‘The Silent Summer’ by Kate Phelan
The summer after I turned twelve, I fell silent. My version of the precipitous shedding of confidence that regularly occurs during female puberty took the form of a selective mutism, which manifested most extremely in the company of a group of local boys who went to the other, bigger primary school in the village. My best friend Beth and I knew their faces and some of their names, and the sound of their shouts echoed up through the pine trees as they fished in the river near my house. Still, they were strange and unfamiliar to us. The sight of them gathered in the green, nudging each other and surveying what territory they had claimed, made my belly tight with a new fear.
They seemed, as a group, to have more defined edges than we did. The air around them crackled with an energy I couldn’t name, some intangible form of permission. It wasn’t merely a question of numbers, though there were always several more of them than there were of us. A cluster would assemble by the crossroads at the bottom of the hill we walked home from school, or gather to lean against the wall outside the sliding doors of the shop where we went to buy bags of flying saucers that fizzled on our tongues.
In those early stages, nothing they said or did was the worst element of these encounters. The most unpleasant aspect was our approach, having registered their presence from a distance but having no option other than to continue, even as my guts constricted with instinctual bodily warning and thrill. There was always some muttered comment as our paths eventually crossed, or a burst of laughter that signalled one we’d missed, but the surge of cortisol through my veins and the confusion of emotions these brushes brought forth – excitement; a creeping, caustic sense of inexplicable shame; and underneath that, rage – were almost a relief in breaking the tension of expectation. In response, I grew quiet. This is an understatement. During those hot, empty months between finishing primary school and beginning secondary, I was struck dumb. My first bewildering full day in the company of those boys saw a spell fall over me, some invisible gagging. I thought of words to say but couldn’t force the thick muscle of my tongue to give them shape. From there on they referred to me as ‘the quiet one’ and my role became that of the observer – a kind of handmaiden to Beth, who developed earlier than I did, as she navigated the world as a newly sexualized object.
My older sister would spend that summer studying architecture at a programme for talented youth in Dublin, but Beth and I would receive a different kind of education. Instead of jumping hay bales and helping her father and brothers with the harvest, like we normally did, we passed our days gathering new forms of knowledge. Much of this we gained on our own, buying our first cigarettes from the noisy vending machine in the hallway of the village pub after several failed attempts, using pound coins stolen on tiptoe from the pile on her parents’ dresser, later learning to hide the shape of the packets in our socks and cover the smell with Impulse body spray that caught in our throats. Throughout summers that followed, we would learn how to clean semen stains out of cotton, before burying the offending pieces of clothing in the centre of the laundry pile in Beth’s utility room.
Those boys would articulate for us a vocabulary of terms – slut, ugly, bitch, village bicycle – that we would come to know intimately. They functioned as a system of measurement of our value and the building blocks of a framework of new limits on our bodies and our movements, our accepted forms of expression both verbal and nonverbal. We were already aware that no matter how humid the day, we could no longer play topless on the beach, even if – as in my case – our breasts had yet to show any inclination toward growing. We understood that the boys could peel their damp t-shirts off in the middle of the street whenever they felt beads of sweat sliding down the hollows of their spines, but that our chests, regardless of their size, had to remain covered. We were less cognisant of the fact that fresh restraints – tangible and intangible – would come to bear on our occupation of both physical and narrative space going forward.
*
Until recently, little of my time has been spent pondering the knotty network of ducts whose foundations were laid while I was just a clutch of multiplying cells within my mother’s womb, coalescing rapidly into miniature organs and body parts. At around thirty-five days of gestation, two ridges known to embryologists as the mammary crests or ‘milk lines’ would have begun to form on my rudimentary chest. Development of the ductal system, a form of epithelial architecture known as branching morphogenesis, was set in motion, only to be arrested again in early childhood. ‘The normal mammary gland remains quiescent from 2 years of age to puberty,’ two paediatric endocrinologists from Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic write of this childhood state of dormancy, in which there is little visible difference between the breast tissue of those assigned male and female at birth. Puberty’s riot of hormonal activity rouses our bodies from this agendered state, setting them on their uneven paths into adulthood. It can also usher in its own form of quieting.
*
As a toddler I was rambunctious, uncontainable. In photographs I have an overly large blonde head and an air of fearlessness I don’t remember ever possessing, an unmistakable look of boldness and mischief. Here I am looking square into the camera with a gap-toothed grin, arms defiantly folded, feet firmly planted in small red wellies. Here I am leading Beth through a field by the hand, charging forward towards whatever adventure awaits while she hangs back, reluctant. Here I am sitting on Dad’s knee as he reads me a story, a large plaster above my left eye evidence of an injury received during an overly enthusiastic spin on the family swing set.
Stories my family tell match these images of dauntlessness. I had sharp tastes, prone to biting into lemon slices, routinely licking lumps of garlic purée from the head of the tube. I was known to steal kittens and storm the aisle of the church on Christmas Day, seeking the rosy baubles on the tree. My older sister remembers waking in the night to find me hovering at the edge of her bed in a woolly onesie like something from a horror film, the latest in a series of times I managed to climb out of my cot in search of nocturnal trouble. Mum describes me squatting in the sand at the beach and screeching with laughter as our dog Pluto hurtled towards me at full speed before changing course at the last minute – a thrilling game of chicken we somehow developed without words. Dad recalls a ‘bolshie’ baby gripping onto the garden wall, my head shaking ‘no’ to taking off my wellies.
With the acquiring of language, I gained the habit of routinely mortifying my parents by airing my every thought aloud without a moment’s pause, such as by announcing to our neighbours that the box of chocolates Mum just handed them as a gift was given to us by my granny a few weeks earlier. I also quickly learned to love to write, crafting my first book of poetry from a Cornflakes box and a few sliced up A4 pages. The poems were about everything and nothing: a butterfly; a biscuit; a missing button; the moon.
*
Breast development is generally the first sign of puberty in cisgender females, preceding the arrival of pubic hair or the spectre of the first period. Pubertal breast changes are sexually dimorphic, meaning that while cisgender males’ breast tissue remains minimal, with just a scattering of futile milk ducts, the female breast undergoes a phase of wild transformation into a complex system of ducts and lobules known as a mature ductal tree. Diagrams showing this tree’s progression from birth through to ‘adult virginhood’ to pregnancy and lactation depict a tiny sapling evolving into what looks like a seasoned cherry blossom in full bloom.
Scientists call the metamorphosis of female breast tissue during puberty ‘dramatic’ – another word often used to disparage teenage girls – because its cellular remodelling processes are so complex and plastic as to be unique in the human body after birth. In this way, a girl of thirteen is a small miracle. And yet, even as their bodies set about achieving natural wonders, this is the very juncture at which many young girls begin to doubt themselves.
‘I love writing poetry and I don’t care if anyone else thinks it’s good or bad,’ writes a twelve-year-old girl somewhere in America, a participant in a research initiative exploring confidence changes during puberty. By the age of fourteen, statements like this become less common among female participants. The boys continue self-identifying as adventurous, strong, and fearless, while the girls turn inward, becoming more likely to describe themselves as worried, depressed, shy, emotional, ugly. According to the study, female confidence drops by 30% between the age of eight and fourteen, and from there on ‘girls never catch up to their male peers.’
A bleak graph tracks male and female confidence up until early adulthood along lines of turquoise and red, respectively – slight variations on the enduring blue and pink colour scheme of gender differentiation. The turquoise male line hovers above the red female one in perpetuity. From age eighteen on, the male line projects straight upward, but the female one clambers forward in slanted bursts, sliding down a rock face somewhere in the wilderness of the twenties before making another effort toward the turquoise peak. Blood, sweat, and tears can be measured in the red line’s fits and starts, its ground losses and recalibrations.
*
Over our final year of primary school, Beth’s breasts developed rapidly and without apology into a D-cup, baffling us both. Somewhere amidst autumn nature walks to collect beech leaves in shades of burnt orange and the dying of the spring wildflowers in the ditches, there was the sting of realizing that she suddenly had the body of a woman, and I a child. The change put an abrupt end to something already fragile, a wordless accord we had made to face our fates together.
Before this, a shared indignation at the impending loss of control over our bodies had become another of our bonds. We formed hushed clusters at the edges of the schoolyard to pore over scraps of information from my sisters’ discarded Just Seventeen magazines, the air of these discussions having the feel of an underdog army preparing to take on the empire without any weapons. Under-resourced but not without hope, we raged against our anatomical destinies, making each other laugh to the point of crying as we considered the unacceptability and potential velocity of monthly vaginal bleeding into old age. We had no control over any aspect of our lives, least of all this, but were united in our intention to resist.
When Beth crossed over into a world I wouldn’t inhabit for some years, my own passage through puberty delayed by a jittery thyroid gland, our differences abruptly became more apparent than our commonalities, particularly in the physical realm – she, small and suddenly curvy; I unusually tall and lean, my chest a hard and flat swoop from under my collarbone to my navel. Being for the first time on opposite sides of a divide brought a new urgency to my ambivalence about growing breasts, and I came to await their arrival with significant impatience. It would take years for me to fill even the small training bra I found discreetly laid on my bed one afternoon by my mother, its box bearing a table of increasing measurements I studied eagerly for months, willing myself forward.
During this season, on our final day of primary school, our teacher gave each person in my graduating class a gift. She handed me a purple bookmark printed with tacky butterflies and an inspirational quote about writing that I can neither find or recall now, but remember feeling more touched by than I would admit. I was a writer, the bookmark said. Miss Ní Laighin didn’t want me to forget this once I was no longer under her care, when she had lost the ability to encourage me through tidy notes left at the bottom of the copybook pages I filled with stories. Sitting next to Beth in a chair my limbs had outgrown, holding the bookmark in my palm, I remember feeling proud and slightly restless as wan May sunlight slanted over my thighs that afternoon, thrilled by the idea of the things I might be capable of. I wasn’t afraid of forgetting.
Then summer came, and the boys arrived like flies. They made lazy circles around us on their bikes as we left the shop in blurry afternoon heat, carefully gripping ice cream cones that dripped dangerously towards our wrists. When we swam at the cove they gathered on a rock face that jutted into the sea, draping their bodies across the non-jagged pieces to dry. There was my charged awareness of their presence, especially the one with the deep tan and the high cheekbones who was kind to dogs, even more so the one who wasn’t quite as handsome but threw his arm languidly across his knee after climbing out of the water, goosebumps forming around the flat pinkness of his nipples. I wanted to touch the hollow place where the two fans of his ribcage met. There was also the felt sense of threat, the potential of their proximity to bring loss as well as gain. Beth and I had no words to express the fact that our agreement was broken, that the slide into adulthood was upon us. We could continue to rail against it if we wished, but it would do us no good.
*
Like so many of the body’s mysteries, the internal composition of my breasts ceased to captivate my interest long ago. This changes on a Saturday afternoon in March of 2022, at a hospital in Brighton. The blinds of the exam room are closed against the first properly sunny day of the year, so that the radiographer, when he arrives, can explore the lunar landscape inside my left breast. As I remove my top, the nurse, her back turned, flicks though my records and wishes me a happy birthday. I turned thirty-four two days earlier. She asks how I celebrated the day; I tell her I went to Ireland to see friends and family. We are both smiling as we discuss the parts of the country that she knows. Then I describe my plans after the appointment, saying I’m going to meet my sister for a birthday lunch at a sushi restaurant. A few minutes later, this will seem like the height of hubris.
The appointment is a result of an urgent GP referral for an assessment of a lump I have found. Despite my usual hypochondria, I find myself not terribly worried in the weeks before visiting the clinic. I even hesitate a moment before paying for a new flight back from Ireland to accommodate it, remembering the GP reassuring me that these appointments turn up nothing serious in around 98% of cases, but I decide to go for peace of mind. I walk there alone that morning with sun on my face, feeling happier than I have for some time.
When the radiographer pauses a moment into the scan and tells me they’re going to stop and send me straight for a mammogram, I know. I won’t actually know until I go back upstairs an hour or so later and speak to the consultant – the smiling man in round glasses who examined the lump earlier and said he believed it to be benign, that unless the radiographer felt it necessary to take a biopsy I could ‘be on my merry way’ – but I know.
The radiographer uses a needle to remove pieces of what he calls ‘suspicious-looking’ tissue from my breast and one of the lymph nodes in my left armpit, and inserts a tiny metal clip at the site of the 26-millimetre irregular mass the consultant will describe to me as U5, or suggestive of malignancy. The tender aftermath of these procedures is then squeezed once more inside the mammogram machine, as I drape my body awkwardly over its contours and the technician makes sure the clip is in the right place for future doctors to track the growth or diminishing of the tumour. ‘I’m sorry it’s a shock,’ she says kindly when it’s over and I’m closing the clasp on my bra, ‘but you’re in the best place you could possibly be.’ It is a shock, even though no one has actually told me yet.
She is kind to me because I am crying. I start crying the instant that I begin to know and continue until my sister arrives in the waiting room, our sushi date abandoned, then start again when the doctor says the words aloud. I cry even though I learned long ago to rein in public displays of emotion. I cry because I learned long ago to rein in public displays of emotion. I cry because I just turned thirty-four and now I think I might die soon, and I still have many things to say. I cry because I’ve spent a decade with my fingers hovering hesitantly over the keyboard, wearing down my delete key, stopping myself from saying them. Because I’ve only just begun to remember how to speak in my full voice.
*
All children experience a thickening and expansion of the larynx during puberty, but those assigned male at birth experience a more pronounced change. Intensified by higher levels of testosterone, the male voice box and vocal chords generally grow more quickly and to a larger size, making the Adam’s apple more prominent than it is in those assigned female at birth. The cisgender male voice and that of trans boys who are able to access hormone therapy becomes significantly deeper during this period. The cisgender female voice, on the other hand, lowers by just a few tones, a change aptly described by one parenting website as ‘barely noticeable’. The level of notice we are forced to pay to a human voice corresponds to pitch, and the pitch of the average adult female voice ranges from 165 to 255 hertz – the lowest point of this scale still higher than the peak of the average male range. In practical terms, this means that regardless of the quality of the content, the typical male voice will tend to carry further than a woman’s across a crowded room. A drunken shout a man calls after a woman’s tensed back as she walks down a darkening street will resonate more than one a woman calls after a man. The words they use against us reverberate better off a hard surface.
*
We spent those twelve-year-old summer days roving from place to place, looking for somewhere to put our stifled energy. One cloudy, listless afternoon, we hung around by the entrance to a housing estate overlooking the village, the boys sitting on the large boulder with the name of the estate carved into it, Beth and I standing a few metres away, waiting for something to happen. A couple of older boys of around sixteen came out of a nearby house and joined us. After greeting his younger counterparts with the standard gruff ‘Well?’, one of them – a pale, thin presence in a denim jacket – looked over at Beth and I with bloodshot eyes, assessing. ‘Do ye all fancy yer one?’ he mumbled, nodding towards me. A blond boy called David snorted with laughter, exclaiming, ‘No! Sure she’s ugly.’
What shocked me wasn’t that they didn’t find me attractive. I had already deduced that the asymmetry of my face and hard lines of my body were not considered beautiful by these boys in this place. But I was stunned by how much the word and the open discussion of my appearance in my presence without any expectation of my input felt like an expression of an almost corporal power over me. Boys I barely knew would tell me at various points during that summer that I was ugly, I was a freak, I was frigid, and each time, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I felt physically cowed, as though if I couldn’t be beautiful, I should at least have the good manners to be materially smaller. Since I couldn’t make that happen, I felt like I should take up less verbal room.
*
The name for the Adam’s apple comes from the Genesis narrative, the cornerstone of Jewish and Christian belief about creation. Long before there were embryologists or evolutionary biologists, there were male scribes, who posited that a male God created man in his own image. Eve was supposedly formed from one of Adam’s ribs or potentially his penis bone, depending whether you ascribe to traditional or more modern biblical interpretations, and her purpose was to act as Adam’s ‘helper’ in the Garden of Eden. Instead, her temptation of Adam into sampling the forbidden fruit became humanity’s original sin.
This myth was one of the first Beth and I were made to learn as part of our religious instruction. Sitting in small wooden chairs before a blackboard on wheels, our feet barely touching the floor, we were handed copies of Bibletime, a series of cartoon-filled exercise books we had to fill in with wobbly pencil to demonstrate our understanding of the doctrine of Christian patriarchy. Still available in Ireland and the UK, Bibletime offers a downloadable lesson plan to assist in teaching the Genesis narrative to preschool age children. It advises teachers to begin by referring to rules the pupils have to abide by at home or school, telling them the purpose of these rules is to keep them safe and happy. The next step is to tell the children that when the world was first made, everything was perfect until Eve believed the serpent, who told her she could become as clever as God by eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Under a section titled ‘Remember it’, the plan recommends teachers check children’s recall of the specifics of the story by asking them a list of follow-up questions: How did Satan persuade Eve to eat the fruit? Who did Eve give the fruit to? What happened to Adam and Eve?
These questions reflect what is considered particularly essential for the children to metabolize: the fact that Eve’s true sin was in her desire for knowledge. In the English standard version of the bible, God’s punishment for this inclination is to make her subservient to Adam for the rest of her life: Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. At the same time, he chooses to make childbearing more painful, adding a shadow of danger to her sexuality and her power to create. The follow-up questions – remember it – also aim to remind children that eating the fruit was Eve’s suggestion, to which Adam acquiesced, and that God’s anger towards Adam is specifically related to his having given credence to Eve’s vocalized ideas: Because you have listened to the voice of your wife ... cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Banished from paradise, Adam will have to sweat in unyielding fields for the rest of his days in reparation.
Finally, this myth famously teaches that the result of the first woman’s refusal to submit to the limitations arbitrarily imposed upon her mind and body was to create shame about human nakedness. Before the ‘fall’, the couple, like children crouching at sandcastles at the beach, are unconcerned with their nudity. Afterwards, they hide themselves in mortification. Artistic interpretations generally depict them wearing the fig aprons they fashioned to cover their genitals, with both their upper bodies remaining exposed, but before casting them out of the garden, God’s final act of chastening is to clothe them fully in coats of skin, hiding Eve’s breasts. Her wish for wisdom has led to her sex becoming a source of shame, pain, and peril.
*
I’ve come to appreciate my modest breasts over time – their soft curve and lift; how they fit perfectly inside a cupped hand; the ability to buy bras cheaply rather than having to invest in expensive ones to keep my back from bending. This fondness isn’t something I have advertized widely, a woman’s open admiration of her own body still being generally considered unacceptable outside the lyrics of a Lizzo song. But in my thirties, as my breasts have once again become an aspect of my daily concern, and I am learning a new vocabulary pertaining to my sex and body, my fevered pubertal interest in them has returned. I have become obsessed by their dualities – the way they are simultaneously essential and invisible in a daily sense; how the awesomeness of their capacity corresponds directly to the level of effort we put into keeping them contained.
I am also learning about how their ability to sustain life connects to their potential to create death, how the same molecular magics that bring about the gradual stretching and unfurling of the branches of the ductal tree can later be ‘hijacked, bypassed, or corrupted’ to produce abnormal cells in the lining of the milk ducts. I am coming to learn that their pronged pathways represent a retraceable map of the choices we make throughout our lives.
The diagram showing the mature ductal tree’s progression shows arrows leading smoothly between each stage from childhood to ‘adult virginhood’ to pregnancy and lactation. No alternative track is presented. There is no path to adult childlessness. By the time of my diagnosis, Beth has two young sons. All three of my closest friends from secondary school have at least one baby, two are pregnant as I write. One night I do the thing I’ve been told not to and burrow my way into Google, where I find an article called ‘From milk to malignancy’. Its authors, two molecular biologists, explain that I am what’s known as a ‘nulliparous’ woman, or one who has not borne offspring, and that those who haven’t had a full-term pregnancy by thirty have a higher risk of breast cancer compared with women who give birth before this age.
Before the glowing screen, I am nineteen again, dropped out of college, broke. It’s summertime. Repeal the 8th is years from formation, and I’m on a plane home from Manchester with my sister, bleeding silently into an oversized sanitary pad. That boy whose ribcage I wanted to touch – the only one I ever managed to have a conversation with when I was twelve and silent, finding ourselves alone one evening on a hill bathed in setting sunlight – has become my boyfriend somehow. We have not been careful enough. He cries when we decide, or when he sits next to me in his dented hatchback as I decide. After this, I will go on the pill for years, then the implant – both of which, I’ll confirm during the same Googling session, have made me slightly more likely to develop breast cancer.
*
‘Text, starting with the Bible,’ Jeanette Winterson writes, ‘has always been a way of claiming knowledge and tradition ... And a gendered weapon too; who is allowed to read? Who is allowed to write? What is the canon? What is literature? And who claims it?’
I was reluctant to claim it. Five months into an undergraduate degree in English, eighteen years old and utterly amorphous, I floundered my way around the chilly Trinity College campus, shoulders low under the heft of reading lists weary with dead white men, painful translations of Beowulf, and existential anxiety. After dropping out and working in various odd jobs before returning to study, I felt entitled to the first-class honours degree I eventually earned in sociology through long hours in the more welcoming library at Maynooth. But I still didn’t feel entitled to write.
Thirteen years later, at thirty-one years old, I take part in my first creative nonfiction writing workshop, held in an airless room at the top of a Georgian Dublin building. The leader is a male writer who has published a successful memoir. He has carefully read the work we participants submitted and made thoughtful observations. Of the eight participants, six are women and two are men. Most of us are at least a little timid, terrified of having the audacity to impose our stories upon each other. We fear smothering each other to death with our words. When we read our work aloud, we do so in voices tinged with apology, as if doing a kind of violence. Or perhaps only I do this, and I project the rest.
During our scheduled feedback sessions, I and several other female participants ask questions related to creative confidence. They are hedged variations on Jeanette Winterson’s queries: ‘What are we allowed to write about?’ we ask without asking. ‘Why should anyone care?’ It seems to me like neither of the male participants seek the same kind of allowances. After one of them finishes reading his submitted essay aloud, the leader begins the discussion by comparing it favourably to the rest of our work. He tells us, ‘This seems to be the only piece that was written without fear.’
*
When I temporarily lost the ability to speak at twelve, in the presence of those boys from the village at least, my speechlessness was largely involuntary. At its essence it was an expression of debilitating anxiety, shyness to the point of paralysis of the tongue. But in hindsight I see something else in my silence, a glint of something sharp and hard that wasn’t sadness or fear. In the years since that summer, I have often felt shame about my lack of response to the words said to me, how I was always careful not to clench my jaw too tightly or alter my facial expression in a way that might reflect their impact. The freeze response is a form of hiding, a lizard-like blending into the background for self protection. But while people often equate quietness with passivity, the true underbelly of my silence was a rage so consuming I couldn’t even begin to articulate it. Instead, I opted not to participate in a system of language that seemed actively geared towards my curtailment. My silence consisted of equal parts powerlessness and rebellion.
*
In the months before I am diagnosed, while working as a copy editor for a medical news website, I learn that Black women in the U.S. are 41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women, despite having similar or lower incidence rates. This discrepancy is widely believed to be a result of a failure of doctors to diagnose – or listen to – Black women at an earlier stage of the disease, as well as inequities in access to quality care that result from structural racism. After diagnosis, in the course of writing this essay, I come late to the work of Audre Lorde, who died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight. In her essay ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, Lorde writes about becoming ‘forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be.’ She writes, ‘priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.’
*
Chemotherapy is a kind of anti-puberty, a regression to an earlier state. It strips away many of the markers of adulthood, turning the body hairless. As it attacks the fast-growing cells in the lining of the mouth, you begin craving the bland brown foods of childhood. Its side effects kill sexual desire. My libido is doubly murdered through the administration of an injection called Zoladex, which blocks my body from producing oestrogen, bringing my periods to a halt to protect whatever eggs still linger in my ovaries from being damaged by the chemo drugs.
An assumption is made early on by the male doctors managing my care that I will want to do everything possible to protect my fertility. When I tell them I don’t want to delay treatment to have eggs harvested for the future, they are surprised. They don’t understand that this is not the kind of fertility I care about or know that the cancer growing inside me has unloosed another form of generativity I thought long lost. At my second chemo session, with a nurse sitting at my side, pumping bright-red drugs into a catheter port near my heart, I begin to write.
From issue #14: autumn/winter 2022
About the Author
Kate Phelan is a writer and copy editor based in the UK. She is currently working on a memoir.
