No, he’d said. He wants to wait. Until when? I wondered. We’d known we were separating for over a year at this point, and we’d been physically separated with a whole country between us for five months. At some point, the kids are going to figure it out on their own, whether or not we ever tell them. And that would be worse than sitting down to tell them, because then we will have broken their trust.
Santi and I continue kissing. Our clothes start to come off. We move to the bed. I am—my body is—desperate for this affection. For any affection. He touches my still bruise-covered breast, releasing a sudden flood of oxytocin into my bloodstream I can actually feel as it shoots out and courses through me.
This bonding hormone is physiologically identical to the one released during breastfeeding. Homo sapiens are the only members of the animal kingdom who engage in breast and nipple stimulation during sex, and scientists are starting to hypothesize that the subsequent release of oxytocin, which promotes both social bonding and empathy, might have been one of the factors, along with face-to-face copulation, that led to our advanced communication skills and cognition. I wonder whether I’ll opt for implants if my breasts have to be removed. My gut says no, but how does one give up this incredibly pleasurable part of the sex act? In fact, researchers now believe that not engaging in the occasional nipple stimulation can actually be detrimental to women’s health, as it decreases the risk of in situ cervical cancer, endometrial cancer of the uterus, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer.
The moment I snap off the bedside light and start to relax into this oxytocin-induced haze—we’re not having sex yet, but we might be heading in that direction—I hear the dogs bark. Someone else from the Commune has come home. Brittany, probably, I think. Or maybe George’s date went south? It can’t be Hannah, my son, or my daughter, but I lock my door just to be safe.
“Mom?” I hear. My daughter jiggles my bedroom door. Then she knocks. “Mom? Are you there? They came home early.” Meaning, the parents down the street for whom she’d been babysitting. “Mom! Your door is locked.”
I feign sleep. Fuck. This is not how I would have wanted this to go down. At all. In fact, I can’t imagine a worse way. You are a shitty parent!!!! I chastise myself. How could you have let this happen? She’s sixteen years old. She’s been told her dad just moved away to start a business, not that her parents’ marriage is kaput. Why did I agree to perpetuate this lie? Why didn’t I insist her father sit down with me and tell her the truth before he left last year? It’s not healthy, I’ve read, for only one parent to tell the story of marital rupture. There’s an agreed-upon dual script you need to follow: “We’re getting divorced,” I wanted to tell her, with her father sitting next to me, “but we both still love you, and we are united in our desire to get along for your sake, to be here for you whenever you need us, to make sure you’re okay as you navigate this new reality.”
Never did I imagine her discovering it this way. I start to panic. What do I do? My bedroom’s on the third floor, too high for Santi to jump out the window. My daughter’s bedroom is next to mine, off the same nineteenth century–constructed hallway with the creaky floor. I’m paralyzed with fear, not knowing how to proceed. Where’s the script for this scenario? I wonder. I didn’t read about this one in the divorce books. “Get dressed!” I both mime and mouth to the man in my bed, whose presence now fills me with shame. “Now!”
“What do you want me to do?” he shrugs.
I shrug back, on the verge of tears. “Just don’t move,” I whisper. “She’ll fall asleep at some point. Then you can sneak out and leave by the front door.”
The hour that passes between her knock on my door and Santi’s silent exit feels like a lifetime, during which neither of us moves. I stare straight up at the ceiling, its surface periodically aglow with the light from passing headlights. A couple argues on the sidewalk below, screaming obscenities. A car honks. Rap music thrums out an open window. Whatever oxytocin had been flooding my arteries has now been replaced by cortisol. Who is this stranger I invited into my bed, jeopardizing everything I hold dear: my children’s trust, their love? I spend the rest of the night, after Santi escapes, fretting, awake, trying to figure out what to say to my daughter the next morning. My bedroom door these days is never locked. And the only times it had ever been thus was when her father and I needed privacy. She’s too smart to see this as anything but what it is.
The sun rises. A new day begins, whether I like it or not. My room faces west, so I can’t see the sun, but I can see its fire turning the clouds purple then pink, now warming the top half of the buildings across the street, first red, then yellow, now white, infusing my room with reflected glow. “What now, Dad?” I say, “How do I fix this?”
My father was vehemently opposed to divorce. “You stick it out,” he always said. “You make it work for the sake of the children.”
“But what if the children would be better off with their parents apart?” I sometimes countered, never referring directly to us kids and his marriage, but he knew what I was saying.
“They never are,” he said, certain of his opinion. The man was completely judgment free, except on this one topic: He judged anyone who got divorced as bad, selfish. “You don’t do that to kids,” he said. “You just don’t.”
I never brought up my marital problems with him. Not once. Not even when he was dying. I didn’t want to worry him, for one, but I also knew what his response would be: Work it out. I don’t care how bad it is, just work it out.
Now I’m suddenly angry about this. What if only one person in the marriage wants to solve its problems? What if conflict and derision have replaced love and compassion? What if the children of dysfunctional relationships carry that dysfunction into their own partnerships, and the cycle keeps going? Shouldn’t somebody somewhere along the way stand up and say, No, time out! We’re not going to do it this way anymore?
Or maybe I’m just angry at myself for not mentioning to my own father my one real and crushing secret for fear of disappointing him. I’m angry that I didn’t make it clear to him, after putting in years of fruitless work trying to save my marriage, that every marriage is unique, and that some marriages are so untenable, they become detrimental to one’s physical and emotional health and well-being. “No!” I suddenly whisper-scream at the sky, five years after Dad’s death. “You’re wrong! Sometimes you have to cut your losses and give up!”
“Mom,” says my daughter, sitting on my bed. “Mom, what’s going on?” The look of hurt and betrayal on her face will enter my brain permanently. She demands answers. I give them to her as succinctly and as honestly as I can. It is my nadir as a parent, and we both know it. It might take years for her to recover from this moment, if not the rest of her life. My guilt over this feels crushing, suffocating. I make arrangements to fly to Chicago the following weekend with her little brother to tell both him and her big brother together. Their father will not meet me. It’s too expensive, he says, to fly out and get a hotel room for the night, plus he’s angry with me for letting the cat out of the bag. I offer to help him with the cost. The boys need to know we’re getting divorced. Now. We can’t ask our daughter to keep that kind of secret from her own siblings. Plus my surgery’s coming up, my job is stressful, and, yes, okay! Fine! I fucked up! I know I fucked up.
I just wanted someone to hold me.
With only enough money for one night in a hotel and two plane fares—thank god for Spirit Airlines, with their $50 round trip specials between New York and Chicago—I fly with my seven-year-old son to Chicago early Saturday morning to tell both boys together that their father and I are getting divorced. It’s an inopportune weekend to do this, as my eldest is in the undergraduate musical, with little time to actually sit down and chat. He can have a late lunch with us on Saturday, he says, but only for an hour or so, as he has to run back to the theater right after. I try to get him to come up to my room after dessert
, but lunch has taken longer than expected, even though the restaurant is practically empty at this hour, and we’ve run out of time. His little brother and I are leaving the next morning. It’s now or never, I tell myself. You have to do it here, in this restaurant. Ugh. After some loving if confusing throat clearing, I say it plainly: “Your dad and I are getting divorced. I’m so sorry. We both love you so much, and that will never change…” The two brothers burst into tears and hug each other tightly, but only the little one will allow me to comfort him. Over the next few months, my texts, calls, and emails to my college freshman go unanswered. I’ve lost him forever, I fear. My friends say, no, don’t say that. He’ll come around. Every child processes these things in their own time, on their own schedule. No, I think. I really fucked this one up but good. He will eventually forgive me, but it will take years.
My daughter, too, gives me the cold shoulder when I come home. I find her a therapist. Apologize profusely. Hope for the best.
This, I think. This hideous pain I have now inflicted upon my three kids and my disconnection from them for being the cause of that pain is why I and so many others put up with untenable marriages for so long. And yet I am also highly aware of the ways in which high-conflict marriages can leave equally noxious fumes within the adult psyches of grown children, particularly when they are forced to pretend to the outside world that everything is peachy inside it. My hope is that, by opting for radical honesty with my kids—saying no both to the poisonous atmosphere within the home and to the concomitant necessity for keeping the truth of that poison hidden inside it—I will have taught my children lessons about boundaries, honesty, self-respect, and mitigation that they can carry with them into the future.
Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself in order to make it through each day.
Santi calls and texts daily, wanting to know how he can fix what he’s broken. You didn’t break anything, I tell him. I did. Some weeknights, after cooking dinner for the Commune, putting my son to bed, and trying to make things right with my daughter, I override my crushing guilt and exhaustion from work and make the round trip subway journey to meet Santi sixty blocks north. I meet him for sex, yes, but also to spoon, even if only for a few minutes before I have to head back home to my empty bed. Eros consumes me. Human touch—and the soothing hit of oxytocin it releases—feels like the sole antidote to my shattered life: a necessity, not a desire or diversion.
Santi lives in a tiny, dilapidated apartment with few possessions aside from his cameras, his computer, a gallery of photos from his last show, and a couple of paintings by his father, a Mexican artist who was once celebrated in his country but is now apparently struggling to stay both solvent and relevant. I bring my new lover sheets for his bed, dinner leftovers from the Commune, the occasional bag of groceries. Without a means to work legally, he lives below subsistence level poverty. His one pair of shoes have holes. With my new Health Today dollars, I buy him two pairs. Some nights, when the rice runs out, he goes hungry.
The bruises on my breasts have now healed, and he offers to shoot them gratis, but I insist on sticking with the deal we struck before we started sleeping together. I have a salary now, I tell him. Please let me pay you for the work I’ve asked you to do as planned. You need the cash. I need to feel, after spending every day not paying my sick and dying bloggers for their work, that I’m not exploiting anyone else in the world. We plan the shoot for the night before my surgery, which is dumb. I try to relax into it, but in each photo from that night my expression is marked by the tension of a woman hours away from going under the knife. My surgery is scheduled for 7 a.m. It’s now 11 p.m. I have to go, I tell him, but as I’m about to get dressed and leave he says, “No. Stop. Before you put on your clothes, I have an idea. Lie down here, in a fetal position.” “Here” is a large green trash bag he places on his floor.
“What? Why?” I say.
“Please,” he says. “Just trust me.”
Trust me: I override my doubts that the male species is actually trustworthy and do what he asks, scrunching myself into a fetal ball and closing my eyes. He circles hawklike around my coiled body, shooting off frame after frame from this angle and that. A few minutes into this, I picture what he pictures and feel tears splashing onto the green plastic below.
February 6, 2014, the night before surgery, © Cristobal Vivar
Yes. Of course. Here I am, eight hours pre-op, a discarded body atop a body bag, awaiting rebirth. Will that rebirth come? Or will the bag cover her fetal corpse before she has a chance to unfurl? The bottoms of my feet are dirty, I think, from walking around barefoot on the living room floor. I wish I’d taken the time to clean them. Ice coats the New York City sidewalks outside. The salt and sand tossed onto it, to keep us from face-planting, are impossible to keep out. The world creeps in, no matter how diligently you sweep it out. Looking back on the image now, years later, it remains the most brutally honest portrait of me anyone has ever taken, before or since. I feel seen during this particular moment in time: known, understood. And my dirty feet are what make the photograph.
FOURTEEN
You Won the Lottery!
FEBRUARY 2014
On the morning of my lumpectomy, I change into a hospital gown before dawn and watch a nurse stick a line into one of the arteries atop my hand before covering it with tape. The anesthesiologist arrives next, to talk me through his plans. Next, my oncologist arrives to tell me that I’ll be put in an MRI first, so that a wire can be threaded into my lump, to help her locate it during surgery. You won’t be in there for long, she tells me. After the MRI, someone will come get you and bring you into the operating room.
Breast MRIs require lying face down with your boobs dangling through two holes. I don’t usually mind the enforced entombment of MRIs. In fact, I often fall asleep in them, despite the noise. But on this particular morning, with the operation looming, my mind is racing and unable to find peace. The minutes stretch on, longer than I’d assumed, and I start to panic. What’s going on? She said I’d only be in here for a little while. This feels closer to an hour.
When I finally emerge from the tube into the light, the radiologist smiles. “You’ll never believe this,” she says. She is—what?—giddy? Giggling? Everyone in this room, in fact, seems to be smiling. “The lump is gone. Completely gone. You won the lottery. This only happens once or twice a year, if that.”
“What?” I say.
“Your mass is gone. You don’t need surgery.”
“I don’t…what?” I stare down at my hospital bracelet, at the yellow I’m-a-fainter bracelet, at the line in my artery. I can’t process this information. Part of me, writing this today, still can’t process it. You go into a hospital one morning, expecting to be sliced open, chunks of flesh removed, but suddenly the bad cells inside you have retreated, and the woman pulling you out of the tube has become…Emily Litella? Never mind.
Wait wait WHAT?
I put my hospital gown back on, and make my way to the MRI anteroom, where my scans are put up on the computer. On one screen, dated January 7, 2014, sits a left breast with a clearly visible mass next to the chest wall; on the other, from today, February 7, 2014, a completely normal-looking breast. “I don’t get it,” I say to the radiologist. “It just…disappeared? Where did it go?”
“Who knows?” she says. “Sometimes—like I said, not often—these things just happen.” My surgeon, she says, will have to ask me a bunch of questions about any diet, exercise, or behavioral changes between the film on the left and the film on the right: These disappearing masses, rare as they are, are useful. They might one day provide important information about the body’s own ability to combat abnormal cell growth.
I wander, dazed and in shock, back into the pre-op room to get the line removed, put my street clothes back on, and meet my surgeon. We go over the thirty-one days that have passed between the MRI with the lump and the one wit
hout it: Has anything changed between then and now? Diet, exercise, work? I wrack my brain, trying to come up with anything of note. I’ve kept the same diet, the same daily regimen of either at-home yoga or walking, the same crushing work schedule and childcare responsibilities. The only thing that has changed this past month is that I went on that ill-fated date with Santi on January 8, 2014, the day after the first MRI, and I’ve been having frequent sex with him ever since.
She smiles and asks if I plan to keep seeing this man. I’m not sure, I say. He’s kind and loving and an ace with a broom, but I don’t see us working out long-term. He’s already been hinting at wanting to get married for a green card, but I’m not divorced yet, not even close, and if I do end up getting married again, I want it to be because I am loved, not because I’m useful. The doc seems disappointed by my answer.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing…” she says. That nothing, I think, is definitely something.
“Wait. Hold on a sec. Are you suggesting I fucked my way out of a breast lump?”
“No,” she says, laughing. She would never suggest that. We don’t have the data to support such a theory. As with most things concerning the female body, there’s a lack of adequate research. But of course oxytocin is a powerful hormone. We’re still learning about its effects on cancer.
“So, are you saying he’s my chemotherapy?”
“I would never say that,” she says, all business.*
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we still know so little about what causes or inhibits abnormal cell growth, that’s all.”
“I’ll keep seeing him,” I say. “For you.”
“Don’t do anything on my behalf,” she says, but I can tell by her smile she’s pleased. She’ll need me to come back in six months, she says, for another MRI, to make sure the breast lump is gone for good. Someone from her office will call me to set that up.
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