Merrill Joan Gerber - Beauty and the Breast: A Tale of Breast Cancer, Love, and Friendship

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This book is not a substitute or meant to be consulted for professional medical, legal, or financial advice. The author has presented her story. Names and identifying details have been changed, except when used by permission. You are encouraged to seek the advice of medical professionals if you have medical questions or concerns.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Beauty and the Breast

Copyright 2016 by Merrill Joan GerberAll rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-60381-526-0 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-574-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942822

Produced in the United States of America

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With appreciation and gratitude to the Cancer Support Community Pasadena

For my beloved friends in the watercolor painting class

And to the memory of Elena, Peggy and Amy

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M y thanks to the children of Martha Schrage Widawer, Michelle, Marla, and Mark, for permission to use their mothers Miami Beach high school collage photo. My thanks to Joel Martin, who designed the collage, for permission to use it.

My thanks to Laura Wending of the Cancer Support Community Pasadena for permission to use the image of the circle of friends.

My thanks to Sarah Whipple for permission to use the memorial collage photo of her sister.

My thanks to Dr. Debbie Bracamonte, my oncologist, for permission to use her image.

My thanks to Cristina Mateo, my chemo nurse, for permission to use her image.

Thanks to the Personal Care Products Council Foundation for permission to use the Look Good, Feel Better image. Note that my photo of the Look Good, Feel Better purse was taken in 2011. It has been redesigned and updated since then.

My thanks to Peg Schulte, whose blog is the source of the Cancer Card image in Chapter Eleven. Check out www.pegoleg.com, where youll find Playing the Cancer Card and lots of other interesting and relevant posts. She is working on her own book, A Guide to Playing the Cancer Card.

My thanks to Darlene Traxler, President of the Sierra Madre Pioneer Cemetery for permission to use the photo taken in the cemetery.

My thanks to Dr. Grace Fu, my primary care doctor.

My thanks Dr. Timothy Cotter, my cardiologist.

And finally, my appreciation and gratitude to the organization of Kaiser Permanente, and to all my doctors, nurses and techs, for their support, encouragement, superb medical skills and tireless care.

A trio of buxom Italian sisters who live next door to us in Brooklyn offer to help me sew my eighth-grade graduation dress. My mother knows nothing about sewing and the rule is that I have to make my own dress. Otherwise I cant graduate. I wont get credit for Home Ec (which is half cooking, half sewing). The cooking half is easygrilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate pudding. But sewing a whole dress?

My mother and I buy white organdy material, yards of it. We buy the pattern that seems simple and pretty, and we buy things with which we need to sew: silver needles, white thread, lace and satin trim, and a zipper. We beg the Ianello sisters to help us get through this.

At the Ianello house, there is noise and laughter and the smell of spaghetti sauce cooking. All the sisters have huge breasts, and when they bend over the dining room table, their flesh shifts like the tides; their breasts swing and surge and flow like a dance within a dance. They have a life of their own.

I am fascinated by this; I am entranced. I imagine how sweet it would feel to lay my head against their breasts. My mother has nothing that ever pillowed me in this way. I am going to have nothing, just little stubs that have just begun to grow, but not very fast and without much confidence.

My grandmother, with whom we live, has soft shifting breasts. Two girls in my eighth-grade class have enormous breasts; the boys circle around them like Indians in a cowboy movie about to invade a fort. I already know there are two kinds of womenthose beautifully endowed, and those like me.

Over a period of weeks, the dress takes shape. I have fittings. The Ianello sisters have me stand up on their dining-room table so they can pin an even hem, allowing my organdy dress to swing beautifully around my legs as I go up to the stage to get my diploma. The dress has lovely darts converging to points that my nipples should fill but they dont come anywhere near.

On the day of graduation at the Kingsway Theater on Kings Highway near my school, P.S. 238, I come to a decision in the darkness of the theater, as I sit in the second row (my last name starts with a G, meaning I will be called up soon). I will stuff tissues down the front of my new dress. I have tissues in a little white purse beaded with pearls, given to me by my aunt as a present. I bend forward in the dimness of the theater and push the tissues into the bosom of my dress to reach to the points of the darts. My plan is not well thought out. I wonder what will hold them in place, what will make them point the right way.

The principal is calling out the name of my classmate, Rochelle Amateau, and then he calls Doris Amerling, Avram Bain, Kim Bak Hong (the Korean boy), and Sheldon Finkleman. Suddenly he is at the Gs, and I hear my nameMerrill Joan Gerber. As I stand up, I feel the tissues shimmy past my chest, down past my waist, and fall like clumps of snowflakes along my thighs and onto the theater floor. I let them fall, stepping over them and kicking them to the side. I go up to the stage, my head bowed, my cheeks flaming with humiliation, to get my diploma. I graduate eighth grade.

Afterward, I go home with my family and pose for a picture on the grass in the front garden, in front of the bush of blue popcorn ball flowers. This is me, on graduation day in 1951. The address of my house is 405, the bench is where my grandmother used to sit every day. Spotty is the name of my dog.

Merrill on grass under tree

A hundred years have passed since my eighth-grade graduation. Somehow I have managed to seduce into my life what breasts are meant to elicit: beauty and boys and love and sex and eventually babies. I have nursed three beautiful daughters. My breasts have never come close to the endowments of the Ianello sisters, but I offered the world (my husband, my children) a facsimile, an authentic set of miniatures. When I was a teenager in the fifties, a crisis occurred having to do with my breasts. I was dating a young man, who at the beach one night under a full moon, tried to put his hand down the front of my square-cut summer dress.

Mine? he said.

No! Of course not!

He seemed to take this as permission and continued his foray into my camisole. He touched my breast.