Mary and O'Neil Page 0,10

sweatshirt and pants); holder of degrees in literature (Barnard) and library science (NYU); daughter of the late Daniel Chaim Braverman and his beloved Alicia; sister and trusted counsel to siblings Monica (fifty) and Abraham (fifty-seven); a woman lately described by a man she met at a party as “a gal who did good and still looked it”—Miriam Patricia, Mimi to her friends, stands in the foyer of the Vinegar County Library and wonders if she is dying.

Two weeks ago: she discovered the lump in her left breast, by rolling over in bed. She turned, half sleeping, and a dark presence met her and then took shape, a mass the size and solidity of an acorn, pressed between the mattress and her rib cage. The awareness of it hurled her into consciousness, and a series of swift calculations to firm the moment into fact. She was in bed; it was seven o’clock; Arthur was away for the day, something about an abandoned farm, and had left for his office early, before she was even awake. She lay in bed, her brain spinning with terror—Not this! Not this!—daring herself to touch the place beneath her nightgown where the thickness was. So large! It met the tips of her fingers with something like an electric current. One in nine women; that’s what they said. But what happened to them, those one in nine? It was more than panic she felt; it was death, making its way to her door.

And yet, as she began her day—the first day of her dying—a strange orderliness filled her, an almost fatalistic calm. She rose, washed, dressed. She sat down at the table (her cold coffee mug, by the stairs, was waiting, and a note: Price Chopper? Anything? Call, signed with the little sketch of a bear he always left for her), rose again, and treated herself to a breakfast of sausage and French toast, glazed with syrup and stamps of yellow butter. She expected not to want it once it was made, but found the opposite was true: she was unaccountably ravenous, and for the time it took her to eat her breakfast, that was all she did and thought about—sliced the toast into squares, the sausage into cylinders bursting with watery fat, forked it all onto her waiting tongue. She chewed, swallowed, reloaded; if she had been capable of it, she would have licked the plate. Then when she was finished she rinsed her plate and called her doctor and told him what she knew; by two o’clock he had his hand there, and told her not to be afraid. “Concerned,” he said, scribbling, not really looking at her. He was a plump man, bald and flatfooted, a doctor who actually still made house calls. She had known him for years, and now he wasn’t looking at her. “I’d be concerned, for now.”

There were other doctors then, and more appointments—the ultrasound and mammogram, and the visit to the radiologist in Cooperstown to read the films, then back to Dr. Bardin and the consensus that the surgeon was the next person to see. Serious medicine, she discovered, was a kind of maze, a series of hallways down which one traveled; at the end of each was a door which one opened, hoping to find it locked; but as long as they opened, one was forced to go on. And yet, somehow, through two terrified weeks, she has told Arthur nothing. On Tuesday next—four days from this moment in the foyer, waiting for Arthur to appear so they can drive to New Hampshire—the surgeon will evaluate her; the mass will be aspirated, and then there will be a surgical biopsy, and decisions to be made. Her story will come out. Why hasn’t she told him? Her lies are not elaborate; it has proved simple enough to explain why she will be away for an afternoon, to let slip over breakfast or watching television in the evening some vague announcement about a meeting with the State Library Association in Ithaca or a booksellers’ convention in Binghamton (Arthur, glancing up from his paper or the program, his eyes distracted, saying, Well, okay, thanks for letting me know, why are you even telling me?), all to account for the three or four hours it takes to drive to a new doctor and back, and of course the mileage on her car. She is saving him, of course, from her bad news, waiting until she knows something one way or the other;