The Cast

by Amy Blumenfeld

  Nolan shifted in his seat and started twirling a pen with his fingers. It was something he tended to do when impatient.

  “Well, yes, some women certainly choose to forgo reconstruction, but typically they are significantly older. I can’t say I know of many, or any firsthand, who are on the younger side, like you.”

  There was a lull for a moment. Dr. Farrow removed his wire-rim glasses, buffed them with the edge of his white coat, and said, “You know, Rebecca, years ago, young women didn’t have the options they have today. You’re very lucky. We now have the ability to make patients look like themselves after such a radical and emotional surgery. You’re not even forty. You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t you want to be made whole again?” He carefully placed the glasses back on his face.

  Whole? I thought. It was an interesting word choice. Would I somehow be incomplete if I didn’t choose reconstruction? I said nothing. I understood his point. There was no denying that the strides had been great, and the options presented were nothing short of a blessing for countless women. But at that moment, I just wasn’t sure I was ready to be one of them.

  When I thought about losing my breasts, I felt relief. I felt free. I felt liberated from fear. It never occurred to me that I would ever feel inadequate or stop resembling myself. I knew I would still be me, with or without breasts—just as I learned at age fifteen that I was still me, with or without hair. The only difference was that hair grew back and breasts didn’t, and that with hair loss, there was no choice to be made. Thanks to reconstruction, I had the power to choose.

  “Well, if you have no further questions, Anne will set you up with the paperwork and we can get you on the calendar. It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said. He extended a hand to me and then to Nolan. “Feel free to call if you want to discuss anything further.”

  As soon as Dr. Farrow and Anne exited the room, Nolan seemed to come back to life. “So?” he asked. “Are you going to play it safe with a B cup, or are we going triple D?”

  “Ha, you’re funny.” I slipped my blouse over my head.

  “What? You want an A cup?”

  “I don’t know if I want any of it.”

  “Bec, you don’t have a choice. You have to do this. You know that.”

  “I’m not talking about the mastectomy. I’m okay with that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I mean this. I’m not sure about this whole implant thing. It’s not really sitting right with me.”

  He was silent for a moment and then laughed nervously. “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head.

  His face turned red. “You’re kidding me,” he said. He began to laugh, but not in the way he’d chuckle at a joke. This laugh seemed to be filled with resentment, and I could feel his anger begin to percolate. “I thought you were just curious when you asked that question about opting out. You were actually serious?”

  I nodded. “Did you hear what he said about the risks and the multiple operations and not knowing how the scar tissue would impact the reconstruction?”

  He stood up and began pacing the small exam room. “You know doctors tell patients all those risks because they have to. It’s part of the whole deal. They need the disclaimer so you don’t sue them if something goes wrong.”

  “Of course I know that. But honestly, I’m already sick of this. I’m sick of being a patient. I’m sick of hospitals and doctors and appointments and constantly looking over my shoulder. I’m one hundred percent comfortable with the mastectomy. It’s what I have to do, and I have no qualms about it. But the thought of having multiple surgeries that introduce a risk of leakage and pain and possible rejection doesn’t excite me. For what? Cosmetic purposes? I totally see the value for a lot of women. I really do. If I were thirty-nine and this were my first experience with cancer, hell yeah, I’m positive I would move forward with reconstruction, because I’d want to get back the body I had always known.”

  I paused to take a breath. Even Nolan’s ears and neck were flushed. He looked at me as if I had six heads.

  “I guess I’m coming from a different place,” I continued. “I’m not saying this is a done deal. But it’s very tempting just to have this shit cut out of me and move on. Why not minimize my time as a patient and maximize my time as a healthy person?”

  Nolan grabbed a pen and threw it across the tile floor. “So that’s it? I don’t have a say? You’ve made your decision?” he bellowed.

  “Jesus! Lower your voice! Of course you have a say. I’m just telling you what’s going through my mind right now. This is a joint decision. We need to talk about it.”

  He took a deep breath and wiped sweat from his upper lip. I could tell he was trying to remain composed. “Listen, Becca, I love you and support you. Ultimately, it’s your choice, but . . . I have an opinion.”

  “And let me guess. You want a brunette Dolly Parton.” I smiled, trying to add levity and end this discussion. Anne would be returning to the room at any moment.

  “No.” He scowled. “I don’t care if it’s a B or an A or a freakin’ mosquito bite, but I want my wife to have something.”

  “Why? What difference does it make? Come on—would you really love me any less if I had no boobs?” This was meant to be a rhetorical question, but he answered.

  “No, I would still love you. But honestly”—he paused and then looked directly at me—“I’m not sure I would find you as attractive.”

  I didn’t blink for a good thirty seconds. I just stared at him in silence as a wave of nausea came over me. Never in my life would I have expected Nolan to say those words. And what made it worse was that he had no remorse. He kept going in a completely measured tone.

  “I understand you’re scared. I get that you don’t want pain. I’ll be there by your side the whole way through, but you need to see the big picture here. It’s most likely short-term pain for long-term gain.”

  “How do you know the pain will be short-lived? How do you know those implants will make me happy? What am I gaining long-term?”

  “Oh my God!” His decibel level began to rise again. “It’s not just about you! What about me? What about Emma? This affects us too, you know!”

  There was no question the medical staff and other patients could hear us in the hallway outside the exam room. I blushed when family and friends serenaded me on my birthday in the privacy of my own home. Publicly airing dirty laundry made me extremely uncomfortable.

  I gritted my teeth. “If I choose to forgo this part of the surgery, it will be because I am strong. Because I have inner strength—the same inner strength that enabled me to stare down kids in my high school who goggled at me with a scarf around my head.”

  “Oh, get over yourself with that bullshit, Becca.”

  I felt as if a tornado were beginning to stir and gain momentum inside my body. My stomach ached, my chest burned, my pulse quickened. I knew it was only a matter of time before I cried. “Who the fuck are you?” I whispered forcefully. “Where is my hus-band? Where is the guy who has always told me I’m just as beautiful on the inside as on the outside? Huh? Where’s that guy?”

  “That guy’s sittin’ right here, wondering how this is all gonna play out in his marriage. You’ve got to be kidding yourself if you don’t think this is going to change us.”

  “First of all, no decision has been made. And second, Nol, it’s us! You and me! The same two people. That part is not changing!”

  He let out a long exhale and then looked down at the phone in his hand for a solid minute. He seemed frozen in place. I said nothing and hoped the storm had passed.

  He shook his head and frowned. “I’ve got to tell you, Bec,” he said matter-of-factly, “I’m not going to be that guy at the bar who all the other guys are whispering about and saying, ‘Hey, did you hear? Scardino’s wife has no tits.’”

  My entire body tensed. The inner tornado was picking up speed; I could barely breathe. The fact that his imagination jumped to a scene of
himself being mocked at a bar while he was still sitting in an exam room with me—his wife, who was confronting a cancer diagnosis and life-altering surgery—was nothing short of appalling. It was so self-absorbed, so egocentric, and so incredibly disappointing. Part of me wished I had a posse of friends and family standing beside me in that exam room to support me and make him realize how ridiculous he was being. The other part of me wanted to go home, get into bed, and hide under my comforter.

  “Who’s gonna know whether or not I have tits? And what do you mean you’re ‘not going to be that guy’? What are you saying? That you’re gonna divorce me if I have no chest?”

  He stared at the phone in his palm and wouldn’t lift his eyes. Oh my God, I thought, he didn’t flinch when I said the word divorce!

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I don’t know.”

  I had no idea who this man was. It occurred to me that I could lose my breasts and my husband in the same summer. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

  I sat silently for a moment, taking in what had just transpired. I knew my next move was critical. I could apologize and make it all go away with a promise to have the reconstruction, or I could just say exactly what was on my mind, regardless of the repercussions.

  “You’re an asshole,” I said. “A real asshole.” I spoke so calmly and slowly so that the word was clearly enunciated. “I guess when the cards are down, your true colors come out, eh?”

  “Screw you!” he said, and punched the air in front of him. “You don’t know how good you have it. You have no idea how much shit I shield from you. I’ve taken on all your crap and never complained. Not once. I’ve been a fuckin’ prince among men. All I’m asking is that my wife has breasts. Breasts! That she look like a normal woman. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

  There was a knock on the door. “It’s Anne. May I come in?”

  I cleared my throat and shot Nolan a get-yourself-together look, although I knew there was an excellent chance she’d heard every word we had flung at each other—a thought that made me cringe. “Yes,” I said. “Come in.” But all I could think was, What could he possibly be shielding from me?

  Before she turned the knob, Nolan had swung his work bag across his chest and mouthed, “I’m out of here.” As Anne entered the room with the paperwork for me to sign to confirm the surgery, he pushed past her and out the door without a word.

  Twenty minutes later, I left the hospital. I checked my phone and saw a text from Jordana. It was a picture of her with Emma, with the caption Em and JoJo having fun! Hope you are too! I gave my phone the middle finger.

  I tried calling Nolan. He didn’t answer, and I hung up before leaving a message.

  How can we possibly leave tomorrow for the reunion and survive the weekend, pretending everything is okay?

  I felt like I might explode. I needed to talk. And yet I was too scared to verbalize or even believe what had just occurred. But I knew that once I was ready to put it into words and allow it to become real, there would be only one voice I could tolerate hearing.

  Chapter 6: Holly

  The phone rang Friday morning the instant I put the gun in my hand. I had fantasized about this day for months, plotting my rebellion like a teenager conspiring to stay out past curfew. One hour was all I needed. I had promised myself I’d avoid all distractions, but when I saw Becca’s number on my cell phone screen, I had to answer. Hers was the one call I’d never ignored.

  I rested the registry gun on a store shelf next to the infant diaper display and lifted the phone from a crumb-encrusted pocket of my purse. “Well, if it isn’t the guest of honor!” I exclaimed.

  “Hey, Hol.” It was only ten o’clock in the morning, but Becca sounded exhausted.

  Suddenly, the loudspeaker in the store blasted in the background: “Lucinda to the stockroom. Lucinda to the stockroom.”

  “Where are you?” Becca asked.

  I smiled. “Babies ‘R’ Us in Union Square.”

  “You actually started a registry?”

  “Uh-huh. Can you believe it?”

  “Wow. I didn’t think you’d pull the trigger on this one. Did you buy a house, too?”

  I laughed. Becca’s affinity for puns rivaled that of an octogenarian English professor. She also knew about my guilty pleasure: online browsing. Virtual tours of suburban homes were my equivalent of porn, and while I spent much of my free time filling website shopping carts with strollers and high chairs, I never actually purchased anything.

  “It’s kind of pathetic how I’m getting a rush from this,” I admitted. “If word gets out that I started a registry for my unborn child, it will be a total scandal. Trust me. The yentas will come out in full force, and frankly, I’m sick of being the talk of the town when it comes to babies.”

  For over a decade, Adam and I had been the couple everyone assumed would have a baby—except we never did. When we announced our long-awaited first pregnancy on my fortieth birthday, we were flooded with good wishes. But behind the smiles and hugs, I knew the women of my Orthodox community were doing the math and calculating that my child would be entering kindergarten the same year theirs would be graduating from high school.

  I tried to disregard the pity in their eyes, because they were my friends. They were the ones who welcomed Adam and me into their world when we were twenty-two-year-old newlyweds. They became our neighbors and customers. Their patronage helped turn my business, Holly’s Challahs—a small kosher bakery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that I started simply to pay the bills while Adam was in yeshiva—into one of the most successful kosher franchises in the country. Because of them, I went from being “the owner of that cute bake shop in Brooklyn” to being the CEO of one of the only US corporations to be led by an Orthodox Jewish woman. While the neighborhood ladies gathered in playgroups and dissected the virtues of various double-stroller models, I spent my time managing employees, speaking at national leadership conferences, and throwing one negative pregnancy test after another into the garbage. When I wasn’t traveling, I’d bump into the women at the supermarket or see them at synagogue. Inevitably someone would ask, “So? What’s new?” and then steal a glance at my midsection. On the rare occasion someone was tactless enough to ask why I was childless, I always smiled and responded that the bakery was my baby. No one knew that I stored IVF medication in the mini-fridge beneath my desk at work, or that whenever “Baby Got Back” played on my phone, it was my doctor’s office calling to report another failed cycle. Other than confiding in Becca, I was very private about how Adam and I ached for a child. We would have traded the bakery in a heartbeat for the chance to be called Mom and Dad.

  During those years, I often found myself thinking back to that time in high school when Jordana, Lex, Seth, and I rode the subway home in silence after visiting Becca in the hospital. I had wondered why she of all people had been picked to suffer. When she finally recovered, I surmised that God must have had a plan—that everyone, no matter how good they were, experienced a certain amount of crap in life, and that Becca was simply getting her share over with early. I told myself that infertility was my “crap,” and that I was in the midst of getting my turn over with. But with each passing year of unanswered prayers and dashed hopes, I grew increasingly bitter.

  “Why?” I’d whimper, burying my face into my pillow at night. How could it be that Adam and I had made a conscious choice to lead a religious life—to keep kosher, to observe the Sabbath, to follow the laws of the Torah, to become active members of our Jewish community—and yet we were being denied the ability to fulfill the mitzvah to be fruitful and multiply?

  Maybe it was the hormones, but when IVF finally worked and my pregnancy started to show, I became a flurry of contradictions: I was grateful my time had come but resentful it had taken so long. I thanked God daily for the blessing of a healthy pregnancy, but I questioned the existence of a higher power that could have allowed fifteen years of pain and sadness. Part of me was content to accept the theory that
God had a plan and I was in no position to question it. I reminded myself that a rough patch shouldn’t lead to the abandonment of faith and a culture. And yet something in me itched to break free. Impending motherhood triggered memories of my own childhood, and I suddenly found myself nostalgic for the decidedly un-Orthodox way I was brought up: Friday nights at the movies, Saturday morning cartoons followed by Little League softball, shrimp in lobster sauce from the local Chinese restaurant, and, most of all, public school.

  All of the children in our community were enrolled in yeshivas. Forget public school—not one family I knew even sent their kids to a modern Orthodox yeshiva or a conservative Hebrew day school. Both of those were deemed too liberal and assimilated. For years, I assumed that Adam and I would just follow the pack. Why not? The intensive curriculum was a fabulous way to cement an understanding of our faith and culture from an early age. But as my due date approached and the reality of child rearing was upon me, I focused more on what my kid would be missing and less on what he or she would gain from the lifestyle that had enriched our lives for so many years. I was a proud product of the New York City public school system, where every classroom was a mini–United Nations. I celebrated Chinese New Year annually with my friend Jennifer Kim’s family. Invitations to quinceañeras and first communions were pinned to the corkboard in my bedroom. Though I ultimately chose to immerse myself in a relatively insular community, I was rooted in multiculturalism and tolerance. How could I not want the same for my child?

  You’re on the cusp of motherhood! I told myself. Figure it out! Which world is it going to be?

  Somehow, I was convinced that creating a baby registry would be my journey to the dark side—that little taste of rebellion I needed to get out of my system. Nowhere in the Torah did it expressly say, “Thou shall not create a baby registry,” so I knew I wasn’t breaking any laws, but it just wasn’t customary in our superstitious circles. Sure, I could have easily shopped online, where there was no risk of getting caught, but I wanted a sensory experience, not a virtual one. I needed to smell the lotions, to run my fingers over the Pack ’n Play fabrics, to squeeze the bouncy seat cushions, to compare the cheerful melodies of crib mobiles. But more than anything, I yearned to hold that silly registry gun—to stand in the aisles of Babies “R” Us with my eight-months-pregnant belly and zap away at bar codes to my heart’s content. My time had finally come, and dammit, I was ready to shop.