Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 9

The denial urge was strong in her as they drove away from the Medical Building. Wednesday I’m having surgery and they will probably take my breast. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it.

“Listen,” Joan said, “I don’t have a thing to wear.” It was a typical remark of hers, no matter where she was going. He almost smiled. “We’ve got to go to Marshall’s,” she said. He turned up Route 128 and headed for the discount store. “We’ve got to get a nightgown and slippers,” she said.

As they walked through the aisles at Marshall’s, Ace pushing the carriage, she was thinking, thinking. Gotta get a robe. If they do it, I’ve gotta get a robe that will obscure the imbalance as best it can. “I don’t want a see-through jobby,” she said. “I don’t want anything sexy.”

“It’s gotta be more sexy than the sweat pants and surplus fatigue jacket you have been wearing,” he said.

“It’s gotta be kind of a utilitarian robe, that could easily be padded out when they do it.” She didn’t say “if,” and he didn’t correct her. Neither had any real doubts, just a very small hope, up there in the corner, almost out of sight.

Marshall’s was a clothing store that sold seconds, samples, and such from bins along the aisles, and had pipe racks everywhere. He hated it there. She loved it. He felt the same itchy boredom he always felt when he shopped with her, a boredom always slightly modified by the pleasure of being, however unromantically, alone with her, out of the ordinary context of home and yard.

He was aware of the garish normalcy of the way he felt, juxtaposed with the desperate purpose of their shopping. ‘The torturers horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree,’ he thought. ‘About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.’ Christ, now I’m quoting Auden.

Joan’s concentration on the choice of a robe represented a kind of lifesaving struggle to proceed normally in the face of a mortal possibility.

“What to wear to a mastectomy,” she said to Ace. They were at the robe rack. “That’s no good,” she said. “That one would gap. And that one is too filmy. People coming to see me don’t want their attention called to my chest.” He nodded.

“Makes sense,” he said.

She picked out two robes. “These lend themselves to the one-breasted bod,” she said, “rather nicely.”

“Chic,” he said. “Chic as a bastard.”

She bought two padded bras. If the breast goes I can wear the padded bra and shove something in it and maybe it will look okay. She talked to herself almost without interruption, a lively, animated, and entirely consuming dialogue. You know, I can receive visitors, and I can look all right. She knew that later, after the hospital, she would be fitted for a prosthesis. She had always hated the word. Her concern was for the first few days after surgery, before the imbalance could be modified, when the first visitors came.

And so she planned. She bought slippers and a nightgown. And she felt a little better. It was like planning for a trip they had to take although they weren’t that keen on going. She was that way. She never allowed things to happen. She planned for them. She had to have an impact on the events. She could not stand randomness. It was a form of control. If you planned enough and thought about things enough they did not slip up on you and start running around loose. If you concentrated on them you could get hold of them. And she needed all her life not to have things run loose. She needed a hold.

And so she planned. Now I have things to wear to the hospital. All right, the next thing is to tell the boys. We will go home and I will tell the boys that I am going to the hospital.

“How much do we tell them?” she said, when they were back in the car.

“They shouldn’t have to carry what we’re carrying. But they have a right not to be bullshitted.”

She nodded. “We’ll tell them I’m having a cyst removed.”

“Yeah. That’s fair. That’s the truth as far as we know it. We don’t have to speculate for them, or lead them into speculation of their own.”

“And if they ask about mastectomies and cancer? Betty Ford’s been in the news.”

“We’ll say it’s nothing to worry about.”

“That’s bullshitting them.”

“Yeah, it is, but only a little and they shouldn’t have to be where we are. Not yet. If it happens it happens and we’ll tell them. But if it turned out to be just a cyst, they’d have been worried for nothing.”

“That’s not likely,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s possible.”

She was thinking, They’ll he revolted at the idea of me with one breast.

He was thinking, They’ll he worried that she’s going to die.

“I guess we can lie to them a little,” he said. “When they were small we lied to them about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I don’t see why we can’t lie to them a little here. At least until we know.”

She nodded. “Until we know. There’s no need for them to deal with the not-knowing. We’ll tell them the truth when we have a truth to tell them. And we’ll do it all along the way. We’ll tell them what we know.”

It was late afternoon as they pulled into the driveway. Dan met them at the door.

“Where have you been?” he asked, the annoyance showing in his voice.

“We’ve been to the doctor’s,” Ace said, annoyed at Dan for being annoyed.

“And we had to do a little shopping,” Joan said. “Come on in and I’ll tell you about it while Daddy gets supper.”

David was sitting at the table in the family room drawing. Joan and Daniel sat on the couch, while Ace made chicken breast in white wine, and rice pilaf for supper.

“Sunday I’m going to have to go to the hospital for a couple of days,” Joan said, “and have a cyst taken out of my left breast.”

“Is it anything serious?” David asked.

“It’s a cyst,” Ace said from the kitchen. “Remember when I had one removed from my neck?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Joan said. “I’ll be in the hospital a few days.”

“Can we come and visit you?” Dan asked.

“Yes,” Joan said. “Daddy will bring you down.”

“Will you be in the same part I was?” Dan asked.

“Daniel, you were in the pediatric ward,” David said. “She’s not a kid.”

“All right, I was just asking.”

“Well, it’s pretty dumb to think she’s going to be in the pediatric ward.”

“Shut up, shut up, David. Just shut up.”

I guess they’re not too worried, Joan thought. But I mustn’t forget what I know about kids. Things like this take a while to sink in. They won’t assimilate it right away. But later there may be some fallout.

“You’re such a baby,” David said.

“I wasn’t talking to you anyway. Why don’t you just shut up,” Dan asked.

Ace exploded from the kitchen. “Both of you shut up, goddamnnit.”

Joan got up and went toward the bedroom. “I’m going to lie down for a while,” she said.

At seven-fifteen that evening she called Judy Martin, at home.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “to call you at home, Judy, but I’ve been having tests, as you know, and the mass is quite suspicious. I’m having a biopsy on Wednesday and then we’ll know for sure. But I think it’s time we talked about the rest of the year.”

“Oh, Joan, I don’t think you should be worrying about that now.”

“No, I should. Dr. Barry said that if it’s malignant the recovery period would be four to six weeks. That means I won’t be back this term.”

“I’m sure...”

“Now here’s my plan.” Joan plowed ahead. It was important to get it all said just right, and to get it all said, and to forestall the need for awkward expressions of sympathy. Judy Martin had never been especially articulate and Joan wanted now to get past her empathy. “I can tape a whole bunch of lectures ahead of time, and Ace can bring them in and play them. He’s on sabbatical and he can be the teacher, playing the tapes and answering questions. It will be a kind of continuity. Then after surgery we can assess where we are.”

“My God,” Judy Martin said, “will he do that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I hope he doesn’t have to.”

“I hope so too, Judy. But I’m pretty sure that I won’t be back this term.” Or maybe ever. The phrase popped up in her head and she pushed it back down. Too busy. Too busy to think about that. Too much to do.

“Anything I can do,” Judy Martin said.

“I know, thank you. I’m going in Sunday, so Big Bobbo will be in Monday with the tapes. And then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. Judy Martin was having some surgery soon on an injured leg and they both felt some empathy. But there was nothing else to say.

When Joan hung up she felt the panic beginning to rise. She had so much to do. All that taping, and the house. Jesus, the house. What if I don’t come home? I don’t want anyone to see the house messy. She had a picture in her head of the mourners coming back after the funeral to sit in the living room amidst the disarray that she had left. Ace will never get it clean. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t see like I do. He thinks it’s clean when he does it, but it isn’t. ‘Poor Joan,’ they would say, ‘it’s not like her to have left her home like this.’ So she began to clean. As she cleaned she thought of all the taping she had to do, and of the parade. She’d have to go to that goddamned parade tomorrow, and yet there was so much to do. And then you’ll have to tape all those lectures, and I’ve only got tomorrow afternoon and Sunday morning. And the house is a mess. Christ! Why doesn’t someone help me?

It got worse. Sharon and Mike came and sat in the family room with them and talked of tomorrow’s abortion. Mike especially acted on the premise that no one had ever loved as he had.

I remember that, Ace thought. Hell, I still feel that way.

They talked of Mike’s upcoming Air Force enlistment and Sharon’s last year of school. Of the year they’d be apart.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Mike said. “To face this kind of separation.”

Ace and Joan looked at each other without expression. Jesus Christ, Ace thought, this is incredible. I may kill them both. But both of them knew that Mike and Sharon’s story threaded into their own was a great plus. It was another something to think about.

“I did miss Joan when I was in Korea,” Ace said, “but it’s probably not the same.”