AUGUSTSEPTEMBER,THECUT 39conscious women, then mastectomywear is far, far
worse, and within that realm the Brobe reigns supreme.
Nothing more than a wraparound robe with a built-in
bra, the Brobe—crucially—has deep interior pockets, the
function of which is to hold the gross drainage tubes that
protrude from your body after a mastectomy and dangle
painfully and disgustingly at your side. If you have a mas-
tectomy, you need some way to support and manage
those tubes, and the manufacturers of the Brobe and its
imitators have capitalized on this.
Anticipating my mastectomy, I might not have known
what to wear, but I knew it wasn’t a freaking Brobe. My
rejection of it, I understood, illuminated the darkest
corners of my closeted vanity. I didn’t want to have
breast cancer, but if I had to have breast cancer, I didn’t
want to be target-marketed because of my illness. “Fuck
it,” I said to my husband, Charlie, with a stubbornness
he recognized.i got the news that I needed a mastectomy while on
the subway on the way home from work. “A lumpectomy
is off the table, hon,” said the surgeon on the phone. The
call had come in between Nevins and Atlantic on the
2 train, and I had taken it there since one of the zillions
of things they don’t tell you about having cancer is that
the surgeons who hold your life in their hands are
extremely busy people, so you take their calls wherever
you are. At some point in the midst of receiving this
news, I moved off the train and sat on a bench on the
platform and held its hard edge with both my hands.
Whatever I had been previously—mother, writer, keeper
of the schedule, maker of the family- vacation lasagna—
was in an instant subsumed by this. Henceforth and
forever, I would be a person who at 56 had to sacrifice
her left breast to the cancer gods.
The next day was Saturday. Charlie and I sat in bed for
hours, spelunking in an internet hole called “Going
Flat”—photos of women, a growing number, who chose
to flaunt their mastectomy scars instead of reconstruct-
ing their breasts. The photos were clinical in a shocking
way, the women determined to exhibit their injuries as
strength. This path initially appealed to me. I could see
myself becoming, in middle age, like a mythical Amazon,
displaying my power through breastlessness. I would get
a magnificent tattoo of a sunflower—long stemmed,
spiny, defiant—where my breast used to be, and fuck it.
Fuck the male gaze and its constant fascination with my
breasts. Fuck the extra surgery and the cost and the pain
and the hassle and the imperative that I look a certain
way to comply with someone else’s idea of me. My sweet
husband looked at the brutal pictures of the women and
the scars and didn’t say a word.
It was in the middle of this exploration that my gyne-
cologist called (on a Saturday! From home! I love her!),
and it was she who reminded me of myself. “You’ve been
a cisgender heterosexual woman for a very long time,” she
gently said. “You might want to think carefully about what
it would mean to have such a radically different body.”
Right.My gynecologist could not have known how far my
body and I had already grown apart or how long I’d been
putting off an honest reckoning with that relationship.
Many women describe a lifelong dissatisfaction with
their bodies, but I had been on excellent terms with mine
for most of my life, possibly because it had come to me,
straight out of the box, in a lucky size and shape.
Starting as a teenager and into my 40s, I wore clothes
with a kind of arrogance, appearing as if I didn’t care
what I wore, while at the same time inviting attention
that flattered me. In my 20s, that meant rumpled and sal-
vaged, a look that morphed, as I ascended professionally,
into something more
ironic, a takedown of the
preppy women I grew up
among: Lois Lane meets
country club. In plaid
pedal pushers, pencil
skirts, cardigans, and
pearls, I aimed to evoke
the reference librarian
who, after a couple of
whiskeys, might be up for
a romp. This approach
served for many years,
flexible enough to accom-
modate my considerable
professional ambition
and the opportunities it
afforded me. To my job at
The Wall Street Journal,
I wore suits with narrow,
knee-length skirts and
high-heeled loafers with
sassy tassels. To interview Senator Barack Obama on his
campaign plane, I wore a gray ’50s-style circle skirt with
embroidered flowers, a brown ribbed cardigan, and flats.
My baby (at 40) changed my body meaningfully for
the first time since puberty, of course. That extra ten
pounds is no myth. But the baby also reordered my life
in so many other ways that, in the throes of her infancy
and toddlerhood, establishing a post-baby personal style
seemed like a laughable concern. With little disposable
income and less time to shop, I bought a couple of pairs
of expensive jeans and a few bulky sweaters and figured
I would revisit the question of my fashion identity at
some later date. And over the next decade, I elevated the
pose of not caring to an art. Out to walk the dog, I mixed
plaids with plaids, stripes with stripes, and wore mud-
crusted men’s slip-on shoes. My favorite item was a pair
of bubblegum-pink sweatpants, purchased at Walmart
during an unexpectedly chilly vacation and stained with
red paint from a renovation of our daughter’s room. Like
a nun’s habit, my dog-walking clothes were a kind of
dare: They shrouded my body even as they alluded to it.
There’s something beneath these garments, and it might
be amazing.
This was bravado, though. The truth was that I was
falling, sagging, swelling up. My body, which had givenI felt grief for
the loss not just
of the breast
itself but of the
hubris that came
with knowing
I had been young
and beautiful.
STYLING BY DIANA TSUI. BLOUSE BY THE ROW AT THEROW.COM.