Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  I reject the notion that blissful ignorance is healthier than an informed choice or even an educated guess, which is often as good as it gets. Shame on any doctor who subscribes to that belief, and God help any woman so easily displaced from the driver’s seat of her own life. We are the CEOs of our bodies. It’s our responsibility to gather the information we need to make the decisions with which we alone will live or die. My definition of an “unnecessary biopsy” is one in which you already know there’s a malignancy. If there’s any question, a biopsy provides a definitive answer. Obviously, I’d love to see a reduction in the number of biopsies on benign tumors. That’s one of the reasons Susan G. Komen for the Cure is convening a major national technology think tank in 2010 with the goal of developing better screening technology, including a more accurate, more predictive mammogram.

  Early mammogram technology that emerged in the 1960s was a step forward from the blurry, nonspecific x-rays of yesteryear. The second-generation designs of the early 1980s reduced radiation exposure and increased accuracy with better film and the first motorized compression device. In the early 1990s, the introduction of rhodium filters again reduced radiation exposure and improved imaging. In 2000, we took a giant step forward when General Electric introduced the first FDA-approved digital mammography system. We’ve seen significant advances in mammogram technology like clockwork every ten years since it was introduced, and it’s time for the next step.

  Meanwhile, we have to use what we’ve got to our best advantage. I’m delighted that the “yield is low for the average woman.” But does that mean I can safely assume I’m average? Or is that just the cover story I’m supposed to tell myself?

  Judy Holliday used to sing a song called “The Party’s Over”; with palpable sadness, she called it a day. “They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away …”

  Late in the spring of ’65, while Suzy and I sat at the kitchen table with our maps and guidebooks, Judy Holliday was quietly admitted to Mount Sinai. By the time we reached Venice, she was dead. Suzy flew off to Spain, unaware of Judy’s fate. Judy died in her sleep, unaware of Suzy’s existence. Would it have changed Suzy’s life if she’d known she was on that same terrible path? Would it have changed Judy’s death to know that someday women would stand up and demand the truth?

  I believe knowledge is power, but I don’t deny that ignorance is bliss. The trouble with bliss, however, is that it’s often short lived. There’s only one way to stay blonde forever.

  ∼ 5 ∼

  May Queen at Neiman Marcus

  Stan Komen made Suzy laugh.

  “More importantly, he makes me happy,” she said. “Nan … I love this man.”

  He wasn’t the prince charming she’d requisitioned in Europe, just a foundationally good man who made her feel warm and domestic. They met and became good friends during her Miss Mizzou days at the University of Missouri. They dated for a while, but faded out. Then Suzy got swept up in that utterly wrong marriage, and we’d spent the following summer exploring Europe. Stan Komen patiently stayed in touch with her, biding his time, just like the Gershwin song.

  “What can I say? He won me over,” she said, when she called to tell me they were getting married.

  “Are you sure, Suz?” I reminded her of our plan to return to Germany and get jobs and continue our adventures together.

  “I’m positive.”

  Suzy sounded settled and content, like a woman whose traveling days were over.

  After the wedding—a beautifully turned do-over in which the entire wedding party made it through the ceremony on their feet—she and Stan moved to a pleasant apartment in a nice neighborhood in St. Louis, and Suzy set up housekeeping with her distinctly artistic touch, nesting comfortably but with panache.

  I was less than 100 miles away from home at the University of Illinois in Champaign, so I came home on a regular basis, and Suzy visited whenever she could for parties and special events. It was understood by our father and by Suzy’s husband: There would be fearsome phone bills. Suzy and I talked for at least half an hour virtually every day, and sometimes chattered on until late at night. She wanted to be filled in on every detail of my classes, sorority doings, and campus rabble-rousing, and wanted me to know every detail about the perfect pitcher and juice glasses she’d found at the five-and-dime, the matching place mats and table runner she’d ordered from Sears, and the entire saga involved in the living room drapes she was having made.

  Her life in St. Louis wasn’t extravagant by any means, but it was lovely. That was important to her. She was on a mission to create a certain atmosphere in which she would flourish and have children, a home filled with beauty: music to fill the air, art to fill the soul, picture books in which to lose yourself. Stan was in sales and worked hard at it, but Suzy’s taste ran a little beyond their means. Sometimes she’d look to Mom and Daddy for something she couldn’t afford on her own budget, and they occasionally indulged her because she gave so much of what she had and devoted so much of her time and energy to those less fortunate than herself. She was trying to get pregnant, volunteering with Girl Scouts and at St. Jude Hospital, doing everything she could for children already in a world that seemed to be growing more complicated every day.

  “I worry about you, Nanny,” she said. “I keep hearing about all these campus demonstrations and lockouts. You won’t get involved in anything like that, will you?”

  “Suzy, when would I have time for that?”

  I always carried a full load of credits, but more important, I’d gotten myself elected to the student judiciary committee and was involved in the student senate. Inside the classroom, I trained myself to do well on tests and somehow found the self-discipline to trudge along with the sole objective of maintaining good grades on paper. Outside the classroom, I actually learned. My mind came alive. Every once in a while, there was even a thrilling moment of feeling like I belonged. I had no interest in unrest or free love. I was one of the uncool kids who stayed in a single lane aimed at my degree. I did believe the war should end, and I was proud to be part of a generation that cared at the top of its lungs, but I mourned the effects of drugs on the bright minds around me. I had my own focus, but when traffic was stalled by a sit-in or class was interrupted by demonstrators outside, I was grateful for those who took to the streets. I learned from them and tried to apply that knowledge in an effort to build bridges, solve problems, and bring about change from the inside.

  It had rankled me since my freshman year that the girls had a different curfew from the boys, and now I was determined to do something about it.

  “It’s for your own security,” Suzy said. “They just want you to be safe.”

  “I can take care of my own safety,” I said. “Why should I have to leave the library an hour before a boy studying for the same class?”

  “It’s different, Nan. You know it is.”

  “If we were being treated equally, maybe more girls around here would be serious about their studies. It wouldn’t just be something to do while they wait for the MRS degree.”

  “I like my MRS degree,” said Suzy. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do, and I’m good at it. I think a lot of nice girls would take no curfew as an opportunity to be loose.”

  “Nice girls aren’t looking for an opportunity, and loose girls don’t need one. Meanwhile, I just want to be at the library.”

  “Nan, there’s a system of rules developed over the course of years by dedicated professionals—experts—who know what they’re doing. That’s not going to change just because this girl comes over from Peoria and doesn’t like it.”

  “It’s going to change,” I assured her. “I’ll make it change.”

  Suzy continued to urge moderation, but my mother egged me on.

  “Before you were born, Boy Scouts were going great guns in Peoria,” Mom said, “but there wasn’t anything for girls, and girls really needed that. Mothers were working outside the home for the first time, everyone doing thing
s for the war effort. Everybody said, ‘Oh, there’s no time or money for that,’ but that’s where the opportunity came in. You go where other people aren’t, and you make the best of it.”

  I sank my teeth in, wrote letters, circulated petitions, and basically got nowhere.

  “It’s so frustrating,” I told my mother. “Nobody’s listening.”

  “There are five ways to Mecca,” she said philosophically. “Five ways anywhere. The trouble is, people stop before they find the one that works. You’re going along, highway’s shut down—so what? Find another way.”

  One semester after another, while I kept my grades consistent, stayed involved in everything I could jam into my schedule, and even found time to date a few interesting men, I kept the issue simmering on the back burner, stirring it up if the opportunity arose.

  “I wrote a scathing editorial for the paper,” I told Suzy. “There was a big response.”

  “For or against you?” she asked.

  “Against,” I had to admit. “But at least people are talking about it.”

  Tides were shifting. I wasn’t the only one making noise, but instead of marching or shouting, I gathered supporting documentation and politely, persistently complained my way up the ladder to the dean of students. I can’t say what actually did the trick, but much to everyone’s astonishment, the curfew was eventually lifted. I couldn’t wait to call Suzy and tell her about this great triumph.

  “It’s a meaningful step in the cause of equal education for women,” I said.

  The next morning I awoke in my dorm room to find exactly two girls on the entire floor: me and the least attractive girl on campus.

  “This is not at all what I had in mind,” I told Mommy.

  “Freedom is always the right thing to fight for,” she said. “You can’t stop believing in freedom just because some people use it to be stupid. Just make sure you’re not one of them.”

  Suzy couldn’t stop laughing about it for a month, but between giggles, she did say, “I’m proud of you, Nan. My sister, the crusader. You said you’d make it change, and you did.”

  My senior year, I threw caution to the wind for a while. Suzy was horrified when she came to visit and found me practically dancing on top of the piano and hooked up with a boyfriend who was the born-to-be-wild type. Mommy and Daddy almost disowned me over this guy, but I refused to break up with him. He was the first in a long parade of bad boys I’ve loved, so of course, he eventually broke my heart and moved on. I resumed my responsible persona, Mom and Dad were mollified, and Suzy continued scouting around St. Louis for nice men to fix me up with.

  “Elegance,” said Coco Chanel, “is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.” I was hovering somewhere between the two by my senior year. With a little help from Suzy and our survey of European fashionistas, I’d discovered a style that worked for me, and the result was an undercurrent of confidence I’d never experienced before. It wasn’t about being pretty, it was about being put together. After years as a loose cannon in Saturday casual, I was learning to carry myself with a well-tailored self-control.

  Honestly, I needed someone to encourage my feminine side. From the time I was in junior high, Suzy had dogged me about my posture, taught me how to do my makeup, and helped me coordinate the right clothes for my figure as I shed my baby fat and grew tall and lanky.

  “There’s no profession in which being fabulous isn’t a boost,” she used to tell me, and of course, she was absolutely right.

  Just before graduation, I was elected May Queen, a title that honored academic achievement, charitable efforts, and civic service, with a nod to the added assets of well-groomed grace and style. For that exact minute, I was essentially everything my parents had brought me up to be, and they couldn’t have been prouder. Suzy loved that I was turning out to be a get-going doer, enforcer, striver, but she was thrilled with the beauty queen aspect of it all and took no small amount of credit. She had a badly sprained ankle and was hobbling around on crutches, but she wasn’t about to miss the coronation of the May Queen she’d helped create.

  Balanced on one foot, Suzy took a picture of me with my tiara, white gloves, and roses, on the stage, flanked by Mom and Daddy. At the time, I looked at it and saw a girl on the brink of becoming herself, a fresh, elated face, eyes bright and looking forward. But finding that photo recently in a tucked-away bin of Mom’s memorabilia—old family photos, yellowed clippings of my scathing (I thought) editorials, tear sheets from Suzy’s department store modeling jobs—I was captivated by the faces of my parents. I never felt like their pride and joy at the time, but pride and joy are the only words with which I can describe the way they’re looking at me. Mom is outright laughing, a study in gladness. Even in profile, the love is apparent in my father’s expression. It makes me laugh to see his car keys in his hand, as if he’s been waiting for me to make it to this point so he could hop in his Cadillac and make tracks toward his own goals without the second full-time job of subsidizing, spying on, and spotting for two lively daughters.

  Daddy was a driver; I was driven. We belonged to each other in more ways than either of us could appreciate at the time.

  Suzy was settled and happy. Now I was on my way with my degree in hand. The first challenge I faced was finding the right time to tell Daddy I was moving to Dallas.

  Daddy’s sister, Aunt Ruth, and her husband, Uncle Ted, had moved to Texas and started a small insurance business back before World War II, so twice a year while Suzy and I were growing up, we all took the Santa Fe Chief south from Chillicothe, Illinois, to visit them. From my earliest memories, I adored Texas with its grand, swaggering spirit, massive tracts of land and can do and cowboys, even the kitschy Roy Rogers décor in the roadside diners. I loved the warmth of the people and the mildness of the winter weather. I had no interest in New York or Chicago; to me, north Texas was the next best thing to nirvana. When I decided to move to Dallas after graduation, I had no idea what I was going to do there, but I was convinced it was going to be Wild West wonderful. My father was not about to subsidize such a nebulous goal. He made it clear that if I opted to move to Dallas instead of going to law school or finding a good entry-level position with a company close to home, I was going to be on my own nickel. Suzy couldn’t understand why I would choose to leave the land of milk and honey that is Peoria, Illinois, for anything other than love, but if there were ever sides to be chosen in anything, Suzy was firmly on mine. That I could count on.

  “You have to go where you want to go. He’ll get over it,” she said. “I’m going to miss you, Nan, but I think you’re going to take Dallas by storm.”

  When I arrived, my uncle introduced me to his friend, Sam Bloom, who gave me a fundraising job out of his office at Bloom Advertising, working at Temple Emmanuel, raising a pot of funds for the care of an aging and beloved rabbi. Not quite the storm Suzy had envisioned, but the project sparked my interest in marketing, and I started hunting for innovative ways to learn more about it. I heard that Neiman Marcus was hiring women with an eye toward training them for leadership positions, so I haunted the store on my lunch hours, absorbing everything about the way it worked. I walked in one day wearing my sharpest suit and went to the office of the personnel manager, Dennis Worrell.

  After a few minutes of small talk, he folded his hands on his desk and said, “So. Nancy. What do you want?”

  “I want to work for a company where I know women are allowed to move up the ladder,” I said. “I want to learn from smart people who love what they do. And I want to not go back to Peoria. My parents aren’t happy about my moving to Texas. In order to stay, I need a good job, and I need it now.”

  “I see.” He absorbed all that for a moment. “Well, it’s true we’re looking for upwardly mobile women. You’d have the opportunity to become a vice president, if you have the desire and you’re willing to work for it.”

  “Oh, I do. I am.”


  “Executive trainees rotate through every department. You learn the business from the basement up, starting in the receiving room, where you learn how clothes are received, tagged, and inventoried. If you do well there, you move to the junior women’s department, then circulate up to the couture division.”

  I liked the sound of circulating up.

  “How long does that take?” I asked.

  “As long as it takes,” he said. “The buyers upstairs have their choice of the trainees they want to have as assistants, so if you haven’t distinguished yourself as someone who’s smart, hardworking, and rock solid, then …”

  “I understand.”

  When I told Suzy about my new job at Neiman Marcus, you’d have thought we’d both won the lottery. My head was ringing with the possibility of being vice president of anything; hers was ringing with dreams of couture at a discount. I worked my way through receiving, made good friends with all the shipping guys, and stayed good friends with them when I moved up through the departments.

  Every day Stanley Marcus walked the store. Everyone knew his sonorous voice before we glimpsed his shiny bald head or neatly trimmed beard above the shelving. He surveyed every detail of his empire, making his presence felt. If you were behind a counter, that counter had better be gleaming without a single thumbprint, and if you weren’t actively helping a customer, you’d better have a bottle of Windex in one hand and a polishing cloth in the other. He wanted the inventory mixed up every day, wanted his employees to think beyond what we were told to do and to re-create our little corner of the store in a way that made it freshly engaging every time a customer walked in the door. Watching the way he connected with people was an education in itself. It wasn’t hard sell; it was a strategic sort of showmanship, and the objective was helping people, not separating them from their money.