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A regular visitor to this website recently wrote a parody of the letters I post here to readers, featuring a roundup of bizarre catastrophes and near-disasters that had befallen me and my family on a recent, fictional week of our lives. Some of our group expressed concern at the time that I might be offended. Let me tell you: it takes a lot to offend me, these days. Plus, I can hardly deny that I have experienced a spate of calamities around here, recently (and for the last forty five years or so, to be honest.) When we left off, I had just come home from a trip to Louisiana, where I was researching a story about a family who discovered their neighbor had hidden a video camera in their attic, for the purpose of videotaping activities in their bedroom. Fascinating, disturbing story -- I’ll let you know shortly where you can read about it more. What you won’t read, in my story, is that when I went into the family’s attic, myself, to get an idea of what it was like up there, I made the mistake of walking on the drywall, rather than the studs, and broke right through into the family’s kitchen cupboards. Came home from that trip to greet my daughter Audrey, who was finally returning to California after a winter spent at her dad’s house in New Hampshire, recuperating from a broken collarbone suffered in a bad car accident last January. I love it about Audrey that she’s the type of person who will say, within minutes of getting off the plane from a six hour flight, "Let’s go to the beach." So we did...and took a hike up the cliffs of Muir Beach where I spotted a little succulent cactus I thought I’d take a cutting of. I scrambled down the cliff-side to get it. Got home, and within an hour, my face began to itch. Within a couple of hours it was clear I had a massive case of poison oak. My eyes swelled. My cheeks puffed, to the point where I was barely recognizable. My children, seeing me, gasped. I was due to fly to New York City two days later, to deliver a speech at Barnard College. I have to tell you, this was hard. While I understood, intellectually at least, that people would be coming to hear me speak, not to look at my face, the prospect of facing an audience with this truly hideous new face of mine really shook me. It was disturbing to discover how much I count on being able to present myself to the world as a reasonably nice-looking person, and how much my confidence and sense of myself was undermined by the loss of any remaining scrap of attractiveness or charm. I have to add, this was not simply an imagined problem, but one confirmed by my experiences, out and about in the world, over the days that followed. There is no question in my mind that I was treated very differently, while my face was swollen and my forehead resembling Quasimodo, than I am normally treated. Sobering lesson, when one reflects on what lies ahead for all of us. If we are lucky, we will all live long enough to lose our looks. I’m glad I have a few years yet to develop a more mature attitude about all of this, because if I’m honest, I have to admit, I wasn’t ready for it that night at Barnard. In the end, though, I had a great time in New York. Met up with a number of readers from this group, as well as other old friends, though my one disappointment was, the weather proved too cold for ice skating. I arrived home just in time to face the next crisis: the discovery of rats under our kitchen sink. One had become so hungry he’d evidently chewed through the hose to our dishwasher, resulting in flooding downstairs, in my son Willy’s room. But the worst of it was having to listen to the pitter patter of rat feet under the sink, and catching the occasional glimpse of a rat brazen enough to show his face, in the kitchen. I like to think of myself as a pretty tough, self-sufficient type, but when it comes to rats in my kitchen, I revert to the very worst stereotype of a screaming sissy, climbing up on chairs and calling for my sons to rescue me. Only problem being, they were no happier at the prospect of facing the rats than I was. I spent a full day on the phone, investigating various rat-removal options. Electrocution. Poison. Glue traps. We bought a machine that emits an ultrasound noise designed to drive rats crazy -- only problem being, it drove us crazy too. The electrocution guy had me almost over the edge, as he laid out for me the scenario in which our one male rat might at this very moment be impregnating as many as a dozen female rats, with the rat population due to escalate at the rate of 200 a month. "You don’t want traps," he told me. "Problem with traps is, rats are cannibals. They drag off the dead rat and eat him. You find rat parts all over the place. Messy business." And then there was the problem of dead rats, decaying in our house. Even if our dog didn’t get into them, we might contract a deadly virus, just breathing in the air around a rat carcass. Then again, rats might die in our walls, and if they did, the smell would be terrible. And of course, sometimes rats have been known to come up through the plumbing, into the toilet.... I won’t elaborate, but the image produced by that one was truly the stuff of nightmares. In the end, I hired an exterminator, who spent five minutes at our house before leaving a couple of poison traps in key areas. Supposedly these traps would drive our rats outdoors in search of water. An hour later, they’d be dead. I know there will be those of you who think I am pretty cold-blooded for resorting to this method. All I can tell you is, after the rats chewed through that replacement dishwasher hose, causing a second round of flooding, I lost what little compassion for rats I might once have possessed.
In the middle of all this, I made a momentous decision. As some of you may remember, from past discussions here, I had cosmetic surgery ten years ago, in the hopes of restoring my shape to its pre-breastfeeding perkiness. Instead, I found myself suddenly the possessor of a body that would have fit right in at an exotic dancing show in Vegas. As with my researches into facial deformity from poison oak, my little foray into the world of large-breasted women taught me a great deal about the way the world responds to physical appearance. As a woman who started life as a small breasted person, and was transformed, overnight, into a large-breasted one, I’m here to tell you: life is different when you have that kind of body. Not necessarily better, but different. Truthfully, I enjoyed my little trip into the land of buxom women. But the time came, as I knew it would, to come back home. Three years ago, I had those silicone implants removed, but -- still not ready to return to the situation that had inspired me to get surgery in the first place -- I opted for smaller, saline implants, instead of total implant removal. Then, a year and a half ago, one of the replacement implants ruptured, and had to be surgically removed. By this time, I was tired of surgery. Out of money, and angry to discover that the cost of removing the remaining implant would be my responsibility. So, for the last year and a half, I have lived my life with two radically different breasts. Interestingly, this bothered me a great deal less than I had once been bothered by my post-breast-feeding body. Chalk it up to the difference between age thirty five and age forty five, I guess. I liked my gynecologist’s view of the whole thing, actually. "You’re like a female archer," she said. If only I’d had a bow... Last week, I finally got around to having the remaining implant out. And now here I sit, back where I started. All the clothes I bought over the years, for the Sophia Loren-style body, look a little comical on the new, streamlined version of me. And you know what? I feel just right. I want to add, that it feels important that I be able to speak freely about this, though I understand a lot of women might be shy to do so. In recent months--around the time of the publication of my book, At Home in the World -- my critics never failed to mention my having had breast implants, as some shorthand way of conveying the kind of laughable, un-literary type of writer I must be. As for me, while I now look back on my decision to have cosmetic surgery as one I would not make again, I refuse to see it as a source of shame. I breast-fed my children. I grieved the loss of my youthful body. I studied too many Victoria’s Secret catalogues and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues... and felt inferior. All experiences shared by so many women. And specifically because so many of us have shared this kind of experience, I wanted to talk about it, in the hopes that other women might be helped by my acknowledging it. As for what the effect might be on a teenage boy, of having a mother who openly discusses this kind of thing: my son Willy went back to another poetry slam in Berkeley last week, to perform a couple of his poems, including his ode, "The Perfect Breast." That one took second prize. His sister had ridden a bus up from Santa Cruz to cheer him on, but not before lecturing him lovingly, first, to the effect that ALL breasts are perfect. Whatever they look like. There you have it. As I was writing this, our exterminator passed through the room where I’ve been typing -- holding a dead rat aloft, in a position of severe rigor mortis. Once I might have screamed. Now, it’s just life as usual around here. Audrey’s back in school. Our dog Opie’s off to Sonoma, where he’s staying with the family of a boston terrier by the name of Abbie, in the hopes that puppies will result. We get pick of the litter. Some people might say the last thing we need around here is a puppy, but what do they know? With my sons on vacation from school for two weeks, Willy’s heading out for snowboarding and exploring California with his dad, Steve, who travelled out here yesterday. After years of painful battling, we all managed to sit around the kitchen table and share a dinner last night, hold hands and sing grace, for the first time in ten years. Another thing I could not have envisioned, at thirty five, that now makes all the sense in the world. Charlie (who turned 17 last week) is heading to Brazil with me for two weeks, on a trip where I’ll be promoting the Portugese translation of At Home in the World (titled, in Portugese, Abandoned in the Rye, I’m afraid). I have already assured Charlie that I won’t be wearing any thong bathing suits. But -- knowing that we’re headed to Bahia, where the music is nonstop -- I refuse to make any promises that I won’t break into a samba now and then. I’ll be off-line while I’m travelling. In case you get to missing me while I’m away, I thought I’d share with you the transcript of an interview-by-e-mail I conducted with one of the Brazilian journalists who have been interviewing me, in preparation for this trip. Meanwhile, I know you’ll find plenty to talk about, with or without me around. And of course, as always, I want to remind you to consider dropping a check to our wonderful web-mistress, Myrna Uhlig (P.O. Box 636, Clatskanie, OR 97016), if you have been enjoying this group, and want to show her your support. As most of you know, her hard work here is supported by your contributions alone. I’ll be back April 11. Ciao! Now it’s your turn.
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My
son Willy had been in Los Angeles all this time, having taken a three
week leave of absence from school for the dual purpose of working intensively
on his tennis, and -- at the suggestion of an agent who had met him some
weeks earlier -- pursuing his acting career, during pilot season. He came
down to the final cut to be cast in a television series -- quite a large
accomplishment for a boy just starting out -- but though in the end he
didn’t get that job, he did return home with a strong sense of future
interest from lots of casting types there, who pronounced him (as all
of us in this household already know) a guy destined either for the Most
Wanted posters in the post office, or the movies. He plans to head back
to Hollywood this summer, to continue pursuing this goal of his -- and
though of course I see this as a path filled with possible risk and danger,
I also love it that he has gone after this as he did, and that he did
so well. At the moment, he’s scrambling to get caught up on his school
work. But I don’t doubt for a minute that the experience was worthwhile,
for a whole lot of reasons. Only some having to do with tennis and acting.
