The Foremost Good Fortune (19 page)

In the afternoon I go to Mimi’s apartment and we do yoga poses to try to loosen my arm on the surgery side. She says the pain I’m having there is a pressed nerve, not cancer. She has me lie on a bolster and stretches my torso until the pressure begins to release. I stay on the floor with my eyes closed. She says, “Try repeating these words: ‘I open to what is.’ ”

I make my mind quiet and then I begin. I say
I open to what is
to myself and the phrase feels vaguely powerful. I say it again. It sounds familiar, even. Like I’ve been waiting to say it.
I open to what is
. Somehow repeating these simple words begins to unlock the box for me. Some of the tension is let out.

IV
Palace of
Tranquil
Longevity

Clouds or Butterflies

Cancer follows us to Maine and up to the second floor of the old wooden house that my parents have given over to us. I think my mother has made some vow I’ll never know about to not cry in front of me. Around me she’s steady and calm. Crying used to be one of my mother’s clear forms of expression—one of her gifts. Something you could count on, because happy or sad, my mother would cry. But I can’t be around crying right now. This is why I know there’s been some vow. Because she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t tell me how terrible all this is. She just helps me.

My sister, Erin, has flown in from San Francisco for the week. She’s the fun aunt who does art projects with maple leaves and glue at the dining room table, then plays rock music during dinner and gets the boys to eat their green beans. The mastectomy is scheduled for tomorrow at noon in Boston. Tony will drive us down today after lunch. My friend Lily will fly in from Italy, where she and her two girls and her husband are living in a village north of Florence for the year. She sends Tony an e-mail with her flight number and jokes that it will be a relief to leave the freak rains that have drenched most of Italy that month. But Lily doesn’t like to fly, and the fact that she’s already in the air, making her way to me in Boston, turns the surgery into something real. Something I can get through.

Aidan finds me in the kitchen and hands me a drawing he’s made on pink construction paper. He’s all business. “Mommy. When you have the surgery, you should keep this drawing near you.”

There are thirty or so pink and purple butterflies under a bed of blue clouds. The wings of each butterfly have been carefully drawn to look
like the butterflies are in midflight. “It’s so pretty, Aidan,” I say. “It must have taken a lot of work.”

We have to be at Massachusetts General Hospital at eight the next morning for pre-op. The surgery won’t start until about ten. Aidan says, “You have to choose which one you want to be during your surgery—clouds or butterflies.” He looks up at me, waiting, and I realize he’s offering me a way to escape the operating room. How does he know I need this? How has he gotten it so right?

“Which do you want to be?”

“Butterfly,” I decide almost without thinking. “I want to be a butterfly.”

“Okay.” He nods and smiles slightly, like I’ve made a good choice. He stares at the drawing for a minute longer and then points. “Now you can imagine you’re one of these butterflies in this drawing if the surgery hurts.” He pauses again. “Which butterfly do you think is the prettiest? You’ve got to pick one.”

There are so many beautiful butterflies it’s almost impossible to choose, but I point to one. “Okay.” He nods again and seems to approve. “Okay. Now this is your butterfly.” He stares at me briefly, right in the eyes. “Imagine you’re this butterfly during the surgery, okay? Then, whenever you want, you can just fly away.” He says the last part slowly, like he’s giving me the keys to the universe. Then he adds, “You just get up and fly away.” He looks at me for another second, to make sure I’ve got it, then heads to the backyard to play a game of Wiffle ball with my father and Erin and Thorne, who are waiting for him.

When I wake up after the surgery, I seem to be in a hospital bed in Boston overlooking the Charles River. I can tell I’m talking a lot; too much, probably. Lily and Electa and Tony have stopped answering, and they stare at me from the little red couch by the window. I babble about how good I feel and ask if they think I’ll be able to get up soon and take a shower. I wonder when we can have lunch. Tony says slowly, “You seem really good, Sus. I’m surprised by how good you seem.” Then I get up from the bed to go wash my face, dragging my IV pole behind me. My friend Genevieve has sent me an incredible care package with chocolates and hand cream and Swedish fish. I lie back in bed and ask Tony where the candy is.

Dr. Specht comes to check on me and I tell her I can hardly feel the pain. “That’s the morphine talking.” Dr. Specht laughs and checks my chart. “You’re all about the painkillers right now.”

After she leaves, Lily stands up from the couch and hands me a blank writing book with a pale blue cover. “It’s something I got in Italy,” she says. “Maybe for you to write in.” I look at her like she’s crazy. Because there’s nothing to write about here. Nothing worth remembering. I want to tell her I won’t be chronicling this disease. I will be forgetting the IV and the morphine and the view to the river as soon as I leave this blue hospital room.

“Just in case,” she adds. “Because writing might help. Writing might be a way to get through this.” I smile at her and put the book on the table next to the bed. I don’t want to see it again.

When the morphine wears off, the nurse gives me Percocet, which always makes me throw up, and so I do, into a bedpan Tony holds next to the bed. Then quickly the Charles River does not look as sparkling. The Boston sky seems grayer. I become quieter and take a long nap. In the morning Electa drives us to a nearby hotel, and we camp out there for two days: me and Tony and Lily and Electa and Electa’s husband, Jos, who is one of Tony’s best friends and who comes and goes, bringing take-out food. On the second night, they eat Indian curries in their laps and we watch a film on Lily’s computer about two lonely musicians in Prague who almost get together and then don’t. I am not hungry. The sound track is haunting, and I find the movie unbearably sad. I lie on the couch riding out the pain, and the film seems to be about death in the end—loneliness and death. Everyone else in the hotel room enjoys the movie, and it scares me to feel so disconnected from these people I love. I kick the Percocet in the morning. I kick all the painkillers. They’re not doing me any good. And I begin, right away, to feel more pain, but also a lot more like myself.

Now if I lie very still in my old spool bed, with my left arm propped up on a stack of pillows, I can keep the pain from spreading down my ribs. It feels like someone has burrowed a knife into my chest and armpit. The boys have gone to sleep in their beds after snuggling with me while Tony read them a chapter from
The Wind in the Willows
. He and I hold hands and watch TV news. There was a large earthquake in China two
days after we left Beijing. The reports today say that over fifty thousand people have died in Sichuan Province. Tony says Tibetans live in that region, and he thinks the Chinese will see the earthquake as retribution for Tibetan protests this spring.

The next report is about a cyclone in Burma that has killed thousands. The footage shows flooded Burmese villages. Then the story switches back to the fallen-down schools near Chengdu, in central China. I can see parents weeping in the background and others walking the perimeter of heaps of rubble in a daze. It’s a terrible thing to watch—these people in so much private suffering. I close my eyes and wonder what Lao Wu is hearing about the earthquake. He does not have a television. He gets his news from Chinese radio. I hope he doesn’t have family in Sichuan.

Tony finally turns off the TV. I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling. Tony falls asleep next to me, and I finger the drainage pipe under the sheets—it’s a piece of thin, plastic tubing that comes out of my skin somewhere near the middle of my rib cage. It transfers pinkish fluid from my surgery site into a small plastic bag that hangs off the corset the doctors have fastened me into. We need to get the pipe out soon.

I’m struck then by how cancer is itself a kind of cultural dislocation. I feel more removed from myself—more distanced now from the people I love than I ever did in China. And why all this sadness? My left breast is gone, and the surgeon has replaced it with a silicone implant, which is vaguely unsettling. All I feel there now is numbness. My hope is that the surgeon did all she could do. I hope she got the cancer out.

During the next week friends come. I sit on my mother’s couch and try to take in the faces of these women I love. I’ve missed them these last nine months in China. But now sometimes my connection to them feels fleeting. I see them, but I can’t really hear them. It’s as if the cancer has somehow separated me from them. I’m astonished at how much work it is to try to talk. I nod my head. I smile. But I’m not even me anymore. I’m someone different—someone with this loss. I just can’t explain it yet.

Sometimes I’m distracted now around the boys. Detached. I can’t quite get my hands on them—I can’t hug them yet because of the tube and the plastic drainage bag, and I can’t move my left arm because of the pain. I don’t feel entirely like their person anymore. Maybe I’m a different version of myself—a woman with a fake left breast pretending
to be their mother. And I have to give a lot of the parenting up to the group. While I was in the hospital, the boys took to the game of Wiffle ball with even more ferocity. Now they spend hours batting and pitching with imaginary base runners and outfielders. There are so many friends who take Thorne and Aidan away for swimming and pizza and ice cream. Tony’s brother, Peter, keeps shuttling the boys to the YMCA to shoot hoops. I can’t think too much about the distance between the boys and me right now or it makes me sad.

Tuesday marks one week since my mastectomy, and I walk downtown to buy flaxseed at the health food store in Bath. I’ve read that it helps stave off cancer. I’m busy now looking for a cure. For an elixir. I’m trying to keep the sadness at bay. The walk takes ten minutes and it’s my longest since the surgery. People go in and out of the local bank and Wilson’s Drugstore, but there’s no larger white noise here, just the sound of wind and the river down below.

Beijing was so loud—the crashing of bulldozers and cranes and the screeching of truck brakes. I pass a woman I recognize on the sidewalk, the mother of a friend from middle school who says she’d heard I was in China. She asks me if the Chinese people were nice to me. I smile because I never know how to answer this question; it always seems beside the point. I want to say that there are so many other things I could tell her about China.

On Wednesday, my friend Katie flies up from Brooklyn to see me. We take a slow walk down to the river. There’s an explosion of tulips and hydrangeas and trellis roses along the way. After lunch in a café, we stand under a lilac tree in my parents’ driveway and we talk about cancer and about our love for our children. And it feels like we can talk for days. Then Katie says, “I love the smell of lilacs. It’s spring to me.”

I smile and say, “Yes. That’s it.” I am so glad she’s come. I’m done talking now. Exhausted. And happy we can sit in the backyard quietly now and watch.

I’m learning that cancer tends to live in a wordless place. On Saturday, a friend of my mother’s named Judith arrives. I’ve been wearing the hospital corset for almost ten days, and it’s begun to make grooves and small sores in the skin along my rib cage. Judith has just finished her
EMT shift for the Brunswick Fire Department. She has me sit on the couch so she can unzip the front flap of the corset and unpin the plastic tubing and remove the pouch attached to the tubing that holds the pink runoff. Then she begins to rub cream on my skin. She doesn’t talk, except to say that the doctors made the corset too tight. It feels good to have the thing off.

I’ve come to feel as if I’m bobbing in a lake where only people with cancer swim. It’s a big lake. My husband is sitting by my side on the floor next to the couch holding the tubing while Judith massages me. But he is not in the lake. Only people with cancer can be in the lake. So where Tony is could best be described as on the shore waiting for me to come back. Maybe he is rummaging in the forest for wood to make a fire to keep us warm. But the biggest surprise of all is still that Tony is not in the lake. That he’s never going to be able to swim in the lake.
He doesn’t have cancer
. The thin line between having and not having seems malleable sometimes, but for me that line is everything. It separates. I lie on the couch after Judith leaves and hold on to Tony’s hand until I feel most of the solitude wash away.

Decade by Decade

The words
lymph nodes
keep playing in my head. Lymph nodes. Lymph nodes. On Monday the pathology report is in, and Tony and I speed south on I-95. I’m too nervous. Tony has the radio turned up to a story about huge profits in the oil industry. The second story is about the earthquake in China. So is the third. One reporter looks at the psychological effects of the quake. Another examines the crowded refugee camps. The latest statistics say fifty-one thousand are dead. Twenty-nine thousand remain missing. Five million are homeless, and the number is sure to grow. The Chinese government has asked the world to send six million tents.