The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming by Jennie Nash

Author:Jennie Nash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lesson #6

The Victoria’s Secret Catalog

Never Stops Coming

You can’t ignore the images of beautiful breasts that pervade our society and you can’t stop your own breast from being damaged. What you can do, however, is make sure you mourn the loss.

In the weeks before my mastectomy, in the long pre-Christmas season, the Victoria’s Secret catalog never stopped coming. There was some sort of glitch in the mail system — or some special preholiday blitz — and I got two or three catalogs in the course of a few weeks, always on a day that I learned that something more — and worse — was going to happen to my breast. There I was, agonizing over the damage about to be done to me, and there they were — all those bare bodies, all those beautiful, smooth, and perfectly balanced breasts, all those pretty pieces of underwear designed to show them off.

It’s easy enough to cancel a catalog — at least in theory. But if it wasn’t the Victoria’s Secret catalog coming in the mailbox, it was their models featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Tyra Banks in a tiny red bikini on the cover of GQ, or the now-famous Victoria’s Secret Web site ad in the middle of the Super Bowl. Idealized breasts were everywhere I turned and I couldn’t help but stare.

I tried to make myself go back to the stacks of breast cancer guidebooks to look at the unlit and unposed photos of women before and after their surgeries, but now that the question of mastectomy wasn’t philosophical, I didn’t want to see those pictures. The women they featured were not beautiful. They had cellulite on their tummies and fat on their arms, thin little rib cages and fleshy middles with angry red scars snaking across the skin. They had pendulous breasts and little pointy breasts, huge-nippled breasts and dimpled breasts, breasts that were dented and cut and mashed and removed. Every one of the pictures made me turn my head as if I had been slapped.

“You’re going about this all wrong,” Lori insisted on one of the many afternoons she sat with me at my kitchen table so I wouldn’t have to sit there alone. “These are hilarious. Look at this one,” she said, pointing to a woman with droopy breasts. “She probably breast-fed about ten kids. And this one?” she said, picking out a woman with large dark circles around her nipples. “Perfect for target practice.” I couldn’t help but laugh at Lori’s loopy sense of humor and was filled with gratitude for her willingness to say anything that had to be said.

“What’s so funny?” Carlyn asked, suddenly appearing at my side.

“Nothing,” I said, snapping the book shut.

“What?” she pressed.

“It’s none of your business,” Lori said.

This, of course, drew the whole crowd of kids in the house — Carlyn and Emily and Lori’s kids, Kimber and Sarah. “We want to see! We want to see!” they chanted.

“No way!” we chanted back. We owned those pages now, and we needed them.

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