NONFICTION

Lost and Unlost

By Shala Erlich     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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I. Lost and Unlost

In the dream, I’ve misplaced my suitcase of usual outfits somewhere over the Mediterranean and find myself in a tank top of peach, see-through netting to show off the breasts I find underneath.

These found breasts are not the breasts I’ve lost but a poetic idea of them: perfect paisleys decorating my chest with teardrop loopy-droopy beauty and exuberance that is maybe—I wonder as I look them over in the dream mirror—a bit too much?

The curves and nipples look back at me the way breasts do. These are purely ornamental and unreal; they don’t need to feel any of the now-phantom sensations or feed my children or jounce along on a run with me.

After I wake up, the wide-eyed teardrops remind me of other dreams about my lost breasts, ones in which I am suddenly exposed to the knowledge that they are really gone: on an exam table inspected by a male doctor, like Esther at the beauty contest, or getting into a crowded pool without my suit.

Also: the first time I dreamed my breasts reappeared, as young cupcakes of modest perfection. I peeked at my reclining chest in disbelief, not wanting to make them go away again by looking too much. I looked again and saw the breasts were still there, and also the scars, unfurling from the sides and underneath, and I started to invent theories about how the surgeons were able to work around my breasts, leaving them intact, or whether they had been miraculously reattached, lovely and alive.

But in that moment of not knowing how they came to be restored to me, there was a lifting joy and magic: the lost unlost through mystery and wishing.



II. Bathtub

When you have the house to yourself, there is no more feeling that your illness—if you want to call it that—is a performance. That you must maintain your most important character trait, quiet perseverance, your habit of not making too much fuss, complaining only with a light humor. The more dire the circumstances, the lighter and more understated the jokes. Surgery. Chemo. The weeks and months of physical and emotional aftereffects.

Is strength camouflaged as normalcy, or does normalcy mimic strength? Whatever it is, there are small interruptions, allowable moments of collapse: retreating to bed, watching Netflix, napping or pretending to nap. It is winter and then spring and you keep working and shopping and cooking and picking up and dropping off and conversing with the kids in the back seat, at the dinner table, at the bedroom door. But how horrible to calibrate the moments of collapse—for the kids, for the ever-swabbing deckhand of a husband, for the vast ship of the family itself. And, let’s face it, for your own need to feel like some version of your old self.

Finally, you have the house to yourself. You could crumple; you could howl; you could call your friend on the phone and talk like a teenager lying on your bedroom floor. You could be not a mother, not a wife, not a vixen, not a survivor, not in competition, not a role model, not the narrator in your head. You could be nothing for nobody. You could take a bath in the scarred tub with the door open. You could submerge in the hot water. You could be a shapeless person with a body that no one is looking at and no one is even imagining, that doesn’t have to be useful or beautiful or appropriate or too noticeable or too hidden. A person in a body, floating.



III. Invisible

I never used to notice how breasts are private and public. Even when they’re not breastfeeding in a restaurant or sunbathing in the south of France; even when they’re covered in clothing, everyone can see them, or their outline anyway. They’re right on the front of your chest. Except mine. No one can see mine.

My breasts are invisible because they don’t exist, but I create a fake outline with obscuring clothing and padded bras, and I create a mental outline out of memory.

I know I am not the only one missing her breasts, not even close. But sometimes it feels that way.

Especially when I feel jealous about other women’s breasts. How come EVERYONE ELSE gets to have breasts? Old women, homeless women with their grocery carts, women who are smoking, tall women, short women, big-breasted women, small-chested women—and they get to let them peek out. It feels like the whole point of breasts is to let them show—a little or a lot of cleavage, or a bit of side boob in a sleeveless dress.

Sometimes, I’m jealous of my old self, my younger self, the one with breasts that could peek out. Mostly, I have tender remembrances of that young self, all the way back to the teenager in layered tank tops, a bra strap falling off her shoulder.

I remember how, when my new breast buds appeared under a pink T-shirt with thin blue stripes in the spring of sixth grade, they at first seemed extra to my essential self, and then gradually assimilated into who I was.

And much later, how I discovered the joy and power of having breasts, in public and in sex. How I learned, over time, to calibrate how much to cover them up to be taken seriously (maybe) and when I could show them off (to be taken seriously in a different way) and how much and when and with whom. And the opposite of these calculations: the unselfconsciousness of having my breasts along for the ride, whatever I was doing.



IV. Magical Thinking

As I tell myself the story of my body with breasts, a story of developing selfhood, I also see a shadow story, one of dim but persistent fear: that the DES my pregnant mother was prescribed in 1970 in France might give me cancer or fertility problems; that my mother’s breast cancer, diagnosed when I was sixteen, might come back for her or for me. And I can trace how I turned my response to these fears into a plan to become a doctor. Wanting safety and reassurance for myself and my mother and all the other women whose bodies wound up on doctors’ exam tables, I followed my studious and sympathetic inclinations into medicine, but I was always driven by magical thinking, warding off these dangers.

After medical school, I chose a residency in pathology, inspired by a funny and engaging teacher. Pathologists seemed less stressed out, more willing to include me in their day than other doctors. I loved looking at the pink and purple cells under the microscope and was good at reading what they said. Also, that current of magical thinking carried me along: the submerged belief that diagnosing cancer and other ailments might keep me from getting them.



V. Who Needs Donuts?

When my daughter was a toddler, my friend Jess gave us the book Who Needs Donuts?

It’s a strange and amazing book with quirky, obsessive illustrations, not entirely suitable for toddlers. Jess loved it from her own childhood. It was a typical Jess gesture: art-loving, whimsical, insouciant, with no tolerance for Goodnight Moon-type bullshit. She had a gift for cooking and swearing, both with unexpected flavors, and for friendship.

We met in our twenties, in mid-nineties Seattle, when she answered my newspaper ad for a roommate. As soon as she moved in, she painted the sunset view of the Olympic Mountains from her old apartment on the door of her closet. She was teaching modern dance to kids. I was starting medical school.

Who needs donuts? Everyone, it turns out, needs donuts.

Who needs breasts? I wonder sometimes. Everyone needs breasts! Or likes breasts. At least most people do, especially when they are babies.

I personally love breasts. Even though they aren’t good for me, kind of like donuts.

We lived together for two years. Then Jess moved away for graduate school. We kept up our friendship from a distance, as we each married, started families, earned our degrees.

Jess, who had magnificent breasts and a tall dancer’s body, endured a series of surgeries to treat her initially-small-seeming, barely-cancer cancer: a lumpectomy, a larger lumpectomy, a mastectomy. This happened in our early forties, when we were less in touch, although I contributed to a GoFundMe for her reconstructed nipple tattoo.



VI. Freezer

Our freezer breaks on the evening of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. I spent the afternoon door-knocking for the Democrats in a subdivision out of the movie E.T. We discover the problem after dinner when my son serves himself ice cream and finds it liquified.

My husband scoops piles of dripping ice from the icemaker and dumps them in the sink. I start on the top shelf: packages of soggy corn and blueberries. Freezer-burned bagels.

That’s when I come across the circular gel pad, the diameter of one of my former breasts, given to me after a biopsy to wear inside my bra. It could be from three years before my cancer diagnosis, when the radiologist biopsied what, in retrospect, was the one area that didn’t have cancer. But haven’t I cleaned out the freezer since then?

More likely it’s from the more recent biopsies on my right breast or the biopsy of my left breast, a couple weeks after I already knew I had cancer on the right.

The gel pad has fuzzy, white, stippled fabric on one side, like the synthetic bib they clamp around your neck at the dentist—that’s the side I was supposed to put against my skin. The other side is transparent plastic through which I can see the pale cotton-candy pink gel, now mostly thawed but with white speckles throughout, like some cheeses, where the gel crystals are still frozen or have coalesced with age.

Whether it was snugged up against the bruised bloodied spots on my right breast or my left, the pad ambushes me with sadness, the sense memory of how icy skin-chill overlaid the deep, pinched breastache. This gel pack, indestructible but disposable—a cousin to the mesh underwear the nurses gave me to hold up the giant, bloody, absorbent pads after childbirth—was designed to give comfort to my poor, absent, taken breasts. My breasts, which are beyond comfort.

Now all I have is this sudden letdown of grief. My throat closes and my tears well up and I toss it in the trash and keep on going, emptying the freezer.

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TO READ MORE FROM THIS ESSAY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 1




SHALA ERLICH is a practicing psychiatrist in Bellingham, WA. Her essays and stories appear, or are forthcoming, in The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Missouri Review, The Ghost Story (Fall 2023 Supernatural Fiction Award), and others. She is at work on a novel that follows a psychiatry resident through a single night shift.


VOLUME 57 No. 1