by Neil Hetzner
The patient tried to discipline her breathing so that it pulsed as steadily as the machinery guarding the temperature of the building. Despite her efforts, Bett’s chest continued to heave intermittently. Each time it did, the rasp of the moving sheets resounded in her ears. Bett flexed her feet until they hurt, then, relaxed them. She did the same with her calves, her thighs, her biceps, and, lastly, her hands. Several times she curled her hands into tight fists before opening and splaying her fingers. She put the fingers of her right hand onto her chest to feel her heart beat. She began counting the beats. By the time she reached one hundred, her heart seemed to have slowed. She counted to one hundred a second time at a pace that was slower than, and independent of, her heart’s beating. By the end of the second round her heart had slowed itself to match its beat to the tickings in her head. Bett moved her hand over to her right breast. Even with her warm fingertips just barely touching the flushed skin, she thought that she could feel the outline of the growth. With the smooth hard edge of her index finger nail, she traced various incision lines on her flattened breast. It was hard to think of a knife, she imagined a matte knife, slicing through her skin and deep enough into her flesh to reach the buried mass. Once the blade had been drawn through her flesh, what would be found? In the days since Dr. Maurer first had guided her fingers to the lump, she had had scores of different images flit through her mind.
A small, smooth gray stone. A mucus slick, maroon-colored chicken heart. A ball of white roots wrapped around grains of vermiculite. Miss Muffet’s watchful spider with its legs tucked up underneath itself. A shiny, dun-colored beetle. The ruby viscousness of a new scab. A pale pea in a blood red pod. A knot of bittersweet snarled around a lilac. A horse chestnut with the spines of its husk holding itself in place in her flesh. A tiny, pink furless opossum growing in its pouch. A lump of brie ripening and oozing outward. A wad of bread dough rising, growing softer and spongier as it grew. A pearl with a map of minute red and blue vessels winding through the nacre.
For each of the images of the mass she had heard a verb describe its removal. Excised. Eradicated. Removed. Expurgated. Divested. Popped out. Gouged out. Dug out. Chopped out. Pulled out. Torn out. Cut. Out. That was the important thing. That it, in any and all of its Hydra headed forms, was going to come out. But it was hard to hold onto the thought of the growth’s removal along with the thought of being flat on her back with the pressure of a knife drawing through her flesh.
Bett rolled onto her left side. She moved her nail along the deep crease that had formed in her skin along her sternum by the shifting of her breast’s weight. She could imagine a cut along that crease. A small cut and a reaching in to remove a smooth gray stone. She shifted the focus of her fingertips and her thoughts from the mass itself to her breast. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to be as she was, rolled onto her left side, but without the weight of her breast pulling down. She cupped her right hand under her breast to heft its weight and then held it to let her body feel free of its weight.
Bett couldn’t have been more than eight. She was running along the lane that passed through a twelve acre stand of red pines, then, ran alongside a field of timothy and another field of corn, to the hay barn that stood across the dirt road from the main house of The Chimneys. The two tracks of the lane had been cut deep by the frequent passage of tractor and truck wheels. The deep, fine, caramel-colored dust in the tracks muffled the sounds of her feet. The wind from her passage had pulled her thick sun-bleached hair out behind her. She could feel its lofted weight trying to tug her head up straight. She pulled against the weight to look down at the puffs of dust exploding beneath her feet. Running bare-chested, she saw the shape and number of her ribs as her chest drew deep the hot summer air. As she came to a turn in the lane where the short side of the corn field abutted the long side of the gray-green timothy, she used her arms as wings to bank into the curve. Rounding the curve, her lower arm hit the half-open pod of a milkweed plant. The sharp sting to her hand caused her to look back. A wake of white fluff, iridescent in the fading sunlight, streamed behind her. She felt herself to be as light as the fluff-born seed. She was running faster than she ever had run in her life. She could feel she was on the verge of flight. She stretched and her stride lengthened. She was running as fast and as wild as any deer had ever bounded along that path at dusk, startled from its feeding by an unfamiliar sound. As she ran the final yards to the worn wooden wagon ramp of the barn, she saw Opa, sitting in the shadows on an upended crate, shelling the last of the previous year’s popcorn into a metal pail. With the blade-like sharpness of her breath cutting through her words she had yelled, “Opa, Opa, I saw a fox, a big one, and I wasn’t even scared.”
She was scared now. And, if she were to have a breast removed she knew that the surgery would not half restore to her the exhilaration that she had felt when, as a young breast-free girl, she had outraced the fox and chased flight along a hot dry dusty path.
How she had loved to run. Although one of the shortest, she had been one of the fastest children in the neighborhood. She had believed in Opa’s theory of running. He often had told her that the secret to running was picking them up and putting them down faster than anyone else. From time to time, she would experiment. She had tried running with various gaits and styles. She tried moving her arms in tighter piston strokes. She had tried running on her toes. She had tried breathing only through her nose. But in the end she had always gone back to the focused concentration of picking them up fast and putting them down faster.
She had loved running. But by the start of her junior year in high school, she had stopped. Over that summer between her sophomore and junior year, her breasts had grown so large that running had felt more like slogging knee deep through the waters of the mud-thick Eel River than like the nearness of flight. Holding her heavy breast in the darkened hospital room, Bett recalled the sense of betrayal she had felt as her breasts had begun to grow. As her body had changed, irrespective of her wishes, she had grown bitter. As friends around her began growing up, she had been growing out. As her two best friends, Susan Weitzel and Eleanor Schlemmer, had grown from less than five feet to more than five feet six, she had crossed the five foot mark and stopped. Where her friends’ hips and breasts had begun to slowly curve and fill, hers had turned into the round lines of a matron almost overnight. As she had once told a college roommate who had commented on the size of Bett’s breasts, she had gone from nubs to jugs to dugs in less than four years.
As Bett’s breasts grew full, as girls, then boys, then, seemingly, everyone, took notice of the change, she had felt herself being pulled in and channeled. Each change in her body had shortened and restricted the definition of herself. The weight of the new flesh massed in front of her mired her. It constrained her. It redefined her. She lost the broad rights of androgyny, to asexual action, that her prepubescent flesh had afforded her. She lost her chance of flight. As her breasts grew, Bett’s dreams first shrank, then, after a while, changed. It was during those intervening years that Bett could not fathom the other girls’ envy of what to her was such a burden. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want an excess of flesh that demanded attention at each jiggling step. What fool would want a mass of gelatin bobbling back and forth, up and down, side to side? Who would want the burn as bra straps cut deep into the thin skin of shoulders? Who would want the throb that buried itself under shoulder blades as spine and back muscles tried to carry the new weight? Who would want the constant distraction of all that surreptitious attention? A man would notice her from afar. As he approached, he would force his eyes to hers, but as they drew closer still, his eyes would be pulled from her face until, just before they passed, his stare would lock onto her chest. Once past him, she could feel the twisted neck and curious eyes as he tried to record what he had seen. It was as if her breasts were the penultimate sign of a Burma Shave advertisement along a country road. The one that closed the rhyme.
Bett’s breasts had been a bane
and a burden. In high school and, more so, in college, she had had to defend them from the frantic investigations of poor hormone-muddled boys. To do so made her feel that she was defending territory that she herself did not want to claim. By nothing more than a biological quirk, she was made a mercenary, hired by the mores of the times, to guard foreign territory that she herself did not value. That sense of unwanted duty had changed with Neil.
When they first began to date, Neil had ignored her breasts. His focus had been on Bett herself rather than on her chest. They had talked for hours, walked for miles, and had seen a half-dozen movies with none of the quick sharp glances that she was used to. Even after swinging their way through several dances, and even after the quick, warm, dry kisses they traded under the protecting canopy of the sycamore trees outside her sorority turned to longer, warmer, wetter connections in the front seat of a borrowed pre-war Chevrolet, Neil seemed to take no notice. As they advanced in their emotional and slowly developing physical intimacy, Bett began to think that Neil liked everything about her but her breasts. The growing realization that he felt about her breasts as she herself did confused her. She found herself growing angry that he ignored what she herself tried to forget. It pained her when he seemed to reject what she herself despised.
Bett used her left hand to pull the flesh of her right breast as far toward the left as its flaccid skin would allow. With her right hand she felt the flatness that she had created. If she were to return home with that unbalanced flatness, unrelieved except for the bright red welt of her wound, would he reject her, or would he act as he had acted forty-five years before? Would he again, kindly and carefully, avoid drawing attention to what she would… Bett tried to hold onto the ellipsis. She wished to leave her thought unfinished, but, despite her efforts the words completed themselves. …would ignore.
Bett’s face hardened. Is that what she would do? If she were to leave her breast in this building, to be sliced up into a deck of metabolically chaotic cards, would she return to Clarke’s Cove ignoring the incompleteness of her body? Would she walk back into her home and pick up her life where it was before the exam? She felt anger growing inside of her. She screwed down her face so tightly that the umbrous air began to pulsate. Why a breast? Why would something grow there? What was the point? What was the point of having breasts on a grandmother anyway? Why didn’t breasts just go away? During menopause? With all the other changes. The heat. The crawling skin. The erratic chemistry of menopause molting a new being out of old flesh. Or was it more pulling an old being out of young flesh? Why couldn’t there be more change? Dugs to jugs and, then, back to nubs? Why shouldn’t an old woman return to the flat-chested weightlessness of her youth? Why, under the weight of old age, be held even more flightless by this sagging, useless weight? What was the sense of that? Why would old unwanted flesh be left to hide such horrible things?
Bett squeezed her breasts until the pain made tears come to her eyes.
Why be betrayed? By something so useless. The sound of the thought of uselessness reverberated inside Bett’s head. Would she return to her home and her husband useless? If she were to leave a breast here in this never quiet, never loud place, what else might remain? She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be wheeled down one of the beige and orange halls to the front doors of the hospital while a part of her body remained behind. She couldn’t imagine lying in bed at home being nursed. Useless. If they took her breast, were there any guarantees that they would not want to take more? What else might she have to give up?
When she had given herself up to Neil, and just as much, he to her, Bett had found that he did not dislike her breasts. He intuitively had known of her sensitivity and, out of respect and understanding, he had chosen to be circumspect until she had chosen to make them a gift to him.
In the darkened hospital room Bett smiled in memory at his enthusiasm. A collage of images of their intimacies over forty years assembled in her mind. His tongue tip, made cool by exposure, tracing wet rings around her aureoles. Looking down at her breasts heaving, white loaves risen high from passion, as their pelvises fused in sexual straining. Water cascading in a hotel shower stall so steamy that their bodies were lost in the hot fog while his soap slickened hands reached from behind her to lift her flesh to weightlessness. His teeth nipping through a silk peignoir until her nipples had so distended that the beige silk wrinkled like a thread had been pulled. His mouth sucking unceasingly until her heat and blood and reservations and desire and love had all flowed out her nipples into him and she was left fuller by the giving.
Mouths on her nipples. Neil’s. And Peter’s and Dilly’s and Nita’s and Lise’s. They had all fed from her. She had given comfort and sustenance through her breasts. And had taken comfort and sustenance back. Hot breaths. A tiny, blindly searching mouth took her nipple and her milk and gave back immeasurably more. Sharp, half-crazy, mind-twisting, wave-after-wave of sexual electricity had been matched in emotional weight by the slow, steady ebbing of her milk into her babies’ mouths.
Age and weight, gravity’s inexorable pulling on plastic flesh while she ironed or weeded, rough fierce youth sex and the dreamy touching of less insistent times, the vacuum of hungry mouths demanding their rights to her flesh, all these life forces, had stretched, softened and distended her breasts. And now another kind of force had insisted on its rights to her oft-used flesh.
No. NO! NO!
The soft flesh under her comforting fingers rose and fell as Bett cried.
In hours a tiny mass of mindless cells, not all that much bigger than a pea, would be excised. And if that was all it was, some small growth as benign, as innocuous as a pea, even that excision would take more than the object itself. Even if the growth were as smooth and as self-contained as a pea, a sense of self, a sense of capacity, of possibility, would be taken, too. And, in its place, would be a new and unforgettable, unshakable knowledge of the shifting boundaries between life and its too often ignored, willfully forgotten complement.
Chapter 9
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Some vowels.
Bett came to. Her first feeling was that she had been a long way away. Some place where oxygen and heat, silence and gravity and time were all stitched into one quilt of comfort. Parts of her, not all willingly, were coming out from under that cover. She felt something twitch inside her half-closed fist. She knew that it was Neil. She tried to understand the slight Morse code of his kinetic fingers. What was the message? How long had she been gone? If she could determine how long she had been away, she might understand his fingers’ message. What had been taken? She was not ready to open her eyes to see. She wanted to remain under the quilt as long as she could. She tried to feel if her breast was gone, but the weight of the cover’s comfort was so heavy that she couldn’t discern her chest’s weight.
Bett stopped measuring to concentrate on breathing. She wanted to be sure that any stray molecule of the gas that had taken her so far away, any spare atom trapped within her nostrils or caught on the sticky mucus of her cilia, might be found and used to keep her covered. With knowledge of the lump had brought restless nights. The anesthetic had taken her to a zone of comfort beyond that of deep sleep. She wished that she could stay longer in that place of peace. But, Neil’s fingers insisted that she come back. They wanted to tell her something; however she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.
Bett gathered her strength to pass into a place with clear bright light, knowledge, others and whoever it was she had become. She squeezed Neil’s fingers hard to pull herself across the gulf.
“Hi,” said a stranger as Bett opened her eyes.
Bett twitched the corners of her mouth in a return greeting.
The nurse stared at Bett as she rubbed the back of Bett’s hand with her thumb
. Bett felt the covers slide from her. She waited for a report on her status. The nurse’s eyes, although focused directly on her own, were empty of information beyond a professional caring. Bett started to ask, “How am I?” but the combination of a dry throat and the residual effects of the anesthetic on her speech center kept the sentence from being completed.
The nurse squeezed Bett’s hand.
“Still pickled?”
Bett gave a little nod.
“Want a sip?”
Bett nodded a second time.
The nurse fumbled with the glass of ice water trying to bring it close enough to Bett so that the adjustable straw would reach her as she lay flat on her back. Bett tried to help by using her heels and elbows to push herself higher up on her pillow. The pain that ripped through her right side when she put weight on her elbow swept out most of the remaining anesthetic. The sound that she made and the face that made it caused the nurse to slop water over the top of the glass. Bett jerked as the icy water splashed onto her collarbone.
“Gone?”
The nurse held her face rigid for a moment before nodding yes.
Bett took a sip of the ice cold water. It cooled the hot spot that had formed at the back of her throat when the woman had nodded yes.
“Done?”
Bett nodded yes and the nurse removed the straw.
“Can you wiggle your toes for me?
“That’s good. That’s a very good effort. We’ll try again later. You’re coming along fine. You just lie here for a little while and then we’ll get you to your room. The surgery went fine. Dr. Falconi said that he’d be by later. Just relax. Everything’s fine.”
