The nurse returned and took my blood pressure again. I stayed quiet, knowing it wasn’t going to matter who took my blood pressure where or when. Goat, boat, mouse, house, here, there, anywhere. Something was building in me like applause or lava, about to shoot out of my head—a sound? A bolt of sci-fi light? Actual brain matter or blood? I felt as bubbly and unpredictable as a cartoon. I found it tricky to calibrate my blood’s panic when its container was in peril.
My body knew it was in danger; every cell in me, including the Judases who were dividing, replicating, partying, knew this next news would be bad. That what we—all the parts of me—were waiting to discover was a question of margins. How dire? Catastrophic? What story would I be telling Charles at dinner—a hopeful version, a euphemistic one? Or telling Leah, if I took that wild route instead?
Leah! See? I was already contemplating it before I got the full impact of the diagnosis. Maybe this whole cancerpalooza is no excuse.
A “spot of calcification” had shown up on my most recent MRI. The deceptively maternal-seeming Dr. A was the one who told me this, holding my slide onto one of those backlit boxes I’d only seen in movies before. She flicked a switch and pressed the picture of tissue up onto that box of light, her broken nail pointing out a spot of white. She spit slightly when she said the word “dense” in her incredible sentence, “because your breast tissue is especially dense”—all those slobbery and disgusting s’s crowding out the verb, the nouns, the actual meaning of the sentence. I never heard what the clause modified, or understood what this especial denseness foretold.
Instead, I watched her spray of spit like a shadow puppet show across the lit slide, wondering whether the white spot was a presence or an absence, a small pearl in a dark sea of tissue or something removed by a mini hole punch. Either way, corrosive cells were coursing through my marrow.
Even before that appallingly alliterative appointment or the one three days ago, when I heard about the dead girl and my own body’s prospects veered toward worse, I had stopped watching television shows that only featured women either naked or dead. That sounds like a pretty low bar, but it eliminated everything. It excluded especially whatever my husband loved, including the pilot episode of a detective show he and the rest of the world were particularly rapturous about. The only character in whose story I could invest my energy was a corpse, hogtied to a tree before the series even got started. How luxurious would it be to find myself among the chorus of men in cop costumes circling that bloodless, naked body, taking notes, aroused, distressed? Furrowing my brow with the concentration of the artificially living, I would vow to avenge whatever also-man had done this heinous thing, all while untying the girl and stretching her out on the grass.
It was less fun, even as a viewer, to identify with the decaying victim. At least for me. And probably every other woman watching.
My husband, Charles, joked good-naturedly with our many friends—also good-natured—about how fussy I was. He had to screen anything we were going to watch together to make sure there was at least one female character who was clothed, alive, and competent enough to speak reasonable sentences.
He found almost no shows suitable for a tyrant like me, although he liked what he called the “Baxter test” and seemed to cherish the task of pre-screening and eliminating anything sci-fi, macho, politically reprehensible, or indifferent to the perspectives of women. We had very little time for television anyway. He was helping corporations defend themselves against whatever litigious clients or environmentalists sued, and I was teaching poetry.
I was alone in the waiting room when I heard about the body. This was right before my body divided into versions I had to work to keep separate, before I betrayed Charles in a fury worthy of some tragic Greek character. Before I made a devastating choice right at the end of my life. Except my choice was tawdry and banal. And even now, it’s only been a few days since I made it, like I said, so I don’t know if it’s the end of my life and won’t until at least a few weeks from now. Maybe my mind has begun to take over, marching my body straight out of my own life, even as I try to save that body, that life. What’s the difference between a body and a life?
After watching the news in the waiting room, I sat on the paper-wrapped table, wrapped in paper myself. Dr. A came pounding in, and right away she said, “I’m afraid I’ve spoken to the pathologist, and the tumor we found on the MRI and biopsied in the core biopsy did, in fact, turn out to be malignant.”
Dr. A is a big waster of syllables. There’s nothing lyrical or efficient about the way she speaks. The sound of blood rose up around and inside me when I heard the word malignant. I wished Charles had come with me, could hear the rest of whatever she said, could ask reasonable questions, could try—as he was wont to do—to statistic me back to the good kind of oblivion, the kind where we pretended numbers were in our favor.
During the core biopsy she mentioned, someone in a lab coat and surgical mask had drilled a screwdriver so deep into my body that I’d had the sense it might impale me, nail me straight to the table. My entire side had remained purple for two weeks, making a carnival mask out of the bruise against the dire pale skin on the rest of me.
Now Dr. A was yammering away about de- and reconstructing, asking questions to which apparently neither of us had answers: Which parts of my skin would they spare? How close to my chest wall would they have to scrape their scalpels, dig with trowels? I never knew chests had walls. I thought of the date again, November 1st. A calendar fell open in my mind: How long would it take me to get over whatever horrors awaited me here? Should I wish the time away, or would these weeks be my final romp on the planet?
Dr. A was explaining that she would do the surgery. She said, “I take the tissue,” and when I didn’t respond, added, “I do the removal.”
“Do” seemed an odd word to me, spinning into all of its forms, due, dew, doo-wop.
I asked, “All of it?”
“All of what?”
“My tissue.”
“We try to get as much of the breast tissue as we can. Of course, we can’t be certain we’ve gotten all of it. Some cells may remain.”
Some cells sell seashells. Maybe I’d write a tongue twister or a limerick. There was once a woman with cancer / who frolicked and—well, what rhyme, answer? Dancer? Prancer. Enhancer. Breast enhancer? Oh my God. Okay, so maybe—There once was a woman with breasts. Whose doctor put both to the tests. She spared her some nipples, but—triples, stipples, ooh, how about a subtle internal rhyme, dimples? Leaving the cutest of dimples?
Dr. A was talking and talking.
Pay attention, I reminded myself. Yes, yes, I gestured with my bobblehead while she said the words, “Depending on what we find, we would either cut under your breasts or across them.” I imagined the knife. A box cutter? A steak knife? How much like a regular thing did it look? Incision here, incision there. She began to draw on the paper table, and I watched. She drew grimaces, one underneath a blob; the other straight across its twin blob. I had an almost overpowering urge to color in the drawings, hear the metrical, waxy click of crayons on paper.
Would the incisions end up hidden under my breasts, or straight across them—real badges of damage? I wasn’t certain which I preferred, to what extent I’d want to hide that this had ever happened. If I survived. And might my preference also depend on how long I survived? Maybe I’d wish to mask the experience in the short term, but then want my body to bear the marks of it later.
In any case, I didn’t know how or want to discuss this aspect with Dr. A, armed as she invariably was with a barbed comment veiled as care. The first time I met her, before she’d examined me and done the slideshow