The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “And I couldn’t know for sure what I’d want to do until I knew how bad it was,” Linda said.

  She’d read that most doctors thought any woman who had anything less than a radical mastectomy was being unforgivably foolish. Unless they took out the whole breast and the surrounding muscles and lymph nodes, they couldn’t be sure they’d gotten all the cancer. But she’d read, too, about a doctor in Cleveland who thought a lumpectomy—cutting out only the lump and leaving the rest of the breast alone—was as effective as a radical for some women. “More effective, even, because he thinks the lymph nodes help your immune system fight the disease.”

  “Dr. George Crile,” Brett said. “There was a piece on him in Reader’s Digest, about studies in Finland and Canada showing five-year survival rates for lumpectomies equaled those for radicals. It discussed a new study just beginning here in the U.S., twenty-two hospitals participating in randomized pools.”

  “I think I saw that fella on the Today show,” Kath added nervously.

  “Randomized?” Ally whispered.

  “You’re blindly assigned to one of the treatment groups,” Brett explained.

  I looked off to the palm tree still standing in the old mansion yard, wanting to say Don’t do that, Linda, don’t let your treatment be decided randomly, luck of the draw. Wanting to say this couldn’t be helping Linda, all this talk. But they were talking at least, while I sat mutely imagining Linda in that coffin for real, Jamie and Julie and J.J. in the front pew, having no idea that dead meant they’d never see their mommy again.

  Linda had gone to Memorial Sloan-Kettering on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not far from where her brother and sister-in-law lived. Her sister-in-law kept J.J. and the twins while she went to the hospital for the preliminary tests: X-rays and blood samples, an electrocardiogram, a lung-capacity test. She was evaluated by a surgeon, a radiologist, and a chemotherapist. They agreed to go in and do the biopsy, tell her what they found, and let her participate in the decision about what to do about whatever it turned out to be.

  “One lump,” she said. Like the first one, but not.

  She’d been saying no to herself all along: No, it’s not a lump I’m feeling, it’s just fibroid tissue or something, like the last time. No, I’m fine, really, even if it is a lump; look how well I’m running. When they said yes, it was malignant, she wanted to say no again, but she was all out of denial.

  “I had them”—she waved a hand in front of her chest—“take out the whole thing. But not the muscles, not the nodes.”

  She couldn’t tell Jeff about the lump at first. She didn’t tell him until the night before the biopsy. He was in Boston, but she called him that morning from her brother’s apartment and told him he had to come to see her in New York. She couldn’t even say why over the phone, but he hadn’t questioned her. He’d been up all night at the hospital, and still he didn’t hesitate. “I have a gunshot wound in post-op, but I can get someone else to cover,” he’d said, and she’d told him if he could get there that evening, that would be soon enough.

  “It’s just a breast, right?” she told us, her voice cracking. And it had been bottled up inside her for so long that it all came out in a gush. “A breast,” she said. “Just a breast. You wouldn’t think it would be so . . .”

  I thought she’d cry then, but she didn’t.

  “So hideous,” she whispered. “There is nothing sexy about me at all anymore. I’m just hideous.

  “I grew up the child of the sick mother, and then the child of the dead mother. I couldn’t imagine going back to that. I couldn’t imagine putting my kids through that. I couldn’t take that chance. I’m healthier, though. I’m so much healthier than my mother was to start with. I could run ten miles. And I caught it earlier. My mom, she was . . . When they cut her open, it was just . . .” She waved her hand again, a gesture that said everywhere, her mother’s cancer had been everywhere.

  “They said consider chemotherapy. They don’t really know if it will help, but they’re having success with it in treating other”—she closed her eyes and took a deep breath—“other cancers.”

  Fast-growing cancers, where a high percentage of the cells are always in some phase of division, Brett explained later. The drugs had to hit the tumor cells while they were dividing; that was when they were most vulnerable, easiest to knock out.

  “I was past no by then,” Linda said. “I said of course I’d have the chemotherapy. Sure, I’ll have this first poison on the menu, and the third one, too, thanks. And I just decided I wouldn’t have any of the bad side effects they talked about, the nausea and depression and . . .” She touched her head. “And this.”

  She cut her hair off the night she got home from New York, while Jeff was back in Boston explaining what had happened, telling the folks at the hospital that he could stay only until they could find a replacement for him. She took the scissors and sliced her braid across at her neck. She went to a hairdresser the next day and had it fixed so it looked nicer, and she attached her braid to her hat. It wasn’t until her hair started falling out in clumps that she took the braid to a wig maker, a woman who, when Linda entered the upstairs shop in San Carlos, was fitting a Hasidic Jew for a wig to wear after she married, because only her husband was allowed to see her hair after her wedding day. “I guess they know how often a man falls in love with a woman’s hair,” Linda said to us. “The girl had eyebrows and lashes,” she said. “I was jealous of that, of her dark eyebrows, her dark lashes, of her knowing they wouldn’t fall out.”

  She felt sick after the chemo—which was being supervised out here; Jeff had lined her up with the best doctor at Stanford—but she’d been given a drug to help curb the nausea. She wasn’t living days with her head over the toilet; she wasn’t unable to get out of bed. Maybe J.J. and the twins were watching more television than she’d like, maybe dinner too often came from a box—“Let’s hear it for Hamburger Helper,” she said—but some things just couldn’t be helped.

  “The doctor said some people think smoking marijuana helps, but I couldn’t imagine explaining that to a neighbor stopping by to borrow a cup of sugar,” she said, and with a break in her voice, “much less to my kids.”

  Brett handed Linda her cap back, and Linda put it on.

  “Jeff didn’t fall in love with me,” she whispered. “He fell in love with my hair.”

  And you could see it all then, like the aha ending we are always striving for in what we write, the of-course-I-should-have-seen-that. The braid first. The cutting off of the braid and yet holding on to it, too. Gaining control over this thing she couldn’t control, or trying to.

  “He won’t leave you,” Kath said quietly.

  It was clear from the pooling in Linda’s eyes that this wasn’t a new idea to her. Worse, she believed he would leave her, he would want to every time he saw the gash across her chest where her breast had been. Maybe he wouldn’t move out right away because that would be unseemly, but he would want to and he would do it eventually, he wouldn’t be able to help himself.

  “Jeff won’t be going anywhere,” Kath insisted. “Lee would, but not Jeff.”

  There was no discussing it, though. Linda was ashamed: her body had betrayed her. She was terrified that Jeff would come home one day and announce he’d rented an apartment, just as Lee had. And as much as I wanted to assure her otherwise, I knew I would feel as she did if all that was left of my breast was an ugly scar.

  Brett, beside me, had not said a word in a while, I realized then; she’d hardly looked up from her lap. She had taken her gloves off. It was a shock to realize it—as shocking as if she’d stripped off her navy sweater and bell-bottom slacks and stood stark naked before us.

  The conversation halted, everyone looking at Brett now. Linda looking at Brett’s hands, though the rest of us quickly looked away.

  We’d seen, though: her fingers all there, but the skin warped, as if it had melted and run, like candle wax or a lava flow. Her left hand more scarred than her r
ight, the little finger bent slightly, as if she couldn’t quite straighten it all the way.

  “I burned them in a chemical explosion when I was twelve. I hadn’t thought through what would happen if . . .” She blinked once, twice, her leaf-bud gaze fixed on Linda, who alone still stared at Brett’s bare hands. “I guess it was an accident,” she said.

  She was silent for a long time. We were all silent, the only sound the flapping wings of the birds, big ugly black crows landing, gathering to peck at the grass seed that had, once again, been spread across the scar of dirt.

  “Not even an accident, exactly,” Brett said, her voice uncertain, as if this was something she’d only just realized, something she’d stuffed deep inside herself and kept hidden there, even from herself, all these years. “My brother dared me. He never dreamed I could make such a dramatic bang.” She intertwined her scarred fingers. “He’s as badly scarred as I am. In a different way.”

  Linda’s gaze lifted from Brett’s hands to her thin little face.

  “Chip says he loves my hands,” Brett said, seeming to be speaking only to Linda now. “He loves me more for my hands. He says he can see that twelve-year-old girl I was, showing her brother she was so much smarter than anyone could imagine.

  “Jeff loves you, Linda,” she said. “It isn’t your hair or your breasts he loves. It’s the person you are. Just like Chip loves me.”

  It seemed we’d been sitting there for an hour, for two, for a lifetime, but the sun had not yet crested the tree line. The sky was still the soft color of dawn.

  “But Chip fell in love with you and your hands,” Linda whispered. “Jeff fell in love with a blond Jewish girl with”—her hand went unconsciously to her wig—“with perfect C-cup breasts, in a sweater that wasn’t blue.”

  She adjusted her wig, her cap, almost surreptitiously, while Brett sat there with her hands free, touched by the fresh morning air.

  I wondered if people would stare less at Brett’s bare hands than they had always stared at the gloves. I wondered if she’d ever thought about having plastic surgery, or if there was anything they could do. If she could afford it if there was. I imagined her watching the medical news, waiting for the day to come when they could fix her up, when they could give her new hands.

  I wondered if it was more complicated than that, if she didn’t on some level cling to the gloves as a kind of protection against the world. It was just her hands people were rejecting, then. They weren’t rejecting the odd girl who could talk about science better than most scientists, the girl who had wanted to be an astronaut when most of us had no idea what an astronaut was, when most of us aspired only to be the homecoming queen. I imagined her as a young student at Harvard, not belonging in that man’s world but belonging no better at Radcliffe. One of the very few women who’d crossed into that world. I imagined her thinking they all would love her—the Harvard boys and the Radcliffe girls and everyone who had ever made fun of her in the school yard or sniggered behind her back in class—if only they could get past her hands.

  She would tell us more later. She would tell us that her brother was so good at science that he really could have been an astronaut. His eye had been injured in the explosion, but he’d had an operation and she’d sat through the recovery with him, even as a girl laying out the facts for him. But Brad never took another science class beyond what he was required to take in high school. In college, he majored in history even though he’d never liked history, and he flunked out. And when he was twenty, he had a breakdown. He couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. He spent several months at Sheppard Pratt outside Baltimore, and he was better after that, but he never was the same. “It’s as if he can’t do anything but relive the past,” Brett said. “He thinks my hands are his fault, because he dared me. But it was my fault, really. I knew what I could do.” And I would remember then Brett’s reluctance to send out that first essay, and see it for the first time as what it was: not fear of failure but fear of success. I would wonder what it was like to love a brother so selflessly, to give up your own success lest it make your brother’s failure worse.

  That afternoon when we first saw Brett’s scarred hands, though, I thought only that those hands were her hands, that she wouldn’t be Brett without them, with or without her gloves. I took one scarred hand in mine, and Kath, across the picnic table from her, did, too, and then we had all joined hands, even Linda. We just sat there, not saying anything, just sitting together as the sun rose above the trees, as the sky lightened from pink to blue and the shadows shortened and the day became just another Sunday to the people waking in the houses around us. Men strapping on running shoes to run marathons. Toddlers dragging stuffed bears they’d cuddled since the moment they were born. Husbands and wives spooning together. Little girls placing their fingers on white piano keys, then reaching up for the black.

  LINDA CAME TO THE NEXT Wednesday Sisters meeting with a piece of writing she wanted to share with us, something she’d written before she’d gone to New York. I took it home and read it, then read it again: Linda packing up J.J. and Jamie and Julie the morning she found the new lump, loading them into the car to search through bookstores. She knows what a radical mastectomy is, but what does it mean, really? How does it look? It’s what they did to her mother, a double radical; they cut both her mother’s breasts off, she knows that, but she doesn’t know, she has never seen.

  There are alternatives now: a modified radical mastectomy and radiation therapy. But what do they mean? How is she to have any idea which choice to make if she has to make a choice? None of it sure to save her life, anyway. A double radical, and still her mother died.

  She wanders through Kepler’s Books on El Camino, through Stacey’s on University, through Books Inc. at the mall, but there is no book on breast cancer that she can find, nothing that shows her what a breast looks like when it’s gone.

  Back home, she calls the American Cancer Society, but the disembodied woman on the line is curt. Severe disapproval in her voice: Books with photos like that for anyone but medical personnel? But Linda grabs on to that one phrase, “medical personnel,” and she is already hanging up the phone, already loading the children into the car again, promising them just a few more minutes looking at books and then ice cream as she heads for the Stanford bookstore, where Jeff gets his medical texts.

  The volume of books at Stanford is overwhelming, though. She doesn’t know where to start, and she can’t ask anyone, she simply can’t. But she won’t have time to do this after she’s in the hospital, so she starts paging through volumes: photos of children with cleft palates, children with measles and mumps, children with unspeakable diseases of the skin. She puts that volume back, moves to another aisle, finds old people with gout and kidney disease. She fumbles her way to books on oncology, where she finds photos and drawings of diseased lungs, small spots on skin that are not good news, polyps in colons and tumors on ovaries. Still, she cannot find a photo of a breastless chest. And the children are insistent now: It’s time for ice cream, she has promised no more than fifteen minutes and it has been twenty-five, Julie says. Linda is sorry the twins have learned to tell time, sorry she has given them her watch.

  She turns to Lee Montgomery. Yes, to Kath’s Lee. She feels the guilt of it, the disloyalty. Lee will know and Kath won’t. But he is the only person she knows who can and will sit and explain to her the options and what they mean. He will let her take all night to get the words out if she needs to. He will tell her where she should go to have it looked at. And Lee, she knows, is discreet. He will never tell a soul, not even Jeff. Especially not Jeff.

  I wept as I read, and as I reread, and then I called Kath.

  “We’ve got to do something directly,” Kath said. “And I’m not talking about making casseroles.”

  But what? That’s what the conversation came down to. But what?

  THE NEXT WEEK, Linda wrote of the sterile, obsolete-magazine anonymity of the surgery waiting room, of imagining this would be the way she
would spend the rest of her life, what little rest of her life there might be. She remembered how her father had never looked at her mother after her surgery. How her father hadn’t looked at any woman after that, not even his daughter.

  The third week, five exquisite pages of Linda sitting naked and alone at her makeup mirror, watching in the soft light of the frosted round bulbs as her own hand raised the sharp silver blades of her sewing scissors to the long twist of her hair. I wept as I read. As I reread. The simple act of cutting a braid off—what it meant to take control of this thing before it took control of her.

  And the fourth week: eight heartbreaking pages that started with the alarm going off the morning of the mini-marathon, Linda waking and realizing that she couldn’t run, that she couldn’t bear to spend a moment away from Jamie and Julie and J.J. on this last day before her biopsy. Realizing, too, that she had to tell Jeff.

  It was early, but she picked up the phone and called him, found him at the hospital, working the overnight shift. She asked him to please come to New York, it was important. Then she went into the bedroom the twins were sharing at her brother’s apartment and woke them. “We’re in New York,” she said. “Let’s go explore!”

  She gathered J.J., and she took them all for breakfast at the Plaza Hotel: waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. And she told them. First thing, over the waffles and whipped cream, she told them so they would have the whole day to ask questions. She waited until the waiter had served them, until they’d eaten and it didn’t look as if they could handle another bite. She waited till the waiter refilled her coffee cup and took the check and the money away, returned with the change, so that they wouldn’t be interrupted. She made them all look at her, then. She made Julie and Jamie put their forks down; they were playing with the uneaten strawberries, threatening to begin flinging them across the room. She supposed they sensed something was up. She wished, as they set the silver forks on the edges of their plates, that she had three sets of silver, that if anything happened to her they would each have that, a set of silver that had been their mother’s, that would touch their fingers every day of their lives.