American Innovations: Stories

AMERICAN INNOVATIONS

This was in Singapore City, midday in an August. I was visiting my thin, tan, sixty-something non-native-of-Singapore aunt of exceptional math skills who had made her fortune, from near enough to nothing, in spandex and sequin fashions. When I was younger, we had called her Tina Turner because her styling was similar — also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they had nodded knowingly at one another, that was the story — but now my aunt seemed smaller, and tamer, if still disturbingly “hot,” considerably more hot than either of her daughters, both now middle-aged and involved in their own relatively less demanding lives, in more prosaic bodies, in other countries. My aunt still shared her mahogany-interiored seven-bedroom house — it was a sixties construction, with lots of obtuse angles, so that you could make right after right after right after right and still not be facing your original direction — with her husband of all those years, although he left for the beach by 5:00 a.m. most days, and she was a night person, and so it was as if she lived alone. After 11:00 p.m., she liked to play bridge online, often with people “in your sorts of time zones.” My aunt told me that not everyone in the online bridge world was very nice; in fact, it was difficult to believe how rude some people could be; really, it was amazing.

“This guy, we were partners; he opened a heart, and then he rebid two spades over my no-trump — that’s a reverse. Do you understand bidding? It’s like he was going backward. Look, it’s not common. To do that, you’re essentially promising your partner that you have at least sixteen high card points. At least. Are you following? For him to make that bid, he’s saying he’s got long hearts and a really good hand. And then he doesn’t, not at all! We end up in four hearts in a four-two fit. It’s like he’s expecting me to have the hearts, it’s crazy. Everyone else is in a normal three no-trump. So I write to him: ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’”

“You said, ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’”

“Yes, you can make chatter in the sidebar of the game. There’s a space. I mean, you don’t even play bridge, but even you can understand that he made a ridiculous bid, right? I’ve read six books on bridge; you can trust me, what he did was really idiotic. That’s why I said what I said. Well, then he called me awful names. Just awful. I can’t say the names. And he was the one who made the mistake! I almost didn’t want to play bridge online ever again. And I have some very nice people that I play bridge with. But I almost gave up playing. See, that’s what happens with the Internet. Some people will be amazingly rude.”

I think I said something about how yes, people could really be people.

She said something about how I must be jet-lagged.

“I’m all right,” I said. The main reason I was in Singapore was that a year-and-a-half-long relationship of mine had recently come to an end, and it had seemed natural to transition by visiting a friend who had moved to Hong Kong, and then, already so far, visiting my aunt, too. I wasn’t devastated, though; it wasn’t that kind of breakup; my serial eighteen-month relationships consistently ended amicably, it was just a weird tic of mine, one with which I was fine. It was like, I had been told, I wasn’t a woman.

“Did I ever tell you,” my aunt asked, “about my September 11th?”

No, she hadn’t.

“It was late here, everyone was asleep, and my God, I was lying in bed, and then I noticed this lump, quite big, right here, on my side. I was sure it was cancer. I was sure I was going to die. How could I have not noticed it before?” She went on to say, “It was right here at these low ribs that aren’t full ribs. Normally I would have called my friend Simona, she’s an excellent doctor, you know, but I didn’t think it was right, ringing her late like that. That’s nighttime thinking for you. I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded. But I told myself I would have to make it on my own until the beginning of the next business day. That’s what I was thinking. I couldn’t rest, of course. I went and turned on the television, just to distract myself, to calm myself down. And what’s there? The towers. Can you believe it? I mean, how awful. And they just kept replaying it. I sat there watching it all alone. Well, it wasn’t cancer, the lump. It was just my breast. I mean, the silicone. The implant. It just fell down. Unbelievable, right? That they would put something in you that could do that. I said to the doctors, Just take it out and never give it back to me. I like small breasts now. I used to hate them, but now I like them.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “I mean, about how scared you must have been.”

Then my Tina asked me, “Are you still working on your physical therapy thing?”

That had been two career interests ago, but it was a thoughtful inquiry, considering that we didn’t see each other very often. “Oh,” I said. “No.”

When we set out to get a bite to eat, I was relieved.

“They have excellent salads at this place,” my aunt said. “The best outfit is a good figure.”

I agreed.

* * *

A year and some later, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I awoke from not particularly uneasy dreams. I was sleeping alone and on my stomach. It was not September 11th. I negotiated nine more minutes from the alarm. Then the alarm went off again; I negotiated again; then the alarm again, and then, like so many other mornings, I got out of bed.

In the bathroom, I washed my face with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk-ily. Instead, only in close patches. Only enough to rest reasonably assured that nothing too grotesque has overnight arrived on or departed from my face, and that I have scrubbed away all the applied scrub. It’s important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there’s anything especially wrong with me — just the usual.

However, in the hallway downstairs there’s a mirror you see yourself in even when you don’t intentionally look.

That mirror claimed there was a substantial lump on the right side of my lower back. An anatomically anomalous and yet familiar-seeming lump.

I would have just looked away but it was like seeing a burn victim or a really beautiful person: I couldn’t unstare. My hand moved to the mass. The mass liked being touched. I lifted my shirt. I would say what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn’t need support. It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private. What I saw was really textbook. Save for its location, there on my back. As if to hide from me. Or as if to discreetly maintain an unacknowledged child. Though the discreetness would work only in a world in which we meet one another exclusively head-on, or possibly in three-quarters profile. Because in profile the anatomy really could not be denied.

I pulled my shirt back down. It was fitted but, thankfully, long.

Was this an inheritance?

I made myself sunny-side-up eggs. The newspaper informed me that a young volunteer worker at a large-cat reserve had been killed by a lion. Her parents said their daughter had been doing what she loved, there at the reserve; she had never been happier; protocol had been followed; it was a rare and tragic accident and not the result of carelessness; the parents did not blame the reserve; they listed the large-cat sanctuary as one of the charities to which mourners might elect to donate in lieu of flowers. I’m not saying I didn’t feel disfigured and humiliated. But I know such things are mainly a matter of mind.

* * *

Like the girl pounced on and accidentally killed by the large cat, I also was attempting to do something I loved. I was studying Library Sciences. I had always loved libraries. No one looks at you there, and you can look at everyone, so people probably are looking at you, just like you’re looking at them, but it’s all nice and quiet, and everyone can stay inside his or her headspace. But I hadn’t really known what library sciences was, and it turned out to be highly nonoverlapping with what I had deduced from the blurred, squinting assessment I had made of it from a distance with as little information—“information” being a word and concept I both dislike and distrust — as possible. Then it turned out I wasn’t even really in a Library Sciences program, I was in a Library and Information Sciences program, the core of which focused on “Humans becoming informed via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records.” I was learning computer skills, basically. I was becoming trained as a searcher of databases. I was taking a metadata course on Indexing and Cataloging and another course on Knowledge Management.

That first day of my supernumeraryness I went to the school library for a timed assignment, done from my pale blue laminated tin carrel. It was a set of twenty query transformations. Query transformations are just what they sound like. A human has a curiosity — something simple, like, What are the seasons like in Mongolia? or less simple, like, How was gender represented in the literature of Heian Japan? — and ideally, the library information scientist will translate that curiosity into intelligently delimited searches in well-chosen databases that then return navigable information.

Whatever. Number twenty-one on the assignment was to generate one’s own query and query results. I chose not to query my body’s recent developments; even more than mirrors, Internet reflections combine the qualia of unflinching and unfaithful. I had once, via the Internet, tried to learn about the anthropologist Margaret Mead. After an hour I was left only with a strong impression that Mead’s primary intellectual contribution had been the adding of an s to the term “semiotic.” That, and having taken a female lover for much of her later life. I assumed, and continue to assume, that there are more important things to know about Mead, although how would I know?

At noon I attended a lecture given by Professor Sidwell. The lecture was about the problem of acidification — what to do about the hydrolysis of paper in books, the “slow fires” caused by the low pH levels of the paper commonly used for printing during certain key decades. Professor Sidwell had the same sloping posture my dad had had, and so I felt closer to him than in reality I was. Early on in the term, I’d had a conversation with him in the cafeteria in which he said that American cuisine had gone downhill since the 1940s. His grandmother had been a great cook, but she was the last of the Mohicans. I said, Wasn’t it at least an improvement to know about Chinese food? About soy sauce? No, he said. It wasn’t. Widely available refrigeration? I asked. No, Sidwell answered, refrigeration has been awful. Refrigeration has been absolutely catastrophic.

In the lecture that day Sidwell was saying, among other things, that the new de-acidification processes — there were several of them, and they were all bad — were leaving the treated paper with an unpleasant texture (the wrong texture), depositing powders, sometimes causing colored inks to run, and leaving clamp marks on books’ bodies. De-acidification was hastening destruction, not delaying it.

After the lecture I went up to Professor Sidwell, to see if he’d notice my altered self. Also just to say hello. “Ah, the refrigeration advocate,” he said. He barely looked at me. “Are things well in the land of the young and innovative?”

“I really liked the lecture,” I said. “I guess you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“No, no, that’s not quite accurate,” he said. He looked me over. His tone softened notably as he said, “I don’t want you to take this in a negative way, I don’t mean it like that, but you remind me of my grandmother.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“I’m going to go ahead and ask you something. Have you become one of those macrobiotic people? Or vegans? I strongly recommend against it.”

I couldn’t tell if this was an acknowledgment of my alteration or just something else he was saying. No one else I saw that day had yet noticed anything. Though I had a five months pregnant classmate who had recently made a similar report: that no one had noticed.

And that was the day. I suppose I might have been more detained or disturbed by the change in my romantic prospects — either I had suffered a bad blow or, it was slimly possible, I’d received a tremendous boon — but I kind of knew where I was in my relationship cycle.

* * *

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.