The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  Twenty-six

  The next week I had my annual doctor’s appointment with Dr. Horowitz. I always dreaded it, something that seemed to creep up on me every February, almost something of a surprise, though clearly it wasn’t. But this year I dreaded it even more than usual because I hadn’t been feeling like myself lately. And as I sat in the waiting room, I had this nervous pit in my stomach that something was wrong, that Dr. Horowitz was going to give me bad news.

  I drummed my fingers nervously against the edge of the chair, too terrified to read my copy of City Style, though I pretended. I opened it up to Kat’s article, “Fifty First Dates,” which detailed fifty different places you could go on a unique date in the city. I stared at her byline and her photo until it made me dizzy, until I could almost see her frowning the way she had that day in her office.

  “Mrs. Levenworth,” the nurse called out, and I jumped,because it felt like it’d been a long time since someone had called me that.

  As the nurse checked my blood pressure, I felt my pulse beating fast and steady in my head, my neck. “A little high.” She frowned.

  “It always is.” I laughed nervously. “Doctors make me a little nervous.”

  “Oh,” she said. “White-coat syndrome then. Well, I’ll let the doctor know.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that Dr. Horowitz already knew, that Dr. Horowitz had seen me clutching Kelly’s hand in my mother’s hospital room when he’d come in to visit after the mastectomy. That Dr. Horowitz had been the one to first reassure me that my lump was probably nothing, and then, when it was, to recommend annual breast MRIs.

  “Jennifer,” he said breezily as he walked in, his easy manner calming me slightly, but not much. “How’s your family?”

  “Great,” I said, which didn’t feel like such a lie anymore, though I imagined he must’ve read about Will and thought it was.

  “Have you been keeping up with your breast self-exams?” I nodded. “Good. Then let’s check everything out.”

  I lay back against the cool table and held my breath as he palpated around my breasts checking for a lump I might have missed. Please don’t find something. Please don’t find something. Please don’t find something.

  “Totally normal,” he said, and I exhaled. “I’ll get you a slip for your MRI, but I don’t feel anything to worry about.” He moved to the end of the table to do the rest of the exam. “Any other problems?”

  “No.” I shook my head, not wanting to mention the headache that wouldn’t go away, or the dreams that wouldn’t stop coming, not wanting to give him a cause to search harder, to find something else.

  “And are we planning on getting pregnant soon?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll write you a script for prenatals, just in case. It’s better to start taking them before you conceive. Then as soon as you get a positive test you can call our office and set up an appointment.” He reached for his prescription pad and scribbled on it, then ripped off the page and handed it over. The way he laid it all out, so officiously, so matter-of-fact, it was as if it was all decided for me. He’d written the same prescription last year, but I’d declined it, telling him I was sure I wouldn’t need it yet, that I would call him if I changed my mind. But now I thought about what Lisa had said, about not always remembering to take her vitamins, about feeling that that was to blame for her miscarriage, and though I didn’t think it really was, I accepted the prescription from him anyway.

  “I don’t even know if I’ll use it,” I said. “If I’ll ever have a baby.”

  He nodded, all business, not reacting to whether I ever would or would not have a child. I imagined the way Will’s eyes would look if I announced that to him, the truth, so openly, and I knew they would mist up, that he wouldn’t even be able to look at me. “How old are you now?” Dr. Horowitz asked, glancing down at my chart.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Well, we recommend that if you know you want to have a baby, it’s better to do it before you hit thirty-five. After thirty-five the risk of Down syndrome increases.” He paused. “Not to rush you,” he said, “but sometimes, timing is everything.”I nodded, thinking about the way people always talked about hearing their internal clock ticking, and I wondered if the sound of mine was just drowned out by something else; fear, maybe. “Are you still thinking about genetic testing?” he asked.

  It was something he’d brought up every year since I’d found my lump, the possibility of learning whether I had the breast cancer gene, of learning whether my mother’s cancer was random or whether it was also preprogrammed in me, my destiny. But I’d never been able to decide whether it was better knowing or not knowing, so I always waffled, telling him I’d think about it. Once I’d asked Kelly about it, if she thought about having the test. She’d waved her hand in the air and said, “Oh, Jen, you can’t worry about every little thing. You could be hit by a bus tomorrow.” I’d nodded, but I’d been thinking, But Mom wasn’t hit by a bus, and getting hit by a bus is not carried in a person’s DNA.

  “I don’t know,” I finally answered him, wondering if having the test might just be better than not knowing. What if it was not my destiny to die? What if my mother’s cancer, my father’s disappearing act had been nothing more than a fluke after all?

  “I’ll tell you what,” Dr. Horowitz said, looking neither pleased nor displeased about my noncommittal answer. “I’ll write you out the slip for the lab work, and then you’ll have it if you decide you want to do the test.”

  So I left his office with two little pieces of paper in my hand, both of them, maybe, having the ability to decide my future.

  When I got home, I finished the wedding announcements. I’d been torn between wanting to get them done, to have an excuse to talk to Kat, and not wanting to get them done, because I wasn’t sure what I would say to her when I did get the chance. Now I had no choice; they were due tomorrow. When I finished, I attached them in an e-mail to Kat, which, even though I’d already rehearsed it in my head all week, I wrote and rewrote three times, before deciding just to simply write: Sorry. Can we talk? xoxo, Jen.

  I sat there and stared at the screen for a minute, knowing she was probably at her desk, that she would probably hear the click of the e-mail and open it up right away. Please respond, I willed her.

  Exactly three minutes later, she wrote back. Can we meet for coffee? Downstairs? 3:30?

  The train station was empty in the middle of the day, and the train wasn’t crowded either. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, feeling my head throb, as if it had its own painful pulse. I should call Ethel, I thought. She would have something to give me. I’d been putting it off because I was worried she would tell me it was a side effect of the calming herb, that she might even tell me to stop taking it, and that was something I couldn’t risk doing again. I felt like I needed the herbs now, needed them to figure everything out.

  When I opened my eyes, the seat next to me was taken, and I recognized the mother and daughter who sat there. The girl still had her Goodnight Moon book, and she held it tightly to her chest. Her mother stared in the other direction, so I couldn’t meet her gaze.

  The girl looked at me, and I smiled. “That was my favorite book when I was a little girl,” I said.

  She hesitated before speaking, and I imagined that her mother, who clutched her ever so tightly, must’ve warned her more than once about talking to strangers. But then she said a line from the book, no louder than a whisper, so I almost couldn’t hear her.

  I closed my eyes again and heard the same words in my mother’s voice, heard her voice so vividly in my head that it gave me chills.

  When I opened my eyes, because I felt the train stopping, the girl and her mother had already stood up and walked away, and the sound of my mother’s voice had once again completely left me.

  Kat was already sitting outside the coffee shop when I arrived at exactly four minutes before three-thirty. She was bundled up in
a gray wool peacoat with a red scarf, hat, and gloves, and I watched her take a drag from her cigarette.

  “Hi,” she said, when she noticed me. She dropped the cigarette and squashed it with her black high-heeled boot. “We can go inside. It’s freezing out here.”

  I nodded, appreciating the gesture. It was cold, but I also knew she wouldn’t be able to smoke inside.

  Inside felt astoundingly familiar—the smell of rich coffee, fireplace, and muffins—and not just because I’d been here so recently in my dreams, but because Kat and I had come here so often when I used to work here, every afternoon, just around this time, just around the time when the day was starting to feel stretched too long, and we were getting weary in our dimly fluorescent lit offices. We’d both order skinny lattes, and then linger at a table in the corner for twenty minutes or maybe even half an hour, our reporter’s notebooks open in front of us, so it looked like we were working, even though we rarely ever had.

  We walked up to the counter now, and Kat ordered first, a decaf chai tea. Tea. And decaf. You’re a different woman now, I thought. And though it should’ve seemed obvious, I still found this surprising.

  “I’ll have the same thing,” I echoed, wanting to show that I, too, had changed, had become someone a little worldlier or a little wiser, though really, I would’ve much rather had the latte, much rather been that girl who could sit in the corner and laugh, and blow off work, and feel as though the heavy things in life were too far away to bog me down.

  We stood by the counter waiting a few moments for our drinks, not saying anything, Kat kicking the tile floor with the pointy toe of her boot. After the barista handed us our chais, I followed Kat to our former usual table.

  “So,” she said, blowing on the hot tea and then taking a small sip, keeping her eyes on the tea the whole time.

  “So,” I said back. I took a sip of my tea, which was too sweet and burned my throat. I tried not to grimace as it went down. It wasn’t really the hot tea but the quiet between us that really bothered me. “Are you still mad?” I finally said, when I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not mad.” She sighed. “You were right. I knew you were.” I nodded. “But I just didn’t want to hear it, you know?”

  “Oh, Kat,” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up like that. I should’ve stayed out of it.” I left out the part about how hard it was to mind your own business when dreaming as a person made it feel like it completely was your business. “And just so you know, I never left you for my friends in Deerfield. It wasn’t like that.”

  “I know.” She waved her hand in the air. “I was just jealous.”

  “Of my Deerfield friends? Don’t be,” I said, thinking that if only she knew, if only she knew, the way the perfect surfaces of their lives were even more cracked and worn than hers. At least with Kat, what you saw was what you got—loud and sometimes brash and sometimes too abrasive—but she put it all out there anyway.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Of you. I was jealous of you.”

  “Of me?” Maybe she couldn’t see me any more than I’d been able to see her before I’d started dreaming. “That’s silly.”

  “No,” she said. “You had the balls to quit your job, and move to the suburbs, and go after what it was you really wanted in life. And me?” She laughed and rubbed her fingers nervously together, as if running them over an invisible cigarette. “I’m still here.”

  She’d mistaken my quitting for living out my dream, rather than what it really was: pretending, playing house, playing judge’s wife, playing high society lady. “You have nothing to be jealous of,” I said quietly. “If anything, I’m the one who should be jealous of you. You have direction, a career, two beautiful girls.” And maybe I had been a little jealous of her, before I’d dreamed about her, that was, before I knew that those things, the satisfying career, the so-called perfect marriage, the children, did not equal happiness.

  She shook her head. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” I agreed again. “They are.”

  “It wasn’t about Grant, you know,” she said. “It was never about him.” I nodded, waiting for her to continue. “I hate my job,” she confessed. “It bores me. I think that’s why I let myself pay so much attention to him—I needed something to get me out of bed, some reason to keep coming to work.”

  Maybe Kat had always been bored. She’d been the one initiating our e-mail crossword puzzles and our coffee breaks, and I’d willingly gone along. She was infectious, and I’d loved every minute of it. Maybe it was being friends with Kat that had made me feel alive, not the job, and I felt relieved that I hadn’t been able to get the job back after all. “You could quit,” I suggested.

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s not that easy.” She paused. “This is all I know. All I’ve ever done.” She finished off her tea and then looked at me and smiled. “I mean, it’s one thing to be a crappy parent if you’re at work all the time. But what if I’m always home, and I still fuck it up?”

  “You won’t,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can’t.” I paused. “But you won’t. I know you won’t.” I thought about the way Sarah Lynne and Ara both were beautiful and loving little girls, and I knew that despite what she thought, Kat was already doing something right.

  “Well, I’m fucking up my marriage,” she said.

  “So am I,” I agreed, but as I said it, I considered whether I still was, or whether Will and I had turned some sort of corner.

  “Oh please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You and Will.”

  “You and Danny,” I said right back, even more emphatically.

  “I know.” She sighed. “You know why I never actually fucked Grant?” I shook my head, wanting to hear, because I had already just assumed that she had. “It was something that you said.”

  “Me?” I considered the power of the herbs, the dreams, to have allowed me to change something, to change the course of Kat’s life, and the throbbing in my head was now temporarily feeling worth it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Something you said at your wedding.” My wedding. So it had had nothing to do with the herbs. Theherbs had changed nothing real. “You were getting dressed in that dressing area, and I was pinning your veil in your hair. We had some champagne, and you lifted your glass to toast. And then you said, ‘To me and Will having even just a glimmer of the spark that you and Danny have. Or something like that.”

  I nodded. I had a vague recollection of champagne, a lot of it, and blathering something about wishing Will and I could be as great as them, something I’d always been afraid wouldn’t happen, that no matter what, we’d never shine as brightly in a room as the two of them.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I better get back up there before Hank sends the police.” She rolled her eyes. She stood up and leaned in and hugged me close, so very affectionate and un-Kat-like. I hugged her back, held on tightly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered in my ear, and then: “Thank you.”

  “No,” I whispered back. “Thank you.”

  That night, as I lay in bed, Will curled up behind me and wrapped his arms around me, and then this feeling of utter calm came over me, this feeling that everything was going to be all right. Maybe what Kat said was true, maybe we were Jen and Will. Will and Jen. An us. A we.

  “I saw your prescriptions on the counter,” Will whispered softly in my ear, as if he was reciting a love poem, something romantic. The calm dissipated, and it was instantly replaced by this cold blast in my chest and the return of my throbbing headache. It was a stupid thing to do, leaving them out like that, leaving them there for him to see, when I hadn’t decided what to do about either one of them. I’d been so caught up in meeting Kat that I’d forgotten all about them.

  “It’s no big deal,” I whispered back. “Dr. Horowitz gives them to me every year. Just in case.”

  I waited for him to protest, to make it a big deal, but all
he said was “It’s good to have options.” Then he curled in closer. “I’m coming home early tomorrow. I planned something special.”

  “Why?” I whispered, feeling warm and drowsy again.

  “It’s Valentine’s Day.” He lifted up my hair and kissed my neck. “Will you be my Valentine?”

  “Of course,” I whispered, wanting to ask him to be mine back. But I was too tired and the words caught in my throat. Instead my mind had drifted back to the genetic tests, and I wondered if whatever doomed me also doomed Kelly, if the two of us were linked in a terrible way. For a moment I missed her.

  “Kelly,” Beverly said, “the kids need new clothes. You can’t dress them like this to go to a party.” I picked Hannah up from her crib. She sucked her thumb, and she looked adorable in her Old Navy jeans and pink sweater. “A girl should wear a dress. To a party, for heaven’s sake. I’m embarrassed for you.”

  “Bever—Mother,” I corrected myself. “It’s too cold for her to wear a dress.”

  “Tights,” she said. “Wool tights, dear. That’s how Kathleen always dresses the girls.”

  I was sure the girls had tears in those wool tights within five minutes from screaming in a tantrum on the floor, but I decided not to mention that, because I knew it wasn’t going to help anything.

  “And really, when are you going to get her ears pierced? Kathleen got the girls’ ears pierced at six months.”

  “I don’t want to get her ears pierced when she’s so young,” I repeated for what felt like the thousandth time.

  She shook her head. “Just because she has two older brothers doesn’t mean she can’t look like a little girl, you know.”