Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (20 page)

I was not mad at Barbie even after I did a story at
20/20
about a woman who decided she wanted to become Barbie and had twenty-seven plastic surgeries to make it happen. But Barbie’s boobs were really pissing me off . . . or more precisely, Barbie’s
boob
. She has two and I only have one. Hers are so large and are her best feature and mine, I just pray it won’t kill me.

I am excited when my sister-in-law Wendy finds a Barbie alternative for Skye on her birthday. Her discovery comes just in time because I was in serious Barbie burn-out mode: For her birthday, Skye received a Barbie car, a Barbie van, a Scooby-Doo Barbie, a Doctor Barbie, a giant Barbie head that talked, and even a Miss Puerto Rico Barbie. Wendy discovered a “Get Real” girl who, unlike Barbie, could actually bend her knees. But the realness did not stop there—the “Get Real” girl could move all of her joints and even came with a surfboard and surf gear. I had grown up playing with girly glitter gowns and matching plastic purses and now I’m asking my daughter to get excited over plastic snow boots and a bendable knee? It seems almost too real to be any fun.

The first thing that Skye does with her “Get Real” girl is rip off her clothing, just like she does with her Barbie dolls. The most striking difference between “Get Real” and Barbie is that “Get Real” girl’s breasts are much more real (smaller) than Barbie’s. And “Get Real” is wearing a sports-type bra made of plastic that is permanently glued on, compared to Barbie who has two perfect globe-size mounds of plastic.

Skye plays with her “Get Real” girl about three whole minutes and then goes back into Barbie bliss. I don’t think she ever touches “Get Real” again, unless I count the time she offered it to her friend Nola because she didn’t want to share her Barbie dolls.

Skye prefers her Barbies naked. I think all the interest in her Barbies’ boobs has made her interested in mine.

“Mommy, when are you going to get another nipple? Why do you only have one?”

I always wondered how I would explain my breast cancer to Skye. Now she is three, demanding to know why I look different. I don’t want her to be scared of her breasts. She is becoming very interested in body parts and even knows what her elbow is. The word
nipple
especially cracks her up, and she giggles and points to herself—“Skye’s nipples.”

“Mommy had a boo-boo and its name was cancer,” I tell her.

Skye loves boo-boos and wants to put a Band-Aid on my boob. She takes her blanket and puts it over my breast and says “Abracadabra” and it’s magic because Mommy’s boo-boo is all better now. But I am not sure how to explain the one nipple missing, and the tattoo that is there instead. Skye didn’t even exist when I first got it. One day, she solves the problem for me: “Mommy’s nipple.” She points to my left breast and pauses at my right. “And Mommy’s cartoon.” Cartoons are Skye’s obsession, her absolute favorite thing in her little world. Every mommy has two nipples—Skye seems so impressed that hers has a cartoon.

But Skye will soon outgrow cartoons, and she tells me she has a great idea. “Mommy you can tape a nipple on.” I will need to explain to her that her breasts might be cancerous one day. How will she feel about being so ambivalent towards her breasts? Boobs are everywhere: wet T-shirt contests,
Playboy, Penthouse
, strip clubs, the Booby Mafia, and now even Barbie dolls are not safe. How will Skye feel when she goes through puberty and suddenly boys notice her breasts? Will she always live in fear?

For now, Skye, is besotted by boobs. Especially Barbie’s. Since she is probably curious about her own little three-year-old body, Barbie must be something to explore. So naked Barbie goes just about everywhere with us—to the pediatrician’s office, to nursery school, and very often out to dinner at swanky New York City restaurants. She causes quite a stir. We often get stares. I think it’s because Skye is so cute, until my mother is in town staying with us and looks extremely uncomfortable when I pull Skye’s naked Barbies out of my pocketbook and put them on the table at a restaurant one night.

“That’s obscene!”

I look down and realize there are three naked Barbie dolls with long blond hair and gigantic boobs on our table. She is right—the naked Barbies do not look like a three-year-old’s toys at all. They look like miniature versions of the topless dancers I saw in the strip club. And at that moment I understand why I have felt irritated by Barbie recently. Barbie’s boobs are bothering me. The fact that they look so perky and perfect. The fact that they are just so big! There is something about Barbie’s boobs that I have to figure out.

I do some research to get to the bottom of Barbie’s boobs. They are deliberate. Ruth Handler, her creator, had the radical idea in 1959 that little girls would like to play with a doll that had breasts. Ruth thought it would give them a sense of self-esteem and show them they could be anything when they grew up. Until 1959, little girls played with baby dolls, and most male executives laughed at the idea of a doll with breasts and said that the public would never accept that. But Ruth knew she was onto something, and she did get the last laugh—by inventing Barbie.

No wonder Barbie’s boobs have provoked me so much lately. Hers are a deliberate symbol of power. Mine almost killed me.

I am still feeling robbed of that power. Booby power taunts me all the time: On my way to my therapist, passing Hooters, I wonder what they might say to me if I went to apply for a waitressing job. Would I get it if I only had one hooter? Am I hallucinating or do Pamela Lee Anderson’s and Anna Nicole Smith’s breasts keep getting larger? They all look like Barbie dolls. Britney Spears keeps denying a boob job. Okay, now I am losing it. Having one boob makes me feel like I don’t belong. I am not a woman. I guess I feel like that “Get Real” girl that Skye tossed into the corner. This is a breast-obsessed society. It starts when little girls are only three! And it just gets worse. It doesn’t matter that I have two Ivy League degrees—I have only one boob.

Something that I think is very strange and sad happened to Ruth Handler, though. The woman who made dolls with breasts was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy. I think that it is bizarre that the woman who brought so many plastic boobs to the world found herself breastless. Not surprisingly, she went on to launch a plastic prosthetic breast line called “Naturally Me” so that women “could be proud to stick their chests out” after a mastectomy.

But I know it is not so natural to put a plastic mound where your flesh and blood used to be. Plastic boobs—on dolls or real women—feel so hollow. But plastic boobs, even on a doll, are such a powerful toy for a little girl to play with.

I wonder if Ruth herself ever considered making a Breast Cancer Barbie. I mean, they have a Doctor Barbie, Astronaut Barbie, and even a Barbie that does math. If one in eight women get breast cancer, a Breast Cancer Barbie feels more relevant than an astronaut one.

I cannot get the image of Breast Cancer Barbie out of my head. Could Breast Cancer Barbie still somehow be beautiful with a large red bolt across her chest? Maybe if there were a Breast Cancer Barbie, a Hooter Girl, a one-boobed pin-up girl in
Playboy
, a one-boobed stripper, I might find it easier to imagine. I would know there is somehow a template for that beauty.

I have never seen a beautiful woman revealing her booblessness, and I cannot summon it up no matter how hard I try. I still cannot look at myself in the mirror. But sometimes, when Tyler and Skye are asleep, I check myself out at 4 A.M. in the shadows of my bedroom. I study the curve of the implant, the bold red diagonal stripe across my chest, and the tattoo at the end of the red line. It is interesting-looking, and the curve even seems natural enough after all that stretching. It is prettier than I expected, in the shadows, in the dark. It looks better than I ever thought it would. When the shadows move across it, my mastectomy looks a little sexy in a really weird way. It is definitely not a breast, but it has its own appeal.

When I get the call from
Self
magazine to pose topless for their breast cancer handbook, the timing feels right. I have just started to look at myself and I want other young women just diagnosed to see a reconstructed boob with a real young woman’s head, not just an anonymous torso, because I remember how much the breast mug shots still scare me. Posing would not be about vanity—it would be charity. At least that was what I expected. After all, I had never seen a beautiful woman with just one breast.

20

Developing

“Take off your shirt!”

Okay. Now I am seriously having second thoughts.

I expected some foreplay and I am startled by how forward the photographer is being. This is like jumping into bed with a stranger. I imagined that a topless photo shoot would be more artful than this.

I remind myself why I am here and why this is a special topless photo: I knew I would not end up on any teenager’s bedroom wall or locker door. I would not be offered a guest appearance on
Baywatch
, and I am not getting paid big bucks. I agreed to do this because I need to show other women that a mastectomy would not be as horrible as they thought. When the editor at
Self
made the pitch to me to pose topless in the magazine, it sounded so hopeful: “To offer inspiration to other women facing reconstructive surgery after breast cancer.”

But I don’t think that the way I look could inspire anyone. I just want them not to be scared of what they’ll look like. Maybe it will give them a sense of relief that they won’t look as bad as they thought they would. The magazine editor told me the photos would be “beautiful” because they had hired a very famous portrait photographer. But I rolled my eyes when she told me over the phone they would be beautiful, because she had not seen what I look like. Let’s get one thing straight, I remind myself: This is charity.

I will do anything for breast cancer, but this is extreme. I am being Mother Teresa. Extreme charity. I am so scared that I will be ridiculed and end up on some Internet fetish porn site. I am scared that every ex-boyfriend who broke my heart, every math teacher who gave me a C, will see this and smirk.

I have become a reluctant activist. I will speak to any woman who has just been diagnosed. I do it because of Julie’s death. That night I gave my first speech as a breast cancer survivor was the night she died from breast cancer when she was only thirty-four. I need to make sense of her death. My breast surgeon and oncologist give out my number so women can call me. I have met so many women in bathrooms in bars across the city and let them feel me up that it is bordering on slutty. I convinced my breast surgeon and therapist to do the Sally Jessy Raphael show with me. I was worried I might get ambushed and that it might turn into “lingerie after a mastectomy,” but it was totally tasteful up until my breast surgeon was asked to do a breast exam live on a model on national television: I know that even though he is a boob doctor, it made him blush. My most outrageous event was “Boarding for Breast Cancer.” They flew me out to Heavenly Mountain in California to speak to snowboarders about breast cancer. The event was in memory of a young snowboard-clothing designer, Monica, who died of breast cancer at only twenty-eight. I had to go, of course, because it could have been me who had died at twenty-eight. I did not expect that I would have to speak to a crowd of nearly five hundred rowdy teenagers (mostly male) about breast cancer. It was a tough sell, especially because I had to speak after the Foo Fighters performed. The crowd looked like they might start heckling me at any second. I was not wearing the right thing. I had to be strategic and win over my audience. At the top of my lungs I screamed into the microphone, “Touch yourself!”

The crowd roared. Earlier in the day I had seen a few snowboarders wearing T-shirts with that slogan. I kept going. “You all have dirty minds. I was talking about breast self-exams. And guys, you should learn how to do it, too. It’s quite a pick-up line and so many lumps are found by women’s boyfriends.”

I told my story—how I had touched myself and saved my life. There was silence. When I finished, someone started chanting: “Touch yourself! Touch yourself!”

Some really hot young guys carried me off stage, and the crowd was still screaming.

But now in the taxi heading downtown to the photographer’s chic Noho studio to have my topless photo taken, this feels more daring than facing a crowd of hecklers. I keep reminding myself of how many women I am going to help. I am trying hard to remember looking at my plastic surgeon’s breast photo book—the breast mug shots, the headless torsos. I know that attaching a head to a torso with a mastectomy, especially a young one, will be so helpful, because I receive so many calls from recently diagnosed women who want to see what my reconstruction actually looks like, who got my name from friends, family, and my doctors. I know how important it is to take this picture because I have seen the relief in their eyes when I unfastened my bra in the bathrooms across the city.

I remember what I imagined I might look like after my mastectomy, and I imagined horrible things. I always make sure to wear my best push-up bra when I meet these women, and even let them feel the reconstructed breast if they want to. I tell them how great I think I look, but part of me feels like I am lying. I need to reassure them. It is an incredible show-and-tell. They are so relieved to actually see me instead of the breast mug shots/headless torsos in the photo book. I know taking this photograph will be important. I need to put a head with a boob for all those young women.

I’m only a few blocks away and I start to panic: What if a woman looks at me and is supposed to feel inspired but really feels appalled? What if I scare her? I feel like I’m opening a door for someone to see what is behind it. I can almost taste their disappointment. I consider going back uptown. Instead I am an hour late.

I think maybe I’m in the wrong place when I walk into the bland entranceway and enter the creaky freight elevator with the big iron gate, because it is not glamorous. But when the elevator jumps to a stop at the ninth floor I know I am at the right place—when I step out of the elevator, I smell how hip the place is. Incense, perfume, photography chemicals, and air conditioning are blending together to create some sort of tonic that instantly reassures me I am in a famous photographer’s studio.