40 THECUTAUGUSTSEPTEMBER,
me so much pleasure, which had allowed me to eat and
drink as much as I cared to and run marathons and take
backpacking vacations and swim miles in the ocean and
in Manhattan pools, was ceasing to live up to my expecta-
tions of it, like a close friend who starts forgetting your
birthday. My waist, increasingly on the same longitude
as my hips, became indistinct, while my formerly mus-
cular abdomen began to protrude in what can only be
called a “pooch.” My ass, my own private measure of my
durable hotness, began to fall ever so slightly, an erosion
I tracked with the intensity of a geologist.
Before my eyes, I was becoming alien to myself.
I found myself averting my glance from my image in
the mirror, as the old women from whom I had once
recoiled (and to whom I believed myself superior)
haunted me: Miss K., my third-grade teacher, whose
flabby upper arms would quiver hypnotically as she
pointed to the blackboard; my great-grandmother,
whose wide, board-flat naked bottom mooned me as she
climbed into bed with her nightgown accidentally hiked
up around her waist on the rare occasions when we
shared a room. These women had signified mortifica-
tion to me. That we were connected by the same human
mortality was a reality my brain understood—yet I con-
tinued to push away, always believing that my obvious
physical gifts and tenacious spirit would show me a
workaround, somehow.
Stuck in this avoidance, I struggled with how to dress
myself. I had outgrown my old flirtatious-ironic style, but
how now to appear mature but not cartoonish, elegant
but not self-serious? How to deal with the fact that I had
ceased to be, in the eyes of most of the world, anyway, an
interesting sexual object? I delayed the project of con-
fronting all this until the pending mastectomy forced the
issue. I was aging, my body changing, and there would
be no stopping it. Not ever.
The weeks leading up to the surgery were filled with
grief for the loss not just of the breast itself but of the
hubris that came with knowing I had been young and
beautiful. I decided to reconstruct my left breast and not
to “go flat,” because, honest to God, the Park Avenue plas-
tic surgeon was the first person I met during the whole
shitty ordeal with a sense of humor, who showed me the
possibility of feeling pretty again.
“This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had,” Char-
lie said during our first visit to his office, when the doctor,
after he was done with his camera and his calipers,
explained the process and the desired result, using words
and phrases likeperkyandorigami nipplewith a straight
face and placing a gel implant the shape of a giant lima
bean into the palm of my hand.
It was Charlie who came through with an alternative
to the Brobe. He bought me a navy-blue Tracksmith
hoodie in a soft wool blend with interior pockets large
and deep enough to hold the gross tubes. On the morn-
ing of my discharge, I rose before dawn and dressed to
leave the hospital in the clothes I’d packed: black fleece-
lined sweatpants and my new hoodie. When the nurse
came in and found me seated in my chair, she laughed
and said I looked like I was about to go for a run, and
I was delighted; my fashion bar had never been so low.
Not having cancer was the only “look” I hoped to achieve.T
he cancer was discovered early, thank-
fully. It was small, slow-growing, and
contained. I’m fine, and more: very
aware of and grateful for how lucky I’ve
been. Odds are great that I will die of
something else, and I’m not preoccupied
with what that will be. My new left breast is a work-in-
progress—a construction project, I joke to people who
ask. It is both my body and not my body, and I find I am
constantly inviting my closest friends to touch it. I would
never ask friends to touch my actual breast, but this feels
so much not like a breast to me, more like a foreign
object the size and shape of a softball stuck under my
numb skin. It is hard like a softball, too, and when I sleep
it awakens me with its strangeness.
Soon there will be another surgery, in which the hard
saline implant will be exchanged for something softer
and more naturally drooping, like my former self, though
my plastic surgeon reminds me constantly that the new
prosthetic left breast will not be flesh, so it will never
succumb, inexorably, to gravity as the right one will. Even
after he gives me a lift on the right—“to match,” as he
puts it—the two breasts will respond differently to the
passage of time. He’s managing my expectations. A cer-
tain unevenness is my destiny now, and I’m postponing
the purchase of a new swimsuit until next year, when
I know more clearly what shape my body will take. In the
meantime, I try to heed the wisdom of a young woman
I know. “The lesson of high school,” she told me, “is that
everyone is so worried about their tits that no one is look-
ing at yours as much as you think they are—although
sometimes they are looking at your tits.”
Aging is loss. That’s what it is, and it’s fantastical to
imagine that loss—like heartbreak or failure—won’t hap-
pen in life. My mother had been an extremely beautiful
woman, the kind who caused strangers to stare, and one
day near the end of her life, when she was dying of colon
cancer, I helped her to bathe. She already looked awful
and corpselike, but when she caught a glimpse of herself
in the mirror, she was aghast. “Oh, my bosom,” she cried
out in grief and shock, touching the flat of her palm to
her deflated breasts, as though only now, after years and
years of chemotherapy and hospitalizations, she under-
stood what was at stake.
There’s no avoiding the wrinkles, the flab, the pooch—
it’s all part of the path, with more loss to come. But I am
also, more than ever, myself: able to work, to plan, to
swim, to make lasagna—even, on a good day, to do crow
pose. So the other day, I went shopping and spent money
I don’t have on two sale-rack items far out of my price
range. One is a pale-teal cashmere turtleneck sweater,
the other a long, gray two-season mohair coat (which the
intuitive salesman promised I could layer over a hoodie).
Both are classic, well made, flattering, adult. I can wear
them forever, whatever that means. ■FEED