Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (25 page)

Her damaged breast hung in a limp fold an inch and a quarter below its counterpart. She measured three times, right before Medieval Lit. The day's topic was
Beowulf
, which she hadn't yet read. It was Indian summer in New York, warm but not humid. The day before, hundreds of prisoners had seized control of Attica, a maximum-security prison in western New York, and that was all anyone talked about.

She set aside the red tube top she'd planned to wear. Professor Stanton loved red, or at least he always noted its significance in the books the class discussed. Kristin, Sheila's roommate, told her that she dreamed of the professor only because of unresolved issues with her dad. When Sheila was a baby, her father left home, and she hadn't seen him since. Jack was a rogue, her mother said. He was a womanizer.

Kristin, who was studying psychology, which she professed to love, though she rarely made it to her eight o'clock class, explained that Sheila's new breasts were a stand-in for Jack, a type of Freudian thing.

Six pairs of shoes, two sauce-crusted plates, and a cardboard box containing Sheila's old bras cluttered the small apartment. She'd written the lyrics to “L.A. Woman” on one side of the brown flap lid the night before, her handwriting
barely legible after two parties and a bottle of wine, which she'd shared with Kristin. The evening's events were still foggy in her memory. Had she fallen? Been punched? Passionately embraced?

She stood in front of the mirror: short white skirt and tennis shoes, hair tied back with a scarf, eyeliner, lipliner, lipstick — all before ten in the morning — checking to see if the damaged breast showed. She'd slipped on two tank tops and a white turtleneck sweater. So long as she didn't fold her arms, she looked okay. Women who developed breasts on their own didn't understand how much time it took to adjust to the new weight of a chest. Or that a breast could suddenly change its shape. Sheila had been warned by her doctor. She wasn't afraid, only irritated that her chest was one of the ones that needed adjustment.

She arrived at class a few minutes late. Professor Stanton, in a plaid jacket and olive trousers that might have fit him better a few years ago, had already written the day's lecture topics on the blackboard. The Medieval Lit class had only a dozen students, most bent studiously over lined notebooks. Sheila took an empty seat in the back. She had no friends in the class, though since the augmentation, she'd struck up a few casual conversations and answered questions about whether the procedure hurt. The other students knew her name now, and at least one of the girls — a blonde who wore polyester slacks with thigh-high boots to class — hated her.
Usually the blonde's judgmental stare made Sheila feel feminine, envied, sexy. Today Sheila determined that the gaze assessed the new shape of her right breast.

Professor Stanton began his lecture with the Attica riots. Another prison guard had been killed and the prisoners still controlled the facility. He didn't stumble as he spoke, never paused to search for a word, never stopped to take a question. When he read passages aloud, he unfolded rectangular spectacles, which he kept tucked in his shirt pocket. “These riots are not about the prisoners,” Professor Stanton said, “but us. Our society and how we treat each other. Treat a man like an animal, and he will respond like one.”

Professor Stanton had a way of finding themes in everything. Sheila loved this about him. He was old, maybe fifty, but radical, brilliant, cosmopolitan. When she imagined sleeping with him, he lay beside her, knowing what the college boys did not, that breasts were more erotic observed than touched. Once, just after the surgery, she dreamed that she bared her chest and lured him to her bed, where he whispered the hidden meaning of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
to her cleavage.

“Treat a man with no respect, and he is no longer a man,” Professor Stanton continued, and after a while Sheila realized that he'd moved on to
Beowulf
. If he noticed her new form, he never reacted to it, either before or after the right
breast deflation. She had to wear sweaters for a full week before she could schedule a new appointment, so Professor Stanton had plenty of opportunity to observe her chest in all its states. He did ask her to stay after class the day of the
Beowulf
lecture, though. Her name from his lips coursed through her like a shot of whiskey.

He said that she needed to participate more and that she shouldn't be afraid to speak up. He said that women needed to find their voice, and that education was wasted on the silent. He reminded her that class participation was part of her grade.

She promised to try harder. The truth was that she preferred to spend nights out with Kristin, and weekends, so long as the weather was warm, at Jones Beach. How good she felt in a swimsuit! Weekdays, she woke up before ten only on days that she had class. She didn't admit that she hadn't read the book, nor that she'd enrolled in both his classes to watch him. She took his Critical Theory seminar on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where she filled notebooks with rough sketches of his face.

She might have stayed longer to talk, but she worried that her deformed breast showed. The sweater was hot and she was sweating. And now that her skin was moist, she could feel the damaged breast, like a melting tub of butter on her chest.

S
HEILA MARRIED A
lawyer a year later. His name was Stanley Talbot, and he, too, was much older than she. He had a thick beard and wore torn jackets to court, to “get a rise from the suits,” he said. She met him at a bar; she was certain that he noticed her breasts from across the room. He commented on them later that night as she lay beside him on his waterbed. “You have the most beautiful knockers,” he said.

“Silicone technology,” she laughed. Her breasts had personality, pizzazz. When she laughed, they, too, bounced with mirth. Since her uncle had replaced her leaking implant, she'd had no further troubles, and she now carried her D like a natural. Sometimes she even lied about her size, telling new friends — Stanley's friends mostly — that in high school she'd required a specially tailored twirling uniform, or that she'd gone straight from an undershirt to a C-cup — all harmless untruths that spiraled in her imagination, bringing new boyfriends, confidence, and excitement to her past.

She enjoyed choosing a wedding dress, opting for a strapless gown she never could have filled out a year ago. She asked her mother to give her away, the one unusual twist in an otherwise traditional ceremony. Her mother wore falsies.

“Just so they know we're related,” she said, stuffing the pads beneath her bra.

“Have you considered surgery?” Sheila asked.

“At my age?” her mother laughed. She'd done her hair for the occasion, piling it grandly above her half-moon pearl earrings. Sheila worried about her mother. She'd never find another man if she didn't try harder. As far as Sheila knew, her mother had not had sex in over fifteen years. “Women my age don't need breasts,” she said.

Sheila smiled, deciding then to buy her mother a pair. Two plastic sacs of silicone, heavier than water and just as harmless. Her uncle said they lasted forever. If a mother wanted to, she could will them to her children. Catheryn, her aunt, had done so, for example, and so had Mrs. Luce, who had once been married to a congressman. At first Sheila felt strange about talking of such things with her uncle, a dusty-blond-haired man who wore glasses, a trimmed beard, and looked, according to several sources, exactly like his twin, her father. Uncle Stuart had a nice, easy way about him. He told jokes, took her blood pressure himself, and asked if she'd like a nurse to hold her hand before the operation. She trusted him, and everyone said he was the best in New York. He had a breast-shaped fountain in the courtyard outside his office. Water spilled out of the copper nipple. Business was good.

Sheila never got her mother a new pair of breasts. The pregnancy that her wide-skirted wedding dress concealed stole most of her energy for the next six months, and the
baby girl grabbed all that remained from the moment she first screamed. Sheila and Stanley named their daughter Evany.

Sheila's breasts grew even larger with pregnancy. So large that her back hurt, and she had to buy new bras and tee shirts. But little Evany didn't mind the size, her small, pink lips encircling first the right and later the left nipple. Sheila could hardly feel the suckling. She'd lost most of the sensation in that skin. She wondered how her cushions of flesh would affect her daughter. How, growing up, the girl might gravitate toward swimming instead of track and field. She'd like bagpipes, balloons, overstuffed pillows, beanbag chairs. Things that enveloped her. Warmth. Contact. If only her mother had offered Sheila so grand a breast!

Now that she was no longer in school, Sheila read the books she'd been assigned:
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, Book of the Duchess, Divine Comedy.
The books were no easier to read, the language struggling to reveal its meaning to her, but days alone with the child needed filling. The television kept the baby awake, so she rarely watched the sitcoms, and Stanley never returned before eight or nine. He'd left corporate law, where he'd made a comfortable fortune, to embrace ideals. Defending the American way, he called it. Now he worked pro bono for the Attica Brothers' Legal Defense, where he fought for justice for the inmates who'd been abused during and after the Attica uprising.
He alone still spoke of the prison riots and of the injustice of not a single law enforcement officer's being charged. Sheila thought of Attica only as the time when her breast had deflated, though she listened to her gray-haired husband's stories and agreed that prisoners had rights.

“Forty-three dead,” Stanley would say. “The National Guard fired at the prisoners for
twelve
minutes. Killed their own men. And then blamed the inmates!”

Sheila liked the passion in his words. He would find the truth and see justice done. Most people felt the matter resolved; the inmates had brought the wrath of the law upon themselves. But when Stanley spoke of it, the matter seemed simple and clear. How could anyone deny that the system wasn't working?

Their flat, carpeted wall-to-wall in cream-colored plush, had a wet bar that Sheila used as a nursing station while Stanley lit a joint or poured himself a glass of white wine. The furniture, aside from the two beaded lamps she had saved from her college days, belonged to Stanley — all dark wood pieces that felt stuffy and old, a remnant of the life he had before he stopped shaving, started grooving, and, of course, met her.

Now and then, while Stanley worked, Sheila considered visiting her old professor. NYU was only a subway ride away. She could even take a cab. She imagined discussing the books she'd scarcely glanced at before each class.
Perhaps she could invite Professor Stanton over for dinner. He'd like her husband. They both had passion, intelligence, a dignified age. She invited her other friends, Kristin mainly, only when her husband was at work. Lunchtime, she called it, for cocktails and gossip before her friend returned to the dentist's office, where she filed paperwork and scheduled appointments.

Sheila and Kristin were drinking vodka tonics at one in the afternoon when Sheila admitted she was pregnant again.

“Are you sure?” Kristin said. She wore a loose skirt and platform shoes, and she would soon return to work intoxicated.

Sheila nodded. Yet again, her breasts had grown, and her nipples extended dark and hard. Each could feed a thousand starving children. She was a goddess, the mother of mothers, the Norse goddess Freya, all beauty and harvest and fertility. “I threw up this morning,” she said.

She told her husband the news later that night, and together they toasted with champagne. Stanley decided that they should take a vacation before the child was born, and Sheila agreed, knowing even as she nodded that they would never find the time to leave New York.

A
FTER THE CHILDREN
started school, Sheila looked for part-time work. Her first job, typing forms for
a legal office Stanley knew, provided a nice salary as well as adult company. She loved dressing and leaving for work. She wore her hair up in a barrette, and matched colored flats to colored handbags to the color of her belt. Business suits flattered her, and shoulder pads gave her command. Her breasts looked good under thin white blouses. She bought a half-dozen cream-colored bras and wore silver and turquoise necklaces that hung nicely above the point where her cleavage began. She worked with four other women, and they often ate lunch together, sharing a single dessert. Of the girls, Sheila had the largest chest, and she couldn't help feeling pleasure when the partners (all men) noticed her — a middle-aged woman with two kids — and called her sexy.

She enjoyed the tap of keys and the hum of small electric motors. But the motion aggravated a discomfort in her fingers, a pain in the joints of her hands and wrists. Her physician diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, common among women, he told her, primarily older ones. At her age the disease was unusual but not unheard of. Was she tired? Did she sometimes lose her appetite? Even children, on occasion, could contract the disease.

Kristin got Sheila a job selling vitamins by phone, sometimes door to door. The work was home-based, but the two often met for coffee in the afternoon where they discussed the clients — awful, all of them; the regional manager, who
had a drinking problem; and the other salespeople, who never showered. Kristin had cut her hair short and frosted the ends. She and her daughter shared a wardrobe, she said: Jordache jeans, turtlenecks, pin-striped button-down blouses. How easy it was to stay current that way. Kristin was seeing a Wall Street investor. She shared financial advice over empty packets of artificial sweetener.

Sheila nodded, aware that she and Evany wore different sizes. Her daughter's shirts would never fit Sheila, even the bulky cowl-neck sweaters. If the girl did not wear her padded training bra, she could easily be mistaken for her brother. How early was too early for surgery? What would be a good cup size for a girl in junior high? Evany should not have to endure gym class, the locker room awash with girls — womanly girls who wore clasping bras while she changed quickly behind her locker door. She should not have to bear the brunt of the jokes: What's a boy doing in the locker room? Ew! A boy!