by Jean Stone
All of which Katie eagerly had complied with before she had been pregnant, before those unfamiliar hormones invaded her body and silently removed her lust. It had not been this way the other times. Then again, she reasoned, as she stood in the dressing room of the apartment awaiting Ina’s arrival with the pincushion and scissors, Katie’s prior pregnancies had lasted only a few weeks.
She ran her hand lightly over the slight round of her stomach. She wondered if she should change her image, if Ina should alter the costumes to a Stevie Nicks’ mien, draped and flowing and sensuously ethereal, loose enough to hide a myriad of sins, even pregnancy, perhaps.
She wondered if changing her attire might also elevate her songs to the notch where Stevie reigned, and transform Katie from a silly, sequined, teen idol into a legendary diva as Stevie was and Joleen once had been. Or perhaps Katie simply should be grateful that she could do the one thing that she loved: perform onstage before a crowd and fill their hearts with joy.
“Oy,” Ina groaned, interrupting Katie’s thoughts as the woman’s mouselike figure hastened into the room with the swift agility of someone half her age. “Oy” was Ina’s favorite word, as if she were of Jewish, not Hispanic, origin. “You’d think it was nine o’clock in the morning for all the traffic outside. I thought the bus would never get here.” Despite the fact that Katie often offered to have a driver pick Ina up, the woman did things her way. Apparently it was okay for Ina to be Katie’s costume designer, schedule-keeper, and all-around assistant, but there was a line between cultures that she simply would not cross. Ina would not leave the declining Washington Heights neighborhood where she still lived. Nor would she pretend to be the elitist she was not.
Ina dumped her bulging bag onto the floor and parked her bony, hardworking hands on her tiny hips. “I did my best,” she said, “but the pink sequins were tough to match.”
Though Katie’s weight hadn’t yet budged, her waist had grown almost two inches. And two inches in her costumes was expansion toward disaster.
“You’re telling him today?” Ina asked, opening the bag and extracting a brown cardboard box that was crisscrossed with string the way bakeries tied bundles of cakes and pastries and all sorts of yummy things. The box was part of Ina’s shield from others on the bus, so they would not suspect that she worked for Ms. Mega-Star, the girl who once again was pregnant, thanks to Ina’s son, Miguel.
“He booked us for Central Park,” she told the seamstress now, then ignored the look Ina shot at her whenever Katie referred to Cliff as booking us, as if he would be in the spotlight next to her, performing his heart and sweat and guts out, as if he wouldn’t be stage right, waiting, watching in the wings while she did all the work.
Katie reached for the box and untied the string. She lifted the lid and pulled out a small, pink-sequin minidress, a dress originally designed to cling to a nonpregnant form.
“July Fourth,” Ina said, “Miguel told me.” She waited until Katie pulled off her bodysuit, then helped her put on the dress. “If the baby’s late, will you give birth onstage?”
Without replying, Katie shook her long hair free and pulled the strapless dress on. She studied her image in the mirror. There was no way this dress would make it past the first two weeks of the tour.
“He’ll have to cancel Central Park,” she said, her voice less convincing now, even to her. The knots in her stomach knitted together again. It’s the baby, she realized without knowing how she knew. It’s not because I’m nervous or upset. It’s the baby moving! She stood in place a moment, then sank onto the pink overstuffed sofa. Without warning, she burst into the tears she’d held back for too long. “Ina,” she cried, “what should I do?”
On any other day, for any other reason, Ina would have sat beside her. She would have put her arm around Katie and tried to comfort her. Instead, Ina stood in the middle of the room. “You are asking about my grandbaby,” she replied. “The question is not fair.”
If not Ina, who could Katie ask? If she had a mother who’d acted like a mother, she supposed she’d have asked her. But Joleen was … well, Joleen had become a stranger, a distant woman whom Katie thought of mostly as “Joleen,” not “Mom” or “Mother,” a sad, reclusive woman to whom Katie once was close but now was not. “He can’t make me, can he?” Katie said quietly. “He can’t make me have another abortion?”
Ina hesitated, then handed her a tissue. “Your father’s decisions are usually best for you.”
“What decisions?” a voice resounded from the doorway. Katie did not move. She stared down at the floor. She realized that what had seemed so possible suddenly did not.
“Katie-Kate?” her father asked as he stepped into the room. “Why are you crying?”
She could not look at him. She could not look at the person who’d been mother and father, boss and friend. Despite that she was twenty-one, she could not look because she could not stand to see the disappointment on his face. Fat drops of Katie’s tears plunked onto the floor.
She stood and walked into his arms. “Oh, Daddy,” Katie said, “I’m afraid I’ve done it once again.”
The doctor was the husband of a friend of Ina’s and had a small clinic that specialized in family planning. He had once been affiliated with a much larger center, but bombings and threats of bombings had coerced him into moving to a nondescript section of town.
Katie sat on a cold, paper-covered table in the examination room. She’d eluded Brady by slipping out at eight A.M. It was not the first time that she’d been there, but it was the first time she’d been there so late, past her first trimester, past the safe point for an abortion.
It was the first time she thought she’d been determined not to be there.
Katie looked around the room in search of a distraction. Twice before she’d sat right there: once with another baby fathered by Miguel, once with one by Jean-Luis, the struggling Canadian actor she’d loved before she’d loved Miguel, before her father had sent Katie with Ina to Puerto Rico for a post-abortion rest, before Katie saw Miguel standing on the beach, his copper skin aglow, his white, white teeth set in a wide smile just for her. He was older, already close to thirty. And so, so handsome. After two weeks with Miguel, she’d forgotten Jean-Luis, which perhaps had been her father’s plan.
She shifted on the table now; the paper cover crinkled. She moved her eyes to a poster on the wall.
¿EMBARAZADA? The poster’s headline read.
¿SOLO?
And then: ¿ESTA LISTA PARA SER MADRE?
Katie bit her lip. Yes, she was pregnant and felt very much alone. But was she ready to be a mother? Would her father ever let her?
Joleen had not been ready.
“Your mother’s had a nervous breakdown,” Cliff told Katie shortly after she turned nine. They were in New York; Katie was sitting on the floor watching Mr. Rogers, though, according to her father, she was “too old” for it. “She’s gone off to a hospital,” her father said. “I don’t know when she’s coming back.”
The scent of lilacs was thick in the apartment air, because Ina was their housekeeper back then and she said fresh flowers made for a happy life.
Katie’s father had left the room and Katie turned back to the television neighborhood that wasn’t anything like hers. Her mother never did come back, and each time Katie smelled the sweet scent of purple lilacs, she felt the hurt return.
And now Joleen was sequestered on the Vineyard, painting watercolors that weren’t exactly good, but brought a good price from the tourists because she’d painted them.
Katie hadn’t seen her for a year, or maybe two. It had become easier to simply be too busy.
“Ms. Clifford?” The doctor had entered quietly. It took a second for Katie to remember that Clifford was the fake name she used for such occasions. “I understand you’re pregnant.” He did not say “again,” though it had been less than a year since Katie had been there.
“I need an abortion. I should have come sooner.”
Doctor Ramos told her to lie back on the table. And then the uncomfortably familiar ritual began. For several minutes the doctor pressed and prodded, pushed and poked, below Katie’s waist, along her hips, between her legs. Katie did not attempt small talk; there was nothing to say.
The doctor asked her to raise her arm. He then held Katie’s right breast and slowly, firmly, massaged it. The room was cool; Katie’s nipple stiffened. She hoped the doctor didn’t think the caress excited her.
Then, with a small frown, the doctor said, “Raise your other arm.” He repeated the massage, this time on Katie’s left breast, then back on the right.
“I don’t want to alarm you, Katie,” Doctor Ramos said, “but before we schedule an abortion, we need to check out something else.”
TWO
FEBRUARY
“If you ask me, it’s a big, fat waste of time, but Doc Hastings wants a biopsy done on my breast.” Hannah made her announcement at the dinner table after everyone had savored their share of homemade peach cobbler, except, of course, fourteen-year-old Riley, who barely ate anything, let alone dessert. And except for Hannah, because it had been a long, comfortable winter and even though the five-mile road race was still ten weeks away, she didn’t know if last year’s shorts would stretch from hip to hip. It was time to pay the fat-and-calories piper.
“What’s a bi … pop … sie?” seven-year-old Denise asked. Hannah did not correct her youngest child’s pronunciation; it was difficult enough as an adult to relate to the word.
“It means she has cancer,” eleven-year-old Casey piped up. “Are you going to die? Gerald Payne’s mother died right after Christmas.”
Hannah sighed, wishing her husband, Evan, would help the kids understand. Instead, he sat, staring at her, as if she’d just said that the world as they knew it would end tomorrow, on an unimportant day at the end of February. “Gerald Payne’s mother had a brain aneurysm,” Hannah said to her son. “I’m not going to die. It’s just a precautionary measure.” That had been Doc Hastings’ term—a precautionary measure—when he’d received the results of Hannah’s mammogram, her first. Though Hannah was only thirty-eight, Doc had suggested baseline films before her fortieth birthday.
Riley stood up, her navel poking out between a short-cropped sweater and low-rider jeans. “Grandma Jackson had cancer. She died.”
Across the table, Hannah’s husband winced. “Grandma Jackson had a different kind of cancer,” Hannah replied.
“You won’t get breast cancer,” Casey chided his older sister. “You don’t have any breasts.” With his thumbs and forefingers, he pulled at the front of his Patriots shirt, forming two small cones of fabric. He crossed his eyes. Denise giggled.
“Mother,” Riley whined, tossing back her shining mane of jet-black hair, “make him shut up.”
Hannah pushed back her chair and stood. In the small eat-in kitchen of their expanded Cape Cod-style house, she was nearly eye level with the five gold hoops pierced through Riley’s left ear.
“Stop it!” Hannah cried. “The only reason I mentioned it is because the biopsy is tomorrow and that’s basketball day. Denise, you and Casey need to find a ride home from school.” She picked up the cobbler bowl and went to the sink.
Evan pushed back his chair. “I’ll be in the shed,” he said.
When they’d all left the kitchen, Hannah picked up the serving spoon, scraped the edges of the leftover dessert, and finished it in three bites. She’d run an extra mile tomorrow, after the test was done.
• • •
It wasn’t really a shed, but a large greenhouse filled with new flats of pansy and geranium and impatiens seeds ready to sprout.
After cleaning up the kitchen, Hannah stood in the doorway of the shed and deeply inhaled the rich aroma of damp soil. She felt only a smidgen of guilt that she was, in fact, sniffing not for the scent of dirt, but for a telltale sign of pot. As far as she knew, Evan had kept his promise and had not smoked a joint in nearly five years. Hannah did not ask about it in case the answer was not the one she wanted. It had been painful enough when he’d told her that he’d been addicted since Vietnam. Twenty-seven years, he’d said. By then they’d been married ten of them, and she’d never had a clue—or had not wanted to have a clue—that his greenhouse solitude was spent in a haze of thick, sweet smoke.
He was in the back, scooping peat moss into cardboard egg cartons. He was not smoking pot.
“Evan,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll be fine. You know that, don’t you?”
He hoisted the egg carton on top of another, then began scooping peat moss into a third. “Cancel your appointment,” he said without looking up.
Cancel her appointment? “I can’t,” she said. “Doc is insisting.”
Evan nodded and pressed his thumbs into the peat moss, creating half-egg shapes that were rich and brown and soon would flower and end up either planted in the landscape of his many Vineyard clients or in one of Hannah’s decorative pots. Tourists paid three dollars more for her flowerpots, which she’d wrapped in fine burlap, then appliquéd a lighthouse, and tied with a cheerful bow.
“Then you’ll go to Boston,” he said. “I don’t want Doc Hastings to do it.” He bent his head more closely to his work. Hannah could see the round bald spot that had appeared over the last three years since his mother had been gone.
Didn’t Evan remember that Hannah couldn’t go to Boston? Hadn’t she once told him that she’d never go back?
She’d almost gone last year to watch the Boston Marathon. At the last minute, however, she’d regained her senses.
She looked down at the front of her long bib dress, at the bouquet of tiny wildflowers she’d embroidered on the front. No, Hannah did not belong in Boston. She was an islander now, a dedicated teacher, a Vineyarder at heart, who made simple crafts more for the fun than for the profit, who ran two miles every day to keep her endorphins charged and happy and her thighs under some semblance of control. The last place she wanted to go was Boston. “No, Evan,” she said, “I want to have it done here.”
Evan stopped his work. “Why? So Doc and his cronies can kill you, too?”
She felt her cheeks turn pink. “Doc didn’t kill your mother, cancer did. I don’t even have cancer.”
He did not respond.
“Besides,” she continued, “it no longer has to be a death sentence.” She hated melodrama, hated that she heard it in her words.
He wiped his hands on his jeans, then dragged another twenty pound sack of peat moss onto the floor. He leaned against it. Despite his thinning hair, Evan was still lean and strong and good-looking in an outdoorsy, Vineyard-sort-of-way. It was easy to forget that he was twelve years older than she was. She never, however, forgot that, of all the women on the island, he had married her. They had met at the theater group, where Evan’s mother dragged him to so he might meet a “nice girl” and finally settle down. Hannah was a volunteer and she was nice enough. She had been wide-hipped even then, though Evan said it didn’t matter, that he loved what she was inside.
Would he still love her if her insides had cancer?
“I won’t argue about this,” he said.
Except to ask for patience when he first stopped smoking pot, Evan hadn’t asked for anything in the fifteen years that they’d been married. He hadn’t even asked her to take care of Mother Jackson in the two years of sickness-before-death; Hannah had done it willingly, dashing back and forth from their house to hers, then staying there at night because Mother Jackson lived by the water and wanted to die in peace in her own home, not in a sterile hospital room with IVs in her hands and plastic bags above her head.
Hannah closed her eyes and thought about the hospitals in Boston: the long white corridors, the scent of clean soap and disinfectant, the low, deliberate sounds of voices saving lives, the innocent optimism of a first-year medical student—her.
“I can’t,” she said. When they’d first met she’d told Evan she’d dropped out of medical school. She said she’
d not been smart enough to be a doctor after all. It was a lie but Evan had no way of knowing that.
He stayed motionless for a moment, then slowly went back to work.
Hannah stood there and watched him briefly. Then she left the greenhouse and prayed he wouldn’t light a joint now that her back was turned.
Donna Langforth was in her kitchen when Hannah returned from the greenhouse. Donna was their neighbor and a carpooling mom, too, and Donna didn’t work, so she was always around.
“Casey called and asked if I can bring the kids home tomorrow,” she said, a pained expression fixed on her winterpale face. “You’re having a biopsy?”
There was that word again: biopsy. B comes before C, Hannah thought. Biopsy before cancer. “Want some coffee?” She filled two mugs from the ever-present, brewed pot, then ushered Donna down the hall to her workroom. It was a small, boxy place that contained a folding table covered with felt and burlap squares and rolls of calico ribbon, and a small desk heaped with Hannah’s lesson plans and books. One wall displayed a panoramic poster of the Boston Marathon and a THANK YOU MS. JACKSON sign from last year’s second-period class whom she’d taken on a field trip to Woods Hole. Across from that, flowerpot designs were thumbtacked floor to ceiling, interspersed with a colorful clutter of photos of her kids, laughing, smiling, sticking out their tongues.
Donna sat down at Hannah’s worktable. “I can’t believe it,” Donna said. “Did you feel a lump?” She touched her own breast as if a tumor might be waiting there as well.
Hannah shook her head and picked up a new pattern she’d designed of a woven Nantucket basket. She’d been meaning to search Mother Jackson’s antique trunk; Hannah remembered several pieces of imitation schrimshaw that might be packed inside, accents that would turn the flowerpots into lovely Vineyard souvenirs. She traced a strip of tan felt; she answered, “Mammogram.”
