Better Times Page 7

  The next day, quite suddenly, was the last day of July, the last good day of any summer. After that it was one quick slide from August into the schoolyard. Addie and I came down for breakfast and found our parents waiting in the kitchen. They were seated next to each other, facing forward, hands clasped in little discrete temples on the table. My mother was wearing her glasses and the sun cast white circles over her eyes. Neither of them spoke and I wondered for a moment if they’d seen us, if maybe we couldn’t sneak back upstairs. But then my father said, “Sit down, girls.”

  Addie stuffed a strand of hair into her mouth and we took the chairs across from them. My mother removed her glasses and pinched the skin at the bridge of her nose. My father was staring into the cavern of his hands, which still carried the tang of the aftershave he’d slapped on his face an hour ago.

  “Are we having breakfast?” Addie asked.

  “In a minute,” our father said. “We need to talk with you.”

  “Is Marjorie coming back?” I asked.

  “This is not about Marjorie,” our mother said, bringing her glasses to the table with a thunk. Her words put up fences I couldn’t see over.

  They told us about the trial separation, that they would be sleeping in separate “quarters,” as my father called them, but would remain in the same house for the sake of “appearances,” as my mother put it. Addie would be moved into my bedroom that night. I’m not sure which news upset us more. Neither was up for discussion.

  After morning drills we were walked over to Mrs. Brewster’s house next door and we watched from an unfamiliar window as our parents drove off to work. We knew the Brewster children from the choir. Angela was imperfectly reliable when it came to gossip but she still liked to give it with gusto. Brian was even younger than Addie; all he liked was making train engine sounds. Mrs. Brewster served us peppered eggs that had the gray quality of brain matter.

  “Oh you poor things. I can’t imagine,” she clucked. “What was that woman thinking?”

  I didn’t know who she meant but she had the sort of wobbly face that inspired argument. “We’ll be fine,” I said. But that no longer seemed a certainty. I said it again anyway.

  That night Addie and I boycotted dinner. We let our potatoes turn spongy and our milk grow skin and we were sent to bed early. We sat and listened as their voices rumbled beneath us. The room seemed suddenly smaller with Addie in it. We were like twins, though not ones that looked alike or conjoined in any particular place. I had treasured the time apart that bedtime once afforded. I wanted to push her into the closet. I wanted to take her in my arms.

  “I hate Mommy,” she said.

  “I hate Daddy more,” I said. For some reason, we both started giggling. We couldn’t stop. We covered our mouths and let the laughter bubble out of our hands. When we finally caught our breath, we noticed it had gone quiet downstairs. We didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one.

  “Do you think they’ll go to court?” Addie asked. “Do you think they’ll make us choose?”

  We only knew one boy whose parents had split up, on the last base we’d lived on. He’d announced it to the rest of us just like that: they were “splitting up.” I’d imagined the earth beneath their house cracking in two. I imagined the eyes of their windows turning sad as the ground swallowed them up in its great grassy maw. Instead they began fighting over his custody. At first, he was boastful. His parents were fighting over who loved him the most, he claimed. Then one day he simply disappeared. The house was put up for sale a week later. We never found out who won. But we could safely agree it wasn’t him.

  I said the only thing I could think of: “Let’s ask the board.”

  The Ouija board had already collected a considerable amount of dust. I sneezed as I pulled it out from under my bed. Somehow I hoped it would look different. That I wouldn’t have to search for an answer, that one would just present itself to me. But the same “Yes” and “No” and “Good-Bye” taunted me.

  Addie and I took our positions over the board. We placed our fingers on the planchette and closed our eyes. We chanted the question and awaited movement. Slowly it began its survey. It crept first one way and then the other before turning back again. It circled its target and then it stopped. We counted breathlessly to three and looked together. It rested on the letter “X.” I thought that was definitely a “No.” Addie declared it a stupid game.

  That night, as Addie and I fell asleep, as she burrowed her nose into me as if I was her napkin, I thought of the photograph of my parents on their wedding day. I had always thought my mother looked shy at being caught in the arms of my father, her gaze cast away from the camera, her teeth nipping at the pulp of her lips. But now I knew it was the same look I’d seen in Marjorie’s eyes that afternoon at the hall. It was that look of resignation, which I could recognize but not name, in many of the women around me that summer. It was the knowledge of doing the difficult thing without knowing if it was the right one. It was jumping from the burning building while the firemen were still locating their tarp.

  Two days later we went to war. The base rattled with an agitated silence. The flags stretched across the front porches. The children were kept indoors. Two weeks later the choir had its first and only concert of the summer. The four of us went together to the church and as I watched my mother and father greeting the other families, I wondered if what they were doing would be considered a sin. If they would be struck down now or later, together or separately. I looked for Marjorie but she wasn’t there.

  Mr. Giletti was in a hand-wringing state. He stood before the piano and as each child arrived, he quickly shuffled them into formation on the risers. We were all outfitted like little adults, the girls in dresses that usually stayed shelved until Christmas, the boys’ hair combed into wet helmets. There was a microphone set up and when I came near, Mr. Giletti adjusted it to my height. “You remember the line?” he asked, his pupils thickened by a pre-performance glaze. I nodded and as I made my way to my place I repeated it in my head. I bet my money on a bobtail nag. I bet my money on a bobtail nag. I bet my money on a bobtail nag.

  The program was heavy on Americana. The country was beautiful and the banner was star-spangled and the soldiers came marching home. Finally, after it was agreed that this land was both your land and mine, it was time for “Camptown Races.”

  We started well enough. I could pluck out individual voices on either side of me but I couldn’t tell how we sounded. It didn’t matter; only mine would be heard alone. But when I got down to the microphone, I found the words had escaped from me. I heard the singers behind me reach their crest. Mr. Giletti held the chord and looked to me. The silence swelled into a pillow I wanted to clutch over my ears. The electricity of the microphone buzzed beneath my lips. I saw my parents paying dutiful attention in the crowd, just like all the other couples, and felt an anger blister in me. What was this fluency for fooling others that all adults seemed to have? Where did it come from? And when would I get it? I opened my mouth and out came the only words I could think of: “What are you doing the rest of your life?” Then my knees locked up and I collapsed on the floor.

  I only sing in the shower now, but singing was not the only thing that didn’t last through that summer. Marjorie never came to care for us again, though we did see her periodically around the neighborhood. We watched as her belly ballooned out. Then a few months later we watched her push a stroller down her drive. A few months after that, her Harry returned to her and the three of them moved to another town. By the time our soldiers began pulling out of Iraqi territories, my parents had officially separated and Addie and I were living with our mother on civilian grounds. She got promoted from secretary to paralegal. We wore jeans to school and bought hot lunches. That spring I turned nine and got my first Walkman. We saw our father every other weekend and on holidays.

  My mother says he reached me first that day in the church. I don’t remember. Nor, really, does it matter. I came to slowly, the lights so br
ight they almost blinded me back into darkness. Then my father and mother and Addie began winking into shape above me, all of them lifting me up from the ground as though I weighed absolutely nothing at all.

  The Modern Age

  Cleavage

  When Dr. Rob told Nan Gordon she would have to have her left breast removed, she decided she would sleep with him. He needed to know just what he was taking from her. She needed to know too.

  Nan was startled but not surprised when she found the lump. She’d been warned of the possibility before, of the cancerous rogue that had wound its way through her genetic code. She’d seen the demonstration slides of excised tissue, sectioned and veined like a halved orange, the tumor nestled in the fat like overstuffed pith. But it always seemed like something so far away from her daily concerns, something unseen she could put off, like taxes or grad school. Now, in this deliberately inoffensive exam room, indignant in her flower-patterned gown, bare ass pinching the paper beneath her, the knowledge was inescapable: she had no one to blame but herself.

  Dr. Rob was in his mid-thirties, with a thin hoop hanging limply through his left lobe and a face unwrinkled by the bad news he had to give. He was a robot, a robot with woolly arms, and his insistence on maintaining both the formality of “Doctor” and the casualness of “Rob” infuriated Nan.

  “What do you do with them?” she asked.

  “Our patients? We—

  “No,” she said, “My breast. What do you do with it after you cut it loose?”

  He seemed surprised by the question, the indifferent mask of his face sliding southward. He recovered with admirable agility. “Well,” he said, tapping his pen against his lip. “First you have to sign the specimen over to the hospital. Then we do what we want with it.”

  Even when he was joking his voice had all the variety and warmth of a heart monitor. Nan didn’t know if she liked him or hated him. “What does that mean?”

  “Depending on our needs, sometimes we use it for testing,” he said. “And sometimes we incinerate it.”

  She hated him.

  He began droning about the procedure, how her breast wouldn’t literally be separated whole from her body like some tribal ritual. But she was no longer listening. Instead she fixated on her face in the mirror floating above his right shoulder. Under the harsh fluorescent light her skin took on a subterranean tone. She looked like something set out on a slab, formaldehyde worming its way through her veins, wedging into her organs. In mere minutes she’d lost years of being beautiful.

  “I think we should discuss how you’ll be feeling after the operation. Sexually, I mean.” He looked at her and smiled an insurance salesman grin, bright and cheery and attempting to hide the grit of his teeth, the boredom behind his eyes. She imagined his tongue flicking back and forth behind that wall of immaculate bone. Then she imagined him flicking that tongue against the tip of the nipple he would soon be taking from her.

  “If we must,” she said.

  “I know I don’t seem like an expert. But I’ve talked many women through this. Now, for a while you’ll probably be feeling uncomfortable with your body, somewhat unfeminine, incomplete.”

  “Plus the other one will be lonely.”

  “Nobody to hang out with,” he said, trying to match her tone.

  She stared at him until her eyes burned, until the silence between them became so crushing she imagined it knocking out all his dainty molars.

  “Yes. Well,” he continued, flipping through the chart to avoid any more direct contact, “it may be some time before you feel like being intimate with someone again. But these feelings shouldn’t last.”

  “How long?”

  “I’m not a shrink; I can’t tell you that. It’s going to depend entirely on your own recovery process. But you’re twenty-eight and otherwise healthy. And you’re only in stage one. Plus I’m sure you have family to support you.”

  “Some,” she answered. She thought of her mother, Pippa, waiting in the lobby, burying her cigarette cravings in a copy of Dog Fancy, and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. Dr. Rob must have noticed because his voice softened, not in kindness so much as acknowledgment of what was required.

  “This is a loss,” he said. “And given your age, it’s perfectly normal to mourn. Many women feel that way. Let me give you the names of some support groups that meet in the area.” She took them down. Three hours later she met him at his apartment. The sex was smooth and spotless and over before either of them had gotten their clothes off.

  This, in its way, was its own act of mourning: the first sex Nan had in over a year and she could easily imagine it being the last she ever did. After so many sloppy attempts at intimacy and so much time spent sleepwalking through the motions, she could keep her body to herself now. This was its fond farewell, its kerchief wave from a departing ship deck. And now it was all over. It was lying in bed with a man she didn’t even like.

  “So,” Dr. Rob said afterward, “should we see each other again?”

  “I think we have to,” she said.

  “Oh, right.” He gave a sad sort of laugh.

  She turned her back to him and he did not reach for her. They curled away from each other and the cold rushed in to fill the empty space. The next week she requested a transfer to Dr. Sophie Hargrove, whose eyebrows came together in sympathetic V’s and who never, ever joked about other people’s breasts. She had the operation a week after that.

  Pippa’s apartment was a hospice for cigarettes; they were nursed to the very end. It took Nan several days of her scheduled convalescence to realize her mother wasn’t looking for her when she said, “Oh, there you are,” picking through butts in the nearest ashtray like a raccoon through trash. Every time it happened, Nan felt she’d stayed too long.

  Nan woke every morning to these smoke-stained fingers reaching for her mouth, as Pippa shoved a quickie cocktail of codeine and orange juice down her throat before heading to work. Once Nan was certain that her mother had left for the day, she would spend several minutes screaming her throat raw. After this, she usually got sick. Then she spent her afternoons watching soaps. When she closed her eyes, shoulder pads and push-up bras swam in the darkness. She got used to the sight of the ceiling above her, could recognize its kinks and whorls even at night. The days passed too slowly, like stones through a kidney. She could feel herself growing rotten.

  She certainly looked rotten. Every time she changed her bandage she found something newly fearsome underneath. The stitches were the worst: the skin pulled tight, bound together with thick black string, a nest of spiders instead of a breast. The longer she looked, the more difficult it became to remember her body in other times: at the prom, encased in terrible teal tulle; camping at the lake, shuddering against the fleece of a sleeping bag; leaning against the wall of a nightclub, sleek and solid and aware of how substantial it was. This was what she knew now: her body strung up like a violin, ready to be locked away in velvet lining, far from the dangers of dust motes and sympathy.

  She tried to go to the support meetings, but she never got past the doorway. All the downcast and wrinkled faces, the bare heads covered in bright paisley scarves, the bodies that seemed to cave in like cored apples. It was everything that she didn’t want to be reminded she could become, that she suspected she already had become. This pain was her own, not something that could be focus-grouped away. So whenever she saw a smiling, sunken-eyed woman making her way toward her, Nan would turn quickly to the bulletin board and grab the nearest flyer, turning back and waving it with a shrug. She put them on Pippa’s refrigerator, so she was bombarded every day: Stop Smoking! Quit Drinking! Why Can’t I Control My Cravings? Why Is My Penis Sad? All those problems and all those questions, when all she wanted to know was how to feel supported when she didn’t really feel anything.

  Then one day Nan woke up and felt something where it didn’t belong. She walked into the chilled air of the bathroom and underneath her robe she felt her nipples rise. In the mirror before her
only one breast stood out against the plush white folds. The left side of her remained neutral, reclusive. Yet, unmistakably, she could feel both breasts on her, could feel the soft slopes suspending, the right one always a little heavier than its twin. Nan removed the robe.

  Since she’d had the stitches removed, the scar tissue had spread across the wound like clay poured in a mold. Now her left chest looked as if she had been excavated. But she could feel a breast there. She put her hands down and closed her eyes, tried to envision her body as she knew it was. As though it recognized what she was doing, her invisible breast began furiously to itch. Well, Nan thought. That settles things. Somehow it had found its way back to her again.

  The itch remained all day, building from a mild sizzle under the skin to a steady blaze. By noon Nan had to put on mittens to keep from clawing at her chest. By three she had emptied the apartment of antihistamines. She stretched out on the couch, pulled the covers up to her chin, and half-expected to die. Instead, she woke up at seven to the smell of smoke and meatloaf commingling in the air.

  Pippa sat at the kitchen table, still in her scrubs, her upper half enrobed in a gaudy approximation of van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Nan took the empty chair opposite her and Pippa scooted a plate in her direction. She cut a thick brown slab from the loaf and used an ice cream scoop to serve the mashed potatoes. But Nan wouldn’t eat it; she would just push it around.

  “My God, what a day I’ve had,” said Pippa, her voice strained like weak tea. “Third sixteen-year-old mother of the week. Third premature birth. It’s goddamn depressing.” She lit a cigarette. “Why are you wearing mittens?”

  Nan looked up at her mother and was startled to realize how close in appearance they had grown over the last few weeks. Though Pippa had Nan when she was eighteen, there had always seemed a safe distance between them. Her mother had carried the weariness of old age even in her youth. Now that weariness manifested in the loose yellow knitting of Pippa’s skin, the bird’s wings poised for flight in the corners of her eyes, the collarbone that stuck up from her body like a salute. Nan recognized these as her own. She felt the first tell-tale pricking of the itch and shuddered. Then she reached out and plucked the cigarette from her mother’s fingers.