The Exploding Breast Implant and the Happily Unhappily Ever After Story
Take Ess. In many ways, her story is typical of a woman in MAM, with the exception that her MAM story takes place in the cushioned world of the 1 percent. Meaning, theoretically, Ess should always be able to afford a roof over her head.
Ess is not a paragon of female virtue, nor is she meant to be. She’s a representation of a certain kind of woman who does what society tells women they should do, who wants what society tells women they should want, and who’s found it’s best not to think too deeply about it.
Ess grew up in Southern New England in a large ranch house in a development of new houses. It was one of those places where everyone makes relatively the same income and enjoys a similar lifestyle and dresses in a similar manner, in clothing from the same outlet stores and catalogues.
Ess had two older brothers and a younger sister. Ess and one brother, Jimmy, got the looks. Her sister, who looked exactly like her mother, was considered the smart one. Ess was Daddy’s little girl. Like a lot of men in those days, Ess’s father was what would now be considered an alcoholic but back then was considered an “everyday drinker.” He returned from the office at five and threw back three G&Ts by the time Ess’s mother tried to make everyone sit down for dinner at six. Sometimes Dad’s drinking was a good thing. Sometimes not so good. When it wasn’t so good, Ess figured out that by amusing and entertaining her father she could jolly him out of his terrible mood and everyone in the family was silently grateful. This she figured out, was her job. Probably for life.
When she graduated from high school, Ess assessed her cards. She was tall and slim, with a figure that was labeled “athletic,” a euphemism for flat chested. Ess was a solid A cup.
This was a major bummer. Being flat chested was on the very top of the list of egregious female imperfections, above “fat,” “hairy,” and “fat and hairy.” Being flat chested was considered an abnormality, an insult to the male gender, the facts of which her brothers never tired of reminding her. They weren’t the only ones. All through tenth grade she’d been bullied by one particular boy about her lack of plentitude. He used to drive by her house on his motorcycle and shoot at her with his BB gun.
“Someday I’m gonna kill you,” he’d shout.
“It’s because he likes you and he doesn’t know how to express it,” her mother said, although Ess knew this was a lie. He really did hate her.
And as she looked at herself in the mirror, Ess realized there was a way to get revenge on that boy and all the others like him: become a model.
She succeeded. She worked a lot, enough to support herself in the world of money, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll where models could spend their time when they weren’t in front of the camera. Unlike a lot of other girls, though, Ess never expected that lifestyle was going to be her life. She wanted the kind of loving, rough-and-tumble family she’d had as a kid.
At twenty-five, Ess married the love of her life, a handsome, former professional soccer player from Ireland who’d transitioned into working in commercial real estate. It was considered an auspicious pairing. Ess was a social dynamo—the kind of person who knew how to oil the water between strangers, who could draw out an intimate confession from the most powerful man in the room. She was a woman who was a fixer, a woman who wasn’t dangerous. A woman who liked to help you solve your problems. Her husband, meanwhile, with his sports background, impressed all her relatives at their Fourth of July barbeques.
The marriage was good for about five years and then real life rushed in.
Ess had two boys. They moved out of New York and her husband lost his contacts and made less money and she tried to work but the only thing she’d ever made money at was modeling and there was no way she was ever going to have the body to do it again. The situation continued for another few years, and then her husband, now in his early forties, had his midlife crisis and ran away.
It turned out her husband had no money. It was an easy sectionorce because there was nothing to split up.
With nowhere else to go, Ess moved back home, back to the ranch house where she’d grown up. Except this time, it was her sons in her brothers’ bedrooms and herself in her frilly pink childhood bed.
Her parents loved their grandchildren. But they were in their seventies, smack in the middle of what was once a typical retirement that included several hours of golf each day and weekend getaways to Mohegan Sun where they went to see Celine Dion. A sectionorced forty-two-year-old daughter and her two sons living at home was not their idea of what their life should look like.
If this were a made-up story, this is the part where Ess would determine to change. She would stop letting life happen to her and take actions that would enable her to write her own narrative. She would find a place to live for her and her two nearly teenage boys that was small but clean and fix-up-able and she would paint the walls herself and would magically get her boys to help her. When they threw paint at each other and laughed, we’d know that Ess was going to turn this boat around. That she was going to find a job at a bakery where she would discover a secret talent for cake decoration—and all would be fine. In the stories women tell each other, the woman always has some special skill or unfound “gift” that allows her to make money, take care of herself and her children, and keep her dignity.
Real life, however, doesn’t always work that way.
In the mirror of h
er childhood bedroom, Ess once again summed up her assets: Her face still looked good. Her legs still looked good. But her breasts—her goddamned breasts again—they looked bad. Two flesh sacks in the shape of torpedoes. Against her mother’s warnings—“small breasts don’t recover from breastfeeding” she’d hissed every time Ess had unbuttoned her shirt—Ess had breastfed. She’d wanted to protect her boys from damage, only to discover there were no defenses against life’s random bad luck.
In the old world, the world where people stayed together, sagging breasts and outward signs of aging didn’t matter. But back in this world they did.
Hence Ess’s visit to the breast surgeon.
Ess got his name from one of her friends and when she went in, she was surprised to find that he was a stumpy, ordinary-looking fellow who reminded her of someone’s father. He wore an optical mask over his face that obscured his eyes and made him resemble a robot.
The nurse, who was in the room the whole time, gently pulled the paper gown below Ess’s shoulders to reveal the lifeless flesh. Looking away, the surgeon carefully handled her breasts as if he were weighing counters in his hands.
He slid back on his stool and sighed. She straightened, quickly pulling up the gown.
“I think I can make you very, very happy,” he said.
“You can?”
“I can make you a D cup. Maybe even a double D. You’ve got lots of extra flesh.”
“Is that good?” she asked.