A Little Change of Face

“Here,” he said, handing me the prescription he’d written. “Now, I want to warn you. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“You mean I’m going to feel even worse than I do now?”

“I’m afraid so. Chicken pox when you’re a kid is pretty easy. But as an adult? The older you get, the harder it is. You’re also going to be contagious for another seven to ten days, so no going out in public places until all the pocks scab over.”

Great.

“Now, I want you to call the office every day to let me know how you’re doing.” There was my reassuring Dr. Berg again. With all that talk of worse pain and the need to be quarantined, I’d wondered where he’d gone to. “This isn’t going to be easy for you and I’m going to want to keep a close eye on you until you start feeling better.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing up and catching sight of myself in the mirror on the wall. Damn! I already had more spots than I had when I’d first come in there. “Um…can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Am I going to look like this forever? I feel like that animal in Put Me in the Zoo.”

“Put me in the zoo?” he asked, puzzled.

I sighed the sigh of the long-suffering librarian. It’s amazing how often people don’t get book references.

“Kids’ book,” I elaborated. “Animal keeps changing his spots. Big spots. Little spots. Red, blue, all the colors, really. Am I going to wind up like that?”

I felt strange, exposing myself that way. Over the years, we’d often talked about socio-cultural issues and he knew that I was big on saying that I didn’t think that appearances were as important as people made them out to be, that most women would be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about the outer so much and just focused on the inner. And I’d even backed it up by being the kind of woman who usually dressed casually, almost never bothered with makeup. Would he think now that all that had just been a sham? Would he think me shallow for being so concerned?

But he laughed, that reassuring sound. “Of course not. Provided you don’t scratch, before you know it, you’ll be just as beautiful as you’ve always been. Even with the spots, you still look good, Scarlett.”

It really was too bad about that wife and those grandchildren.

“Can I ask you a question now?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you get the chicken pox as a kid, just like everybody else?”

4

(And now for a little station break, as we talk about my breasts…)

It’s really bothering you, isn’t it? I mean, like, you’re not going to let me go any further until I tell you about those breasts?

Am I right? Come on, I’m right, aren’t I?

Fine. You asked for it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It all started when I was ten years old….

Hard to believe that this silent war I’ve been having with a particular body part has been going on for nearly three-quarters of my life, for twenty-nine years. You’d think I’d be over it by now. God, I need to grow up.

But really, it all started when I was ten years old. Ten was when I went through puberty, got my first period, got my first hint of a pimple and when I heard the words for the first time, those immortal words that no girl or woman can ever hear enough of in her life—can you hear my sarcasm?—as spoken from the still prepubescent wise-guy mouth of Don Deeble, “Man, I’d like to grab a hold of those tits!”

Yeah, my life has been fun.

And it’s only gotten better from there.

On the trampoline; out jogging, even with a humongously camouflaging sweatshirt on; walking by construction sites—there hasn’t been one clichéd set of circumstances I’ve ever encountered in life where a member of the male population has failed to hold up his end of the cliché, has failed to make a loudly rude utterance something along the lines of the above citation from Don Deeble.

And they always preface it with that one italicized word: man.

“Man, those are great…!”

“Man, would you look at those…!”

“Man, man, man…tits!”

It got to the point, pretty early on in life, where it started to seem as though, based on the evidence of those sentences, my breasts could not exist in a man-less vacuum. The way I figure it, the fact that I’m heterosexual has as much to do with the fact that the male population has linguistically linked my breasts to their manhood for all time through the employment of a simple sentence structure as it does to any natural inclinations on my part.

Of course, none of the really fun stuff I’ve mentioned above gives any hint of the dark side of having spectacular breasts: the dates that turn ugly because mere possession of nicer-than-normal mammary glands is somehow interpreted as a law requiring willing sexual congress under risk of penalty for refusal; or the odd male relative who starts showing an unusual interest in your development, or worse; or the fact that some girls write you off without a chance, visibly resenting you, as though you had some kind of control over such a fate, as though you’d made an unholy alliance with the devil of pubescence.

But that’s just yet more of the good stuff.

Did you ever notice how, in today’s world, the most notoriously-breasted woman are all triple-namers? In the past, it was the alliterative that had it, the Marilyn Monroes. Nowadays, it’s the Pamela Sue Andersons and the Anna Nicole Smiths. Which is really bizarre, because that triple-namer thing means there’s still room left on-bimbo-board for…Scarlett Jane Stein?

Okay, now here’s the really killer part:

I do not—repeat, do not—have notorious breasts, not like those other women do.

I have spectacular breasts, which is nowhere near the same as notorious breasts, but is the same as average breasts…which you’ll soon see.

All of those triple-namers—who, by the way, are all blond, which I am not—have breasts that are creeping up on or have even tipped over to the other side of the forty-inch mark. Plus, they have cup sizes that all equal or surpass the enough-is-enough alphabetic place mark embodied by the fourth letter.

I, on the other hand, am a 36C, which is—collective gasp here!—average.

Yes, folks, that statistic is really true: the average American woman is a 36C.

So, why so much fuss about me? Why have all the men I’ve been naked with each uttered some version of the personalized phrase, “Man, Scarlett, but you’ve got great breasts!”? I’ve heard that phrase so often, it’s been so universal in my life, that on more than one occasion I’ve been tempted to inquire of whichever man was humping above me, “Um…uh…excuse me? But this is really an honest question here: Do you say that to all the girls? I mean, is saying that, like, some kind of thing with men?” But I’ve never had the nerve. And, truth to tell, the guys, even though they all say the same thing and all look the same way when they say it, all somehow also have that “Eureka!” look on their face, like they’ve discovered hooter gold where previously they’ve only encountered hooter tin.

Oh, and, parenthetically speaking? Yes, I do know that a lot has been made over the years of the fact that men have a tendency to be—hmm…what’s the most delicate way to put this here?—penis-obsessed, but we gals can be pretty breast-obsessed ourselves, this entire chapter standing as some kind of monumental proof of that fact. We just don’t like to publicize it.

But back to my breasts. Which I still maintain are average.

Did you ever notice how the most spectacular thing that any American kid can aspire to is to be average? Being top of the class is nothing to boast about; being head cheerleader is an open invitation for people to wish obesity on you later in life; being too good at chess is like requesting to get your ass kicked. On the other hand, being stupid means people calling you that; being fat means people calling you that and stupid; being not good at even chess means there’s not even a lowest rung for you to stand on.

The middle. Keeping to the middle ground in everything is the safe place to be as a kid in America.

And this middleness extends to adulthood as well. The wealthy are resented, the poor are blamed, and the message is clear: the safest place to be, even if it’s getting harder to keep up with the housing payments, is middle class.

In the breast department, if in nothing else in this life, I represented the national average, which was interpreted as being a smashing success, breastwise.

So, basically, I was spectacular mostly by virtue of being so damned average.