Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 7

She had to tell Gladys why she was getting x-rayed. Gladys promised to say nothing. From the beginning Joan’s impulse had been secretive. Gladys would do what she said, but it was scary for her to be there again. It means something bad is going to happen to me again. Dan’s surgery had always been something that had happened to her as much as to Dan. The nights sitting all night in a chair in the hospital, getting disapproving looks from some of the nurses, whose territoriality was impaired. The fear. I’m headed for worse. Superstitious, very superstitious. But I am superstitious. And yet it was good that Gladys was there. Gladys talked with her. It helped.

The mammogram technician was earthy and intelligent and informed and warm. The procedure was innocuous and painless. Wearing the inevitable johnny, Joan laid both breasts on a horizontal plate, between two perpendicular plates, and the pictures were taken from all sides. The technician took extra pictures of the left breast.

“When this is over with,” Joan said, “will we know? Will somebody be able to say it is or is not malignant?”

“Yes. It’s a wonderful diagnostic tool. You get a really clear idea of what you’re dealing with.”

“It will be good to know finally. Even if it’s bad news, it will be good to be certain.”

The technician nodded. “I know. Remember something like eighty-five percent of all lumps are nonmalignant. Your odds are very good.”

In five minutes it was over. Painless, unembarrassing, easy. The results would be in tomorrow. Joan went home.

In the Cabot Gymnasium at Northeastern, Ace, in a gray T-shirt and white shorts, was lacing his sneakers. They were faded blue Adidas Varsities with one of the white stripes missing. Working out when Joan maybe has cancer? Do what instead? I could go home and sit around and stare at her and say ohmigod a lot.

He walked to the cage to the indoor track and began his daily twenty-two laps around it, two miles. He counted the laps by switching pebbles from one hand to another, and his mind was thus free to roam. That had always been useful to him in the past. He could work out plot complications, try out dialogue, imagine character as he ran. Today he thought about himself and Joan. As a concession to the steady low-grade ache in his stomach he’d had since she told him, he didn’t run today against the clock as he usually did. Today he just did the twenty-two laps.

If she dies, I can make that. If she dies I will have the boys. I won’t fold. I can do that. I can do whatever I have to do. I can do that. But, Jesus Christ, who will I talk to? Who will I screw? I’ll want to. In a while I’ll want to and who? I can’t stand to do that dance again. Hi, my name’s Bob Parker, what’s yours? Do you have any hobbies? Shit!

It was a late spring afternoon and most of the runners were outside. The cage was nearly empty as he went around it, the sun shafting in through the high windows and silhouetting the particles of dust that always hung in the cage.

There’s no point to this. Maybe she’s fine. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a sebaceous cyst Thinking what if is no good. We’ll take it as it comes and not look past it.

He finished the two miles and headed for the Universal trainer. He seemed to have no strength today. He couldn’t bench-press what he had bench-pressed Tuesday. He had to force himself through the routine. If she dies can I write, I wonder? It was hard to imagine doing anything if she were gone. But the boys, he had the boys. Funny, I don’t think of them still having me. I think of me still having them. He saw himself, his face a mask of controlled grief, with an arm around each of his sons. He snorted. Bathos. He pressed up the weight, exhaling hard as he did.

After supper, when they were alone in the kitchen, he said, “Do you want me home when you call Barry? Would you like me to call him for you?”

And she had said, “No, I think I better call him. I’ll be okay.”

He didn’t pursue it. That spring they found that silence was a much better approach than talking, and that, oddly, staying apart was better than being together. There developed a kind of truce in their traditional commitment to discuss everything with each other. Talking made it worse, they realized, and sitting together in aching silence made the fear manifest. She went in the bedroom and lay down to watch television. He sat in the family room and read the Globe.

Friday, April 18

She went to work. The classes went well and after class she spoke to Judy Martin, the department head.

“Judy,” she said. “I gotta tell you. I have a lump in my breast and yesterday I went for a mammogram. If the lump is malignant, and we’ll hear today, you and I will have to figure out what to do with the rest of the term.”

Judy Martin tried to be very upbeat. “Oh, Joan, don’t worry about it. You know how often people have lumps and how it usually isn’t bad.”

“I hope so. Today we should know.”

Driving home afterward Joan thought, Jesus, now she knows. This is getting out of hand. Ace knows, and Marcie knows, and Gladys knows, and Norma knows, and Judy Martin knows, and who else? And for Christ sake there’s probably not anything wrong with me.

And on that warm April day, with the sun streaming into the car as she spun along Route 128, it didn’t seem that anything was wrong. She had a new raincoat on, and she was driving the little hatchback Vega they had bought for her that was fun to drive compared to the station wagon they also drove. It was fun to drive because she felt in control of it. It was that feeling as she zipped along 128, looking good, feeling good, and in control that gave her a mystical sense of well-being. I’ve got this under control. I do not have cancer. There’s no way someone can feel as good as I do and he walking around with cancer. I’m not going to think about it. I’m not going to let it he cancer.

That Friday he didn’t go in. He was on sabbatical leave and went in only to write and use the gym. Today he didn’t. Today he got the boys off to school and stayed home and walked around the house and looked at the clock. At one-thirty Dr. Barry’s office would open and Joan would call and they’d know. After the boys had gone to school he stood a long time in the front door and looked out at the street, the same street he’d looked at for sixteen years. There was a stillness in him. And a need to breathe deeply from time to time. And tag lines and images from books he’d read and books he’d written flitted in the stillness. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Three and a half hours. He could feel the burden of them pressing against his upper back. The trapezius muscles felt tense. He shrugged his shoulders. The dog was looking at him with the wise innocent face that dogs have, and he thought how he’d felt as a small boy when he had been punished and only the dog remained unchanged. There was no disapproval in dogs. But not all that much consolation either. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. Readiness is all. He shrugged his shoulders again and walked through the house to the family room, and looked out at the woods, and the new growth that surged up as it did every spring. ‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’ He thought about a bargain. God, if the mammogram is okay I’ll come back to the church. He shook his head. For crissake I can’t do that. What kind of deity makes that kind of switch? ‘Okay, if you’ll go to Mass every Sunday I won’t kill your wife.’

“No,” he said aloud. “No.” I don’t want to do business with that kind of God. If he’s there he’ll do what he’ll do, and if it involves trading faith for a tit I don’t want him. “If I do this,” he said to the dog, “and Joan’s okay I’ll be superstitious all my life. I won’t dare renege. If I do this and she’s not all right I’ll be ashamed.” And where does it end? Do I start making trades for a good review in the Times? For a movie contract? For a good reprint sale? If the kids have good checkups at the dentist I’ll make a novena? As he talked to himself he walked continuously. Back and forth from living room to family room, to bedroom to kitchen. The dog got used to the pattern and went to sleep on the living room rug, on his side, with his feet out straight.