I am in the dressing room of Wanamaker’s in downtown Philadelphia as my grandmother tries on bras. Her back is to me and all I can see reflected in the mirror, softened by just-bright-enough sconces is the top of her head, a crown of soft gray curls, bent over a pile of lingerie spread across the bench, price tags dangling. This is 1970: city department stores are grand, fitting room lights are flattering, and primly dressed sales ladies in stockings and low heels assist patrons. My grandmother stands erect to adjust her clothing, and a piece of sculpted foam rubber drops to the floor. She lets out a little cry as though mild pain has shot through her and tries to retrieve the falsie, but the thing bounces under the dressing room curtain and into the hall.
“Gram, what is that?” My innocence is appalling.
Her mouth opens and closes without response. She turns and her blouse falls open just as an especially chipper salesclerk draws back the curtain to see if we need help. In that moment mortification sweeps across my grandmother’s face as the woman and I look at the concave spot where a breast had once been. The skin covering the emptiness sags. Around the edge is a pink sickle-shaped scar with a puckered edge, like the serrations of a grapefruit knife I once saw in her kitchen drawer.
“Oh, oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman stammers and backs away, fumbling with the curtain, nearly stepping on my grandmother’s cheap prosthetic. She gives a little flustered wave. Her eyeglasses, hanging from a chain around her neck, bounce up and down. I pick up the breast. My grandmother sinks to the seat, not even bothering to push the undergarments aside. She covers her face with her hands.
“Didn’t your mother tell you?”
I stand there holding the spongy mound. Tears bead on my bottom lashes.
“I have—” She doesn’t finish her sentence for a moment. I can’t imagine what my mother hasn’t told me.
“I have cancer,” she says into her palms, still covering her face. “They had to cut my breast off because I have cancer.”
She seems ashamed, as though she had done something wrong.
My lip trembles and I feel a little woozy. She struggles to put her bra back on but I am afraid to help. I am twelve years old and more than anything I want a bra. I do not, by anyone’s measurement, need one. But every other girl in my seventh-grade class, it seems to me, is sporting them. The bands with hooks and eyes, like badges across their backs, are just visible enough through their white blouse, now that we no longer have to wear the jumper tops, a requirement through the end of sixth grade in our Catholic grammar school. The front of the blouse bears the school’s insignia on the left breast pocket, flattening and obscuring what little bit lurks behind. The chest of any girl who had a bit of a bosom looks a little lopsided.
I want to join those bra-boasting ranks, but this shopping trip is not about me. No one—not my mother as she pressed the bus fare into my hand that morning, nor my grandmother whose suitcase-sized pocketbook I am guarding—gave a glancing thought to my wanting that coveted piece of underwear. But I fantasized about the silky, lacy, womanly apparel as I surreptitiously let my left hand rifle the whispery displays as I walked through the store.
As Gram stands and wipes her eyes, all I can think of is how I no longer want breasts, much less a bra to cover them, primp them, prop them, or boost them. Having the wrong boy touch them now seems to be the least of the problems to potentially beset them.
My grandmother tucks her foam rubber right breast back into her old white bra. Elastic tendrils poke through the worn straps. She buttons her blouse and marches us from the fitting room, through the store, and out the door onto Market Street to catch the bus.
Fifteen years after that eye-opening shopping trip, my mother will die of breast cancer. It turns out to be a different kind of breast cancer from the type suffered by her mother. It seems her mother was the lucky one, and my grandmother would express feeling somewhat lucky in the course of her illness, often telling people, “My doctors say if they could bottle whatever keeps me alive for all these years with cancer, they’d be millionaires!” What kept her alive was sheer will, definitely not something big pharma could package. It served her well for almost twenty-five years after her diagnosis.
There would be no pill, no therapy, no bottle of elixir to save her daughter, my mother, whose breasts blazed with a fast-moving monster of the mammary glands called inflammatory breast cancer. Diagnosed at forty-eight, she was dead by fifty-three, with the last of her ten children still in grade school. She, like her mother, had an abundance of sheer will, but before that will could be married to cutting-edge cures, the disease prevailed, leaving my five sisters and me to see the one dozen boobs among us as ticking time bombs.
One of my most poignant, painful memories is of an exchange I had with my mother about her breasts when I was thirteen. I found a letter she had written to my father when he was overseas with the navy. My parents had eloped at age nineteen, and my father was away in the service when my mother delivered their first baby that same year. I don’t remember how I got my hands on the letter. Perhaps she was looking through her box of mementos and the flimsy piece of paper, softened by time, bearing her elegant Palmer penmanship, slipped away from her other personal effects. I found it on the laundry room floor. Makes sense to me now, as the laundry room was probably the only place, other than the bathroom, where she ever spent time alone.
Always insatiably curious, I pored over the letter, in which she told my father she is breastfeeding and her breasts are swollen and tender. I brought the letter to her, expecting a conversation of some kind. My mother absorbed the contents with a quick sweep of her eyes across the page and then slapped me. She was all at once angry, hurt, and embarrassed. As was I, in equal measure. To this day, I’m not sure what code of conduct I breached.
Now I am sixty-seven and past the tussle over body image and self-esteem. I see that women’s breasts have always been a kind of iconography. They are the one body part that might bring unbidden leers and suggestive wisecracks one day, a lover’s near-reverence or the singular intimacy of a nursing infant the next. For some, breasts are a nuisance that intrude on athletic efforts; for others they become a weapon of manipulation.
Breasts are expensive to dress, cheap to vaunt, a source of worry and often of regret. Legend has it that the Amazon women bound or even amputated their right breasts so as not impede their shot with spear or arrow. That legend is probably apocryphal, but today’s truth is that many women remove or reduce their breasts for complicated reasons, not all of them medical. On the other hand, there are women who augment their breasts or lament their flat chests and feel that they’ve been denied a dimension of sexiness that should have been their birthright.
Of course, I couldn’t have understood all that in the Wanamaker’s dressing room with my grandmother that day. As she snapped on her gloves, angled her pocketbook into the crook of her arm, and led me to the bus back to the suburbs, I was mostly feeling shortchanged that we would not be having lunch in the Crystal Tea Room or —even better— at the Horn & Hardart automat on Chestnut Street, special trip-to-Philly traditions. Instead, we rode home in silence staring out the dusty windows.
Donna Kennedy Maccherone is the founder of Zen Wise Writers, a growing community of writers and thinkers based in Moorestown, NJ, where she hosts workshops. Her work has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tiferet Journal, Collateral, ParentCo, Kaatskill Life, Paterson Literary Review, East By Northeast Literary Magazine, BrainChild, Persimmon Tree, and The Weight of Motherhood, a Moonstone Arts anthology. You can read one of her recent poems here: www.zenwisewriters.com.