I wanted to watch TV, longed for Amy Schumer, the girls from Broad City, Abby and Ilana, or for Samantha Bee. Someone sharp, hit-or-miss maybe, maybe only half-funny even, but always on the side of what was right, a risk-taker.
But now that I was taking risks, I had forfeited the right to entertainment, to watching TV at all. That belonged to Charles, and now if we watched TV together, I would have to confess what was happening. And then it would actually be happening. A throbbing, irrational fury of self-justification rose in my chest; I imagined it solid, knocking on the wall they’d soon scrape.
Men left their wives all the time and shacked up with graduate students—or, in the case of our former dean, other middle-aged men. This anger was replaced almost instantly by twin forces of guilt and freedom: I would be cast out by society forever, or would have to cast myself out.
I saw, in my mind’s now-vicious eye, the slides of my breast tissue, all that dark swirl and a single devastating spot of white. Dr. A’s words spritzing the light box.
The night came down on me, sheer, cold fear of a sort I hadn’t felt since childhood, gasping under the covers at the clear calamity of what forever meant. Feeling in it all I’d never see again: spit, light, leaves, a slide, my girl.
I sat up and called my mother.
“What’s wrong?” she asked before I’d even said hello.
This would have seemed eerily prescient if she hadn’t always answered the phone that way. The only counterpoint to my mother’s cheerful firecracker style was her own belief that catastrophe was right around the next bend. I think she believed—in some primal way, a feeling more than an articulated thought—that worrying would stave off actual danger if done diligently, constantly, relentlessly. Like if she could just prevent misery from sneaking up on her, she’d prevent it entirely.
“Well … the news from that MRI wasn’t excellent, and I—”
“Oh, Sam! What? Is it malignant? Oh my God. I’m coming over. I’m on my way.”
“No, Mom! Please don’t come. I’m in bed already, I taught all day, and I—”
“What are we going to do? What are they recommending?
“Surgery and then we’ll see.”
“What surgery? When? Have you scheduled it?”
I couldn’t say the word. “It’s on the 21st.”
“But that’s—
Was she going to point out that it would ruin Thanksgiving two days later, on the 23rd? I wanted to provide her an opportunity for further consideration before she did, so I interrupted, “Mom—”
“So soon. I was just going to say how soon that is—do they feel it’s an emergency?”
“Isn’t having cancer that could be spreading through your body always something you want to address sooner rather than later?”
“Oh, Sam. Do they know what stage it is?”
“No.”
“Is it in both breasts?”
“No, just the one.”
“But you’re going to have a bilateral mastectomy, right?”
I squeezed my feet and then released them, made fists and released those too. I tried to shrug my shoulders, which were riding up near my ears.
“Oh, Sam!” my mother said. “I wish this were me again, not you.”
My mother had what her doctors called an “insignificant” breast cancer twenty-four years ago. At the time, it felt significant to my mother and me. I was desperate for my mom not to die, so terrified when I let myself imagine losing her—which I almost never did—that I blacked out and whacked my head on the floor of our apartment.
And then she was fine. She had her surgeries and didn’t need any additional treatment, and slowly the doorway to that hellscape closed and eventually, it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen to us again. I no longer remembered what that fear felt like—until now.
I said, “Thank you, Mom.”
“You don’t believe me, but I really do.”
“I believe you. That’s how I’d feel if it were Alexi.”
“What can I do?”
“Um, this is fine. You can just talk to me about it.”
But then I said goodbye and we hung up. I felt like I’d run out of words. I went outside in my pajamas and stood on the deck, relieved and terrified at how big nighttime had stayed even though I was an adult. What does it mean for human beings to disappear? When our bodies quit their jobs, what happens to our minds? Dickinson was right that the only secret people keep is immortality. I think the reason we can’t babble about it and have to keep it secret is that we have no access, can’t say what we don’t and will never know.
No wonder I was this disoriented by the possibility of my own dying, of even just admitting, acknowledging that we’re all dying, sooner than I’d realized.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALEXI KNEW, OF COURSE. KIDS always know everything, a fact we can accept when recalling our own childhoods—the handcuffs in our mothers’ pajama drawers, the war-torn (ripped, oh my God, why?) copy of the Kama Sutra under other books in the bedside table, the candy and naked photos and weed and old love letters and appalling musical taste they thought were secret from us. Ha. Nothing is really safe from children, not even death, and children aren’t safe from anything. But somehow, when we consider our adult selves the protagonists, we forget that.
There was never any chance of keeping my illness a secret from Alexi, no matter what I told or didn’t tell her.
Although she left no message after calling when I was at Leah’s, I called Alexi back two days later, on the morning of November 5th, sunlight blasting into every bedroom window, screaming a Frank O’Hara kind of joy. I thought of the violent happiness of his poems, streams of consciousness, lines running all the way over the page, crossing into each other, never slowing—imagined orange juice, sight, sunrise, the details of a newspaper headline or a short walk through New York made meaningful.
“Mom, what the hell is happening?” Alexi asked. She had picked up before the first ring finished ringing.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”
“What? What do you mean you’re fine? As opposed to what? Everything’s okay, but what, Mom? There’s a but, right?”
“Well, they found a little bit of calcification on my MRI—”
“What? What is calcification?”
“It turned out to be a little bit of cancer.”
“Oh my God. Is that why you haven’t been picking up? I knew it was some fucked up thing. What do you mean a little bit of cancer—what even is that? Is Dad there? Are you okay?”
“Calm down, Alexi,” I said. “Of course I’m okay. Dad’s at work. I’m about to go teach.”
“And then what?”
“Then what what?”
“Are you having chemotherapy? What do they do? Has it spread?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to have surgery and then we’ll see.”
“See what? What surgery? Oh my God, Mom.”
Here I paused. Each time, the word mastectomy made my bones vibrate because