I understand you’re not feeling so good today, Scarlett,” said Dr. Berg, glancing at what the nurse had written on my chart as he entered the examination room, hand outstretched for a warm shake; Dr. Berg never looked scared that he might catch something from a patient. Dr. X, on the other hand, had always given a can’t-you-people-keep-your-distance look at the audacity of patients coming to see him while sick. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“These spots.” I indicated my face. “I think I have the measles.”
“The measles?” He spoke in a soothing voice as he felt my lymph nodes, examined this, looked at that. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All these red spots—it just seemed to me like this is what the measles would look like.”
“No,” he said, sitting down on the stool next to the examining table, pen already flying across his page, “you don’t have the measles. I’m pretty sure what you have is the chicken pox.”
“The chicken pox?”
“Yes,” he said, starting to write a prescription. “Have you been exposed to anyone recently that may have been infected?”
I told him about Sarah, the girl with the list in the library two weeks ago.
“Yup,” he said, doing the math on the dates, “that’s the incubation period.”
That damned precocious little reader, I thought. Why couldn’t she have waited until later in the season, just like the rest of the kids, to come in for her books? Or at least have waited until she really wasn’t contagious. I suppose that’s Harried Mom’s fault….
“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
