I Must, I Must, I Must Decrease My Bust

From 1949, the year after my mother was born, until 1954, my grandmother sold bras door-to-door in northwest London. She herself wore a D cup, and the grace with which she moved under the weight of her extraordinary endowments, combined with her obvious control over their will, was as convincing an advertisement as was needed: Every week she brought home a tidy profit. She often sold the bras to women she knew from synagogue. Her expertise was naturally the big-busted, and my grandmother—who always struck up conversation with strangers and had no inhibitions whatsoever—wasn’t shy about offering her services to someone standing behind her in line at the grocery.

She was a Jewish refugee from Germany, via a transit camp in Zbaszyn on the border of Poland, where she and her parents had been sent by the SS in October 1938, when she was 21. She volunteered in the children’s ward at the makeshift hospital in the camp, until she managed to get a place as a chaperone on the last Kindertransport out of Poland, caring for the 86 children bound for England. She embraced her parents for the last time at the train station in Zbaszyn. I once asked her if she’d thought she would ever see them again. “When you are young, you are always an optimist, you understand?” she told me. But, in fact, my grandmother remained an optimist all her life.

My grandmother kept the bras, corsets, and girdles in a regulation leather case given to all saleswomen, or corsetieres, of the Spirella company. The “foundations,” as they were called, included the famous “514″ and “305.” (“While fitting a client, we discussed the radio program Desert Island Discs,” wrote corsetiere Mrs. A. of Croydon in the company magazine, an old copy of which I found among my grandmother’s papers. “Said the client: ‘You know, if I were asked what luxury I would take to a desert island it would be a spare 305.’ “) My grandmother would strap the case to the back of her bicycle and go from house to house, usually in her neighborhood at the edge of Stamford Hill, where in 1949 you could still look into bombed-out homes and see the wallpaper and the exposed center staircases. When the family was in need of extra money, she would go farther afield and sell more bras.

Not long ago, walking down Madison Avenue, I stepped into a lingerie store, the kind of well-established place with a long history of sizing up breasts, where the no-nonsense corsetieres have been honing their eyes for a good 40 years each, which amounted—there were three of them in the shop that afternoon—to 120 years of combined experience. A hundred and twenty years, and not one of them could find a bra that fit me. The dressing room began to pile up with rejects, until at last, in exasperation, one of the saleswomen, a brusque but elegant Frenchwoman, finally came out with it: “But, really, why do you bother wearing one at all? You have hardly anything there!”

The real question is why her retort gave me such satisfaction. If I’m honest, I have to admit that it even filled me with pride. The real reason I walked into the lingerie shop was to test my body once more against all of its ready examples of the feminine form. Because if I failed to fit them, or they me, then something was as it should be, as I had planned for it to be—I almost want to say, but am afraid to say, willed it to be—since I was a child. Recently, after meeting my mother for the first time, a friend of mine commented on her breasts—”amazing” was the word she used—and when this same friend later saw a photograph of my voluptuous sister, she was moved to ask how I had turned out as I had. Did flat-chestedness run on the other side of the family? No, it did not: My father’s mother was a 38 C. So? my friend asked. I shrugged. Not the shrug of not having an answer, but of knowing my answer was hard to justify: “I decided to be something different.”

I didn’t decide, couldn’t have decided; one doesn’t decide such things, and I’m all too aware of the danger of suggesting that our bodies are subject to our powers of self-invention, as other elements of our being are. And yet I feel I decided, because so much of what I remember about childhood was a willful deciding about what I would and wouldn’t be, and most of these decisions hinged on what was the less likely or expected way of being. My decision to write with my left hand didn’t last because nothing I wrote in that hand was legible, even to me, but my decision to wear my watch on my right wrist like a left-handed person was easier to pull off, and that is where it remains. My decision to be a passionate fan of the World Wide Wrestling Federation lasted two years, until my cousin nearly broke my spine with a camel clutch during our home edition. My decision to master the Chinese language also only lasted two years, as did my decision to be someone who wore hats, but my decisions not to wear makeup and to become a writer have endured to this day. My decision not to ever cook and to instead marry someone who cooked lasted from when I was nine until last year, when I separated from my husband and decided that, in fact, it would be a good idea to cook, and even to like cooking. And so on and so forth, so that my youthful decision not to have a bust like my grandmother’s and my mother’s—to, in fact, have hardly anything there at all—also appears, if only by the good grace of some unidentified flat-chested ancestor, to have lasted until today.

All children are forever deciding what they will be, even as they cannot decide, as life decides for them. The broad strokes of my grandmother’s life were determined by history, as were the lives of the 86 children she chaperoned on the Kindertransport. Compared with them, I had immeasurably more freedom in choosing what shape my life would take. But of course so much was out of my hands, and I’ve always thought it was largely that—the feeling of wanting to wrestle back control, to expand the possibilities of being—that led me to begin to write at a young age. Much more than a tool for expression, writing is a means of self-creation—a chance to will oneself, again and again, into new shapes and ways of being. If that sounds like an overly optimistic view of what is, after all, a very trying vocation, there I can point to another form my grandmother’s influence took on me, more than half a century after her own path took her door-to-door through the streets of London, selling one bra at a time.

This article originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of ELLE Magazine.

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