for right now.
I’m a woman who has two doctors in my life, a gynecologist and a pediatrician, and of the two I see the pediatrician, Dr. Marks, by far more often. He’s young and handsome and funny and sweet; I’ve often thought he was the sort of man I would have an affair with if I ever had an affair. (Which I would not, by the way, not ever.) I happened to mention to Dr. Marks about a month ago, when we casually bumped into each other at the drugstore, that my husband had just turned forty and that I would be forty in a few weeks. And he, because he is this way, asked if I had scheduled my first mammogram. I said I’d thought of it, and he made me promise I’d call my gynecologist that same day. And perhaps because he was just so cute, I did as I was told. A week later I was in the office of Greenwich Radiology, with my shirt off.
“Can you tell they’re real?” I asked the technician, looking for a laugh as he maneuvered my chest in the least sexual way I could ever imagine.
“Yes, I can.”
“I’ve been thinking of getting implants,” I said. “Would that make this more difficult?”
“Not really, no.”
“I guess I just tend to talk a lot when I’m nervous,” I said.
“Nothing to be nervous about,” he said, as he squashed my breast into the machine, which was shiny and cold and smelled of the spray I used to use to clean the dust off record albums. “Nothing at all.”
Turned out he was wrong about that.
If I really was a character in a book, then at the start of the next chapter the radiologist would be telling me he sees a shadow, something really small, too small for me to feel, he would be surprised if I could feel it. It’s a solid area on the ultrasound, which needs to be biopsied. He is asking me if I want to call my husband first. I say no. I’m not really listening. Or, I am listening but not hearing, it’s not registering. It is as though it is happening to someone else. There is nothing very real about being told you have cancer, even if you are a character in a book.
Then the radiologist is cleaning an area at the outside of my breast with a cotton pad, soft and wet and cold, and there is a needle in my breast, and I am having a sonogram-directed biopsy. It hurts, but not enough to make me cry. I’m not sure I could cry anyway. I am having trouble just breathing. And then, just like that, I am in my car, on my way home. There will be no results for forty-eight hours. Blessedly, my husband is away. He’ll likely call late tonight. I’ll deal with that when it happens. First I need to get through dinner.
The kids are home when I arrive. One of them needs help with homework, the other is upset because “Connor called me stupid.” These are real issues for them. They need me, and as always I am there for them. I help with the math, and have a talk about what are and are not appropriate words to use with our friends. “We don’t use the word ‘stupid,’” I am saying. “It isn’t proper behavior at school.” In my own head, I hear my mother’s voice.
I had planned to make salmon for dinner, but now I am in no mood for all the fuss, so instead I put a pot to boil on the stove. Pasta with olive oil, a little butter, parmesan cheese. I know both kids will eat it happily. I don’t even make a vegetable, which I normally insist they eat if they want dessert. Aside from that, I feel as though I am behaving perfectly normally until my daughter bursts that bubble.
“Mommy, you seem sad,” she says.
I am seated at the dinner table. The children are on either side of me, eating. I realize I don’t even remember setting the table, straining the pasta, mixing in the butter, sprinkling the cheese, pouring the milk.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I say, with a smile that comes more easily than I would have expected. “I guess I just miss Daddy, that’s all.”
“Why aren’t you having any wine?” my son asks.
“I don’t know, sweetie, I thought I might not drink any wine for a little while.”
My two children exchanged looks. “Mommy,” Jared says, after