Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (26 page)

When Evany turned eighteen, Sheila paid for her daughter's breast augmentation surgery. She and Evany had discussed the procedure for years, and Stanley had given his blessing. Only their son disapproved, but he was a gangly teenager who had yet to learn about women. Stanley never made time to teach him. Forehead bare beneath a retreating hairline, her husband still left for his office each morning,
though he often spoke of retiring. He and his colleagues had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Attica inmates. The state had brutalized the prisoners and should pay them $2.8 billion, he explained. He spoke of the matter often, though the case had remained unresolved for nearly twenty years.

“Eighteen's old enough,” Sheila said as she applied a light pink nail polish. She'd cut her hair short like Kristin's and wore dangling earrings that knocked against her chin when she leaned forward. The rheumatoid arthritis had moved from her hands to her neck and shoulders and down to her hips, knees, and ankles. Stanley helped her fasten necklaces now, and she avoided lifting heavy things like water-filled teapots or mopping buckets.

“I'm old enough,” Evany confirmed. She had grown tall and thin, and she played volleyball, an option Sheila had never considered for her. She would start NYU in the fall, live in the dorms. With new breasts, she would find a nice boyfriend. She would learn, as Sheila had, to love her body. What more could a mother give her daughter? She and Evany discussed cup size on the cab ride over to Doctor Steenwycks's office.

“B, I think,” Evany said.

“The people who know you now are just
now
people. When you go off to college, no one will realize.” Sheila
knew her daughter worried that her new breasts would be a stigma if considered false, a concern that ultimately led the calculating girl to choose a C over a D-cup.

The doctor's clinic now occupied a full six floors and an administrative suite in the building across Broadway. Doctor Steenwycks had twenty-six doctors on staff, and he had more or less retired, but he met Sheila and Evany at the door.

He remarked that Sheila looked well, joked with Evany, asked about her boyfriends, the prom, her plans for the summer. He had aged since the last time Sheila saw him, but he'd gotten a face-lift, or at least the skin of his face seemed tighter than she remembered. He no longer wore a wedding band, but he spoke fondly of his daughter Elizabeth, who was about Evany's age. He'd moved the breast fountain from the outside courtyard to the lobby, where he said the elements didn't harm it.

The day Doctor Steenwycks's associate inserted the tissue expander in Evany's chest, twelve separate wildfires blazed through Yellowstone Park, the worst fires in seventeen years. Experts said the flames blackened the mountains, but no permanent harm was done. Sheila waited in the lobby beside the fountain and read the newspaper. Falling water reminded her of rain, the outside humidity.

Afterward she and Evany celebrated with ice cream sundaes. “How does it feel?” Sheila asked.

“I feel like a woman,” Evany said.

E
VANY HAD STARTED
NYU, and her brother had gone off to Berkeley when CBS did a TV special on silicone breast implants. Sheila was working on her Christmas lists, which she archived each year and later reviewed to ensure that she never bought the same gift twice or missed mailing a holiday card. She'd grown her hair out in a short bob and wore a terry cloth leisure suit, jacket half-zipped with matching drawstring trousers. She'd turned the television on, her companion when Stanley worked long hours. It seemed the Attica case would at last go to trial, which meant many late nights and worked weekends.

Face to Face
with Connie Chung filled the room with a cool, television glow as the program guests, all women with silicone implants, began speaking of symptoms. One admitted to swollen glands, fevers, chills, sweats, and sore throats. Another said that she could no longer walk, that her joints were swollen and sore, that she'd lost small handfuls of hair. A third sat in a wheelchair and explained that it had started as nothing more than pain in her fingers. With them was a doctor, who spoke of the immune response system and abnormal antibodies. He'd examined these women and found silicon in the thyroid gland, the spleen, the liver. Every part of the body.

Sheila raised an involuntary hand to her chest, remembered, suddenly, the scars at the crease of her breasts. She had an hourglass figure, firm and toned. Her chest did not
sag or stretch. Last time she went to the beach she'd worn a string bikini. Until this moment she believed that her breasts had aged well, better than natural ones.

She reached for the telephone, dialed her daughter. For most emergencies she called her husband, but today she thought only of Evany with the C-cup breasts.

“Do you have the TV on?” she asked.

Evany laughed. “I don't have one, Mom.”

Her daughter's voice reassured her. Sheila curled the phone cord around her fingers. She and Stanley had at last purchased furniture, and she leaned back against the black leather of their new couch. Scattered across the floor, her index cards, pens, and lined notepaper seemed irrelevant, unimportant. “They're saying the implants react with the body, that silicone damages connective tissue.”

“It's just like carbon.” Evany was a chemistry major. She studied hard, had lunch with her professors, led freshmen labs that paid her tuition. She said that silicon was the second most abundant element on earth. “We all have it inside us anyway.”

Sheila bent her fingers, forming and releasing a loose fist. She'd grown used to the pain in her joints.

“It's TV.” Evany laughed, and Sheila agreed because her daughter sounded so confident. It was foolish to be alarmed, to have involved Evany. Sheila asked her instead about classes. Did Professor Stanton still teach in the English
department? She admitted that she used to fantasize about him. That he'd been the sexiest man on faculty.

“I haven't thought of him in years,” she said, though she had a clear image now of the back of his classroom, she in three layers of clothing over a leaking breast implant.

Evany said she didn't know if he still taught. She would ask around, report back. “Bye, Mom,” she said.

Sheila hung up, dialed another number. She had to try dozens of times before she got through to her uncle's clinic. He was out, and no one else took her call, though the receptionist promised to leave a message.

Three days later, Sheila received a form letter from Doctor Steenwycks's office. There's no proven danger, it said, though the lifetime of silicone implants was likely lower than originally thought. The clinic offered replacement surgery at half price for the next six months. The letter did not mention the CBS broadcast, but it said that certain parties were spreading unfounded rumor and that women should not be afraid to take control of their bodies. It was a woman's right, the letter said. Women should be who they wanted to be.

Sheila discussed the matter with her husband. Should she get the implants removed? She'd worn the silicone breasts for half her life. They belonged to her. She could not imagine ripping them out. Yet what if she, like the women on TV, never walked again?

“Don't be rash,” Stanley said. His skin had softened, but the short hair that showed where his shirt collar opened had turned wiry and hard. He didn't want her to get surgery, she decided. His wife with the beautiful figure. “Thousands of women are fine, right?”

S
HEILA'S BREASTS WERE
wrapped in an orange sports bra the day the Food and Drug Administration banned silicone-filled breast implants. The commissioner of the FDA announced that the implants had not been proven safe and therefore should not be placed inside a woman's body.

“The good news is that there are plenty of women to study,” the television announcer said. “More than a million women have had the procedure over the past thirty years.” The Mayo Clinic and Harvard were conducting research. Dow Corning, the major manufacturer of the silicone-filled sacs, was pouring money into new studies. The announcer warned women not to panic. No one was claiming that the implants were unsafe.

Sheila was doing aerobics, one arm folded under her chest for added support. For the past few months, ever since the Connie Chung broadcast, her breasts had felt heavy, almost as they had when she'd first received the implants. Could they really attack her body? Had her arthritis worsened?
She could sense the implants against the muscles in her chest. They moved beneath her fingers, like egg yolks in the sizzling whites of a frying egg.

She turned off the TV, called Evany.

“Even if there is a correlation,” Evany said through the telephone — always the phone, though she lived a few subway stops away — “it would take years to affect me. I only just got them, and I love them! Oh! And Professor Stanton still teaches.” Her roommate had him for a class, she said, the students called him the “old coot.”

“Perhaps there is no correlation,” Sheila said. Her uncle's clinic had sent her a half-dozen letters to that effect. The most recent offered to replace silicone with saline implants, and a small note at the bottom reiterated a common theme in each communication: that any legal complaints should be against the manufacturer. Her uncle had added a handwritten apology because he had not yet returned her calls; he offered to update her breasts free of charge.

Her fingers found her chest, rubbing gentle, loving circles. Someone in Cincinnati was filing a class action suit. There was a general call to women who'd received implants. Sheila read about the case in the paper, called Stanley at work.

“Class actions are tricky,” he said. “I'm still waiting to hear what happens with Attica.” The prison riot case had
been thrown to a lower court, and the state denied that it was at fault. No excessive force or violence was used during the riots, they said, though dozens of witnesses testified otherwise.

“What if …” Sheila asked him. A woman in Texas had been awarded twenty million dollars in punitive damages. Another, in San Francisco, received over seven. The cases opened and closed like snapping mousetraps.

“You're better off filing charges yourself,” Stanley said. He knew several lawyers involved in similar suits, and several more who would be good, if she was sure.

Sheila felt the uncomfortable weight of her half-filled coffee cup. Her wrists ached. “Please ask them,” she said.

H
ER LAWYER, A
white-haired Harvard man with three ex-wives, insisted that Sheila have her implants removed; he wouldn't represent her otherwise. “No jury would be sympathetic,” he said.

Sheila hadn't realized until then that she'd made a decision.

She called Kristin, who'd moved out to Colorado, and asked her advice. “Are you crazy?” her friend said. “Get them out.”

She called Evany, who had a physics exam the next day and could not talk long but said, “The
New England Journal
of Medicine
published a study that found no evidence connecting implants to other complications.” Sheila jotted down the name of the journal. She wanted to believe her daughter, but doubts had created an urgency inside her. She needed to know the truth.

She called her son, who asked her to keep him posted. Half the girls he was dating had augmentations.

She called Stanley, who told her that they didn't need the trial money, and she should only go through with it if she really believed in what she was doing. He'd support her, he said, whatever her decision. He didn't sound enthusiastic. When she asked, he explained that inmates waited years for justice — that was all, he was sorry, he was having a bad day.

She spoke to her physician, who examined her and said that she ought to have surgery on her knee — a replacement; the existing joint had been badly damaged by her arthritis. Yes, her symptoms had worsened, the physician said. Was she having trouble breathing at night?

She stood shirtless in front of the mirror cupping her breasts in her hands, feeling both their weight and the pain in her joints. How would she look without her implants? Who would she be? How would her clothing fit? Her posture change? Her confidence? She had become a 32D. This was how she knew herself. She didn't even have photos of herself flat-chested.

She made an appointment at her uncle's clinic. Doctor Steenwycks was on vacation. The nurse told Sheila he came in only to pick up mail.

“How nice for him,” Sheila said. She asked if she could see her implants after the surgery, if the doctor could save them until she woke up. The nurse said she'd ask, told Sheila that she would come to in the recovery area, a small rectangular room with striped wallpaper and lacy curtains.

Sheila tried to smile. Her lawyer had assured her that women felt better afterward, relieved. He represented two other silicone victims; he knew.

S
HE NODDED WHEN
the doctor explained that in a few minutes, the drip anesthesia would take effect. She drifted to sleep with the thought that she should run her fingers over her breasts one more time.

When she awoke, still groggy, she had acres of empty, powerless skin. She couldn't see it, but she knew. Women my age don't need breasts, she thought, though the words belonged to her mother — her flat-chested mother who had died alone, years ago.

“Did they leak?” she asked the doctor, a young man who seemed too young to have finished medical school, too young to be working on her. He brought one implant for her, the fist-sized sac grown yellow with age.

“Does it look like it?” He was busy, had another patient scheduled. She should return for a follow-up next week.

“That thing could have killed me.”

“There's no evidence about that.” The doctor shook his head. “No one's saying that. The Mayo Clinic released their findings —”

“How do you explain the settlements?” Sheila wondered if her symptoms would cease, if she would begin to gain strength in her fingers, if she'd feel less tired and sore. Was that evidence? Was that worth this loss?