Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  Suzy and I were somber as we made our way back to the Bartons.’ She’d worn out another pair of walking shoes and needed a new flight bag, so we stopped to buy a serviceable beige satchel and a pair of loafers with square toes and a thick, matronly heel.

  “These are even more hideous than the ones you bought in France,” she said.

  “On the bright side, they match your hideous bag.”

  Out on the crowded sidewalk, I lagged a few paces behind her, laughing my head off. Here was Miss Susan Freda Goodman, connoisseur of all things pretty and delicate, tromping down the street in her cast-iron loafers with that tan monstrosity on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Miss?” I called. “Miss, I couldn’t help noticing those smart shoes you’re wearing. And that darling bag! Wherever did you find that little gem?”

  “Very funny.” Suzy looped her arm through mine, and we fell into step side by side, plugging one ugly shoe in front of the other, laughing harder than we did over Uhren & Schmuck.

  Mrs. Barton was such a dear hostess, we bought her a dozen sweetheart roses on the way home, and when we presented them to her, she invited us to have dinner with the family. Their daughter would be coming with her fiancé, she told us, a wonderful man who spoke fluent English and held degrees in government and law from Tel Aviv University. She didn’t mention that he was black. When the happy couple showed up at the door, Suzy and I did our best not to act like we were seeing a unicorn. We’d been taught all our lives how wrong segregation was, but despite the Civil Rights Act that had passed the previous year, it was still very much the norm in the United States.

  Just a few months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had called from the steps of the Alabama state capitol: “How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.… How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

  I knew it was true, but sitting across the table from Miss Barton and her fiancé, I rankled with impatience. How long? It had already been too long.

  Lying in bed next to Suzy, I marveled, “His race wasn’t even a footnote in her description of him. No separate but equal. Just people. Without having to say anything about it. What a wonderful country.”

  “It’ll be like that in the U.S.,” Suzy said. “You’ll see. Someday, it’ll change.”

  “It’ll change when people make it change. When we get off our duffs and—”

  “Oh, Nanny, don’t go on about it. We had such a lovely day. Just enjoy being here.”

  I turned away and punched my pillow into submission.

  “Nan?”

  “What?” I huffed.

  “Don’t be a bitch.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Well, how would you describe that disposition?”

  I didn’t feel obligated to describe my disposition one way or another.

  “Nan?”

  “What?”

  “Now that we know what we’re doing, I’d love to tour South America … Asia … India. And we have to come back to Europe with Mom and Daddy. The only thing that could possibly be more fun than you and me would be the four of us together.”

  “I can’t wait to get my hands on an American newspaper,” I said. “I’m dying to know how the space flight is going. But I will miss the wonderful breakfast here.”

  “Four of the guys I’ve gone out with are going to be in London,” said Suzy. “They’re snowed, but I could care.”

  “Even the one with the guitar?”

  “Especially the one with the guitar.”

  We met up with Mike and Dave in London, but they were catastrophically hung over, and the happy reunion devolved into an argument about the car, which they were having shipped back to New York. They were planning to drive from there to Peoria, and the Goodman sisters with all our bags and baggage were conspicuously not invited along for the ride. Things went downhill from there.

  “David,” Suzy said imperiously, “I hate to say this, but I’m sorry I met you, and right now, to be quite honest, I could wring your fat neck.”

  As we haughtily stalked off, I broke a heel on my last pair of shoes.

  “Oh, terrific,” Suzy groaned. “You’re hobbled again, and there go Uhren & Schmuck with the car.”

  We splurged on a taxi back to our dingy hole of a hotel room, which was filthy and without hot water, so our first order of business the next day was to find new digs, which we liked so well, we wrote Mom and Daddy asking if we could stay an extra week.

  “I love hearing English again,” said Suzy. “I’m tired of being the one with the foreign tongue.”

  I liked the British, so staid and dignified, proud of their heritage. We went to Parliament and Westminster Abbey, checked our watches with Big Ben, walked Trafalgar Square, and visited the National Portrait Gallery. I was stirred by the pomp and ceremony at the Changing of the Guard, and Suzy was in seventh heaven standing in front of the Crown Jewels.

  “Five hundred and thirty carats.” She whistled softly. “How’d you like that on your little handilock?”

  We bought a large postcard with a picture of Queen Elizabeth and wrote on the back:

  Hi Ellie! Like my picture? Just wanted you to know I’m taking good care of the girls—they are such dolls! How lucky you are! Tomorrow night Phil and I are entertaining them at a state dinner and perhaps they’ll meet some interesting people—you never know! Suzy is staying in the new guest rooms, but Nancy preferred to sleep in the guards’ quarters. I wish they would stay here forever. Such poised young ladies! Phil and I send all our love to you and Marv!

  Every night, we took the Tube to the West End to see the ballet or a play: Oliver!, The Right Honourable Gentleman, Beyond the Fringe, Richard V, Little Me. We both loved Camelot, and Suzy was surprised to see me cry through half of it.

  “Goodness,” she said, “I thought I was the sob sister.”

  “It was so … so … alive” I sniffled. “So idealistic and tragic.”

  On the nights the theaters were dark, we watched risqué film noirs in stuffy art houses, where cigarettes glowed like fireflies, appearing and disappearing here and there throughout the audience. Suzy and I made no attempt to flag down viable dates, and if any were eyeing us, they didn’t let on.

  “All the hair on these men here in Beatle Land,” Suzy said on our way home from Madame Tussauds. “I can’t tell if they’re mods or rockers. Very confusing.”

  “I don’t have anything to wear on a date anyway. Our clothes look like they’ve been dragged through three wars.”

  “I know, but we can’t give them up for two days to be cleaned. We’ll just keep dousing ourselves with French perfume to disguise any musky aroma. Mommy would do the same in our situation. It would be silly to miss any opportunity.”

  “Agreed.”

  Suzy rested her head on my shoulder, and we swayed with the subway.

  “I’m glad we came, Nan. This trip will forever be the highlight of my life. Other than getting married and having children, I mean.” She stuck her feet out in front of her. “Are my legs smaller?”

  “No, your shoes are bigger.”

  “I’ll bet I’m down to a size two. My hose have to be rolled three times at the top. And I’ve been eating like I’m getting shot in the morning.”

  “We must have walked another six miles today. That would do it,” I said, wondering why that wasn’t doing it for me.

  Our excitement about laying hands on an American newspaper faded when we saw the front page. Escalating bloodshed and casualties in Vietnam. Thirty-four people dead after five days of race riots in Los Angeles. Close to home in Illinois, a plane had crashed into Lake Michigan, killing the crew and twenty-four passengers. That night, while I stared at the ceiling, despairing over the state of the world, Suzy thrashed and moaned until I shook her awake and crawled in bed with her.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered. “You were having a nightmare.”

  “That plane crash … oh, Nan …” She hugged her arms around
me, trembling. “I want to go home, but I feel sick when I think about getting on that airplane.”

  “We’ll dose you with Dramamine. You’ll see. No more shpilkes.” I used Aunt Rose’s word for nervous jitters. “If we’re going to be world travelers for the next fifty years, you can’t be afraid to get on an airplane.”

  “I hear they have fabulous parties on ships. Dancing every single night.”

  “Oh. Well, if you’d be more comfortable on the boat, I don’t mind.”

  I miss the days of sprinting into the airport to catch a plane. No barriers, no fear, no standing in line with one’s shoes in one’s hand. We pride ourselves on our streamlined connectivity, but in some ways we’re more segregated than ever, conferencing via video instead of face-to-face, thumb typing a quick text instead of making the call. Dashing down the concourse in those God-awful square-toed shoes, we felt like we were flying already. Every gate invited us on another adventure. Suzy charmed her way out of the extra luggage fees and fortified herself with root beer and Dramamine.

  “I’m ready to get home,” she said. “I’m going to take a long, hot bubble bath.”

  “I’m going to eat a slab of roast beef two inches thick.”

  “Nothing compares with good old America.”

  “My favorite place in the whole world.”

  “My favorite place is everywhere.” She closed her eyes and gripped my hand as we took off over the Atlantic. “I don’t want it to be over, Nanny. I can’t believe how fast life flies by.”

  Forever Blonde

  Judy Holliday, whose portrayal of a junk dealer’s doxy in Born Yesterday created a new kind of beautiful-but-dumb blonde, died of cancer yesterday. She was 43 years old.

  THE OBITUARY had appeared in the New York Times the same week Suzy and I left for Spain in the late spring of 1965. Suzy probably saw the item or something similar that went out on the wire, but she wouldn’t have known that Judy Holliday died of breast cancer. The Times obit mentioned something about “cancer surgery” but spared readers the specifics, sharing instead the more comforting detail that “She died in her sleep.”

  The obituary mentioned Miss Holliday’s Oscar, Golden Globe, and Tony Awards, her genius IQ, and how she rallied friends to cook up a cabaret act while blacklisted from radio and television during the Red Scare. In 1960, she starred opposite Dean Martin in the film version of Bells Are Ringing, playing switchboard operator Ella Peterson, the Broadway role that won her the Tony. Ella has a second-act showstopper, “I’m Going Back,” in which she sings about returning to happier days at the “Bonjour Tristesse Bra-zeer Company.” In the movie, Holliday danced her hands across her décolletage and tossed in a sly little line about “modeling on the side.”

  Judy Holliday was hilarious and charming. Like my sister, she somehow managed to be sexy and wholesome at the same time, and that’s how the mass audience liked to think about breasts back then. Torpedo bras were lifting and separating from coast to coast, but we kept it classy for the most part, a coquettish wink-and-a-smile that offered just a hint of sexuality, the way peep-toe shoes offer a hint of red nail polish.

  The unwritten media rule on breasts was “Look but don’t type”; most people probably wouldn’t have recognized the word mastectomy anyway. When Judy Holliday had her left breast removed in October 1960, she and her PR people put out a cover story that she was in the hospital for a “bronchial infection.”

  Hoping she’d been cured by the surgery, Miss Holliday appeared on Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall TV show a few months later and subsequently returned to the stage. She went on What’s My Line? in 1963 as part of a junket for a Broadway show called Hot Spot. It flopped despite her formidable star power, and the game show appearance would turn out to be Judy Holliday’s last TV gig. According to later reports, well-meaning physicians and family members thought Miss Holliday, who was prone to depression, would be better off not knowing her cancer had metastasized, so she was told the increasing pain in her right breast was “inflammation of the sternum.”

  I strongly suspect that the dumb blonde with the genius IQ knew she was being lied to. The ravages of the spreading cancer quickly became undeniable. Whether or not it came up in conversation, she had to have known she was dying.

  Would Judy Holliday be alive today had she known the truth about her diagnosis? Almost certainly not. Treatment options in the 1960s were few and ineffectual. At most—and it’s a stretch—chemo might have bought her enough time to make it to her son’s bar mitzvah. (Jonathan Oppenheim was twelve when he lost his mother.) Would she have died more peacefully or less peacefully had she been told up front about the terrible fate that awaited her? It’s not appropriate for those of us who didn’t know her to speculate.

  The truly relevant question takes in a much bigger picture:

  Is knowledge more dangerous to a woman’s health than ignorance?

  Women were being “protected” from the facts about their breast cancer long before Fanny Burney’s surgeon assured her back in 1811 that a mastectomy was “but a little thing” to be carried out with the patient seated comfortably in a parlor chair. And it’s still going on today. Every time I think we’ve come so far, gained so much ground, established open dialogue, claimed our right to make informed treatment decisions—every time I’m certain we can file this one under “No-Brainer”—we find ourselves rehashing it again.

  As recently as November 2009, forty-four years after the death of Judy Holliday, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (which sounds like a government agency but is actually an “independent panel”) revised its recommendations regarding breast cancer screening and early treatment. Instead of getting routine annual mammograms beginning at age forty, they said, women should forgo routine screening until age fifty and then get a mammogram every other year. They went on to say women shouldn’t be taught proper breast self-exam (BSE) technique—that BSE was, in fact, harmful—because finding a lump in her breast causes a woman emotional distress and prompts her to take unnecessary action. The panel had based its recommendations on statistics that had been floating around for a long time, but as Mark Twain said: “People commonly use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination.”

  Of course, the news hit the fan, and pundits rushed in where angels fear to tread. One anchorwoman sat down with the network’s chief medical editor to ask the obvious questions. Scrimping on mammograms could at least be rationalized as a cost-cutting measure, but why discourage BSE—a no-cost, noninvasive procedure which simply encourages a woman to be aware of changes in her breasts?

  “Amid the passionate response,” said the anchorwoman, “are a lot of women who say the old guidelines saved their lives. For example, we have a woman from Pennsylvania.…” She produced a letter and read from it.

  I am a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of thirty-five. It was because of me and my self-exam that I found this cancer. It was grade three, invasive, with three lymph nodes positive. It infuriates me that this study is suggesting that self-exams are useless. If I’d not done my exam, I’d be dead right now.

  The anchorwoman lowered the letter and looked the medical editor in the eye. “So what are we saying to women like this one?”

  “What we’re saying, with great sensitivity,” said the medical editor, “is that there are big bodies of science, where we look at the numbers across all women and all age groups who’ve been getting mammograms, and then there are anecdotes. The personal stories. We all know women who’ve found their breast cancers and were diagnosed at twenty-eight or routine screening at forty, and those stories matter.”

  She really did say it with great sensitivity, too. Great sensitivity, I must say.

  “But,” she went on, “the recommendations say that for every story like that, there were nineteen hundred other women who got unnecessary radiation, for whom screening wasn’t the issue. So cancer is always personal, but these recommendations are supposed to give us scienti
fic guidelines.”

  “But if, in fact, self-exam shows you that you have a lump,” said the anchorwoman, “even if the chance is overwhelming that you won’t find anything—but there’s a chance that you would—what does it hurt? Why not just let people self-exam?”

  “If you do self-exam and you’re comfortable with that, that’s fine,” said the medical editor, “but a lot of women have been taught to do this search-and-destroy mission on their bodies every month, that our breasts are our enemies … and for the average woman, the yield is very low.”

  A lot of women. (Certainly a scientific, nonanecdotal way to quantify it.)

  Do a search-and-destroy mission.

  Against their enemy breasts.

  The clumsiness, inaccuracy, and disrespect in that statement literally took my breath away. That characterization is the antithesis of what BSE is.

  We take our children to the pediatrician every year for a routine checkup before the start of school; it’s never recommended that mothers should blow that off because “the yield is low” and the “average child” walks in and out as healthy as a polo pony. At regular dental exams, the hygienist never accuses us of “a search-and-destroy mission” on our gums. Driving the car into the mechanic’s bay for a routine inspection, we aren’t berated for treating the Chevy like an enemy. Yet for some reason, routine maintenance of breast health is constantly being scrutinized and blustered against. I’m just plain baffled by the assumption that women who drive eighteen-wheelers and perform brain surgery turn into hysterical nitwits when they walk into a doctor’s office, so (as Judy Holliday’s well-meaning physician believed back in 1965): Women are better off not knowing.

  The problem with BSE is that it works too well. When a woman finds a lump, she usually insists on knowing what it is, and when it’s a malignancy, she usually insists on getting rid of it. The vast majority of lumps are benign and even some of the malignant ones aren’t life threatening. If you completely ignore your breasts—keep your hands in your pockets, slap anyone who tries for second base, go to the movies instead of going for mammograms—odds are in your favor; you very probably won’t die as a result. That’s a statistical fact. One out of eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, but look at the bright side: the other seven won’t! A biopsy that rules out cancer is deemed “unnecessary”—a waste of a perfectly good panic attack. So, they conclude, why worry our pretty little heads? We’d be healthier not knowing, and the people who love and insure us would be happier if we weren’t so high-maintenance.