Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 4

She didn’t drive straight home. She drove around town. There’s no way now to say there’s nothing to worry about. Barry didn’t come even close to saying this is nothing to worry about. He hadn’t said that this is not breast cancer. He didn’t even come close to saying that. I’m scared. I’m scared shit. In the Center on the common the white meetinghouse looked much as it must have looked in the eighteenth century when it was built. The spring night was silent and unoccupied around it. No cars, no kids on the wall, no lights, except the empty arc of streetlights on the aimless asphalt. She drove home and didn’t tell Ace and went to bed. As long as he doesn’t know and no one knows hut me I can pretend. When I’m with him or with others I can pretend it’s not true and all the people who are talking to me as if it weren’t true will make it seem as though it isn’t so. She slept. Every few hours she woke and remembered and fell asleep. During the waking periods she alternated between telling herself it wasn’t cancer and beginning to deal with the possibility that it was.

At four-thirty Tuesday morning she lay on her back in bed and thought of Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller. All right. I remember them. It happened to them. And I remember saying to Jude and John that it all happened awfully fast. Betty Ford. Did they railroad her into a radical mastectomy because she was the President’s wife and they didn’t want to take chances with her life? Why didn’t they give her an opportunity? Why wasn’t there a chance to explore chemotherapy and radiology? Did some male chauvinist pig surgeon push her into a mastectomy because it was easier, safer for him, instead of trying the riskier newer approaches and thereby save the breast? I will not be railroaded. I am going to be very thorough and research this very well and, maybe, if it’s breast cancer I can hang onto this breast. I will move on this slowly. And if it is cancer, say it is cancer, I will not be pushed. I’m not going to lose this breast because it’s the quickest way, or the easiest for someone else. I’m not going to say, ‘Yes Massah Doctor, whatever you say.’ I’m going to make sure what I’m doing.

The dog, sleeping against the wall, half under one of the floor-length drapes as he always did, made a kind of lip-smacking sound and sighed and shifted his position. She got up. The bathroom door was ajar and the bathroom light was on. In the light from the bathroom she could see the dog now, lying on his side, the drape partially covering his head, his muzzle sticking out. He looked like Mammy Yokum. Ace on his side of the bed was motionless, his back to her, sleeping on his side. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She took off her pajama top and looked at her breasts. She tried to flatten out the left breast by pressing down on it with her hand. What does it look like? Grotesque. Gross. Unbelievable. A one-breasted woman. I can’t believe it. Even flat, with boobs like mine you can’t tell what it looks like and mine are easy to flatten. But you can’t really tell. They had paneled the bathroom in pine with a reddish stain and hung a big copper carriage lamp over the mirror. Where does the incision go? Does it go up the shoulder? Down the hack? Around the side? Under the armpit and around and meet the original scar? What do they do? Is it up? Down? Is it across? Christ, it’s too awful. It’s too much. I can’t think about this. But I have to. I have to be prepared. If this happens to me I’ve got to be ready. Goddamn it, I will be ready. I will handle this.

She put her pajama top back on and buttoned it. Her hands were steady. She went back to bed, stepping over the dog to do it and pulled up the covers and turned on her side and went back to sleep.

Tuesday, April 15

Work organized her morning. She taught her classes, focusing on the development of the young child and on the students, and handling it as well as she always did. She loved to teach, loved the students, and the sense of interacting lives that she found there. And the students gave it back. They were all girls and there was a sense of female community among them, teacher and student, of shared concern and shared awakening. Most of the administrators she thought suffered from near-terminal anality. But she loved the girls.

Her class ended at one-fifteen and she drove home and ate lunch, sitting on an antique blue stool at the chop-block counter in her kitchen. She had a half hour before she had to go and supervise the person whose take-over day it was.

The phone rang. “This is Dr. Barry’s office. We have an appointment for your mammogram Wednesday at five P.M.”

“Thank you very much.” So it will be Wednesday.

Well, it’s late, I’ll be able to go to Ace’s speech. She felt he needed her there. He usually needed her there. The speech didn’t make him nervous, but he depended on her for the social bridge. His second novel was out, and he’d done some talk shows, but this was the big speech in the hometown at the women’s club luncheon. Billy and Eileen, their oldest friends, were driving sixty miles for the luncheon and speech. Others were coming, Judy, June, Embeth. There would be a group back at the house afterward. She’d have time for that. Good. And at around five she’d excuse herself and go down to Union Hospital and get mammogramed and be back in a half hour or so.

“Days of Our Lives” broke for a commercial and she realized it was time for her to supervise.

Jean was an undergraduate at Tufts, majoring in Early Childhood Education and placed for her practice teaching at the Huckleberry Hill School, with Ruth Lenrow as head teacher and Joan as her supervisor. Today Jean took over the kindergarten, planning the activities and directing the children.

Joan concentrated on Jean’s performance, on her relationship with the children, on her ability to redirect them, on her sense of the classroom dynamics. She sat quietly on a kid-sized chair and took notes. The children were used to her; she’d been there every week all term. There was a great deal happening in the classroom. It was relatively unstructured and the children moved from the doll corner and block corner to the math area and cooking projects in a boisterous tumble of movement and interest. It was late in the term. The children had gotten their place in the order of things worked out.

At snacktime Joan went into the other kindergarten to talk with Marcie Pitt, the teacher. Marcie was young, not long out of college, and Joan had helped her get the job. Joan had supervised student teachers in Marcie’s classroom often and they had become friends. Standing beside Marcie at the sink, looking at the kids swirling earnestly about the open room, Joan said, “Marcie, I have a lump in my left breast.”

“Oh, Joan,” Marcie said, “what are you doing about it? What’s happening?”

“I’ve been to the doctor and I’m having a mammogram tomorrow. No one is encouraging me to think it will be all right.”

“Well they are always cautious,” Marcie said. “My mother has had lumps and my aunt, and they were benign. Most of them are, you know.”

“I know, but I’m scared shit, Marce.”

“I know,” Marcie said.

Why in hell, Joan thought. Why in hell did I tell her? Were friends, hut there are a lot of friends I’m closer to. Christ, I’m nearly twenty years older than she is, I could he her mother. Here we are in a classroom full of five-year-olds and I’m telling her something I’ve told no one else. What time could he a worse time? She hasn’t got time for this.

But the time and the relationship were about right. The situation structured the discussion so it could not last long, and could not get out of hand. Uncontrollable emotions couldn’t well up and spill over. The work was there, and the children.

Marcie is a caring person, but it’s not like telling Eileen, or Jude. Or Ace — Jesus, telling Ace. Marcie wouldn’t care like they would, couldn’t care like they would. It wouldn’t devastate her. And Joan needed a woman to talk to. That was new for her. But now she needed someone female to bounce her emotions off of. She needed an outlet. She had told no one and now she had told Marcie. Someone has to know how terrific I am.

Joan saw herself, in part, as the central figure in a drama. And some of what she wanted from Marcie was audience feedback. She wanted Marcie to know that she was supervising and entertaining after tomorrow’s speech and teaching her classes and conducting herself with grace under great pressure and burdening no one with her problem. She wanted Marcie to think, What A Fine Human Being. What is the goddamn point of being terrific if no one knows you’re being terrific? Now someone knew. And tomorrow there was the mammogram, tomorrow I’ll be sure.