American Innovations: Stories (8 page)

*   *   *

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when I had no afternoon classes, I worked at an after-school program for teenage girls, called GRLZ. Fridays were for Bardo exercises, which are “perceptual distortion” exercises. The week before, our Bardo exercise involved going to the grocery store with the goal of walking each aisle without touching anything, without buying anything, without even setting off the sensors for the automatic doors at the entrance, but, instead, following in and out other people who had set off the sensors. We spent an hour and a half like that. It was like practicing being a ghost.

The mechanism of Bardo activities is that they require total focus, but they also blank you out. I know these exercises sound stupid, I say to the girls, but they seem to work. Or at least to do something. The van ride home after the grocery store, for example, was very peaceful. Although one girl started crying. But in a very unobtrusive way. The girls in the program are—I wouldn’t say they are “difficult.” It is more that they have difficulties. Most of them are referred to GRLZ from the nearby pediatric clinic and have lupus, or eating disorders, or severe asthma, or early run-ins with alcohol and drugs.

That day we were staying close to home for Bardo. The local Mormon church provides GRLZ with a free space: a large, open-layout basement with pantry shelves holding gallon jars of peanut butter, vats of pickles, costumes from past Christmas pageants, cartons of colored pipe cleaners, hanks of yarn, reams of colored stationery, boxes whose labels cannot be trusted but that purport to contain Life cereal. I opened the Bardo notebook to a random page and began to read aloud from Activity #14: “‘Walk quietly around the space, touching nothing except the floor with your feet—’”

“We’re all touching air all the time,” interrupted Alina, the most frizzy-haired and isolated of the girls. “Air is a thing.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Very good. OK, ‘As you quietly walk around the space, pause to take note, almost like you’re a camera taking pictures, of perspectives or places or things that remind you of being dead.’”

I did feel a slight jet stream of having stumbled into an “advanced” exercise. “Take special note of the particular words, OK?” I went on, following the script. “It’s not about what reminds you
of death
. Or
of dying
. It says specifically: things that remind you of
being dead
. We can think about what that might mean.”

That’s when Brandee, who has lupus and nice manners, said to me, “You look sideways pregnant.”

“I’m not pregnant, but thank you for asking.”

“I didn’t say pregnant, I said sideways pregnant.”

“Do you guys have any questions about the exercise?” I asked. “Listen to your instincts. I’ll set the egg timer for forty-five minutes. Then we’ll regroup and discuss. Just try to relax into it.” The setting was ideal for the exercise, really. The fluorescent lighting glanced off the steel refrigerator in a way that was like not being in Kansas anymore.

“That’s what happens when you’re a bulimia,” another of the girls said. “The sideways thing.”

“No,” a third said. “When you’re a bulimia, your teeth are black and you cough blood. That’s where the idea of werewolves comes from, these hungry creatures with bloody mouths—”

“That’s not true. In bulimia you explode out your ribs—”

“That bleeding mouth stuff is about being inbred, it’s not bulimia—”

“I didn’t mean to start a thing,” quiet Brandee said.

I acknowledged to the girls that their curiosity and speculation were normal, even admirable. I made a simple announcement that it was a breast, what they were talking about. My hope was that we could then quickly move on.

“I think it looks hot,” said Lucille, the one GRL who herself was especially “hot” and who, when she arrived two weeks earlier, had unsettled the group dynamics just by looking the way she did. She was of the physical type, already full and curvy, of whom I’d heard men say that she was so ripe that one had to take her now, before she was rotten. Lucille snapped a photo of me with her phone. I asked her nicely to please not do that. She took several more photos. At least I liked the navy color of the fitted long tee I was wearing. My face looks best against dark colors. I would need more of these longer shirts, I noted to myself. Lucille went on: “You know those models, they’re all so, so flat, they have no breasts at all. They choose them as models because they look like young boys, you so totally know that’s what all those gays running the industry are dreaming of, of a world where even women are boys, they’re trying to convince
us
to wish we were boys, they’re trying to make
us
think like
them
, and that is so, so wrong. It’s like so wrong, and that’s why it’s so cool; it’s like you’re like saying, No, I am so definitely not a boy, not a man, very much not, like there’s no denying it.”

I repeated, to Lucille and to everyone, that I was setting the timer. I also reread the exercise prompt aloud, start to finish, one more time. I reemphasized that we were entering quiet Bardo time. And that was that. I sat on a costume trunk and waited for the minutes to pass. I like being near kids. It takes me out of myself; or, it does something. There had been a woman, Helen Magramm, whose children, two boys, I babysat when I was a teenager. I had no authority with those kids, and nearly every time one or both of them ended up crying before their parents returned home. I’m surprised neither was ever seriously hurt. One night years later, the boys were in high school, the husband woke up to his wife having a seizure in her sleep. It turned out she had a brain tumor. The tumor was resected and she recovered. Three years later the younger son was killed in a car accident. Eventually the mom, in her forties, was put in a nursing home, after a return of the tumor. I’d probably lived in seven different towns after I had last seen Helen Magramm; that was why, I think, I very rarely thought of her; I was away from almost all the triggers that might bring me back to being a teenager. Not too long ago, Helen appeared briefly in one of my dreams; and a couple of days later my mother told me Helen had died. That spooked me, naturally.

*   *   *

I decided to go see a professional about the breast.

The doctor had thick, long blond hair and a mild Russian accent; when she palpated my neck, a scent of eucalyptus that must have been her hand lotion or soap came to me. I trusted this doctor because a few months earlier I’d come to her about an intermittent ear pain I’d had for years—it was always in the same ear, and the pain was worse in the mornings, but I couldn’t predict which mornings it would be there—and with no fuss or imaging she had determined that my ear pain was heartburn manifesting as ear pain. A diagnostic trial of Prilosec had disappeared the problem. She told me an apparently-so story about how long ago, in an early pre-embryonic state, the ear’s nerve and the esophagus’s nerve had been intimates, and that it was a memory of this closeness that made the two areas confuse their pains, and that this intimacy persisted even as they were now distant. It was a fanciful, pastel-hued story, yes, but I mean, she cured me. After that solve, Dr. Jane Shliakhtsitsava seemed to me like a dragon slayer.

Also, I couldn’t help trusting her because she was very pretty.

I mentally absented myself as she examined the dorsal breast.

She asked me about heart palpitations, about night sweats, rapid weight gains, rapid weight losses. “Any major regrets?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Losses you haven’t accepted?”

“Not really. I mean, I’m far from home. But I guess we’re all far, right?”

“Have you been trying to have children or adopt children? Or thinking about it?”

“No.”

“Have you lost a child?”

“Never.”

“Have you lost a loved one? Or love? Are you longing for your childhood?”

“I don’t get your line of questions,” I said.

“I ask these things,” she began, and her accent suddenly sounded false to me, “because it’s very common to manifest these things in our body. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Your body speaks a language. It’s like a foreign language we all speak but have forgotten how to understand. Maybe you’ve heard of pseudocyesis, of women who develop all the signs and symptoms of pregnancy, even though they aren’t pregnant. There’s no shame in speaking in signs. You shouldn’t worry about the word ‘hysteria.’ It’s not just women who speak these languages. I think men are even more fluent in them—”

“Did you do your training in Oregon?”

“In Vladivostok,” she said. “But I’m always training. Even now I’m training.”

“I just want you to say whether I’m dying or not dying. Really, that’s it.”

She took out a green marker pen from her lab coat and wrote down two words in all caps on the white butcher paper of the exam table. “I understand you’re more interested in
prognosis
than
diagnosis
,” she said, indicating the two words she had written. She paused. “That’s natural. I understand that. But I’m not so detained by either diagnosis or prognosis; what really interests me is simply
gnosis
.” She had underlined and was pointing to the stacked “gnosis” ends of the two words. “Gnosis itself.”

There had once been a TV show in which a gnu named Gary Gnu reported the gnews. “It seems like you don’t believe in illness,” I said.

“I believe in wellness,” Dr. Shliakhtsitsava said.

Her framed diplomas suggested she was normally certified; also, she had helped me before; you can’t be blinded to past goodness by the klieg lights of a little bit of odd.

“But do you think I can get it safely removed?” I asked. “Do you think my insurance will cover the surgery? It’s not considered just cosmetic, is it? I mean, it’s a pretty extreme case if it is. Would I need full anesthesia?”

“I can answer all those questions for you,” she said, deploying full eye contact. “And I will answer all those questions for you. But first I want to say”—and here her status as a pretty person seemed to flush her face with ordained assuredness—“you might want to think about this new part of yourself. Just take some time and think about it. Do you really want to change yourself just to suit fashion when you don’t even know what fashion will bring next? That may not be the person you want to be.”

The visit cost me $215. I appreciated that she had taken the time to really talk to me.

*   *   *

Spring came around. Flowers, I suspect they were daffodils, made their pronouncements. What were maybe dogwood blossoms decorated neighborhood trees. I started craving fruit popsicles. One evening, on the street, I by chance met a woman I had known back when I was in high school. She had distinctively large and wide-set eyes and had never seemed to have reached puberty; it might have been a medical thing; anyhow, it made her easy to recognize. She was in town to help design a duck pond for the campus, or really it was a sort of goose pond, she explained, a place to encourage Canadian geese to rest during their annual migrations. What a treat to see you, she said. You know, I wanted to write to you, she went on. To make sure you were OK. But I didn’t want you to feel singled out in that way. I hadn’t talked to you for so many years.

Don’t worry about it, I said. I’m just happy to have run into you.

I had no idea what she might be talking about. That evening I went ahead and investigated myself on the Internet.

Someone, probably one of the GRLZ, or one of the GRLZ’s friends, had pinned one of the more casually striking photos of my “condition” onto her Pinterest, which had gone to a number of other Pinterests, and Tumblrs, and other places I didn’t know about, and those images had synapsed and traveled and collided with other images, and commentary, and eventually become a Buzzfeed, yoked alongside what must have really driven the traffic, a photo of an actress from a remake of the movie
Total Recall
; the woman—she played an alien or something—was three breasts across and wore an outfit that offered coverage of those breasts only via a strap across the nipples. She was fairly inarguably hot. Although somewhat arguably, as manifested in the comments sections. However, the majority of the censoriousness, ridicule, and loving support was directed not at the altered beauty from a fictional dystopic 2084 in a red dress and thigh-high black leather boots but, rather, at me. I was an ugly who needed to get over herself, or someone bravely making my own choices, or a fourth-wave feminist, or a symptom of fakesterdom, or a rebel against the tyranny of the “natural,” or a person who really, really needed help … It was unclear what I would learn if I read more, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn it. Though I did like one comment, in which someone wondered whether this was “a difference that made a difference.” He/she posited that that was what knowledge was: a difference that made a difference. The next comment compared me with eugenicists. I stopped reading. I wrote to administrators of the first few sites I had come across, in the cases where I was able to find a contact address; I asked, politely, if my photo could be taken down. It was, after all, a photo of me, an ordinary citizen who had not put herself forward. Only one person wrote back to me. He expressed understanding. He said he admired my courage in making a physical “statement,” and he invited me to participate in an interview series he curated, American Innovations, on his YouTube channel. There were
freedoms from
and
freedoms to
, he said. That was what made this country great, he said. Past participants had included the celebrity underwear designer Lorna Drew and the winner of
Survivor Panama
Aras Baskaukas.

I had once seen a hog at a farm. That hog must have weighed near on two thousand pounds, and she was in a little pen—not the worst conditions, merely depressing ones—and there were sores near her tail, which seemed to have been clipped off; the sores had attracted flies; she had many nipples, and they also looked like sores, and might have been cohabiting space with sores; her babies were not with her; she was quiet in her pen. I describe this because that was how I felt. I came across stories connecting soy consumption to extra-mammary development; another story of a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles who combined belly button removal with breast addition in a package deal. In Germany, some male soldiers were developing enlarged breasts from the repetitive recoil of shooting rifles. I’m not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be. I didn’t call up my mom, or my aunt, or my previous boyfriend, or any of the boyfriends before that, either. I didn’t make a Facebook posting on which others might comment with generous sympathy. But I did feel very feminine. I went out and bought a mod kind of dress, sort of like a shift.