Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 25

Re-entry. The boys came home from school prepared to visit and found their mother home. Eileen Ganem drove up that day from Plymouth to find Joan’s hospital room empty, the bed newly made, the flowers gone and no sign of Joan.

“Jesus Christ,” she said to Joan when she arrived at Canterbury Road. “I thought the grim reaper had come. I was running around the hospital like a goddamn maniac, asking where you were. I thought you’d cashed in the old chips.”

Midafternoon Joan’s sister arrived. She was dealing with a difficult divorce and the need to find a job and Joan’s experience had hit her hard.

“Chummy’s shook about this,” Ace said to Joan in the kitchen as he poured a glass of wine.

“She’s always been crazy about her boobs,” Joan said, “and I suppose she’s got to be thinking if it could happen to me it could happen to her.”

They sat in the family room and drank wine and talked, and Joan was exhausted and thrilled. Students came, detoured from the hospital, and drank some wine and talked and left, to be replaced by others. Neighbors were there. Ace had to go to Donovan’s for another gallon of Gallo Rhine Garten.

Saturday was a day like Friday, with people coming and Joan talking and between visits cleaning her house and feeling the weakness that the three weeks had brought her and reveling in the excitement and the homeness.

Saturday night they sat in the Marshes’ kitchen and drank a little beer and wine and ate some raw vegetables with sour cream dip and Joan decided that Monday she’d go back to work.

“The students keep coming and coming. In a way I love it,” Joan said, “but they stay so long. I’m better to see them in a more controlled situation. If I am in the classroom I can leave when I want to. Now I can’t seem to get them out of my house.”

“I can.” Ace said.

“Not that way. I love seeing them. I just need to get them out better. Going back to work will take care of that.”

“But Ace won’t be able to do your classes anymore,” John said, “and rap with the students and your fellow professors.”

Ace said, “Yarrgh.”

And so she would do it. Not four to six weeks after surgery, as Dr. Barry had suggested, but twelve days after surgery. I am absolutely wonderful. I am going back to work and I’m going to do it in twelve days after a mastectomy.

Sunday she raked leaves. Her left arm still had a limited range, but she used it as a fulcrum and raked with the right and looked natural. Neighbors questioned if she should work so hard so soon and she loved it.

Monday she went to work. She couldn’t drive the car yet, and there was a wordless fear that they both had. She shouldn’t be alone yet. They had been afraid too long. They couldn’t let go at once. So he drove her and sat in the car in the parking lot and read the Globe and drank coffee from a paper cup while she told her classes of her surgery.

When she came into the classroom, its tables undisturbed, its bookshelves and decor exactly as it had been three weeks before, she felt a moment of fierce self-doubt. The inviolate normalcy of the classroom set her back. What if no one gives a shit? she thought. Here I am all primed to tell a drama-laden tearjerker of a story, filled with pathos and power, and what if no one gives a shit about my boob.

But she was committed and she went ahead. It was difficult to do. The students were obviously glad to see her back. As she began to speak the pleasure went out of their faces and an uncertain apprehension replaced it.

“And so,” she said, “I reached up to shave under my left arm and my hand brushed against a lump in my breast.”

As she went on several of the girls put their heads down on the desks. Many of the girls had tears in their eyes. The tears and the heads down and the fear in their eyes was difficult for Joan. But she felt she must.

“Some of you will have a lump in your breast,” she said. “It probably won’t be malignant but you must learn to examine your breasts. You must remember that if it is malignant, it is not the worst thing that can happen. If it happens to you remember that you know someone to whom it happened, and remember how I was back and feeling good twelve days after they took a breast. And remember if they have to take it, it’s a lot better than a lot of things. And it is not so ugly a thing.”

Thirteen days after surgery she went with him when he spoke at Bradford College. It was dinner first and some drinks and then the speech and no one could tell and she felt good. The bra still rubbed a bit and she got tired quicker, but no one could even guess there was anything wrong and it was an act of pride that she proceed with her life.

Driving home from Bradford she said to him, “I’m going to have some sort of postoperative depression.”

“Are you going to start now?”

“No, but it’s bound to come,” she said. “It’s naive to think it won’t.”

“It’ll be a lot better than the preoperative one we were both in.”

“I wonder how I’ll handle it.”

“You’ll handle it as well as you handled everything else,” he said. “I’m not so sure it will come at all.”

“Oh, I think it probably will,” she said. “Like after the babies. There’s the old postpartum blues. There will probably be some reaction. You too. You’ll need some kind of emotional shakedown.”

“Well,” he said, “if you get too depressed we can apply the miracle cure, Parker’s internationally acclaimed beef injection.”

“The thought of that is bringing on my depression,” she said.

It was dark and the dashlights of the car softened appearances. The chance to be enclosed with her, surrounded by darkness, excited him. Delimited by the moving car, the privacy of their shared space was romantic to him, and he very carefully patted her thigh. “I’m waiting for physical recovery, sweets, I’m after your body. Screw the post-op depression.”

But it came. There was no sudden shock, no startling realization. There was a period of more than a week when she had gotten back to work, and the pace of her life had begun to move more normally, that she went over and over the events in her mind. It was in some way deliberate.

I’ve got to assimilate this experience into my whole life’s experience. I have to know what really happened to me. I will make sense of it gradually and not bury it and have a breakdown two months from now.

And so when she was alone she would rerun the events of the past three weeks. She wasn’t on stage now, she wasn’t putting on a show. Now she was alone and it was time to face a real fact. She was different now: she had but one breast. What was it Gary said that was so funny? ‘The girl in the Hathaway Bra.’ That’s me. I’ve lost a boob. The girl in the Hathaway Bra.

She woke up frequently in the dark mornings at two or three and she would feel an unspecified anxiety. And she would feel, Oh, something bad has happened. And she would become aware of discomfort on her left side. And then she would remember, My God, they really did it. They took off the old boob. Jesus Christ, did that really happen to me? That’s really too bad. That was a really good bod I had there. It was really nice and now it isn’t. Now it will never be the kind of body that anyone would go out of his way to see. In fact they’d go out of their way not to see it. Nobody is going to say, ‘Boy, I can’t wait to see her with her clothes off.’ Never. Never. Nobody is going to say that.

Waves of self-pity, like nausea, rolled over her. She had to fight it off. She talked to herself. Wait a minute, you goddamned fool. What does that mean compared to the luck, the total luck, don’t talk about bad luck, the total good luck, the wonderfulness of being told that you’re free of cancer and you have a life ahead and you don’t have to have radiology and chemotherapy and have your hair fall out. Think about that, you jerk. Concentrate on that.

And she would fight off the self-pity and work on the feelings when they came, and they came often at two in the morning, when she felt very vulnerable. It was a solitary battle and one of the hardest kind, for it had no audience. The feelings came and she didn’t know what to do with them except to fight them off. She didn’t cry. She didn’t wake up nights and cry, but she thought often, why me?

It was not always two in the morning. Sometimes during the day or early evening something would happen to dramatize her loss and she would feel, why me? A week after she came home she was lying on the bed watching The Rockford Files. She had to lie on her back to watch, for her side was still uncomfortable and her head was at an awkward angle and she sighed. David was in the room looking for a pencil and he heard her.

“Are you feeling depressed?” he said.

“Yes, I guess so. Not in the pits of depression, you know, but kind of depressed.”

“I don’t understand that,” he said.

“I don’t mean to be snotty about this,” Joan said, “but it ain’t your boob that was lopped off.”

“Yeah, but Mom, that’s just a crummy old boob. It’s not your life.”

And it helped. She felt the reminder and a gratitude that he was free to give it. That’s right, she thought. That’s right, Dave. It’s good that you remind me that it is just a crummy old boob. The boys’ ease with her surgery helped. When asked by their friends they spoke of their mother’s mastectomy as they would have spoken of a tonsillectomy.

One afternoon Charna Levine called. A colleague at Tufts and a friend of some years, Charna called regularly to check in and see how Joan progressed.

Always Joan said bright and up-tempo things when Charna called.

“How are things?”

“Oh fine, good. I went back to work. I told my students. It was hard, but I did pretty good.”

“You know,” Charna said, “you must be feeling angry about this. I know you feel good as well, and you’re glad it wasn’t worse. But you don’t want to deny the angry feelings either.”

“I know.”

“You have a right to those feelings, and a right to let them out.”

“I don’t want to dwell forever on it.”

“Of course not,” Charna said, “and you shouldn’t. You don’t want to get obsessive about all of this. But you need to let those feelings out. You shouldn’t be Pollyanna Parker about it.”

For Joan that was valuable. It was not that she couldn’t think of such a thing. It was that she hadn’t quite articulated it. And Charna having said it gave it configuration and reality. Of course she was angry. And in the days of re-entry she talked to herself almost constantly. She stayed way inside her head. She wanted not tears but anger. And she succeeded. Less and less she thought, Oh my poor body. More and more she thought, I wish this did not happen, but by God it’s not going to get me.

Ace asked her one night why she was so quiet. “Are you okay,” he said. “Do you feel all right?”

“Yes. I’m okay, but I have to go inside for a while,” she said. “I have to keep running this experience through until somehow it becomes part of everything. You know?”

“Would it help to talk?”

“No, I don’t think so. I have to do this myself.”

He shrugged. She knew his feelings were hurt slightly. He was devouringly possessive and he resented anything that shut him out. But he knew that about himself and he suppressed it when he could and he knew this time she was right and he would have to stay outside, for a short while anyway.