Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
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Density and Space
by LAUREN OETINGER
1.
This is the part where I tell you that I hate my breasts.
When I try to remember the day I realized I started to hate my breasts I can’t find it, like I’m missing a cable channel. But I remember sitting in the bathtub at my abuela’s house complaining of sore spots on my chest. I remember how she said I was just growing up, filling in, that they were growing pains, and that I’d be fine. And if I blink I remember nothing else about them until after the eclipse of adolescence.
But when the memories are steady, and I can focus again the distaste for my breasts is already there. So I guess I don’t have an answer, which is fine – I’m fine.
2.
I must be 5 or 6, because we’re at Stride Rite and I’m up on the bench and you’re bent over in front of me tying my shoes and pushing down on the toe and you keep asking me, “Do you have room?” But I’m not listening to you. Bent down in front of me the way you are, I can see down your shirt. I am mesmerized by the crease of cleavage, the round fullness, the white bra they’re hidden in. Maybe you knew I was looking and didn’t care because one day I’d have them too. But mine never filled out like yours.
This comes years later: “Men only like women with large (insert simultaneous hand motion here),” my abuela says. Maybe I’m 9. Maybe I’ve just started growing into a woman. Maybe a year from now I’ll be in a regular bra with underwire and lace and have tampons in my summer camp backpack because my mother understands it will be too hard or too embarrassing for me to explain to my male counselor why I can’t go swimming.
3.
Mammograms with gray hair and wrinkles that have seen time and wars and bills paid and bills unpaid and children raised and grown with children of their own grandbabies and pregnant stomachs and sleepless colic nights. Mammograms of retirement planning and laugh lines and timeshares. Mammograms see through the bullshit and the Chanel, through the acrylic and the pantyhose until a woman is only a black and white image of density and space.
4.
Why are there so many damned men here? They really shouldn’t let men come here. They don’t belong here. This is a gynecologist’s office for goodness sake. I feel them looking at me, and they probably figure I’m knocked up.
I’m here for my yearly exam, (“because it’s the responsible thing to do,” my mother says). But it never fails, the one day a year I show up in this office it’s a constant parade of pregnant women and their men. I know they don’t want to be here either, but this is not a place for men. You don’t see me hanging out around colonoscopy waiting rooms do you?
The doctors in this office have seen the anatomy of every female in my family for four generations. You’d think that because of this I’d get a special treatment; that they could block off a square of time where men weren’t allowed in the waiting room. Not only have these doctors seen between the legs of my foremothers, but they’ve delivered every child in my family for the last thirty years. They know my history here, that is, where I come from.
This probably makes me a prude, but there is something unsettling to me about all these men knowing that I’m here for a limited number of reasons, all involving the anatomy between my legs. I wonder how pissed the nurses would get if I put up a sign on the door that says VAGINAS ONLY!!! Stamp it in stone. Make it law.
They call me back before I have time to put this into action. They know trouble when they see it.
5.
After the age of 14 they never got any bigger. My abuela is not alive for this development. Would she have thought me less of a woman? Would she have waved a hand at my chest and said it must be my father’s gringo genes?
But I’m 10 and my mother is escorting me through the department store. I need a training bra, and I’m holding one white bra in every style this store has. We’re walking to a fitting room, and when we find one, we both squeeze into it because my mother still comes into the dressing room with me. I remember slipping my arms through the straps, and my mother hooking the back for me. It was tight and foreign. I pulled the material any which way I might to get a little room, a little air. But my mother’s mouth is set in a line and she tells me to stop fidgeting while she adjusts the straps. She tells me to lift my arms, to move around and see how it fits.
Up until now I’d been enamored with the idea of a bra. I’d seen them in the laundry room; the bras of the women in my family were the coat of arms that I’d been waiting to inherit. But now the grip around my ribcage seemed more a shackle than a statement of independence.
6.
I think I should tell you now that I’m fine. That after playing voice-mail tag for three days, my doctor’s office unceremoniously left me a message lasting approximately 31 seconds, give or take a heartbeat. Long enough to say I’m fine. Long enough to say they want to keep an eye on things, but that I’m fine.
I tell you this now, so you will know how this ends. Maybe in knowing the end, the trip there won’t seem so bad. But really, I’m fine.
7.
Here’s a riddle: Is a person without hair and without breasts a woman?
8.
I’ve been compulsively smelling myself all morning.
Lifting each arm as discretely as possible and taking a deep whiff. I am 23. Last night I scrubbed under my arms in the shower until my skin was pink. I shaved the stubble of hair, and figured any traces of deodorant must be gone. I patted my underarms dry. They itched all night. I was alone.
My mother called, “Are you alright?” she asked me.
“I’m fine.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“If you’re sure. I mean, are you sure? I don’t mind going.”
“Really, I’m fine.”
“Te quiero, mija.”
“I love you, too.”
But this morning I woke up earlier than usual. The sun was still a dream when I rolled out of bed and stood in my living room breathless. I was alone. I went from room to room in my small apartment without turning on the lights.
I imagined to someone looking through my windows my pale skin in the light coming off of the streets must have made me look like a ghost; that I am removed from myself. I am just the transparent outline, the untouchable form without soul. I am alone.
9.
I have an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Specifically with dying. Specifically with when my time will come. I expect bad news. I’ve been preparing myself for years for the moment the doctor will tell me that what I have is incurable, that I should get my affairs in order and travel the world. I have letters in my apartment to the people I love in the event that one day I don’t wake up. I wonder who will come to my funeral, and if any of them will be thinking of me or if they’ll be thinking about the football game they’re missing, or the dirty dishes in their sink, or their pantyhose digging into their waists.
10.
Mastectomy, chemo, hair loss, pink ribbons – I don’t even like pink – walk-a-thons, survivors, non-survivors. But I’m fine.
October is breast cancer awareness month (I never knew that, before). But this is not October.
I am fine, but how many are not?
11.
The steering wheel is sticky under my fingers. I can’t remember if the day is chilly or if the sun is out, but I know that my heart barely moves. I know it is noon, and that I’ve been up since before the sun came up. I know I was alone.
The women behind the counter are looking at me strangely, and I guess they’re wondering why I’m here. I don’t look old enough to be here. I’m in the waiting room for half an hour before they call me through the door. The nurse holding my chart is pretty and she smiles.
Inside the room she asks me to lie down and locate the problem for her. I point there, just there, on the right side. She squirts warm lubricant onto the spot. Movies, TV shows – they all said it would be cold. But I’ve never seen a sonogram of a breast on television, maybe it’s different. I expected my skin to pimple from the chill, but the room is warm.
I wish I knew how to tell you what she did next, but to tell you the truth I’m not watching. I’m looking at the screen in front of her. I’m looking at the black and white images that were supposed to indicate mass and tissue composition.
Inside I look like static television without sound.
12.
This is the 143rd name I’ve neatly painted onto a tile. I’m bent over and my hand is cramping from holding the paintbrush too tightly. I swear that my stack of tiles is impressively tall, so tall that those who walk by no doubt gawk in wonder at my accomplishment.
Okay, it might only be the 20th, but it feels like more, and the stack of tiles that need to be completed gets bigger every day. The girls I work with have done more tiles than I have, so I know I shouldn’t complain. To be honest, I’m not a great candidate for this project because I work too slowly. Don’t be such a perfectionist, my boss tells me. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
I work at a small pottery shop that smells like warm coffee beans and vanilla. There are days where this is the only place I feel welcome. On occasion, organizations in the community ask us to do projects for them. Schools, churches, non-profits – they make walls out of tiles that we paint for them. There’s a new mall up the street and there’s going to be a wall there for breast cancer victims. I want my tiles to be perfect, because I’m writing more than a name on a tile with a pink ribbon on it. It feels like I’m carving their tombstones by hand. I try to remember the names, try to retain them in my memory so they can live on past a glance, but I can’t remember them for much longer than it takes to paint them on the tiles because there are too many.
When the wall is completed, I think I might bring flowers.
13.
I’m sitting on the examination table in a thin cloth robe made to fit women of all sizes – it leaves little to the imagination. My doctor guides my head back onto the pillow at the end of the table. She lifts my right arm, parting the robe down the center. She asks me questions about other things – school, my niece, anything – and I hardly feel her hands working in slow methodical circles.
Now she does something she’s never done before. She opens the other side of my robe without closing the first side. She’s stopped talking. She takes my hand and leads it to my right breast.
“Feel this,” she says.
And I do.
“Do you feel it?”
I do.
A slight swelling under the skin, something that isn’t like the tissue around it. Small, but noticeable. The words sonogram and mammogram and biopsy are thrown at me. That because my mother, and her mother, all had breast lumps I ought to get it looked at.
I’m told not to worry.
I’m told it’s just a precaution.
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I’m told to rest easy.
But I don’t think I need to tell you that I don’t.
14.
Here’s another: Which would I hate more, the presence or the absence of my breasts?
15.
For this is my prayer: Give unto me, Oh Lord, the tranquility to see this through. In this let my soul be purified through the flame of fear that casts the shadow in the valley I stand in. For I will praise you in the storm.
My healer, my redeemer, I praise you in the storm, Lord.
Show me the path, Lord, though it be dark and narrow. Put a compass in my heart that will lead me Home.
I see one set in the sand, Lord. And I thank You.
16.
Technicians cannot give results.
I’m still on the table when the sonogram technician hands me a hand-towel and tells me I can clean myself off. She’s left me and I’m sitting on this table still staring at the screen, now blank. The room is silent wanting even the noise from other patients walking through the halls. I’m insulated, isolated.
There might be literature on the walls, or pamphlets, but all I see is a sign typed out with even margins and bold font.
Technicians cannot give results.
I wonder if they used Garamond font, someone told me once that everything looks nicer in Garamond.
Technicians cannot give results.
I’m thinking back to the self-addressed envelope I filled out. I’m thinking about what they will send me. I’m thinking it might be pictures, that like a mother I may hold them to the light and say this is growing inside me.
Technicians cannot give results.
But really, I’m fine.
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Brittany Passons is an undergraduate at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is married and loves to write poetry. She spends most of her free time entertaining her two adorable children, Aiden and Adelaide.