It’s All about the Breasts
It’s All about the Breasts
Ruth’s up before her alarm goes off. She’s always up early and isn’t sure why she even bothers to set an alarm at all. She stands in the shower, her washcloth full of suds, the spray of the water tapping off her shower cap like rain on a tin roof. While the steam fogs up the glass, her mind wanders to the day ahead: a status meeting with the Barbie team, a meeting with their accountant, another one with the bankers and one with her advertising agency at the end of the day. Meetings, meetings and more meetings. Every minute has been planned out, but the one thing she hasn’t allotted time for, what she has not been anticipating, what has not even entered her mind, is what she’s about to discover in the shower.
As her soapy hand rides up and over her rib cage, her fingers head north, gliding over her right breast until— What? —she stops. She backs up, feeling for it again. It can’t be. She feels for her breast again. It’s there all right. A lump. She runs her fingers over it, around it. Does it hurt? No. But it wasn’t there yesterday or the day before. Was it? Her skin turns to ice beneath the spray of hot water and she reaches for the wall as her legs go weak.
Sarah died of cancer. She was just fifty-five; Ruth is forty-three. She remembers scouring the country, finding doctors and experimental treatments, doing everything in her power to save Sarah’s life. But despite it all, Sarah didn’t make it; her body was consumed by cancer. It’s in their family. And now it’s in her, too. All she can think is, No, not now. I don’t have time for cancer .
—
It’s been almost a week since Ruth discovered the lump, and on that Saturday, she’s offered to take Barbara shopping. Really, it’s a bribe so her daughter will spend time with her. Now that Barbara’s married, Ruth hardly sees her anymore, and oh, how she misses her. The house is so quiet now. Ruth even misses the slamming doors, the stomping around, the bickering that was background music for them. When Barbara was younger, the two of them loved to spend the day shopping, and she knows Barbara can’t afford anything new on Allen’s salary, so Ruth will take her to Giorgio’s, which just opened on Rodeo Drive, and let her pick out whatever she wants.
Before she swings by to get Barbara, Ruth needs to stop at the office to check on a few things. It won’t take long, fifteen minutes, maybe an hour tops. Ruth delegates as much as she can; refinancing the building, bringing on a new trucking company, ordering new boxes, deciding the best time to have the parking lot repaved—all that is off her plate. But she’s the only one who can handle the forecasting or structure a marketing strategy for the new toys they’re bringing out.
As she pulls into the Mattel lot, she sees Jack’s car and a few others, which is not surprising—someone’s always working. She says good morning to the weekend security guard and pushes through the turnstile. Twist, Frankie, Sid and a handful of others are milling about, and she bumps into Stevie coming out of the kitchen, carrying two mugs of coffee. When Ruth sees Jack on Mahogany Row, he asks if she’s okay.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “Just tired is all.”
They each say something else, but neither one is really listening to the other, and they both head into their offices. His door closes first, then she shuts hers.
Before she even sits down, Ruth fishes out a cigarette from her desk drawer. She’s smoking too much. She knows this, but what difference does it make now that she already has cancer? And she just knows she has it. She checks the lump every chance she can, and it’s still there. A reminder of her mortality and the horrible road that lies ahead. Like a phantom limb, the painful memories of Sarah’s illness come rushing back. Ruth can smell that sour, antiseptic hospital fetor, hear the endless beeping of the heart and blood pressure machines monitoring her sister’s vitals. Is this what’s in store for her? Even when she’s not touching the lump, Ruth can still feel it: a throbbing sensation caused by all her nervous energy pooling in that one spot.
She’s doing her best to ignore it, hoping to bury her burden beneath the stack of work on her desk. But after a few moments of shuffling papers, it’s obvious she can’t concentrate. She looks at the pink memo slip on her desk, beating like a heart. In her secretary’s loopy script it says, Dr.Rekers. Please call right away. There are two telephone numbers: office and home. This message has been sitting there since Friday afternoon, but she couldn’t bring herself to return the call, wanting to prolong the inevitable. It’s the call right away that frightens her. Urgency is never a good thing when it comes to cancer. She knows that from Sarah. Ruth hasn’t said a word to Elliot about the lump. He has no idea that she went to Dr. Rekers’s office earlier that week for a needle biopsy, where they drew fluid from the lump.
As an adult she’s always taken her breasts for granted. It’s only now that she’s in danger of losing them that she remembers how much she wanted breasts when she was growing up. She would lock the bathroom door and study her prepubescent chest in the mirror, desperately looking for any signs of womanhood. All the popular girls had already begun to develop, and, being as short as she was, she felt like a child in comparison. She’d been so fascinated and preoccupied with the whole idea of breasts. She’d studied her classmates, hoping they wouldn’t notice as she sized them up to see who had them, who didn’t, how large or small they were. Who wore a bra, who didn’t? Who jiggled when they walked, whose nipples protruded beneath their sweaters? And what about her own breasts? What kind would she have and where were they? When those breasts she’d longed for did arrive, Sarah had taken her shopping for her first brassiere, showing Ruth how to adjust the shoulder straps, how to get herself down in there . Ruth had been both proud and self-conscious about wearing that bra. She’d seen the way the boys snapped girls’ bra straps—a sign that they liked them—and she’d hoped someone would snap hers, too.
Until Barbie, Ruth had forgotten what a goddamn big deal breasts are—for little girls, big girls, for mothers, for men. They are the ultimate symbol of femininity, a source of female power and even sustenance for a newborn. If she loses her breast, how will Elliot react? Will he still think she’s beautiful? Will he ever want to touch her again? Make love to her again? Will she live long enough to find out?
She can’t put this off any longer. She looks at the two telephone numbers on the message slip. It’s a Saturday, so while she lights another cigarette, she tries the home number. Her heart is doing double time while she hears Dr.Rekers’s wife calling out, “Paul, it’s Ruth Handler.” In the background she hears a dog barking, hears a cupboard shutting, hears something else she can’t decipher.
“Oh, Ruth, finally,” Dr.Rekers says, sounding a little out of breath, like she’s called him in from the yard, maybe the swimming pool. She pictures him standing there, dripping onto the kitchen floor, a trail of footprints leading from the door. “I’m glad you called. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Well? Just tell me.” Ruth grips the phone with one hand, holds her cigarette in the other. Blood is thrumming up inside her head so loud she can hardly hear her own voice. “Do I have it?”
“Have what? Cancer?” he asks, as if it could be anything else. “No. You don’t have cancer, Ruth. Your biopsy came back benign.”
“What?”
“That’s why I called yesterday. It’s just fibrous tissue. Very common. Especially in women with large breasts.”
“You mean it? I don’t have cancer? You won’t have to take my breast?”
“It was totally benign. But—and I’m serious about this, Ruth—you have a history of cancer in your family, and you need to quit smoking.”
She looks at the cigarette scissored between her fingers.
Before hanging up the phone she promises Dr.Rekers she’ll quit. Just as soon as she gets through the Ken doll launch. And she’ll make all kinds of other positive changes, too. She’ll spend more time with the children. She and Elliot will take them all on that vacation to Hawaii they ended up canceling. She will slow down. She’ll get back to playing tennis…
“Did you forget about me?”
She looks up and sees Barbara standing in the doorway, arms folded and fury in her eyes.
“You did, didn’t you? You forgot we were going shopping today.”
“No, of course I didn’t.” But heaven help her, just then, she did. The guilt just about clobbers her and she has no choice now but to sit there and take the beating from her daughter.
“You said you’d pick me up at eleven. I’ve been sitting at home waiting for you. And I knew it! I just knew I’d find you down here working…”
Ruth lets her rant and rave, because what is the alternative? Scaring the living daylights out of Barbara by telling her that she was on the phone with her doctor? That she thought she had breast cancer? That she thought she might die just like her aunt Sarah did? Ruth can’t do that.
“…Work always comes first with you. Always has, always will,” Barbara is saying now. “How do you think that makes me feel, to be an item you have to check off on your to-do list?”
—
Next door, Stevie and Jack are in his office, working. This is the third weekend in a row she’s gone into the office. Today they’re working out the final details on a Barbie concept that Charlotte’s calling Busy Gal . So far all Stevie’s got is a red linen pencil skirt and jacket. Charlotte wants the red-and-white-striped blouse to match the jacket lining. Jack wants to plus it up, and since Barbie is a fashion model, why not add a portfolio with some sketches inside? Stevie argues they should be photographs of Barbie instead. They’re going back and forth on all this when they hear Ruth’s daughter pitching a fit, her voice carrying right through the wall.
It feels like Stevie’s eavesdropping, and she can’t believe what she’s hearing. Barbara clearly resents Ruth, but can the girl not appreciate what her mother’s doing? My God, here is a woman practically running this entire company. Stevie’s mother only held one job. Ever. Modeling cars. Buicks, to be specific. It’s how her parents met. Stanley Klein stood off to the side watching the pretty brunette on the revolving platform pointing to the adjustable wire-spoke wheels, the chrome hubcaps and luggage racks. The story goes that her father was instantly smitten, and Stevie takes solace in thinking her parents were happy together once upon a time. That is, before she came along and spoiled all their fun. She wonders what might have become of her mother had she not gotten pregnant so young.
Stevie looks at Jack, assessing him as he bends over his drafting table, working out the intricate details of the fashion portfolio. She’s never noticed before what a lovely profile he has—straight nose, strong jaw, sexy Adam’s apple. Her mind begins to drift, and she thinks about how Jack is kind and caring, recalling how he rolled up his sleeves to get her old clunker going when the spark plugs and alternator died, and how he cosigned for her car loan. One day, when her coffee went down the wrong pipe and she fell into a coughing fit, it was Jack who ran and got her a glass of water. And—she catches herself. Oh whoopty-fucking-doo. The whole thing is ridiculous. Other than the one time when he tried to kiss her, he hasn’t made another pass at her, and given his reputation, she sometimes wonders why he hasn’t tried again. Has he given up? Does he not find her attractive? Has he put her in the same camp as Ginger? And even if he has, why does this bother her? It’s not that she wants him to kiss her. Does she? No, definitely not. But still, she does catch herself from time to time looking at his soft pillowy lips and wondering, just wondering…
Stevie is still wondering when another burst of shouting comes from Ruth’s office. “I swear to God, sometimes I wish we never went to Europe. I wish you never saw that doll.”