The Wednesday Sisters (29 page)

“But Chip fell in love with you
and
your hands,” Linda whispered. “Jeff fell in love with a blond Jewish girl with”—her hand went unconsciously to her wig—“with perfect C-cup breasts, in a sweater that wasn’t blue.”

She adjusted her wig, her cap, almost surreptitiously, while Brett sat there with her hands free, touched by the fresh morning air.

I wondered if people would stare less at Brett’s bare hands than they had always stared at the gloves. I wondered if she’d ever thought about having plastic surgery, or if there was anything they could do. If she could afford it if there was. I imagined her watching the medical news, waiting for the day to come when they could fix her up, when they could give her new hands.

I wondered if it was more complicated than that, if she didn’t on some level cling to the gloves as a kind of protection against the world. It was just her hands people were rejecting, then. They weren’t rejecting the odd girl who could talk about science better than most scientists, the girl who had wanted to be an astronaut when most of us had no idea what an astronaut was, when most of us aspired only to be the homecoming queen. I imagined her as a young student at Harvard, not belonging in that man’s world but belonging no better at Radcliffe. One of the very few women who’d crossed into that world. I imagined her thinking they all would love her—the Harvard boys and the Radcliffe girls and everyone who had ever made fun of her in the school yard or sniggered behind her back in class—if only they could get past her hands.

She would tell us more later. She would tell us that her brother was so good at science that he really could have been an astronaut. His eye had been injured in the explosion, but he’d had an operation and she’d sat through the recovery with him, even as a girl laying out the facts for him. But Brad never took another science class beyond what he was required to take in high school. In college, he majored in history even though he’d never liked history, and he flunked out. And when he was twenty, he had a breakdown. He couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. He spent several months at Sheppard Pratt outside Baltimore, and he was better after that, but he never was the same. “It’s as if he can’t do anything but relive the past,” Brett said. “He thinks my hands are his fault, because he dared me. But it was my fault, really. I knew what I could do.” And I would remember then Brett’s reluctance to send out that first essay, and see it for the first time as what it was: not fear of failure but fear of success. I would wonder what it was like to love a brother so selflessly, to give up your own success lest it make your brother’s failure worse.

That afternoon when we first saw Brett’s scarred hands, though, I thought only that those hands were her hands, that she wouldn’t be Brett without them, with or without her gloves. I took one scarred hand in mine, and Kath, across the picnic table from her, did, too, and then we had all joined hands, even Linda. We just sat there, not saying anything, just sitting together as the sun rose above the trees, as the sky lightened from pink to blue and the shadows shortened and the day became just another Sunday to the people waking in the houses around us. Men strapping on running shoes to run marathons. Toddlers dragging stuffed bears they’d cuddled since the moment they were born. Husbands and wives spooning together. Little girls placing their fingers on white piano keys, then reaching up for the black.

L
INDA CAME TO THE NEXT
Wednesday Sisters meeting with a piece of writing she wanted to share with us, something she’d written before she’d gone to New York. I took it home and read it, then read it again: Linda packing up J.J. and Jamie and Julie the morning she found the new lump, loading them into the car to search through bookstores. She knows what a radical mastectomy is, but what does it mean, really? How does it look? It’s what they did to her mother, a double radical; they cut both her mother’s breasts off, she knows that, but she doesn’t know, she has never seen.

There are alternatives now: a modified radical mastectomy and radiation therapy. But what do
they
mean? How is she to have any idea which choice to make if she has to make a choice? None of it sure to save her life, anyway. A double radical, and still her mother died.

She wanders through Kepler’s Books on El Camino, through Stacey’s on University, through Books Inc. at the mall, but there is no book on breast cancer that she can find, nothing that shows her what a breast looks like when it’s gone.

Back home, she calls the American Cancer Society, but the disembodied woman on the line is curt. Severe disapproval in her voice: Books with photos like that for anyone but medical personnel? But Linda grabs on to that one phrase, “medical personnel,” and she is already hanging up the phone, already loading the children into the car again, promising them just a few more minutes looking at books and then ice cream as she heads for the Stanford bookstore, where Jeff gets his medical texts.

The volume of books at Stanford is overwhelming, though. She doesn’t know where to start, and she can’t ask anyone, she simply can’t. But she won’t have time to do this after she’s in the hospital, so she starts paging through volumes: photos of children with cleft palates, children with measles and mumps, children with unspeakable diseases of the skin. She puts that volume back, moves to another aisle, finds old people with gout and kidney disease. She fumbles her way to books on oncology, where she finds photos and drawings of diseased lungs, small spots on skin that are not good news, polyps in colons and tumors on ovaries. Still, she cannot find a photo of a breastless chest. And the children are insistent now: It’s time for ice cream, she has promised no more than fifteen minutes and it has been twenty-five, Julie says. Linda is sorry the twins have learned to tell time, sorry she has given them her watch.

She turns to Lee Montgomery. Yes, to Kath’s Lee. She feels the guilt of it, the disloyalty. Lee will know and Kath won’t. But he is the only person she knows who can and
will
sit and explain to her the options and what they mean. He will let her take all night to get the words out if she needs to. He will tell her where she should go to have it looked at. And Lee, she knows, is discreet. He will never tell a soul, not even Jeff. Especially not Jeff.

I wept as I read, and as I reread, and then I called Kath.

“We’ve got to do something directly,” Kath said. “And I’m not talking about making casseroles.”

But what? That’s what the conversation came down to. But what?

T
HE NEXT WEEK,
Linda wrote of the sterile, obsolete-magazine anonymity of the surgery waiting room, of imagining this would be the way she would spend the rest of her life, what little rest of her life there might be. She remembered how her father had never looked at her mother after her surgery. How her father hadn’t looked at any woman after that, not even his daughter.

The third week, five exquisite pages of Linda sitting naked and alone at her makeup mirror, watching in the soft light of the frosted round bulbs as her own hand raised the sharp silver blades of her sewing scissors to the long twist of her hair. I wept as I read. As I reread. The simple act of cutting a braid off—what it meant to take control of this thing before it took control of her.

And the fourth week: eight heartbreaking pages that started with the alarm going off the morning of the mini-marathon, Linda waking and realizing that she couldn’t run, that she couldn’t bear to spend a moment away from Jamie and Julie and J.J. on this last day before her biopsy. Realizing, too, that she had to tell Jeff.

It was early, but she picked up the phone and called him, found him at the hospital, working the overnight shift. She asked him to please come to New York, it was important. Then she went into the bedroom the twins were sharing at her brother’s apartment and woke them. “We’re in New York,” she said. “Let’s go explore!”

She gathered J.J., and she took them all for breakfast at the Plaza Hotel: waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. And she told them. First thing, over the waffles and whipped cream, she told them so they would have the whole day to ask questions. She waited until the waiter had served them, until they’d eaten and it didn’t look as if they could handle another bite. She waited till the waiter refilled her coffee cup and took the check and the money away, returned with the change, so that they wouldn’t be interrupted. She made them all look at her, then. She made Julie and Jamie put their forks down; they were playing with the uneaten strawberries, threatening to begin flinging them across the room. She supposed they sensed something was up. She wished, as they set the silver forks on the edges of their plates, that she had three sets of silver, that if anything happened to her they would each have that, a set of silver that had been their mother’s, that would touch their fingers every day of their lives.

“Listen,” she said. “This is important. I want you to listen for a minute while I tell you something, and then you can ask anything you want. I want you to ask anything you want.”

“Can we go to the toy store?” J.J. asked; they’d passed FAO Schwarz on the way.

“After we’re done talking,” Linda said. “Maybe it will be open by then.”

She pulled J.J. into her lap and leaned closer to the table, the twins on either side of her. She looked at each one of them, at Julie and Jamie, who had Jeff’s sober brown eyes, at J.J., whose eye color couldn’t quite be described, like her own.

“Mommy has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning for an operation,” she said. “I hope it will be just a little operation, but I don’t know. If it is, I’ll be home in two days. I might have to have a second operation, though, and if I do, I’ll be in the hospital longer.”

“Will you bring a baby home, like Hope?” Julie asked, her face so expectant that Linda had to look away. Her eyes met her own reflection looking back at her from the mirrored wall, her children’s smaller faces focused on hers, fear edging its way into their eyes.

She held J.J. more surely, leaning closer to the girls. She set her hand on Julie’s hair, on the little bit of ear that peeked through the sheet of blond. “Not this time, honey,” she said.

“Can we come visit you?” Jamie asked.

“Yes, you can visit me there,” Linda said. “Daddy will be here tonight, and he’ll bring you every day.” She touched a finger to her daughter’s neck, pushing away the thought that she might never see how lovely it would look on the woman her daughter would become. “I might look kind of weird after the second operation, if I end up having two,” she said. “Grandma did.”

Her mother must have known Linda loved her even as she was hiding in the closet, Linda realized. Julie and Jamie and J.J. would always love her: she knew that as surely as she knew anything.

She took a sip of her coffee, cold already. She didn’t want to scare them, but she wanted them to understand. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s okay to be afraid if you think I look weird. I’ll probably be afraid, too. Everyone is.”

And when Julie said, “But Grandma died, Mommy. Are you going to die?” Linda thought:
This is why Mom and Dad never told us, because how do you answer this?

She met each of their eyes before she spoke again—all those straight-across eyebrows, like hers—so they would see that she was telling them the truth. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to die, but I can’t promise I won’t.” The earnest way they looked back at her. Could they even begin to understand this? “If anything happens to me,” she said, “I want you to always remember this: No mommy in this whole wide world has ever loved her children more than I love you guys. And always, always, you make me the happiest mommy in the world. No matter what happens, I want you to remember that. Okay? Promise me that?”

They all did. They all promised her, no matter what.

“Forever?” she said, working to make her voice lighter. “Even when you’re a hundred and two?”

They all giggled.

“Even when I’m a hundred and
ninety
-two,” Julie said, and Jamie, not to be outdone, said, “Even when I’m two
thousand
!”

Linda wrapped them in a big group hug then, not able to get out the one last thing she’d wanted to say, not able to tell Jamie and Julie they might have to remind J.J., that he might not remember his mother at all, he was so young.

They rode the carousel in Central Park that morning. At the zoo, the children laughed at the gorillas (Linda trying not to think about the poor mother gorilla who’d been so sad to be separated from baby Patty Cake and now might never get him back), and J.J., at least,
eeeewww
ed with real glee at the two-headed snake. They rented a little rowboat and the twins took turns at the oars, making a crazy zigzag across the water, putting them in the path of other rowboats again and again, but no harm ever came to them.

When they got back to her brother’s place, Jeff was there, and she told him, and when she leaned into him once the awful words were out, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered, and for a moment she thought maybe it would.

They all slept in the same bed that night, the five of them together, so that if the children woke in the middle of the night she and Jeff would be there. She snuggled up with them, and when they were all breathing easily—even Jeff, who’d been up all the night before at the hospital—she eased out from under the covers and found some of her sister-in-law’s heavy stationery. She settled on the floor in the hallway outside their room, and she wrote Jamie and Julie and J.J. each a long letter, recalling the moments they were born and their first words, their first steps, describing in detail what she loved about each of them and imaging the wonderful futures she knew they would have, the things they would do and the love they would find, the love they would give along the way.

The next morning, she and Jeff got dressed quietly, not wanting to wake the children before they had to. When she was ready, she climbed back into the bed, woke them gently, hugged them and said again how much she loved them.

“Always remember that,” she said. “How much I love you. And remember: it’s okay if you’re afraid, even if you’re afraid of me, if you think I look gross.”

They giggled at the word
gross.

“Mommies can’t look gross!” J.J. protested.

She wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Remember that two-headed snake we saw yesterday?” she said.

“
Mommy,
you won’t have
two heads
!” J.J. howled delightedly, and they all laughed.

“No,” Linda promised them. “I won’t have two heads, I can promise you that.”

She hugged them again, and she told them one last time that she loved them, and she said good-bye, and she went to the hospital and signed the consent to surgery, the you-may-die stuff. She held her breath as she had that first time, when they put the mask over her face. And she said a prayer not to God but to Jeff, to take special care of them if anything happened to her, to hug them every morning and kiss them every night and always always to remind them how much she had loved them, how much she still loved them even if she couldn’t be with them as they grew up.