D R A M A++Q U E E N

What's the sleaziest thing you've ever done? Come clean in Drama Queen for a Day
(04/14/98)

T A B L E++T A L K

Is your workplace "family friendly"? Discuss corporate policies and attitudes on everything from maternity leave to child care in Table Talk

BY SALLIE TISDALE | I'm lying on the operating table covered with a flannel sheet warm from the dryer, staring into the inverted silver bowl of lights at my own miniature, upside-down image. My right arm is bound to a board behind my head. The sheet covers me from neck to toes except for a single circle of flesh -- my right breast, exposed as neat and pale as a newly opened rose. A masked nurse dressed all in green leans over me, large and close, tracing a line at the edge of my breast with her finger.

"Where did you get this scar?" she asks, with a throaty English accent. I mention an earlier surgery, not important now.

"I have a scar a little like that," she says, and I feel she's smiling, the mask moving with her words. "I had a mastectomy, myself."

Then I'm left alone for a while, bound and blanketed, that one breast with its centerpiece of crinkled brown staring down at me from the silvery lights, blinking when I shift.

I love my breasts. I love yours, too. I cup them, the breasts of the women of the world, with great fondness, in celebration. Breasts are home, they are unearned kindness, they are a small mercy in a cruel hour.

I love all that frames the breast -- the neck, the shoulder, the collarbone, the tiny horseshoe of bone and the soft plane of flesh above them. I love the history of women's clothes, thousands of years of clothes to disguise the waist, cover the bottom, drape the thighs, hide the ankles and push the breasts up and out into the world, mounds of skin mocking the curtains of fabric below.

I love bras, all kinds of bras: padded bras and strapless bras; Wonderbras and nursing bras; pushup, training, junior bras; sport bras; underwire bras; see-through bras. Bras make cleavage, and I love décolletage and cleavage, the cleft between, that warm, inviting darkness.

I have white and pink and black and blue bras, lacy and smooth bras. My daughter wears bras now. She was a little shocked when we went shopping for the first one, shocked in that conservative adolescent way at the mundane attitudes of adults to all she still finds new. All these bras and undies and unknown contraptions of lace and elastic hanging in public, available in unexpected colors, fingered by strangers who smiled at each other.

She was particularly shocked that the lingerie lady expected to help her pick one out.

An hour before my surgery, I sat at the admitting desk, sick with fear and second thoughts, and answered the clerk's questions.

"Are you married?"

"Yes," I said.

"What is your maiden name?"

"That is my name," I said. "I didn't change it."

She duly jots down my name, again, in the slot marked maiden.

"Do you work outside the home?"

I consider possible explanations, the meaning of work, my unused nursing license in my wallet, my writing.

"No," I said.

"Well then," she continued, her way clear, "what is your husband's Social Security number?"

And so on, through his birth date, employer and much more, and not another question about me. My illegitimacy was duly established.

N E X T+P A G E: The power of breasts, together