Today, while I sat in my flimsy flowered paper robe in the stark examination room, waiting for the nurse to wheel in the ultrasound machine, Sally casually brought up Lila. And Zach.
“Do you want to know what’s going on?” she asked, as she pressed her palms into her thighs.
“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked.
“Because every time his name comes up, you get this sour look on your face, so I’m pretty sure that you either want to know so badly that it’s eating you up inside or else you truly don’t want to know, and thus, I won’t tell you.”
“Unfortunately, no, that’s not what’s eating me up inside. If that were the only thing that was eating me up inside, I certainly wouldn’t need an ultrasound to tell me how to treat it.” I sighed. “Fine. Yes, tell me what’s going on.”
“Did something happen with you two? That night at his apartment? Because why all the bitterness?”
“No, Sally, nothing happened. Need I remind you? I have cancer.” I focused on the pale green wallpaper and tried to avoid meeting her eyes.
“Yes, that’s clear,” she said. “But I’m not sure why it’s relevant.”
“Because I have cancer.”
“Uh-huh. Again, clear.”
“How can I possibly be attractive to someone right now?”
Sally let out a long breath. “Okay then. If that’s how you’re going to play it. Here’s the lowdown. From what Lila has told me, they met for drinks twice. Both times she initiated. And after the second time, she kissed him.”
I felt myself blanch and didn’t respond. Finally, I said, “Did they go home together?”
“No.” Sally shook her head. “Lila tried to work it, you know how she does. But they left it at that. I think she’s going to call him for dinner this week.”
“Figures,” I muttered, and stared at my toes.
“What? What figures?”
“Just that he told me that he wouldn’t take her back.” I picked imaginary lint off the sterile hospital gown.
“Well, maybe he wasn’t sure. Or maybe whatever Lila said made him change his mind.” She paused and put down the dog-eared copy of Glamour she’d been flipping through. “Sweetie, if you want to be with him, why not just tell him when he expressed it to you?” I glared at her. “I know. I know. You have cancer.” She looked a bit too harshly back at me. “Nat, Zach knows that, too.”
I wiggled my toes and then stared up at the rectangular fluorescent light on the ceiling.
“I was trying to protect him, Sally. Why should he be with a damaged set of goods like me? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have kids. Hell, I don’t know if I’ll be alive next fall. It’s just so much better for him not to get dragged in. Besides, how can my body possibly be attractive to anyone at this point?”
She looked at me, her harsh gaze growing soft, and for a quick millisecond I thought I saw pity. In that moment, I relented: Maybe she was right. She took a breath and responded.
“It seems to me that he’s not the one you’re trying to protect.”
THE NEWS COULD not have been better. Dr. Chin actually said this. “The news could not be better.”
The tests indicated that the chemo was having the desired, even better than desired, effect. My tumor had markedly declined in size, and my lymph nodes were virtually cancer-free.
“Your progress is remarkable,” Dr. Chin told me, after I’d gotten dressed and was seated in his office, clenching Sally’s hand and trying with every healthy cell in my body not to explode into a waterfall of tears. He flipped through some pages in my chart. “Better than we could have hoped for. So what I’d like to propose is that we do the mastectomy sooner rather than later. The tumor is of operable size, and I think the earlier we get it out of you, the better.”
I inhaled sharply and squeezed Sally’s hand tighter. I knew from the original diagnosis that there was little choice, that this moment was coming, and that hacking off one part of me to save the rest seemed like a reasonable compromise. Still though, when he said it, when the time crept up on me before I’d really given myself a chance to say good-bye to my breasts, I felt my heart break in the same way that it had that morning when it all started, the morning that Ned discovered the lump. But I didn’t tell Dr. Chin any of this. Instead, I nodded and told him that was fine—that he could take my breasts whenever he felt necessary.
“You need to consider whether to have a single or double,” he said, clearing his throat. “Obviously, there are pros and cons to each. Because you have a family history of breast cancer, there is a greater chance that it could reoccur in the left breast. Of course, you have to weigh the odds of this against how much you’d like to keep a part of yourself intact.” He fell silent. “Many women opt for reconstructive surgery at the same time that they get the mastectomy. I suspect that it helps to get something back when we’ve just taken something else away. If you’d like, we can certainly schedule that as well.”
I nodded again and didn’t speak.
“I’ll give you some time to think about this. If possible, we’d like to get you in next week. Why don’t you take the night to consider your options and call me tomorrow.”
I stared out the window the entire cab ride home and wondered whose life I was in, how it was possible that Natalie Miller, the supposed future American president and current feared and revered aide to a powerful senator, had been demolished into this. How an otherwise healthy thirty-year-old found herself in the position of choosing how many breasts to surrender.
“What would you do?” I asked Sally when she dropped me off at my building. She was already distracted by an e-mail on her Palm from an editor she was trying to impress.
“Oh sweetie,” she said. “I can’t make this sort of monumental decision for you. I can’t pretend to know how it feels.”
“But what would you do?” I pressed, and my eyes welled with tears. “My parents are away, and I don’t know who else to talk to. I’ll make my own decision. But if you were me, what would you do?”
She took a deep breath and hugged me. “I would tell them to take them both. And then, I’d tell this cancer to fuck off and get back to living my life.”
MY APARTMENT FELT claustrophobic, so despite the nearly freezing temperatures, Manny and I went out for a walk. Fresh air is good for the soul, Zach had said.
Manny and I cut over to Central Park West to head into the park. He stopped to sniff a street lamp, then tugged me harder and harder until we were in a near sprint. Then he stopped abruptly, tangling his leash under his front paws. When I looked down to unknot him, I saw the object of his overly zealous olfactory system: a lifeless squirrel, curled up on top of a patch of dried, skeletal leaves. On instinct, I tugged Manny back, pulling him up in the air, until he was far enough away that he couldn’t take the squirrel in his teeth. We started to walk away, but I looked back: The squirrel looked perfect, alive almost, like it went to sleep on a bed of leaves and happened not to wake up in the morning. It was only when you peered closer that you noticed that its abdomen didn’t rise and fall, and that there was a thin layer of white, crusty foam around its mouth. Dead. It was for sure.
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, so I shifted Manny’s leash to my left hand and flipped it open.
“Dr. Chin told me,” I heard Janice say into my right ear. “And I wanted to make sure you were okay with things. This can be a very hard step.”
I kept walking and watched the cold air billow out from Manny’s snout. Rather than respond, I asked her the question that had been weighing on my mind.
“Do you think anything happens to us, Janice? You know…after we die?” She went silent, and I knew she wouldn’t answer, that it was up to me to come to peace with the issues I wrestled with. “I mean, I’d always believed before my diagnosis, this time around was simply your one shot: that you better make the most of it now because once this opportunity passed you by, there were no second chances.” I shrugged and pulled Manny across the park drive. “But now.” My voice
faltered. “I don’t know.”
“How does it make you feel?” she asked, and I heard her take a sip of what I imagined to be her green herbal tea.
“How is it supposed to make me feel?” I said and kicked the dead leaves in my path. “Terrified. Totally fucking pissed off.” I paused. “Curious, I guess, too. I mean, what if there are just, like, millions and millions of people up there waiting for us, having, like, an incredible party and wondering why we’re all so scared to die.”
“So you believe that there’s something more than this?” Janice asked.
“Honestly, who the hell knows?” I sighed. “I mean, up until a few months ago, no. We were worm food. But now…” I faltered again and bit my nearly frozen lip. “I guess that when you’re staring down the barrel of your own mortality, it’s awfully difficult to accept that this is all there is.”
“You realize this is normal,” Janice said when there was nothing else to say.
“And to think that most of our lives, all we want to be is ‘normal.’” I laughed. “If people only knew how damn hard it really was.” I exhaled. “Thanks for the call, Janice. To answer your original question, I’m okay. I’m fine. I’ll deal.”
She chuckled into the receiver before hanging up. “You know, Natalie, sometimes, it’s okay to admit that you can’t.”
I dropped the phone back into my pocket, tugged at Manny’s leash, and heard the frozen leaves crunch under my boots as we circled the park. I expected it to be deserted given the frigid air, but up in front of us, an elderly couple held hands and slowly strolled down the tree-covered sidewalk. We grew nearer, and I could hear her singing to him, though I couldn’t quite make out the tune. He threw back his head and laughed, and moved his arm around her shoulder to kiss the top of her head. We passed them, and I turned to smile. They nodded back, and she kept singing. I thought of my grandmother who had faced this same disease with so much dignity, even when she didn’t have a chance, and I imagined that if given that chance, she’d still be singing to my own grandfather.
No, I decided. These thirty years, they simply can’t be it. There must be more than this. Or at least there had to be more for me. I didn’t know if that meant that I’d come back as a squirrel or a dog or a man, or even if it meant that I’d just hover around up above, looking out for those who I might have been too busy for in the first thirty years, but as I watched Manny run his tongue along the three-day-old snow and dig in his nose, I knew that I wasn’t ready to find out. At least not yet.
“I’M HAVING THEM take both. Lopping them both off,” I said into the phone. “I wanted you to be the first to know.” I stood in the kitchen and boiled water for my tea.
“Okay,” he said. “Are you comfortable with the decision? Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.” I shrugged. “It seems like the obvious choice: Why would I even risk the chance that I’d go through this again? Why even test it? I know that my grandmother would have happily given up her left breast in exchange for the chance to meet me.”
“Seems reasonable,” Zach said. And then we fell silent.
“I could use some more pot. It’s really helping my eating, and I’m almost done with the original bag.” I leaned back on the fridge and felt its cool exterior against my shoulder blades.
“No problem. Should I bring it over to you? I guess leaving it with your doorman could make him complicit in a crime. No need to drag him down into your sordid lifestyle, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “That would be great. Tell me when, and I’ll try to be here.” And then I frantically grasped for some other reason for my call: The flimsy excuses that I’d already offered up were waving like pitiful white flags that the opposition was choosing to ignore.
“I’ll bring it by this weekend.” Zach paused. “Is that it?”
“I hear you’re back with Lila,” I said before I could think to stop myself.
“You might want to check your sources,” he said. “‘Back with’ connotes that it is something that it is not.”
“So what is it?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. It was a few drinks and two dinners, and the sum of it is nothing.”
“She doesn’t think so. Which makes me not think so.” I’d forgotten all about my water, which I just noticed had boiled itself into a fever pitch and was cascading over the sides of the pot. Frantically, I flipped off the burner and grabbed a dish towel from the hook on the cabinet.
“Why are you asking, Natalie? It seems that it’s really not your place. You’re close with Lila, so why don’t you take it up with her?” His voice stirred with irritation. “If I recall, you suggested that we should stick it out as friends.”
“You just said that you wouldn’t take her back. So I wanted to know if you knew what you were getting into.”
He sighed. “Natalie, I’m thirty-five. I’m pretty well aware of what I’m getting into. You don’t have to warn me. Not with her and not with you.” He paused, and I heard him tapping a pencil in the background. “Do you have some sort of problem with Lila and me, should there actually be a Lila and me?”
My ears flamed. “Of course not!” I replied, even though given the venom of my response, it was painfully clear that I had a terrible, terrible problem with it. I grabbed a tea bag from the cabinet and dropped it into my mug.
“It seems to me that you don’t want me and yet you don’t want me to be with anyone else.”
“Don’t be twelve,” I said condescendingly. “I was just trying to be helpful.”
“It seems to me,” he said, just before we hung up, “that you should spend more time helping yourself and less time worrying about me. Maybe then, you’d let me help you.”
I SIPPED THE tea and stared at the phone. I should have called him back. I should have told him I’m sorry. But I didn’t. Instead, I curled my hands around my mug and felt its warmth seep into my palms, hoping that it might penetrate all the way to my core. Maybe then, you’d let me help you. I replayed his words over again in my mind, pushing my mother’s age-old mantra, there’s no “we” in Natalie, out of my head as it echoed just as loudly. I nodded to myself and walked into the living room to curl up on the couch. Maybe then, I should.
THIRTEEN
I am woman, hear me roar,” I thought to myself when I first opted for the double surgery. By the time it was here, I no longer had it in me. I was losing my breasts. And though there were a few things worse in the world—truly, I knew that there were—right now, with no one to talk to and not much to do, it didn’t feel that way. Sally was busy with her deadlines: She’d just landed her first cover story for the New York Times Magazine, and though it wasn’t due until after her wedding, she dove in headfirst out of sheer excitement. Quite coincidentally, the piece was on stem cell research, my pet project. I told her that I might have some information to help guide her, but she waved me off. “I’m still figuring out the angle,” she said. “So I want to work independently until I see how best to tackle it.” As a newly fledgling couple (or so Sally told me), Lila and Zach weren’t options to keep me company, and my parents were in fucking Australia. I considered hitting the self-help section at Barnes and Noble or surfing the Web for some rabbinical spiritual enlightenment, but the thought just depressed me more. So instead I pressed the “on” button and heard my computer whirl its motors alive. I needed to write my mother.
I plunked down in my chair and ran my fingers over the keyboard. Surprisingly, it had been over forty-eight hours since I’d stared at the screen, which had to be some sort of record since high school. My monitor flashed on, and I ran my mouse over the icons that hovered over the backdrop of a photo of Dupris and me, just after we’d pushed a social security bill through Congress. I craned my neck forward to examine the picture on the screen a bit closer: Neither of our smiles quite met our eyes—hers almost always looked that way, but I suspect that my frozen facade had more to do with the fact that I was certain this bill would do nothing to actually improve the
lives of senior citizens and less with the fact that I should have gotten used to hollow victories by then. Most of them were, it seemed. I pressed my index finger down on my mouse. Click. And pulled open my e-mail.
From: Miller, Natalie
To: Mom
Re: Surgery
Dear Mom and Dad—
I hope you’re having fun on your trip. I had my checkup and things look so good that Dr. Chin is performing the mastectomy in two days. Mom—it looks like you don’t know
everything after all because it turns out that it would have been nice for you to have been here. Maybe you should consider marking this day in history.
I guess it’s too much for me to ask for you to come back, but since I am losing my breasts and all, I’ll ask anyway. As I said, it would be nice to have you here.
Natalie
I reread the note. I tried not to make it sound too angry, too spiteful, because the truth of the matter was that though I was angry and I was spiteful and part of me just wanted to shout, “I fucking told you so,” at my always-right, always-stoic mother, the other part of me knew that it wasn’t worth it. That I could choose to rise above it and accept that my mother was who she was, and that no matter how angry I was, how fucking furious I was, and, ultimately, how betrayed I was that they could fly ten thousand miles away while I was in the midst of a literal life or death battle, at a certain point, you make a choice. And I’m not talking about the choice to accept my mother as is, which, I suppose, is also a very valiant, noble choice. No, the choice I’m talking about is whether to ask for help, whether to let someone in and say, “You know, you fucked up, and I’m hurting, but I still need you to come stand beside me, despite all of that.” There is no “we” in Natalie. Maybe there wasn’t, and maybe there still isn’t, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t ask. That I couldn’t make the choice to put aside my ire and ask my parents to come join me as I faced down the most horrifying moment of my life.
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