by Linda Pressman
In late 1974 I was sitting in our fake wood paneled family room on our leather-look sofa watching news coverage in which Betty Ford revealed to the world that she’d had breast cancer and a mastectomy.
I called out to my mother in the kitchen, “Mom! What’s a mastectomy?”
Dead silence.
The chance of my mother answering this question honestly was doubtful. My mother had a long history of being unable to speak of female body parts. This was a woman who could not warn me when I almost bounded off to my sixth-grade gym class with a can of FDS spray thinking it was deodorant, only saving me from utter ruin finally not by telling me what it was but by pointing her nose downwards, towards the lower region of her body. When I began menstruating there was no conversation about it, she just had one of her henchmen – my five older menstruating sisters – hustle me some Kotex pads.
This time, again, the same type of pantomime: a hand slashing down the chest and I understood: Betty Ford, breasts, gone.
Was it possible to understand the yawning chasm that opened in my brain at that information? I was looking at her on the TV set. Why, there were her breasts under her blouse! How could they possibly have been cut off? Then the jumble of questions: Cancer like the horoscope sign? Cancer – an illness? Breasts could be cut off? Presidents’ wives’ breasts could be cut off? At fourteen, my breasts had just barely begun to be used, appearing just a few times in the palms of a few groping boys’ hands; would they, too, end up cut off somewhere? And where did the breasts go?
In my family we prided ourselves on everything we were and never acknowledged anything we weren’t. Anything we weren’t just wasn’t desirable. We were seven sisters. Clearly, that was the optimal number of siblings for any family ever. We were Jewish but not religious-Jewish, not much of anything Jewish except Holocaust Jewish, like it was a Jewish movement, from both our parents, with a fond, ignorant pride in it. We were opposed to organized religion – even our own – mostly because we didn’t understand it. We believed we could talk about anything on the planet – nothing was off limits – because we were bigmouthed, forthright Jewish girls.
But this thing, this cancer thing, this Betty Ford thing, this thing that happened to be eating our neighbor’s wife up across the street – that we couldn’t talk about.
The Shapiro family across the street was engaged in a cancer dance to the death. Our house was noisy; theirs silent. Our house had teenager-driven cars in a ragtag jumble strewn all over our acre; theirs, a mirror pie-shaped lot, had only Mickey Shapiro’s Lincoln Continental pulling up as close to the front door as he could to get Ethel and then to bring her home again, doctor appointment after doctor appointment. She was dying right in front of us.
What, exactly, was the state of the cure in 1974 when Betty Ford had just shocked the world by using the words “breast” and “cancer” and “mastectomy” together in one sentence?
We moved from Chicago to Arizona, from Skokie to Scottsdale, one year before, in 1973, into one house in a neighborhood of sixteen houses built by a Jewish builder, all these Jewish families drawn to his name on the sign in a vast desert of cowboys, of trucks and horse trailers, of hay bales and feed stores, of churches dotting every corner; clinging together in a makeshift Jewish shtetl in north Scottsdale. Our shtetl was made up of couples carefully paired off in their matching homes up and down the street, the ladies in their smart 1970s pants suits, their hair in gigantic bubble bouffants; the husbands in their leisure suits and green golf pants. There were the children blinking in the blinding sunlight: me and my six sisters, the Dubnow kids, the Roth kids, the Shapiro boys, the Shulmans, the Kelmans, the rest.
The house we moved into was flat like a brick with fake sideways windows in front of the sideways garage. There was a sunken living room, a pool we almost fell into the minute we walked out our back door, five bedrooms and two and a half baths. Both our house and the Shapiro’s were angled on their corner lots like gigantic pinball paddles as if when a car turned in they’d both pull loose of their mooring and flip it all the way to the end of the block and wait for it to roll back down again. This would be possible because our street dead-ended down there, going nowhere.
Even though when we bought our house the neighborhood had consisted of only the paved street, one model home, and dirt, I had vision. I could already imagine Skokie blooming in Arizona, with its giant oak trees, its needling sidewalks, the tar-etched streets and grassy lawns. What eventually was built, of course, were just the sixteen flat homes lining the sides of our one street like gigantic bricks that fell out of God’s construction truck, all scattered about. The trees were newly planted and there were no sidewalks. Instead of grass there was gravel.
The builder assured us that, by the middle of August, this desolate desert would be filled with families, most notably, that the Shapiro family would be moving into the model right across the street from us and that they had enough sons to marry all seven of us off and then marry us off again. So very many sons that even our married sister could get married off again if she wanted to. That many sons. I was thirteen, yet I was already very interested in exactly who my husband would be on this great big Noah’s Ark of life. I understood the sobering math of 1970s spinsterhood: I would be an old maid at twenty.
First there was the vibrant Ethel Shapiro, one of the boisterous, brand new Arizona Jewish couples living on our street, bounding off with Mickey to their poker parties with her puffy hairdo back-combed to the ceiling and a pretty polyester dress and practical pumps. She caused some consternation among the other ladies because she’d been married before. No one, absolutely no one, had been married before, or at least would admit it. She was saved from being labeled a sex-starved divorcee only by her marriage to Mickey.
They all matched up very neatly, two by two by two. Everyone understood their place. Each couple was a husband and a wife, no monkey business. There was no past in which they weren’t together and no future in which one had died. No one was allowed to be single or a widow or a widower or a sex-crazed divorcee or a sex-crazed widow. Some allowance could potentially be made for single men who, of course, would soon be snatched up, but definitely no women. Single women steal husbands.
But as the months went by, as 1974 first appeared and then disappeared, so did Ethel, piece by piece. She wasn’t going to be at this poker party or that poker party; they were going to see this doctor or that one. No one would admit that she was sick, instead there was a pause in the conversation, just thoughts filling in what was too horrible to contemplate. And, finally, at home, my mother uses her pantomime. Her head points down towards her chest. Her lips are sealed tight. Yes, we’re watching Ethel die.
My father, on the other hand, was robust and barrel-chested, red-faced and round-headed. He’d walk in a room and the oxygen left as his presence filled every corner. He’d flick all the light switches off as he walked down the hallway, saying, “What, you think money grows on trees?” He was the King of our House, of our lives, of our psyches.
He’s completely alive, seemingly infallible, immortal, until the day he isn’t. On March 1st, 1975, he fell to the ground at our store dead of a heart attack.
We bury so quickly in Judaism that he died on a Saturday and was buried on a Monday. I was outside our house on our horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway getting in the limousine that would drive us to the funeral when I saw Ethel getting into Mickey’s Lincoln on her way as well, wearing a scarf, her dress hanging on her.
And two months later it was the reverse: our family at her funeral, the limousine across the street at their mirror of a house.
And then there was just my mother and Mickey, widow and widower, sitting in their identical houses on their identical lots, staring out of their identical windows at each other across the street.
I have a picture of my mother from 1975. She is cute and perky, just 45-years-old. Her hair is a mass of blowing ash blonde fuzz. She’s wearing a smart polyester pant suit and holding a smart little matching pocketbook. She is squinting into the sun.
Then I notice a few other things about the picture: she is at Mickey Shapiro’s house, and the picture has a date scrawled across the bottom: September 17, 1975. Six months after my dad died and four months after Ethel, and where is my fuzzy-headed, polyester-clad mother? At the widower’s house across the street, of course. The poker game must go on.
And so my mother inherited Mickey Shapiro. She inherited all those boys, or at least their scorn. And she and Mickey resumed attendance at the weekly neighborhood poker parties. But the idea of how this would work was different than the reality, and social rules could only take them so far; it turned out that silence didn’t heal all wounds. My mother, pantsuited and pocketbooked, would never be Ethel, her dresses prim and proper, fitted until they fit no longer, empty.
But the couples parted to admit them and then the group re-formed around them, without a ripple.
Linda Pressman is a freelance writer, editor, and author of the prize-winning memoir, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie. Her freelance work has appeared in Sand Hills Magazine, Brain Child, Motherwell Magazine, Six Hens, and on Kveller. She is working on a second memoir.