Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 2

Saturday, April 12

The morning was bright spring. The lump felt smaller than it had Friday night. Saturday afternoon it felt bigger than it had Saturday morning. She went through the weekend feeling the lump in her breast, touching it, touching it. Talking to herself. It’ll go away. It’s the kind that changes like that, it will be gone soon. I take good care of myself.

She did take good care of herself. She was regular in going to the doctor for Pap smears. She was careful about her eating. She rode her Exercycle three miles a day. She’d given up smoking more than a year ago. She cared about her body and was proud of it. My mother did not have breast cancer, she thought. I am not menopausal. The odds are with me. It is just unlikely that this will be a malignant mass.

The front yard was mushy. The frost had melted and the last traces of snow were gone, except in the recesses where the trailing roses rah along the low fieldstone fence they had built. The bright April sun shone on the debris of winter: dead grass, MacDonald’s wrappers, the sports section of the Globe, crumpled and water-stained under the willow tree. There were dog droppings and a dead bird decomposing near the maple tree. The brick walk that they had laid in sand together three summers ago had buckled and needed to be reset here and there.

She said, “Ace, are you going to do the yard today?”

“Maybe, after I read the paper.”

“You and your goddamned paper,” she said.

“Saturdays,” he said, “I like to read the paper and drink my coffee. The yard’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s a goddamned mess,” she said.

“Well, go clean it up. You want it cleaned, you do it. When I want it cleaned I’ll do it. I don’t mind it.”

The bastard. That’s how he always got her. She was compulsive about the yard and the house and he wasn’t. They were too liberated to talk of man’s work and woman’s work. He cooked. She painted the house. She couldn’t say, “But yard work is your job.” They were way past that and sometimes she looked back a little wistfully to when they weren’t.

“Besides, the yard’s too wet for raking. You’ll tear up all the grass.”

“Shit,” she said. She put on his blue warm-up jacket, six sizes too big, that said TENNESSEE TECH STAFF ON it, and went out and cleaned up the yard savagely.

Smug bastard. I’m out here raking the yard with maybe goddamned breast cancer and he’s in there reading ‘Broom Hilda.’ But of course he doesn’t know. It’s not like I’ve told him. You’d think one of the boys would come out, maybe give me a hand with the yard. They don’t care. They’d rather stay in and fight with each other. I’m the only one that cares about this house.

She could feel the tears begin to form.

Not that way, Joan, for God’s sake not that way. Don’t get into the horror of self-pity. You’ll get in too deep, you won’t be able to get out. You’ve got to stay out of that, Joan. But alone, oh God, it’s hard alone. But it’s harder if they know. I can spare them that until I have to. I can spare me that. Don’t lie to yourself, it’s me that I’m sparing. I’m not Nancy Noble. I don’t want him looking at me thinking of the terror that might he ahead of us. The horror that might he ahead of us.

She went and opened the back door. He wasn’t there. She went in. She heard the shower running in the downstairs bath. He was in there, showering, singing “The Impossible Dream” in his harsh New England voice and flatting badly on the high notes.

She stuck her head in the bathroom door. “When you get through with your shower,” she said, “could you take a minute and get rid of a dead bird for me, or haven’t you finished your paper yet?”

He didn’t like having his singing interrupted. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

It was almost twenty minutes before he did come out. The bird was in the way. She wanted to rake where it was but she couldn’t stand to pick it up. He came out with his hair still wet and his shirt off in the raw spring air. He really ought to lose twenty pounds, she thought. He got a shovel from the garage and scooped the decaying carcass of the bird from the lawn and took it out back and flicked it into the woods. He put the shovel back in the garage and went back in the house without comment.

She put her hand inside the jacket and felt her breast again; the lump was there. As it had been since last night.

It was there all afternoon while he watched the season’s first ball game on network television and the boys had a long argument over whether they’d go to the movies or not. She tired of the lawn and went in and lay down in the bedroom and tried to take a nap and tried to keep the thoughts of her breast off in that cold bright spot in the upper corner of her consciousness. If she could keep it there, balanced, and still, it wouldn’t sweep down and swamp her. And she managed. She kept it there carefully, the way you would carry a very full glass, not spilling a drop. The knowledge of her lump was like that and she was able to do it, to keep it up there, and still, and even take a nap.

When she woke with a soggy feeling and a sense of unspecified apprehension he was in the kitchen making a venison meat loaf for the boys’ supper and drinking Miller Lite from the can. Lying on the bed she could hear the pop top come off the can. He drank too much. What was she apprehensive about. Oh God, yes. The breast. What if it were bad, would he drink more? Maybe he wouldn’t be able to cope and he’d jump into a bottle, as they said on the soap operas. Or a beer can. If he couldn’t handle this it would kill him. He had to be able to handle things. He needed that for his sense of himself. What if he couldn’t? But he always had — some tough things too. But, Jesus Christ, nothing like this. What if he went under and she died and the boys...

She got up abruptly and went to the kitchen; the TV set on the counter showed the waning innings of the ball game. He was crumbing oatmeal bread in the blender.

“We have to be ready to leave at seven-thirty,” she said. Her voice was flat and unloving, grayed by the annoyance of the afternoon. She felt like fighting with him. He nodded without speaking. What the hell is he annoyed about? she thought. He’s been in here reading the paper, watching the ball game, drinking his goddamned beer, and I’ve been out in the yard with goddamned breast cancer maybe, raking my ass off.

“You hear me?” she said.

“Yup.”

“You don’t feel like answering me.”

“I nodded,” he said.

She made a cup of instant coffee without saying anything else.

At seven-thirty she wasn’t ready and he waited without comment while she got ready. She was never ready on time. They went with the Marshes to a great large party in a restored colonial house with more than a hundred invited guests. It was more interesting than it might otherwise have been because of several factors. The house was fascinating, perhaps fifteen or twenty rooms, restored and furnished by people who cared about the task and knew about the period. For another thing the Parkers hadn’t been invited.

The Marshes had been invited and had convinced them they should come. In a party this size who would care about two more? And they could have fun making a lot of private humor among all those people. It was a different thing to be doing on a Saturday night and Joan was able to think about the party enough so as not to think about her breast.

In all this mob, she thought at one point, I’m the only one who knows. What if I stopped someone and told them: ‘Hello, I have a lump in my breast that might he malignant.’ Wouldn’t that pick things up.

She smoked occasionally that night, though she hadn’t for a year, bumming three cigarettes during the evening, and she was buoyed, as she always was, by the excitement of the party, the challenge of conversation, the pleasure of making people laugh. She was good at interacting and she knew it. It was one of the things she was proud of. He did not like small talk. She always said his only outstanding social skill was ending a conversation.

“I prefer to think that I do not suffer fools gladly,” he said, and patted her covertly on the backside.

“Mr. Warm,” she said. “You and John are about as much fun at a party as Charlie Manson.”

“Or the Masque of the Red Death.”

“The what?”

“It’s a story by Poe, you know, there’s a party...”

She yawned elaborately.

“Screw,” he said.

They left the party near midnight and went home, with the Marshes. She was elevated. Elated by the contact and the slightly illegitimate nature of their attendance, by the pleasures of being with the Marshes, friends for ten years with whom they spent three Saturday nights out of five and whom they saw nearly every day.

It’s just a simple damned cyst, she said to herself as she lay in bed poking at her breast, feeling the lump in the dark while he snored beside her in the bed. It’s just a cyst.