on the back porch, the heady scent of spring lilacs still in the night air, and told me we’d have beautiful gardens one day, too.
“Yes, we will,” I said, smiling, “because I’m going to plant them.”
“Oh, no,” he mock-protested, knowing what was coming.
“Yes, our humble home will teem with roses before you know it,” I teased and he put his arm around me and kissed my hair. Theo thought roses were overused and overbred, and he preferred less formal flowers, things that drooped and swayed in the breeze.
“I tell you what,” he said, “I’ll plan and plant the flower beds if you water and weed them.”
“Deal,” I said, and we walked back in, arm in arm, as if it was really going to be that easy.
I soap up my arms and legs, then duck underneath the water to rinse. In addition to photos, I have stubs from the theater, business clippings from the Inquirer, obituaries written and awards given, the natural ephemera of a long life. Ellie will likely be equipped with her own flotsam of course: markers, colored pencils, construction paper, poster board in every color. Tinsley has kitted out her bedroom like an elementary school cloakroom with its pegs and cubbyholes and art supplies. How long will that last? How long can she enjoy sharpening her pencils every night, running her fingers across them, comforted by their presence, like lead soldiers standing sentry in their case? How much time before socks and bras are scattered, candy wrappers everywhere? That’s my deepest fear when I shut my eyes in the bathtub: Ellie’s future. The horrible half women all girls become. She’ll reject her mother and father. She’ll reject me eventually, too.
I shudder. The bath has cooled. A slight breeze leaks from the lowest corner of the window where the ivory lace curtain doesn’t quite brush the ledge. It’s shrunk over the years, as I have, and now it’s shorter on the left than the right, something that would have bothered Theo, but not me. He was always straightening pictures, moving a vase or a candle one inch to the left or the right, as if he was setting a stage or taking a picture. He’d cock his head, then squint to focus in on something, then decide, like God, where it needed to be.
I sigh as I stand, the breath bringing me up. Some of the water drips off my left breast like a ski slope; the rest of it finds a faster path, running straight down the empty right side of my chest. I should be thankful, I know, that one breast remains. That I have exactly half what I used to.
Some days I am. It is easier to find that grace in the tub than the shower. The pounding rivulets on the right side used to vibrate and thrum like hard rain on a flat roof. I am well rid of my shower.
Yes, some days I am thankful just for being upright. Grateful I can get in and out of things without fanfare or contraption. That I can walk up stairs and play tennis. My knees are fine and so is my back, and most days my memory is steady enough. I am here, Ellie. I need no pink ribbon to trumpet my ordinary survival. I am not to be wept over or admired or donated to. I am not quite whole, but I am here. I was spared. I’m here to tell the future about the past.
Together, we will construct some kind of history. Not the real history, of course—I’ll spare your classmates the tales of death and disease and embezzlement, of women who got in over their heads. I won’t tell them how my mother took all her meals at friends’ country clubs when she ran out of money, or how I refused to let my own father walk me down the aisle. There is no need to scare you, Ellie. We’ll build one that’s more romantic and colorful, one that will glean an A. I’ll make Theo’s architecture career more illustrious, perhaps. I’ll credit him with rebuilding the Philadelphia waterfront, instead of the strip malls dotting the turnpike. I’ll say he was a man devoted to his family, instead of a man who was devoted only to his work. I’ll emphasize my own feminist protests, my radical leanings. I’ll speak of the time mothers circled bulldozers about to demolish Haverford Park. How we collected for UNICEF and dialed back our thermostats and rode bicycles