Just the Two of Us
When we were young and budding, we smiled as the girl’s body began to change. She was a skinny little thing without an ounce of fat or a wiggle to her bum.
She played two-hand touch football with the boys on the block, scrambled over chain-link fences and never paid attention to us.
But we were pushing and growing and demanding to be noticed. Which was when she began to cup her hands to us, wondering what was happening.
“They hurt,” she complained to her mother, who went out and bought us a training bra. We giggled with delight. Our very own accessories.
By the time the girl was twelve and her period began, my sister and I became more serious about our responsibilities. We burgeoned with fat and lobular ducts, as we pushed and stretched our delicate skin.
The girl wasn’t sure what to make of us, but it had become a contest of sorts among her girlfriends to have the largest bra size. She was barely a B.
“You’re a C cup?” we heard her ask Ruthie incredulously.
Ruthie was a bit of an exaggerator, but the girl took her at her word.
So she took herself down to the shopping center two blocks away, walked into Guys and Gals, and eyed the boxes of bras on a table in the center of the store.
She went home with a Playtex white cotton C-cup. The girl stood in front of the bathroom mirror after struggling with the hook and eye closures, looking defeated. Then she bent over and jostled us a bit. I nudged my sister. Think big, I whispered. She’s counting on us.
Soon after that, things began to change. Though we had always been equals, my sister was getting larger.
What are you doing? I asked her. This isn’t a race. I can’t keep up.
She pushed against me as the girl slept on her side. It’s not my fault, she said softly.
As the months passed, we became more of an afterthought. The girl worried more about the size of her nose, the small pimples on her face and the chipped tooth she’d had since she was eight. We thought the tooth thing was charming, but she practiced hiding it from her smile as she stood in front of the mirror each morning.
But by the time she was sixteen, the girl’s tiny bum wiggled when she wanted it to, her thin legs were the envy of her friends, and best of all, the boys’ eyes were riveted on us long before they saw her smile.
The girl was nineteen when the birth control pills that her boyfriend insisted she take, took us by surprise. We loved how he loved us, but really, were the pills necessary? We grew fuller and firmer, week after week, until those child-sized 4-H tee-shirts with the big clover in the center that she wore every day on campus, grew tighter and tighter and we were the talk of the dorm. Boys sought her out, introducing themselves to us first, but she barely noticed.
Well, he’s kind of cute, I whispered when an especially handsome guy stared at us. My sister tried to answer, but the tight bra left her breathless.
It was when girl went to the doctor to refill her prescription that the real trouble began. He found a lump next to my nipple, under a slurry of beauty marks. Six weeks later, a surgeon removed a benign fatty tumor, as well as those lovely beauty marks. My sister stood by my side throughout.
You’ll be fine, she whispered, as the girl slept. I’ll try not to bump you. And you know you’ll always be beautiful to me.
I moaned through the bandages.
Things settled down after that. The girl stopped taking those pills, and my sister and I grew smaller in size, which was a relief, but now we were swimming in our bras. After my scar healed, the girl went shopping with her friend, Judy, and they insisted on sharing the same dressing room at A&S. The one with the three-way mirrors that reveal everything.
After taking off her shirt and bra, she finally saw us for who we were.
“Oh my god,” she said. “One is bigger than the other.”
Judy looked at her surprised. “You didn’t know that?”
“I had no idea,” she said as she stared at us accusingly. “When did this happen?”
The girl began to hide us the way she had hidden her chipped front tooth for years. Instead of parading around the dorm in her jammies without a bra, she made sure never to be without one, in case there were boys roaming the halls.
And she tried not to gaze at the perfectly matched bosoms of her friends.
The girl liked me just fine. I was beautifully shaped and respected my boundaries, always pointing in the right direction. But my sister continued her downward spiral. During the summers, I tried to fill out the bikini tops the girl chose to wear.
You need to stand up straighter, I whispered to my sister.
I’m sweating in this thing, she hissed. I don’t have room to breathe.
When the baby came a few years later, my sister and I knew we needed to work together. As he grew inside the girl, we bolstering our ducts, becoming blue-veined and rich as we filled with the colostrum that would sustain him.
Not to boast, but we were actually very good at this. After the baby was born, the girl could squeeze either one of our nipples, and milk would literally squirt a good five feet.
Despite the difference in our breadth, one could say my sister and I were the closest in we had been in years. When the girl let the baby sleep past his feeding, grateful for the extra hour of quiet, we tried not to be a problem. But the milk was our undoing.
It simply would not stop flowing. Goodness knows we tried, but as it was stopped in its tracks, it struck back angrily.
I must, it screamed frantically. The baby! The baby!
Shhh, we said, but it was having none of that.
You’ll pay, it threatened.
And we did. We became hard and painful, even to ourselves. The girl would wake up, waiting for a sign that the baby was ready to relieve us. But he slept on. We all needed his little mouth to latch on to us and suck with the intensity that had made the nurses swoon right after his delivery.
“Look at him go,” they had said admiringly.
Not, Look at those beautiful breasts doing such a great job with that colostrum.
Ingrates. All of them.
It was not until the baby was a month old that he began to eye my sister suspiciously. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to fit her large nipple into his little mouth. He’d stop nursing and cry, and the girl struggled to master the art of the switch. Her arm would tire, her patience would wear thin, and she would shift back to me. I smiled smugly at my sister.
See, that’s what happens when you let yourself go, I whispered. She said nothing, but I could hear her sighing heavily.
As they both began to choose me over my sister day after day, it was clear she was not working as hard as I was, and it was beginning to show. When the boy missed a feeding, my sister tried to sympathize, but really, her pain was only half my own.
You’ll be fine, she whispered.
Some of us have real jobs, I whispered back, glaring at her as the girl and I tightened with pain.
My sister still held milk, of course, but nothing of consequence. It was not until the girl went bra shopping again that she noticed the difference.
We were almost the same size.
Stand up straight, I’d remind my sister. Slouching doesn’t do either one of us any good.
You might try that too, she once replied. I was taken aback until I realized that all the cocoa butter the girl had rubbed on us hadn’t stopped the gentle sag. The stretch marks were pale and pink and barely noticeable, but there was a definite droop to my middle.
A second baby arrived six years after the first, and he never tired of me. I say me, because the girl never even gave my sister a chance. She was large and blue-veined and at the ready, but the girl practically ignored her.
What did I do wrong? my sister whispered. Looks aren’t everything.
Two years later, neither one of us had much milk, and the girl gave the baby a bottle instead. As you may imagine, my sister enjoyed the moment, and I was left swimming in the extra fabric of the bra once again.
We had always grappled with lumps and bumps and cysts, and sadly caused the girl much discomfort from the time she was a teen. She’d taken to unhooking her bra at the first opportunity and flinging it off to let us breathe, and we were so very grateful.
Especially my sister. She struggled more than I as she had to squeeze into some very tight places. The girl and I made some hasty lingerie purchases that didn’t take into account the my sister’s feelings, which to this day, I regret.
When the girl turned 50, everything changed. She was healthy, she was happy, but things were slightly amiss. At night, her muscles tightened up leaving her cramped and ill-at-ease and without much sleep. This can’t be good for us, I whispered to my sister. We need our rest.
She smiled at me, but said nothing.
I realized that as the days went by, she was saying less and less.
It was not until one especially trying night that the girl decided to do what the doctors had instructed for years: Self-examination. She had ignored their advice after trying unsuccessfully to figure out what was a lump, what was a gland, and what was a cyst.
“Why bother?” the girl told her friends. “It all feels the same.”
But on that one night, as her body refused to settle down, her hands traveled over us like a blind person trying to learn the terrain. She stopped at my sister, above her nipple and pressed down.
Why is she poking at me? my sister whispered.
Maybe because you’re so damn fat, I said.
The girl felt no pain, but she did feel a mound beneath her fingertips, one she had never noticed before. Another benign fatty growth, she said to herself before turning over and falling back asleep.
Things moved quickly after that. I remember the mammogram. Getting compressed between those two pieces of plexiglass, and that final turn of the vise. The girl held her breath, the agony of being squeezed so tightly felt by us all.
I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I whispered.
My sister was more stoic than I, which was always surprising because there was more of her to squash. It’ll be fast, she said softly. Try not to look and don’t breathe.
The girl went to the breast surgeon she had known for years. The blond woman, who had photographs of ballet dancers on every wall of her office, was noticeably less chatty as she prodded my sister.
“Just take it out,” the girl said.
“I think that’s a good idea,” the doctor said finally with a smile as she touched the girl’s arm.
“Do you think it could be malignant?”
The blond woman with the beautiful blue eyes, who always thought she was taller than she was, moved to the other side of the room.
“As a doctor, until you prove to me it’s not malignant, I have to assume it is, she said. “But chances are it’s just another benign fatty tumor.”
It wasn’t. My sister left us six weeks later.
Think of it this way, I told her. You won’t have to put up with me and tight bras anymore.
She tried to smile. We both did.
Well, that last black lacy one was a doozy, she said finally. Why didn’t you try to stop her?
The morning of the mastectomy, the girl walked into the operating room on her own, stroking us gently, as she bid us farewell. I had no idea that I was also on the chopping block. I heard the words, “a lift and a reduction,” but didn’t know what they meant.
I awoke a few hours later covered in bandages, and whispered to my sister.
What just happened?
No one answered. And then I remembered.
-Lynn Edelson
Lynn Edelson has been writing memoir for the past twelve years, and is currently at work on a collection of short stories. In 2016, her essay, Heart Monitor, was selected to be part of the NYC Listen To Your Mother show. Seven of her pieces have been published by Read 650, included in the books, “What We Wore”, “My Library”, “Holidays”, “Back To High School”, “Summer Jobs”, “On Mothers”, and “Jew-ish”. In 2021, her essay, Counterpoint, was included in the Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope Festival, through the Read650 podcast. Lynn is the mother of two grown sons, and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, Michael Principe and their two dogs.