How is it that our children can make us feel shame? We are the ones, after all, who set the rules, give the warnings, define the lines, and yet, despite our obvious authority, the truth is that there comes a time when the tiny child wields a wand more magical and fierce than any tool her parent has.
My daughter, at twelve years of age, has a pageboy cut, a pale neck where the branching veins are visible, little-girl legs lengthening, her hips just making an appearance, two demure curves. Tonight is her school concert and she looks smashing in her scoop-neck shirt and short black skirt, a uniform I could never wear, my middle-aged legs too plump for a mini, my style all blend and blur. Just as she is learning to use clothes to reveal, I, nearing fifty and heavier than I’ve ever been, am learning to use them to conceal.
It is time to go. My daughter grabs her clarinet case and we all pile into the car, driving down dark roads, my daughter in the backseat, fitting her instrument together, moistening the reeds that make the music. “Your hair,” she says to me, “is so frizzy tonight,” and I nod yes, because it’s true. “And you’re wearing that?” she says, leaning over the ledge of the backseat to view my Coldwater Creek balloon pants and my long, loose shirt, the cuffs rolled. She scans me top to bottom and then turns her eye on her father, my best beloved, who is driving the vehicle. Thank god I’m not the only one. “With your beard so long,” she says to him, “you look like a lumberjack.”
“I can pull over to the side of the road and shave,” he says. “Or better yet, why don’t I shave in the school parking lot, right out in the open?”
“Right,” my daughter says and flops back in her seat. “Just do me a favor, you guys,” she says.
“Whatever you want,” my husband responds.
“Just pretend you’re not my parents,” she says. “Pretend we’ve never met.”
“Clara!” I say. “Never.”
“Why not?” my husband says. “I remember being twelve and feeling just the same way.”
We pull into the lot. As soon as the motor stops my daughter leaps from the car and disappears into the crowd of milling parents and performers, students carrying all manner of instruments: curving French horns, bronzed trumpets with their flaring mouths, silver flutes, and slender piccolos. A bell sounds and, en masse, the crowd heads towards the lit school building, inside the corridors gleaming, the walls tiled, hung with student artwork and world maps with their broad blue rivers. We enter the concert hall, the seats ascending up a carpeted slope to the top where the spotlights are. The room dims and hushes. The stage glows; on it the students are all seated, holding their instruments aloft until the conductor waves his wand and, as one, the children begin to play. Their songs soar and dip. The music they make mimics their young bodies, nimble and supple and constantly lovely, teetering on the cusp of something bigger. My husband and I, seated in the cramped back of the hall, are in seats too small, and with each passing stanza I feel my aging body bloat, inside me, my own secret song of shame.
As my daughter edges into adolescence I realize how much I’d like my old body back, the one I had when I was twenty, or even thirty, slender and athletic, the body that could do a back bend or, better yet, that could—and would—pose naked for the Polaroid, my husband clicking away, the pictures sliding from the slot all blank and milky, slowly the image resolving into itself, and what is it that we see? A nude woman flexing a substantial bicep. The same nude woman flashing her strong and slender calf. Now, facing front, plainly posed, her neck dipping down to her chest, which sports large breasts, the skin there thin as parchment, the vinery of veins visible as they crisscross, now purple, now teal, the nipples the size of quarters, topping the two mounds off. There I was. Here I am. These pictures are hidden in a pouch that is itself hidden in my desk drawer. Lately I’ve had the urge to show them to my daughter, just to prove to her that, once upon a time, I could strut my stuff. And yet I won’t. Show her. The photos are, in the end, evidence of the private part of the relationship between my husband and me, and revealing that would be wrong. The very fact that he holds the camera and that I am posing for him suggests that we are lovers on a romp.
As my daughter teeters into womanhood, her gaze turning sharp and critical, I find my confidence waning. I join Weight Watchers, and when that doesn’t work I call Jenny Craig. The woman who answers sounds young and thin and annoyingly upbeat. “How many pounds do you want to lose?” she asks. I hadn’t figured that far. “A lot,” I say, thinking of my slender progeny. We go through their menu and I select my foods, which arrive on my doorstep a few days later in cartons full of freeze-dried contents, the boxes hissing when I break them open with my daughter, pulling out the packages: pancakes and syrup in a small, wrapped well; a chipotle chicken sandwich with a freeze-dried side of pickles; sliced breast of turkey, the gravy in a cold lump. I sit amidst the boxes as they sweat and steam, the food scattered on the floor around me. “I can’t eat this stuff,” I say. “Sure you can,” my daughter says. “It looks good!”
“If it looks so good, then why don’t you eat it,” I grumble, feeling, suddenly, very small and young in the worst way. This happens sometimes, now that my daughter is on the cusp. We’ll have an interaction and I’ll lose my footing as her parent, as the adult. I’ll become, for a few brief moments, her peer, sour and sullen and all the more so because I can’t find my footing here.
“I’m not the fat one,” my daughter now retorts and when she sees my fallen face she says, “Sorry, Mom. It’s just that I really worry about you.”
I miss my body and, because of my daughter, I take the steps I need to take to bring my body back, if such a thing is even possible. I know it is. I’ve seen nubile white-haired women: slender, sexy middle-aged women with long shiny hair and cotton tights. If I try hard enough, might I become like them? Part of me is irked by my position. At fifty, or nearing fifty, you should have the right to some pudge, I think. Should not the onus of beauty fade as you age? Should you not, at some point, be able to step free from the tyranny of pretty? I wonder about this. I tell myself that in certain cultures—which ones I’m not sure—weight is seen as a wonderful thing, the bigger the bottom the better; so somewhere in the world is a place where I might be feted. My arguments don’t soothe me though. The bottom line? I don’t like my bottom, and having a coming-of-age beauty to remind me of this doesn’t make it any easier.
I eat Jenny Craig for two weeks. For two weeks I microwave my freeze-dried feed, the meats, so succulent in the package pictures, are in reality grainy and tough in their texture, the sandwich buns dust in my mouth. The pickles have a tinny aftertaste and suggest a sugary flavor iced out of them long ago. Still I persist, using tall glasses of water to wash it all down, and then each morning, just as the sun illuminates night’s navy clouds, turning them, tinting them, the most delicate inner-lip pink, I rise and, in the hesitant glow of a barely born dawn, I weigh myself in the bathroom, stepping off the cold tiles and onto the scale’s rubber mat. The digital numbers blink and blur as they juggle for position, finally settling down just shy of the two-hundred-pound mark. They never move, day after day, meal after freeze-dried meal, the numbers have settled into a groove and, stubborn as mules, rigid and red, a pronouncement. An announcement. I begin to get angry, setting aside my appetite and refusing even a small square of chocolate. I begin to take off even my earrings when I weigh in, and then my watch, and my small Star of David. No go. The numbers won’t budge. They flicker and jiggle and then settle down: 180, 180, 180. I’m always alone when I get the bad news. I’m stark naked, in a house emptied of all its inhabitants except, of course, myself and the cat, a long-haired domestic who wreathes around my ankles and flexes his nacreous claws on the upholstered furniture. The cat, Laylo, likes my rolls and bulges. This morning, after my weigh-in, I lay back on the bed and let the cat walk the chubby plank of my prone form, which he does before settling down on my chest, where the scars are, deep pink scars, and still deeper dents from my mastectomy ten years ago.
The cat purrs, his whole body vibrating with pleasure, and I scritch his bony skull, grateful for the loose and lovely way he drapes me, his tiny, tacky tongue occasionally licking the salt from my skin. Through our large bank of bedroom windows I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees. The cat sleeps and so do I, and when I wake there’s a feeling in me, a sense that somewhere in the house something’s not quite right, but what? Lately there’ve been scads of break-ins in our neighborhood, so we keep our doors locked. Still, I check every one. The windows, too. The floor planks creak beneath my feet, and from the kitchen window I can see the border where our open land turns to forest, dead trees forking into the air, the evergreens disappearing into the dense darkness where, at night, the coyotes pace and cry. Upstairs, I open the door to my seven-year-old son’s room, ignoring his handwritten sign: Wrning: Club membrs onlee. His room has five skylights cut into the ceiling, so it’s ablaze, aglow, the bureau lit, the bed strewn with sun, the blankets and the pillows warm to the touch. I go to my daughter’s room next, facing her closed door with a feeling of dread I can’t attach to anything in particular. She has the larger room but only one skylight, so while there’s sun there’s also shadow, lots of it, shadows that seem to have shape, form; shadows that hunch here and there, in her corners, bending under the bed, falling like cloth across her desk, which is piled high with papers and plates of half-eaten food, on her floor more papers, haphazardly tossed, a math textbook with a broken spine flat on its back. I bend down to the book and see all sorts of equations, letters and numbers, dashes and dots and boxes, fractions and decimals and divisions, none of which I understand. I see word problems: Norma gave Sam twenty-five dimes, and Sam gave Norma sixty-five pennies, so how many nickels in total do the pair have? I’m not going to take the time to figure this problem out, even though some odd thing in me suggests I should. The same odd thing directs me to my daughter’s dresser, a beautiful antique I bought for her right after she was born, the wood the hue of honey, the surface scratched here and there, initialed by people in the past. Lately my daughter’s been complaining about her dresser. “Why is all our furniture antique?” she has been asking. “I don’t want to be surrounded by stuff that’s old and breaks.”
Comments like this remind me that she’s still a child and, like children everywhere, is drawn to the bright and the bouncy, the sleek, lacking any sense that the carved initials of a stranger suggest worlds of possibility and link you to a past you might not have even known you had. I won’t buy her a new dresser; I’m suddenly sure of it as I trace the ridges and scars in the beautiful planks of the furniture’s surface: “E. C.” “Lyle Conant.” “1906.” The wood, sun struck and glowing, has almost visible layers that I feel I could lift with my fingers, peeling back this palimpsest for marks made earlier still.
And as I stand there, running my hands over the marked and beautifully marred wood of my daughter’s dresser, it seems only natural that I would open her drawers, just to rifle though them, just to remove the clothes outgrown, my mission not to snoop but to smooth, to organize. I pull out a pair of 6X jeans in the bottom drawer. I lift her shirts and camisoles in the middle drawer, each one smelling of clean. Holding a blouse up to the light I can see straight through the material, the blouse suddenly wraith-like, ghostly; I put it back. In her top drawer I find her underwear stuffed in crevices and corners, her socks mismatched and full of holes, and as I’m ferreting around in there I suddenly feel, with my fingers, a cool clasp, a padded mound. I pull it out and, then, dangling before me is a bra, a very small bra, to be sure, but a bra nonetheless, with a tiny rose in the crook between the two cups.
A bra. A bra! When did she get a bra? Why did she not tell me? Isn’t this the quintessential confidence between a mother and her preteen daughter, the daughter murmuring to the mother that maybe it’s time, the pair making their way to the mall to buy the bra together, the mother helping adjust the straps, finding just the right fit? The bra my daughter has bought is soft and small. I feel, suddenly, utterly inconsequential. I feel like a pendant on a slender string, just hanging. She doesn’t need me. Her independence, her growth, they are, in the end, cold curves.
Yes, I miss my body, but at least theoretically, if I were to work hard enough, I could slip into slenderness again, although it might take a semi-starvation diet to do it. But as for my breasts, there is absolutely nothing I can do to bring them back. My mastectomy was ten years ago or so, after a diagnosis of atypical ductal hyperplasia and possible ductal carcinoma in situ. I swore I’d never regret my mastectomy, in part because I was tired of all the biopsies; my breasts required, each month, it seemed, a new suspicious lump, now here, now there, some big, others tiny and hard. I wanted to live free from the shadow of fear that cancer continually cast over a life filled with living purring pealing laughing beings, a house where the walls were yellow, my bedroom painted primrose blue, my gardens—all perennials—sprouting cones of lupines in the early spring and white wheels of daisies in midsummer, the plum tree growing larger each year, its rounded purple fruit falling to the soil and leaking juice that darkened the dirt and made our soil sweet. Everything, it seemed, was sprouting in my life, including my writing career, with books and essays accepted, but how hard it was to enjoy it when my fibrous breasts were sending their threatening messages, the biopsy needle plunged down deep into the suspicious masses and drawing up samples of cells that were later stained on slides and scanned. So, when the last biopsy came back bad, I said, “Lop them off,” imagining that I’d finally be able to splash into my existence, like falling from a concrete rim into a warm blue pool full of flickering fish and caressing currents. “Lop them off,” I’d said, because, in fact, even without their propensity for sporting problematic lumps, I’d never much liked my mammary glands anyway; they were large, far too big for my petite frame, a strain on my back and shoulders. The surgery lasted nine hours, and as I struggled to come out of the anesthesia, I ran my hand over my bandaged flatness and felt no regret, even though, already, the pain was pounding and red. I healed over six weeks and then did, indeed, plunge into the pool of my life, with no regrets, no regrets, no regrets, until, one day, today, after finding my daughter’s first bra, feeling its softness, I suddenly remembered what it was like for me long, long ago, when I too was a child on the cusp of something bigger, my own breasts beginning slowly and lovely back then, then rising up out of me, aching and hot. The day before my mastectomy, my surgeon suggested writing a good-bye letter to my breasts, and I’d laughed, in private, thinking good riddance was more like it.
Back in my bedroom I cry into my cupped hands. The tears snake down my face and seep between my lips, tasting of tin and salt. The tears come from a place deep down and far back within me, a little knot of grief I hadn’t even known I’d had: ten years later and I am finally mourning my wrecked chest. I am mourning the fact that there’s nothing I can do to bring my breasts back. I am mourning the fact that never, ever will I show my daughter what is left, post-surgery, two shapeless lumps inflated by saline bags, the lumps scarred, dented, and blind—no nipples—they are icons of a war, a fraught and high-cost victory. They are not icons of love or nurturance or the curve of a woman’s beauty. My chest is ugly, perhaps horrific, and no amount of dieting can change that.
My daughter comes back from school early today and swings by me on her way to her bedroom. “Hello,” I call out, and she says an obligatory “Hi” and then disappears down the hall. I tiptoe after her. I feel like a thief. What am I doing? Why am I stalking my child? Her door is closed. I don’t knock. Instead I ease it open quietly, slowly, peering in on her unaware. She’s chewing on a hank of hair and typing fast on her keyboard, her back to me. Through her thin shirt I can see the jut of her spine. I was in labor with her for forty-eight hours and finally gave birth to her in an emergency C-section. They brought her to me, with her cap of dark hair and fixed crystal-blue eyes, her open mouth searching for a nipple; a hungry baby, my breasts not yet gone, she sucked down my milk, more and more and more.
“When did you buy your bra?” I finally ask her.
With her back still to me she answers without missing a beat. “About a week ago,” she says.
“Why didn’t you ask me, tell me? I could have helped you out.”
“Papa went with me,” she says.
“Papa?” I say, aghast. “Why would you want Papa to go with you and not me?”
“I figured, you know,” she says, and then swivels her seat so she’s facing me. “You know,” she says again, gesturing towards my chest. She knows about my mastectomy. She was young when it happened. She came to visit me in the hospital, her child’s face white and frightened as she scanned my bandages, bloody, the morphine pump and needles slipped into my skin.
“Just because I lost my breasts doesn’t mean I can’t help you buy a bra,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
I stand there in her doorframe.
“Okay,” she says again, and then, after another moment has passed, she says, “You can leave now. I’m kinda busy.”
So I go.
There are coyotes out here, where I live. They roam the roads and rule the woods, making it unsafe for dogs and cats. Our cat, Laylo, is one tough nut, but one night, late, I hear a high, horrid scream coming from the forest, and in the morning, when I go outside, I find the corpse of our feline at the edge of a copse of trees. He is torn and opened, his fur matted with blood, his body stiff in rigor mortis. I cry into his fur, which is still, oddly, warm and then carry him back to the house and lay him on a towel. It’s Sunday, so everyone is home. We all gather around the cat. “Let’s all say something we loved about Laylo before we bury him,” my daughter suggests. “I love how he purred,” my seven-year-old son offers. “I loved how he was a night warrior,” my husband says. “I loved how acrobatic he was,” my daughter adds. “I loved his smarts,” I say, but I’m thinking of those mornings, lying back naked on the bed, the cat atop me, luxuriating in my warmth, sharing with me his rich, reverberating purr and his dramatic glossy coat, lending me his loveliness for minutes at a time. Now I stroke the coat again, still weeping.
Later that day, despite the fact that it’s Sunday, my husband leaves for his office, bringing my son along with him. Now it’s just my daughter and me at home. “We need to bury Laylo,” I say and she nods, but neither of us moves. We watch the cat lying, still, on the towel on the counter. When we lean close to him our breath animates his whiskers, making it seem like he’s still alive. We stroke his cream-colored belly, his white socks. We kiss his small skull. Together we are tending him. We are joined by mourning, and I realize my shame is gone. So too is her ever-critical eye, filled now with falling tears. A tether between us. It’s time.
We carry the cat outside. Early autumn, the trees plumes of plump color—saffron, wine, plum, crimson. The air is summer-soft but the breeze has a bite, and the hairs on my arms rise up in response. We find a suitable spot, under the stand of pines that front our country house, a place Laylo liked to lie, his bed of sun-warmed pine needles gone golden on the ground. My daughter is holding the shovel and now she raises it over her shoulder and strikes at the ground but doesn’t make a dent. “Let me,” I say, suddenly sure and confident. True, I am nearing fifty. True, my curves have turned to lard, my breasts to medical waste. True, I miss my old self, and this missing is made more acute by my daughter’s slow acquisition of everything I’ve lost. But standing outside in the early fall, I realize that everything I’ve lost has left me with a gritty strength, with capacities I cannot even begin to calculate. My hands are lined and cracked from all the gardens I’ve grown, all the flowers I’ve coaxed up from the dark dirt. The lines around my eyes suggest everything I’ve seen and—oh!—I’ve seen a lot, so much more than she. Now I take the shovel from her and, expertly, drive it into the earth, again and again, cutting into the soil until a square grave emerges, my daughter watching, impressed, the grave neat and firm and deep down there. I lower the cat with confidence and sadness; this is something I know how to do. Nearing fifty, I’ve buried my fair share of felines, canines, canaries, hamsters, and even people, whom I have loved and lost. I lay Laylo in his grave-bed and then, standing, I shovel soil over him until, layer by layer, piece by piece, his body disappears and all we have of him now is a mound.
My daughter and I place a rock to mark the mound while, in the woods—it is getting towards night now—the coyotes start to sing. “I don’t like it out here in the dark,” she says, looking back towards the house, its windows aglow with apricot-colored light. I put my arm around my daughter. She presses herself against me. Soon, soon, we will enter the home I’ve made for her, but for now, out here, my body becomes her shelter as I pull her into my plushness and give succor.