Free American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen Page B

breasts at all. They choose them as models because they look like young boys, you so totally know that’s what all those gays running the industry are dreaming of, of a world where even women are boys, they’re trying to convince us to wish we were boys, they’re trying to make us think like them , and that is so, so wrong. It’s like so wrong, and that’s why it’s so cool; it’s like you’re like saying, No, I am so definitely not a boy, not a man, very much not, like there’s no denying it.”
    I repeated, to Lucille and to everyone, that I was setting the timer. I also reread the exercise prompt aloud, start to finish, one more time. I reemphasized that we were entering quiet Bardo time. And that was that. I sat on a costume trunk and waited for the minutes to pass. I like being near kids. It takes me out of myself; or, it does something. There had been a woman, Helen Magramm, whose children, two boys, I babysat when I was a teenager. I had no authority with those kids, and nearly every time one or both of them ended up crying before their parents returned home. I’m surprised neither was ever seriously hurt. One night years later, the boys were in high school, the husband woke up to his wife having a seizure in her sleep. It turned out she had a brain tumor. The tumor was resected and she recovered. Three years later the younger son was killed in a car accident. Eventually the mom, in her forties, was put in a nursing home, after a return of the tumor. I’d probably lived in seven different towns after I had last seen Helen Magramm; that was why, I think, I very rarely thought of her; I was away from almost all the triggers that might bring me back to being a teenager. Not too long ago, Helen appeared briefly in one of my dreams; and a couple of days later my mother told me Helen had died. That spooked me, naturally.
    *   *   *
    I decided to go see a professional about the breast.
    The doctor had thick, long blond hair and a mild Russian accent; when she palpated my neck, a scent of eucalyptus that must have been her hand lotion or soap came to me. I trusted this doctor because a few months earlier I’d come to her about an intermittent ear pain I’d had for years—it was always in the same ear, and the pain was worse in the mornings, but I couldn’t predict which mornings it would be there—and with no fuss or imaging she had determined that my ear pain was heartburn manifesting as ear pain. A diagnostic trial of Prilosec had disappeared the problem. She told me an apparently-so story about how long ago, in an early pre-embryonic state, the ear’s nerve and the esophagus’s nerve had been intimates, and that it was a memory of this closeness that made the two areas confuse their pains, and that this intimacy persisted even as they were now distant. It was a fanciful, pastel-hued story, yes, but I mean, she cured me. After that solve, Dr. Jane Shliakhtsitsava seemed to me like a dragon slayer.
    Also, I couldn’t help trusting her because she was very pretty.
    I mentally absented myself as she examined the dorsal breast.
    She asked me about heart palpitations, about night sweats, rapid weight gains, rapid weight losses. “Any major regrets?” she asked.
    “I don’t think so,” I said.
    “Losses you haven’t accepted?”
    “Not really. I mean, I’m far from home. But I guess we’re all far, right?”
    “Have you been trying to have children or adopt children? Or thinking about it?”
    “No.”
    “Have you lost a child?”
    “Never.”
    “Have you lost a loved one? Or love? Are you longing for your childhood?”
    “I don’t get your line of questions,” I said.
    “I ask these things,” she began, and her accent suddenly sounded false to me, “because it’s very common to manifest these things in our body. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Your body speaks a language. It’s like a foreign language we all speak but have forgotten how to understand. Maybe you’ve heard of