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139 they don’t go flopping around inside us, and we have skin so that everything won’t fall out of us. There is something horrible about seeing what should be enclosed and encased and hidden by skin. In Israel there are Orthodox volunteers who gather body parts after a bombing to make sure that the remains have a religious burial. For them, every particle of a human is sacred. What did that woman look like, the one who lay on the table at the Sorbonne medical school while another woman made sport of her breasts? Did that woman live? We assume her breasts were cancerous and were removed in order to save her. How old was she? How much longer did she live? It’s not so hard these days to find images of women with mastectomy scars. One of the most famous is the artist Matuschka’s 1993 self-portrait on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. We can imagine what the Frenchwoman looked like after her surgery, though radical mastectomies were more the norm back then than now. In 63 years we went from one woman taking a picture of another woman’s removed breasts, to a woman taking a picture of her own scarred self after her breast was cut away. “Beauty Out of Damage ,” Matuschka called her self-portrait. I wonder what Miller did with the breasts after she was finished with them. Who threw them away? I would bet they did not make it into a cemetery. A dozen years later, Miller was photographing the European theater of war for British Vogue. In Saint Malo she accidentally stepped on the severed hand of an American soldier. She went on to photograph Buchenwald and Dachau; and in an extreme show of bad taste, in Munich she posed for a photo in Hitler’s bathtub. This photo became infamous. After the war she stowed her cameras and turned to cooking and drinking. She died in 1977, of lung cancer. JANUARY 26. WHAT SCAR? . . . . . . I asked Linc today. He’d asked me if I remembered showing everyone my scar last night. I thought it might have been the scar under 140 my collarbone, a raised pink almond sliver where the port had been inserted and removed. It wasn’t that scar. Apparently, under the in- fluence of demon rum (or rather, tequila) I flashed my mastectomy scar twice. Were people horrified? I asked. He said no. There were six of us at the table at Fernando’s and a couple carafes of margaritas. Today Mitch reported that I kept asking him, Do you want to know a secret? but I told the same one or two over and over. I didn’t ask what I told him. I hadn’t been this drunk for about 10 years. It made me realize why people drink, why frat boys have frat parties and people go to bars and sling back the beers. Because you get giddy and nothing matters and you’re out of control. And then you have patches of memory. Did we have flan? I asked Mitch. We had. I remembered two shared dishes of flan and I remember ordering shrimp Veracruz and I remember the food coming but I don’t remember eating it. Mitch said that his girlfriend Laurie told me that I didn’t need reconstruction. Alcohol unleashes inhibitions. Does this mean that I really want to show my scar? Perhaps. I was thinking of that “Beauty Out of Damage” photo and wondering if I should have a picture like that of myself on the cover of this book. I’m usually the only one in the locker room at the park district building when I change for step aerobics. I’ve wondered what the reaction would be if someone saw me. I’m sharing a room with Posey at an upcoming conference. I’ve imagined myself asking her if she’d like to see the scar. I think the scar is interesting. I’ve wanted to see friends’ scars but thought it impolite to ask. I saw a mastectomy scar for the first time at the former Women’s Gym, about 20 years ago. One of the proprietors had cancer and it seemed to me then that she came back to exercise a week after surgery. It couldn’t have been that short a time, but it seemed like it. I was impressed that she’d returned so quickly. She...

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