He said that she needed to participate more and that she shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. He said that women needed to find their voice, and that education was wasted on the silent. He reminded her that class participation was part of her grade.
She promised to try harder. The truth was that she preferred to spend nights out with Kristin, and weekends, so long as the weather was warm, at Jones Beach. How good she felt in a swimsuit! Weekdays, she woke up before ten only on days that she had class. She didn’t admit that she hadn’t read the book, nor that she’d enrolled in both his classes to watch him. She took his Critical Theory seminar on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where she filled notebooks with rough sketches of his face.
She might have stayed longer to talk, but she worried that her deformed breast showed. The sweater was hot and she was sweating. And now that her skin was moist, she could feel the damaged breast, like a melting tub of butter on her chest.
SHEILA MARRIED A lawyer a year later. His name was Stanley Talbot, and he, too, was much older than she. He had a thick beard and wore torn jackets to court, to “get a rise from the suits,” he said. She met him at a bar; she was certain that he noticed her breasts from across the room. He commented on them later that night as she lay beside him on his waterbed. “You have the most beautiful knockers,” he said.
“Silicone technology,” she laughed. Her breasts had personality, pizzazz. When she laughed, they, too, bounced with mirth. Since her uncle had replaced her leaking implant, she’d had no further troubles, and she now carried her D like a natural. Sometimes she even lied about her size, telling new friends — Stanley’s friends mostly — that in high school she’d required a specially tailored twirling uniform, or that she’d gone straight from an undershirt to a C-cup — all harmless untruths that spiraled in her imagination, bringing new boyfriends, confidence, and excitement to her past.
She enjoyed choosing a wedding dress, opting for a strapless gown she never could have filled out a year ago. She asked her mother to give her away, the one unusual twist in an otherwise traditional ceremony. Her mother wore falsies.
“Just so they know we’re related,” she said, stuffing the pads beneath her bra.
“Have you considered surgery?” Sheila asked.
“At my age?” her mother laughed. She’d done her hair for the occasion, piling it grandly above her half-moon pearl earrings. Sheila worried about her mother. She’d never find another man if she didn’t try harder. As far as Sheila knew, her mother had not had sex in over fifteen years. “Women my age don’t need breasts,” she said.
Sheila smiled, deciding then to buy her mother a pair. Two plastic sacs of silicone, heavier than water and just as harmless. Her uncle said they lasted forever. If a mother wanted to, she could will them to her children. Catheryn, her aunt, had done so, for example, and so had Mrs. Luce, who had once been married to a congressman. At first Sheila felt strange about talking of such things with her uncle, a dusty-blond-haired man who wore glasses, a trimmed beard, and looked, according to several sources, exactly like his twin, her father. Uncle Stuart had a nice, easy way about him. He told jokes, took her blood pressure himself, and asked if she’d like a nurse to hold her hand before the operation. She trusted him, and everyone said he was the best in New York. He had a breast-shaped fountain in the courtyard outside his office. Water spilled out of the copper nipple. Business was good.
Sheila never got her mother a new pair of breasts. The pregnancy that her wide-skirted wedding dress concealed stole most of her energy for the next six months, and the baby girl grabbed all that remained from the moment she first screamed. Sheila and Stanley named their daughter Evany.
Sheila’s breasts grew even larger with pregnancy. So large that her back hurt, and she had to buy new bras and tee shirts. But little Evany didn’t mind the size, her small, pink lips encircling first the right and later the left nipple. Sheila could hardly feel the suckling. She’d lost most of the sensation in that skin. She wondered how her cushions of flesh would affect her daughter. How, growing up, the girl might gravitate toward swimming instead of track and field. She’d like bagpipes, balloons, overstuffed pillows, beanbag chairs. Things that enveloped her. Warmth. Contact. If only her mother had offered Sheila so grand a breast!
Now that she was no longer in school, Sheila read the books she’d been assigned: The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, Book of the Duchess, Divine Comedy. The books were no easier to read, the language struggling to reveal its meaning to her, but days alone with the child needed filling. The television kept the baby awake, so she rarely watched the sitcoms, and Stanley never returned before eight or nine. He’d left corporate law, where he’d made a comfortable fortune, to embrace ideals. Defending the American way, he called it. Now he worked pro bono for the Attica Brothers’ Legal Defense, where he fought for justice for the inmates who’d been abused during and after the Attica uprising. He alone still spoke of the prison riots and of the injustice of not a single law enforcement officer’s being charged. Sheila thought of Attica only as the time when her breast had deflated, though she listened to her gray-haired husband’s stories and agreed that prisoners had rights.
“Forty-three dead,” Stanley would say. “The National Guard fired at the prisoners for twelve minutes. Killed their own men. And then blamed the inmates!”
Sheila liked the passion in his words. He would find the truth and see justice done. Most people felt the matter resolved; the inmates had brought the wrath of the law upon themselves. But when Stanley spoke of it, the matter seemed simple and clear. How could anyone deny that the system wasn’t working?
Their flat, carpeted wall-to-wall in cream-colored plush, had a wet bar that Sheila used as a nursing station while Stanley lit a joint or poured himself a glass of white wine. The furniture, aside from the two beaded lamps she had saved from her college days, belonged to Stanley — all dark wood pieces that felt stuffy and old, a remnant of the life he had before he stopped shaving, started grooving, and, of course, met her.
Now and then, while Stanley worked, Sheila considered visiting her old professor. NYU was only a subway ride away. She could even take a cab. She imagined discussing the books she’d scarcely glanced at before each class. Perhaps she could invite Professor Stanton over for dinner. He’d like her husband. They both had passion, intelligence, a dignified age. She invited her other friends, Kristin mainly, only when her husband was at work. Lunchtime, she called it, for cocktails and gossip before her friend returned to the dentist’s office, where she filed paperwork and scheduled appointments.
Sheila and Kristin were drinking vodka tonics at one in the afternoon when Sheila admitted she was pregnant again.
“Are you sure?” Kristin said. She wore a loose skirt and platform shoes, and she would soon return to work intoxicated.
Sheila nodded. Yet again, her breasts had grown, and her nipples extended dark and hard. Each could feed a thousand starving children. She was a goddess, the mother of mothers, the Norse goddess Freya, all beauty and harvest and fertility. “I threw up this morning,” she said.
She told her husband the news later that night, and together they toasted with champagne. Stanley decided that they should take a vacation before the child was born, and Sheila agreed, knowing even as she nodded that they would never find the time to leave New York.
AFTER THE CHILDREN started school, Sheila looked for part-time work. Her first job, typing forms for a legal office Stanley knew, provided a nice salary as well as adult company. She loved dressing and leaving for work. She wore her hair up in a barrette, and matched colored flats to colored handbags to the color of her belt. Business suits flattered her, and shoulder pads gave her command. Her breasts looked good under thin white blouses. She bought a half-dozen cream-colored bras and wore silver and turquoise necklaces that hung nicely above the point where her cleavage began. She worked with four other women, and they often ate lunch together, sharing a single dessert. Of the girls, Sheila had the largest chest, and she
couldn’t help feeling pleasure when the partners (all men) noticed her — a middle-aged woman with two kids — and called her sexy.
She enjoyed the tap of keys and the hum of small electric motors. But the motion aggravated a discomfort in her fingers, a pain in the joints of her hands and wrists. Her physician diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, common among women, he told her, primarily older ones. At her age the disease was unusual but not unheard of. Was she tired? Did she sometimes lose her appetite? Even children, on occasion, could contract the disease.
Kristin got Sheila a job selling vitamins by phone, sometimes door to door. The work was home-based, but the two often met for coffee in the afternoon where they discussed the clients — awful, all of them; the regional manager, who had a drinking problem; and the other salespeople, who never showered. Kristin had cut her hair short and frosted the ends. She and her daughter shared a wardrobe, she said: Jordache jeans, turtlenecks, pin-striped button-down blouses. How easy it was to stay current that way. Kristin was seeing a Wall Street investor. She shared financial advice over empty packets of artificial sweetener.
Sheila nodded, aware that she and Evany wore different sizes. Her daughter’s shirts would never fit Sheila, even the bulky cowl-neck sweaters. If the girl did not wear her padded training bra, she could easily be mistaken for her brother. How early was too early for surgery? What would be a good cup size for a girl in junior high? Evany should not have to endure gym class, the locker room awash with girls — womanly girls who wore clasping bras while she changed quickly behind her locker door. She should not have to bear the brunt of the jokes: What’s a boy doing in the locker room? Ew! A boy!
When Evany turned eighteen, Sheila paid for her daughter’s breast augmentation surgery. She and Evany had discussed the procedure for years, and Stanley had given his blessing. Only their son disapproved, but he was a gangly teenager who had yet to learn about women. Stanley never made time to teach him. Forehead bare beneath a retreating hairline, her husband still left for his office each morning, though he often spoke of retiring. He and his colleagues had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Attica inmates. The state had brutalized the prisoners and should pay them $2.8 billion, he explained. He spoke of the matter often, though the case had remained unresolved for nearly twenty years.
“Eighteen’s old enough,” Sheila said as she applied a light pink nail polish. She’d cut her hair short like Kristin’s and wore dangling earrings that knocked against her chin when she leaned forward. The rheumatoid arthritis had moved from her hands to her neck and shoulders and down to her hips, knees, and ankles. Stanley helped her fasten necklaces now, and she avoided lifting heavy things like water-filled teapots or mopping buckets.
“I’m old enough,” Evany confirmed. She had grown tall and thin, and she played volleyball, an option Sheila had never considered for her. She would start NYU in the fall, live in the dorms. With new breasts, she would find a nice boyfriend. She would learn, as Sheila had, to love her body. What more could a mother give her daughter? She and Evany discussed cup size on the cab ride over to Doctor Steenwycks’s office.
“B, I think,” Evany said.
“The people who know you now are just now people. When you go off to college, no one will realize.” Sheila knew her daughter worried that her new breasts would be a stigma if considered false, a concern that ultimately led the calculating girl to choose a C over a D-cup.
The doctor’s clinic now occupied a full six floors and an administrative suite in the building across Broadway. Doctor Steenwycks had twenty-six doctors on staff, and he had more or less retired, but he met Sheila and Evany at the door.
He remarked that Sheila looked well, joked with Evany, asked about her boyfriends, the prom, her plans for the summer. He had aged since the last time Sheila saw him, but he’d gotten a face-lift, or at least the skin of his face seemed tighter than she remembered. He no longer wore a wedding band, but he spoke fondly of his daughter Elizabeth, who was about Evany’s age. He’d moved the breast fountain from the outside courtyard to the lobby, where he said the elements didn’t harm it.
The day Doctor Steenwycks’s associate inserted the tissue expander in Evany’s chest, twelve separate wildfires blazed through Yellowstone Park, the worst fires in seventeen years. Experts said the flames blackened the mountains, but no permanent harm was done. Sheila waited in the lobby beside the fountain and read the newspaper. Falling water reminded her of rain, the outside humidity.
Afterward she and Evany celebrated with ice cream sundaes. “How does it feel?” Sheila asked.
“I feel like a woman,” Evany said.
EVANY HAD STARTED NYU, and her brother had gone off to Berkeley when CBS did a TV special on silicone breast implants. Sheila was working on her Christmas lists, which she archived each year and later reviewed to ensure that she never bought the same gift twice or missed mailing a holiday card. She’d grown her hair out in a short bob and wore a terry cloth leisure suit, jacket half-zipped with matching drawstring trousers. She’d turned the television on, her companion when Stanley worked long hours. It seemed the Attica case would at last go to trial, which meant many late nights and worked weekends.
Face to Face with Connie Chung filled the room with a cool, television glow as the program guests, all women with silicone implants, began speaking of symptoms. One admitted to swollen glands, fevers, chills, sweats, and sore throats. Another said that she could no longer walk, that her joints were swollen and sore, that she’d lost small handfuls of hair. A third sat in a wheelchair and explained that it had started as nothing more than pain in her fingers. With them was a doctor, who spoke of the immune response system and abnormal antibodies. He’d examined these women and found silicon in the thyroid gland, the spleen, the liver. Every part of the body.
Sheila raised an involuntary hand to her chest, remembered, suddenly, the scars at the crease of her breasts. She had an hourglass figure, firm and toned. Her chest did not sag or stretch. Last time she went to the beach she’d worn a string bikini. Until this moment she believed that her breasts had aged well, better than natural ones.
She reached for the telephone, dialed her daughter. For most emergencies she called her husband, but today she thought only of Evany with the C-cup breasts.
“Do you have the TV on?” she asked.
Evany laughed. “I don’t have one, Mom.”
Her daughter’s voice reassured her. Sheila curled the phone cord around her fingers. She and Stanley had at last purchased furniture, and she leaned back against the black leather of their new couch. Scattered across the floor, her index cards, pens, and lined notepaper seemed irrelevant, unimportant. “They’re saying the implants react with the body, that silicone damages connective tissue.”
“It’s just like carbon.” Evany was a chemistry major. She studied hard, had lunch with her professors, led freshmen labs that paid her tuition. She said that silicon was the second most abundant element on earth. “We all have it inside us anyway.”
Sheila bent her fingers, forming and releasing a loose fist. She’d grown used to the pain in her joints.
“It’s TV.” Evany laughed, and Sheila agreed because her daughter sounded so confident. It was foolish to be alarmed, to have involved Evany. Sheila asked her instead about classes. Did Professor Stanton still teach in the English department? She admitted that she used to fantasize about him. That he’d been the sexiest man on faculty.
“I haven’t thought of him in years,” she said, though she had a clear image now of the back of his classroom, she in three layers of clothing over a leaking breast implant.
Evany said she didn’t know if he still taught. She would ask around, report back. “Bye, Mom,” she said.
Sheila hung up, dialed another number. She had to try dozens of times before she got through to her uncle’s clinic. He was out, and no one else took her call, though the receptionist promised to leave a message.
Three days later, Sheila received a form
letter from Doctor Steenwycks’s office. There’s no proven danger, it said, though the lifetime of silicone implants was likely lower than originally thought. The clinic offered replacement surgery at half price for the next six months. The letter did not mention the CBS broadcast, but it said that certain parties were spreading unfounded rumor and that women should not be afraid to take control of their bodies. It was a woman’s right, the letter said. Women should be who they wanted to be.
Sheila discussed the matter with her husband. Should she get the implants removed? She’d worn the silicone breasts for half her life. They belonged to her. She could not imagine ripping them out. Yet what if she, like the women on TV, never walked again?
“Don’t be rash,” Stanley said. His skin had softened, but the short hair that showed where his shirt collar opened had turned wiry and hard. He didn’t want her to get surgery, she decided. His wife with the beautiful figure. “Thousands of women are fine, right?”
SHEILA’S BREASTS WERE wrapped in an orange sports bra the day the Food and Drug Administration banned silicone-filled breast implants. The commissioner of the FDA announced that the implants had not been proven safe and therefore should not be placed inside a woman’s body.
“The good news is that there are plenty of women to study,” the television announcer said. “More than a million women have had the procedure over the past thirty years.” The Mayo Clinic and Harvard were conducting research. Dow Corning, the major manufacturer of the silicone-filled sacs, was pouring money into new studies. The announcer warned women not to panic. No one was claiming that the implants were unsafe.
Sheila was doing aerobics, one arm folded under her chest for added support. For the past few months, ever since the Connie Chung broadcast, her breasts had felt heavy, almost as they had when she’d first received the implants. Could they really attack her body? Had her arthritis worsened? She could sense the implants against the muscles in her chest. They moved beneath her fingers, like egg yolks in the sizzling whites of a frying egg.
Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Page 18