The Foremost Good Fortune (16 page)

“Almost to infinity is when I’ll die,” I whisper to Thorne. I unwrap his arms from my neck and say I’ll be right back with Daddy. Then Tony lies down with Thorne, and in minutes I hear them both laughing about the ace Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon, and what his earned run average was last September. Thorne talks to me about death and laughs about baseball stats with Tony? What is it with mother love? Why does it get so heavy?

Aidan is still awake. He keeps calling for me from the bottom bunk. “Which god do you believe in?” he asks when I get there. Couldn’t we just go to sleep? Aidan’s been asking me this question every day this week.

“Which one do you believe in?” I volley. I don’t want to have to find another way to explain that I’m not sure what I believe. That I’m still figuring it out like he is. I explain that the Native Americans believed in animal gods and that Buddhists believe in the Buddha and that people called Christians believe one god did all the work.

Aidan announces, “I believe in the one god. And I believe in Jesus Christ, too. Jesus was a good man.” I stare down at my child. “They nailed Jesus to the wall,” he says then. “They nailed him and he died.”

I had not planned on talking about Christ’s sacrifice tonight. What I want to do is lie down in my bed and read. But I need to set the record straight. “Aidan,” I say, and smile nervously. “Aidan, I believe Jesus was a nice man, too. That he was a very good man. But where, by the way, do you talk about Jesus?” I try to sound casual. “At school?”

I hope his answer will be no. Because we will have a problem if the secular international school in Beijing is dipping into religion. “Not at school. Just talking,” Aidan says. “Just talking with friends. Which god do you believe in, Mommy?” He won’t let it go. Then he makes an abrupt shift of course and says, “Mommy, who will be the next wife when you die?”

I’ve been working on trying to be patient in China. On trying not to be a helicopter mom. There’s a small boy in bed with big, brown eyes
and he’s lying on his stomach with his bottom up in the air. He used to sleep like that when he was a baby. I’d come into the room to check on him in his crib, and his little tush would hang suspended above his legs. I put my hand out now and gently flatten his body on the sheet. I can’t help that I find his question unfeeling.

I know he doesn’t mean it, but is this really my son? Daydreaming about an imaginary new mother while I have spent afternoons worrying over the state of his psyche and whether or not his Spider-Man costume was clean? I’m thinking of a way to change the subject. And once we’re done here, I’ll have to dig out the Brazelton parenting book and see how long the fascination-with-death stage is supposed to last. Because Aidan has to know a second mommy requires something to happen to the first. Or maybe he hasn’t thought it through that far? “I have some good ideas for the next mommy,” Aidan says and closes his eyes.

III
Hall of
Martial
Valor

Tell Me in Centimeters

By the time we’re crowded into the ultrasound room together, spring has come to Beijing. It’s April now, and the Chinese surgeon is here, and the Chinese radiologist, and Tony and me. Everyone is speaking loud Mandarin, which forces Tony to concentrate on what they’re saying. I found the lumps myself the week before. It was a Sunday morning, and I was talking with the boys in bed about whether or not we’d go swimming. I leaned up against the pillows and made small circles with my index finger under my collarbone. I often do this. I wasn’t checking for anything, just listening to the boys tell me how much they wanted to practice the backstroke and could we go now please?

The lumps felt like marbles. Two of them. I showed them to Tony after the boys left to get their swimsuits on. “Feel this,” I said. “Does this seem weird to you?” And he said the perfect thing, which was that he was sure the lumps would go away on their own, but maybe I should make an appointment anyway.

A week later, the lumps still felt like marbles. That’s what the Canadian internist told me when she felt my chest at the Beijing international hospital—that we were looking for marbles. Marbles or peas. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. But none of these people watching the ultrasound takes me seriously. The Chinese radiologist works quickly and takes the requisite pictures. “There’s one,” I say into the TV screen while everyone looks. “And there’s the other.” We all agree that there are lumps on the screen—that’s no longer in dispute. But what’s
inside
the lumps? One by one, the doctors in the room say the lumps are
nothing to worry about. Leave them alone and check again in three months
. I think it’s a Chinese nervous thing—these patronizing smiles. Because I don’t understand what it is we’re smiling about.

The radiologist speaks English that’s blunt and formal. I suspect he has a narrow bandwidth of English vocabulary in which to discuss breasts. And I don’t blame him for that, but the effect is stern and dismissive. “These are tiny masses,” he reminds me. “These are nothing.” This country doesn’t seem big on patient advocacy. This is the top-down model—doctor knows best.

I stare again at the little smudges on the screen that he’s located with his probe. They are small; he’s right. “But how do we know they’re nothing?” I ask. I’m not really worried yet. I’m just aiming for due diligence. As a rule, I do not fret about my health. Up on the TV my entire left breast looks suspect—grainy and textured and alien. But everything appears foreign with ultrasound. My own babies’ heads looked like exaggerated Martian skulls when I first saw them on the sixteen-week ultrasound.

“How do we know they’re harmless?” I repeat. Because the lumps are small, but they’re also in the middle of my breast, and what are they doing there? The radiologist doesn’t answer. It’s as if he hasn’t heard me. Then I realize he may not have understood my question. I have a bad habit in China of speaking English too fast. “So we’re not worried?” I say again, more slowly this time, and sit up on the examining table. “We’re not doing anything about these right now?”

“These cysts are tiny,” the radiologist repeats and hands me a tissue to mop up the goop he’s spread on my chest with the probe. “The cysts are fluid. There’s nothing that’s worrying me about the cysts.”

I reach for my shirt, and the surgeon, Dr. Lan, smiles knowingly at me again. “Tiny,” he says, echoing the radiologist. “They are tiny cysts. Too small to take out.” Then he does something I’ll never forgive him for. He hands me a small wooden ruler. “Tell me how big you think your lumps are,” he demands, and grins. “On the ruler. Tell me in centimeters.”

I look at him and then over at Tony, and I’m confused. My eyes fill with tears. I haven’t come to the ultrasound room to argue about how big the lumps in my breast are. I want to make a run for it. I want to leave this zooey hospital with its condescending smiles and rulers.

The problem is, Dr. Lan seems to be the only breast expert in town. The other problem is the ruler he gives me is in centimeters. I’ve never learned the goddamn metric system, so I can only think of my lumps in
terms of inches. “I don’t know,” I say and stare at Tony while the tears fall. I have a funny feeling in my stomach—like something is not right. Something is not adding up in this examining room. If I keep my eyes locked on Tony, it makes it easier to speak. “I have no idea how big the lumps are in centimeters.”

“Well,” Dr. Lan says in his labored English, “the lumps on the ultrasound are much smaller than the way you described them at first.” Then he adds, “I see these all the time on young women like you and they’re nothing. Besides”—he pauses now and begins harping on the scar issue again, something he’d brought up in his examining room before he’d walked me over to radiology—“there will be a scar. And if you’re like most Chinese women I know, you do not want a scar, do you?”

I look at him and wonder if he’s been listening to me at all this afternoon. I do not care about scars. I’m not a single Chinese woman trying to find a mate. I’ve been married fifteen years and have two small boys. I do not give one flying fuck about scars. “You should wait,” the surgeon repeats, and for some reason he keeps smiling. “Even if you are a worrier, you should wait. Are you a worrier? You should wait and check back with me in three months.”

It is decided. We will wait.

How it goes after this is I call my doctor in the States. “Wait? How long ‘wait’?” says Dr. Rainville. It’s nine o’clock in the morning in Portland, Maine.

“Three months ‘wait,’ ” I say loudly over the phone. The line from Beijing is scratchy.

“We never wait. I never advocate waiting.” Dr. Rainville is a woman who doesn’t mince words.

“No?” I ask. I am calling her from my bed, and now I put my head down on my pillow and close my eyes. I was afraid she might say this. Afraid my time with Dr. Lan in Beijing was not over yet.

“No waiting. Because you can’t be sure, Susan. No waiting. You go in and you find out.”

I call Dr. Lan back the next morning. “It’s Susan,” I say into the phone after a nurse tracks him down. “The American with breast lumps. I’m not waiting. I can’t wait.”

The thing is, in China, if you have money you can undergo surgery any day you want. There’s no backlog at the international hospital, and so the very next morning I’m scheduled in the operating room at ten. Before Tony and I go, Aidan climbs into bed and lies between us and asks if we’ll live in China forever. It’s still dark out and the dump trucks are quiet in the hutong. Tony says no—there’ll come a day when we move back to the States. Then Aidan says, “I like it here. It is different than Portland. There is bamboo in China.” Which gets me wondering again how the mind of my five-year-old works. Mostly, I’ve decided, Aidan lives in a kind of free association: one thought leads to another until they can be strung together to form a series. How nice to live in that nonlinear space—a land of sights and smells and memories and no breast surgery.

What will transpire between now and then is I’ll feed the boys Honey Nut Cheerios and poached eggs. Then I’ll go over Thorne’s spelling words with him (this week he has compounds like
chopstick
and
crossroad
). I’ll fill each boy’s backpack with a water bottle and a bag of Wheat Thins for the bus ride home. Then Tony will walk the boys down to the bus stop. I won’t tell them I’m having surgery today. At the door, just before they go, I’ll say,
Have a great time at school. You know how much I love you
.

If neither boy looks me in the eye, I’ll say it again: Y
ou know, right? You know how much I love you?
I can do this now that I’m having surgery. I can push the envelope on how much you talk openly about the love with elementary-school boys. And sometimes Thorne can be harder to get my hands on, but there he is, standing in the elevator, smiling at me while I kiss him one last time. Aidan drinks it up. He’s always open to talking about the love and how much—just as long as it isn’t
in public
.

At the hospital, the nurse walks me into an examining room to have an EKG before the surgery. They are big on EKGs in China. I’ve already had two here (which is two more than I’d had in my whole life before now). For some reason the Chinese feel EKGs are the benchmark for good health. You can’t get a long-term visa here until you’ve passed your
EKG. You might have some serious disease (like cancer, for instance, or hepatitis) and they’ll let you into the country, but not if you have a weak EKG.

The nurse has trouble with the machine’s wires, which are connected to small round suction cups meant to adhere to the skin on my chest, but they’ve lost most of their sucking power. When things seem to be in place, I lie back on the bed while Tony watches from a chair across the room. The machine spits out numbers on the ream of graph paper and then the nurse turns to me in alarm. She asks loudly, in a heavy Chinese accent, “Are you having heart attack? Do you feel unusual?” Her words are labored and rushed. Tony stands up and grabs the graph paper and looks over at me. Then he reaches for one of the little suction cups that’s come loose on its wire.

“Do you feel unusual?” the nurse screams again, and I shake my head.

I want to tell her yes.
Yes, I do feel unusual
. I’m about to have breast surgery in China with an unwilling surgeon. I don’t have family here, so while I’m in surgery, my children will be watched by our wonderful ayi, whose last name I am still a little unsure of. She lives in a small village out near the airport and I don’t know the name of that either or what these lumps are doing inside my breast. The one thing I know on this Thursday morning is that I’m not having a heart attack. My heart feels fine.

After the EKG, the nurse walks me into a small changing room and hands me a hospital johnny made of green crepe paper. I put it on and come out into the waiting room and then I’m the naked woman standing in front of the bank of upholstered brown chairs, wearing a see-through gown. That’s when I start laughing so hard I cry. Tony takes a picture of me wearing the thing, and then he laughs too, while I run back inside the changing room and wait for him to bring the nurse, who hands me something else to put on made of gray cotton.