”

  Color it was. My strands stripped of their darkness and gray, saturated with something gold. My husband reacted exactly as he was supposed to, just like a husband on a perfume commercial: “Wow,” he said.

  I could go on. And on. I could tell you about the lid lift I thought of getting, the tarry mascara I bought, the fancy shampoo with a lather as rich as a racehorse’s. I could tell you about the pants, but I won’t. The clothes are at once entirely the point and not at all relevant. What matters is this: I began to see the surface of everything, the shifting surfaces of people’s faces, the grainy surface of my desktop, the surface of the sky, all slick and blue. I saw the surface of my body and ignored the bones. And this was all very good. Not only was it fun; it was somehow, somehow healing, to use a surfacy word. I bobbed to the top of life and blew a bubble or two. I began to understand that a life dedicated to appearances was not, in fact, a shallow life; it was life lived at the pitch of drama, life on a stage, life acted and enacted, almost Shakespearian. When you tend to your surface, you are making an image, and images are the essence of art. When you tend to your surface you are making a statement of faith. You are saying, I matter. You are saying, The world is worth dressing for. You are engaging in the best kind of optimism, an optimism that propels you out of bed in the morning, that directs you to the day. When you put on nice clothes, you are putting on hope, you are saying, Here I am. This is fun. Look at me. You are jerked out of your scrunched existence and into possibility: the pretty, the silky, the tweed. You are celebrating the excellent malleability of human experience, that you can be this and you can be that, the fusion of image with flesh.

  But at the end of the day, of course, you have to take your clothes off. Unless you want to sleep in your suit, this act of undressing cannot be avoided. The night air is cold. An airplane roars. A grandmother has just died, and as well-dressed in her coffin as she was, she still looked, well, s
he still looked dead, the swoop of blush hideous on her sallow skin.

  I wonder if there are some people who never get undressed, or who always stay well-dressed, in a metaphorical sense. If there are, I salute them. To go through life clad and stylishly clothed, with all the relentless optimism this implies, is in and of itself a herculean feat. I, in the end, do not have this stamina. I cannot run that race. I cannot bring myself, when all is said and done and stripped, to see the fabric of the universe as anything other than rumpled. Clothes are a grand vacation, an excellent adventure, but in the end, you come back to your body.

  My body is aging. I have warts on my feet. My hair is brittle, with strands of gray beneath the saturating gold. I cannot stick to my surface. I sink, and in that downward decline, in the quiet moments, with the suit hung up in the closet, the flared velvet pants put away, in the quiet moments lying side by side with my infant son as he falls asleep, I think of frightening things. And it occurs to me, in these unclad moments when the world comes at me raw, it occurs to me that my images of terror are as commodified and commercialized as my newfound interest in clothes. I mourn what the media tells me to mourn. I now dress as the media tells me to dress. Even my deepest fears have a sort of surfacy feel to them, aerosolized toxins and jihadists in kaffiyeh.

  What are the real dangers here? What are the actual risks that exist beneath the fabric of our American lives, beneath all our stylized surges? I cannot answer that question. Perhaps the answer is simple, though. Perhaps it has something to do with a grandmother in a grave, the way our faces crumple in time, our ends, however they happen. A person cannot tolerate it all; it is too much. Clothes are as fine a diversion as any. They may not remake your soul, but they give you a much-needed break. I would like a gown, pale blue, seeded with pearls at its collar and cuffs. I would like to dress my children in everything Gap. I would like us all to go forward, together, as beautifully bandaged as a human may be.

  11

  Bilateral

  Once, when I was a child, I milked a cow and didn’t like it. I remember the beast, sizzling with black flies, hair matted with dung, one cloven hoof dangling delicately in the air as I closed my fist around a teat and squeezed. Milk spurted into the bucket, a bluish-white warm liquid with something scummy on top. The beast pawed at the ground, turned her huge head, looked at me. Go on, she seemed to say. Her udder was hot and hard, her nipples as big as pinkies, indecent.

  Years later, when my own breasts began to grow, I thought of that cow. My mammary glands turned so tender they would ache when the wind blew. Now, in my thirties, I am five feet, one hundred pounds, and my breasts, double-D cup size, have always exhausted and embarrassed me.

  Therefore, it was easy for me to decide, when my most recent breast biopsy came back bad, that I wanted a mastectomy. It was a Tuesday. It was late winter, snow still gleaming on the ground, and the doctor called to tell me: atypical ductal and lobular hyperplasia. The lump that had been plaguing me for the past eight months turned out to be stuffed with rusty cells, misshapen and exuberant, multiplying much too fast. Atypia isn’t cancer; it’s the thing before cancer, the warning sign, the announcement before the building blows up. I asked my surgeon right there over the phone what percentage of women diagnosed with atypical hyperplasia go on to develop carcinomas, and she said no one knew. No one knew! Is this not ridiculous, blasphemous, that no one has yet done a simple study that follows, say, one thousand “atypical” women for a period of years and sees who dies, who doesn’t?

  That day, I made an appointment to see a surgeon, to discuss next steps. I already knew what I wanted to do. I have two close relatives who have had breast cancer; I’ve had a child over the age of thirty-five; I am Ashkenazi Jewish; and for the past eight years I’ve had to subject my enormous lumpy breasts to countless mammograms, sonograms, MRIs, and biopsies, and this well before I’d hit forty. Early-detection technology obviously saves lives, but it wrecks minds; you live in the terrible grip of waiting. I made an appointment with my surgeon, and the morning of, I went to the farm near my home to look at cows. They were waiting to be milked, kicking at their painful udders, their breath hot-sweet blasts in the winter air.

  My surgeon’s office is in a stark, practical building with little color. The halls are hushed, the few decorations rational. She started to tell me about all my treatment choices and I interrupted her, a slash with my hand, “I want a mastectomy,” I said. “Now.”

  “Is that really what you want?” she asked. “We have so many advanced techniques, like the MRI, for early detection, and breast-conserving therapy, and you can take tamoxifen. . . .”

  But I didn’t want to discuss it. I had touched a cow and found it distasteful. I had had my babies, so whatever utilitarian purposes my two external placentas might serve were all gone anyway. More important, I didn’t want the psychological torture of endless testing. Modern breast-cancer detection, while it’s obviously done great good, puts women in a stark conundrum. Advanced mammography, frequent and accurate biopsies, and nifty MRIs all enable both patient and doctor to see conditions whose prognosis they do not know. The hazy, maybe prognosis, like atypical hyperplasia, that could or could not become cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ, that might or might not spread, means you live your life on high alert, hitched to your oncologist, who checks you at the slightest sign. No, I didn’t want that. I chose the most extreme medical intervention—bilateral mastectomy—to get out of a lifetime of more minor medical interventions with serious psychological side effects. It’s no way to live, as a screening devotee. Better to take what time you have left and be blissfully ignorant, than to whittle it away worried over what result, when and how.

  My surgeon said, “Maybe you should think about it. There’s no emergency here. Take your time and think it through.”

  “I’ve thought it through,” I said. “A) I’m not at all attached to these breasts, and B) I can’t live my life in an MRI machine.”

  She said, “Give it a couple of months.”

  I said okay, but I knew I wouldn’t wait that long. I was done with waiting.

  My husband was tentative. “I really like your breasts,” he said, but he knew I didn’t like them. He’d seen me lift the ledge of them up on a hot day. He’d seen me sweat out countless biopsies too. He said, “Without your breasts you’ll look weird.” I said, “With my breasts I look weird.”

  I convinced my surgeon that a mastectomy was truly what I wanted to do. In the week or so before the procedure, a kind of elation filled me. Here I was, diagnosed with a dangerous condition, and I was high, high on the cold, clear winter air and the fashion possibilities in front of me and the freedom: no more screenings, my breast-cancer risk plummeting. A mastectomied woman can still get breast cancer, but studies show that she has only a 5 to 10 percent chance, and that’s a lot lower than you. Or you. Or me, who, with all my combined risk factors, had a whopping 90 to 100 percent lifetime chance (my surgeon finally came up with some stats), good god. Why wouldn’t I cut off my breasts? Why doesn’t everyone? I sometimes wonder this.

  I visited a plastic surgeon who told me to take off my shirt. “Well,” he said, “you are large. We’ll make you a B,” and then he showed me the breast that would go in me, a jellyfish-like saline-filled sac, almost pornographically pert.

  As the days drew closer, my elation turned almost manic. Dr. Poires, my surgeon, said, “I’d like you to see a therapist. A woman should grieve before she loses her breasts.”

  Is this true? Did I have grief I was covering up? I went home and stood naked in front of my mirror. I eyed my mammary glands for a long, long time. Through the pale skin I could see the roaming of veins, green veins, running from my throat, snarling in my chest, and fingering their way into my pale, pale breasts. I could see how the seam of the breast was connected to the chest wall, beneath which hammered the heart. When I breathed, my breasts rose up on the lobes of my lungs; breath and breast. Heart and breast. Flesh and breast. What I saw, standing th
ere, was that the breast is an integral part of the body, its intricate ecosystem, which, when severed, would cause pain. I didn’t doubt my decision then, but I had a long moment of feeling bad for my body, and bad for my breasts, which I was abandoning in cold blood, a piece of me, killed off.

  I went into the surgery with my head held high, a tight scoop-necked shirt from the Gap packed into my bag, what I would wear on the way home. There was a damsel fly in the surgical waiting room, one of those leggy primitive insects, and I thought that was strange, a bug in the hospital, but I wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t take it as a sign.

  I was shown to a cubicle, where I undressed and lay on a stretcher. The man in the cubicle across from me appeared to have no legs and only one arm. He was pretty much torso topped with brain. I couldn’t stop staring at him. He saw me staring and waved.

  The anesthesiologist came around. He told me his name was Dr. Drown. This is when I started to feel definitely scared, but I also thought it was funny. Dr. Drown had a teal-green surgery cap and a mask over his mouth, so I could not completely see him or assess him. Dr. Poires, the breast surgeon, came in; she looked funny in her scrubs and masked mouth, like a criminal. They wheeled me down the long hall.

  Dr. Drown put me out; he flicked a neural switch and I was down, drowned, and then I bubbled up to consciousness again, nine hours later, in a room I had never seen. I knew immediately that my breasts were gone. My chest felt terrifyingly light, like it was filled with only cotton, and then there was a long, slow, curving pain that took its time with me.

  I was baked on drugs, still swimming in the liquid-glass of anesthesia, but my mind was strangely, awfully clear. I could feel the sawed incisions, the enormity of the amputation, and how hard it was to breathe. “Breathe, breathe,” a recovery room nurse kept yelling to me, and a machine above me was beeping out some warning, and I didn’t want to breathe; I wanted just to sink, and I thought I was possibly dying, sometimes people do die from surgery, and right then and there, just after the operation, I regretted my decision.