by Amy Boesky
I could barely eat dinner that night. I couldn’t sleep.
“The doctor said,” Jacques reminded me, “it’s probably nothing. Probably just a cyst. Right?”
I ignored him. I got out my old Merck Manual, the one I used to look things up whenever I felt anything out of the ordinary. The book was tatty from overuse. Several pages were dog-eared: Brain, tumors in. Esophagus, cancer of. Melanoma. Uterine cancer. Some pages were coming loose from overuse. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Jacques admonished me. He hated it when the Merck Manual came out.
He hadn’t seen the look Dr. Millis had given me. The way she wrote so quickly, so gravely on her little pad.
Exasperated, Jacques rolled over, getting into his I-need-to-go-to-sleep-and-you’re-driving-me-insane position. I had no intention of sleeping yet. I turned on my bedside lamp and opened the Merck Manual to the index. With one finger, I rolled down to the entry for Breasts. Cancer of. Cysts in. Cancer of came first, and had a much longer entry.
I SAW DR. HENNEKER ON Thursday. The fact he was willing to squeeze me in with so little notice made me certain I was in trouble. Maybe that was what Dr. Millis had written on the slip of paper—See her immediately! Something is very wrong here! Jacques canceled an afternoon of meetings to come with me, which made me worry even more. Jacques never cancels meetings. Dr. Millis had probably called him already, I told myself. Be sure to come with her. It looks bad—
We walked through the oncology floor at the Brigham, Jacques holding Sacha. I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Here we go,” Jacques said, holding open a door to a large waiting area. Inside there were mauve-and-beige couches and tall rubber plants, and we sat and waited for what seemed like forever before a nurse called us. Then all three of us went in. I changed into the blue and white cotton gown, and we waited together.
Dr. Henneker was small and wiry, older than I expected. He knocked on the door and came in at the same time, without waiting for me to say “Come in.” “What do we have here?” he boomed, looking straight at Sacha, who looked nervously back at him. I was sitting on the table, my arms full of goose bumps. He winked at me, like we were all in on some kind of joke. “Dad,” he said to Jacques—was he kidding?—“why don’t you wait outside with Baby while we take a look here.”
Jacques took Sacha back out to the rubber plants, leaving me alone.
Dr. Henneker was quicker examining me than Dr. Millis had been. His fingers went right for the lump. “This?” he asked, and I nodded, holding my breath. He seemed completely unconcerned. “Breastfeeding?” he asked. I nodded. He gave me a look like I’d gotten the answer right on an oral exam. “This,” he said, after about twelve more seconds of probing, “is what we call a galactocele. That’s a small cyst filled with breast milk. You may notice it gets a little larger,” he added, “but it’s nothing to worry about.” He smiled at me. “In three or four months, or whenever you’re done nursing, come back in and we’ll check on it. But I can give you a ninety-nine percent assurance that it will either be half the size or completely gone by then.”
I stared up at him, relief flooding through me like adrenaline. It was like he’d released me from a death sentence. I wanted to throw my arms around him and weep.
“Better get going,” he said, giving me a pat on the shoulder. “I hear somebody out there making a fuss. I think you’re needed in the waiting room.”
Baby and Dad. Waiting for me.
The look on Jacques’s face when I told him everything was fine was hard to decipher.
He was quiet all the way out to the car.
He didn’t say, “I told you so,” on the drive home. He was pale, thoughtful. Sacha had fallen asleep in the back, and he was focused on the road. Rush hour seems to start earlier in Boston every day.
“Listen,” he said finally. “I’m really glad it’s good news, Ame.” Ame is my private family nickname. It almost never gets used, and when it does, it’s usually at a time of stress. Like now. “But this anxiety of yours—”
I fiddled with the strap of the diaper bag. “I can’t help it. It’s how I grew up,” I mumbled. I was close to tears—half relief, half shame.
Jacques was shaking his head. “It’s just, the second there’s anything—a lump, a rash—you think it’s cancer. You go from nothing to the worst thing possible, zero to sixty all at once. I don’t think it’s healthy.”
I stared ahead, not saying anything. I didn’t want to worry. Did he think I wanted to be like this? Jacques thought you should wait and worry only when an expert told you to. Otherwise, until then, why not just live your life? Why not—strange as it sounds—enjoy whatever time you had?
That sounded perfectly reasonable. In theory, at least. But in practice, I couldn’t do it. It would be like opening your eyes at midnight, everything pitch-black, and have someone explain to you—calmly, rationally—that it was really bright as day. You just had to open your eyes and look.
“Maybe,” Jacques said simply, “you should talk about this with someone.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to go tell a stranger, not even a very intelligent one trained as a therapist, how I felt about my body. How much of the time I worried something was wrong with me. Worrying was just part of who I was. It was what I knew. I worry, therefore I am.
Before Sacha was born, I’d assumed my anxiety was mixed up with wanting to have a baby—quick, before I ran out of time. But now here I was, almost thirty-three, Sacha was healthy, almost five months old, and whatever I’d felt in my breast was only a galactocele (probably) and nothing more. There was a 99 percent chance it was nothing. For the moment, at least, my panic was beginning to fade. This particular panic, anyway. But not completely, and not for long. Like Donne at the end of the twenty-third Meditation, I knew something else would spring up. I was haunted by Sylvia, Pody, Gail. I felt like they were out there, trying to reach me. Trying to tell me something.
I wanted more. Another baby. A chance to watch things unfold. A whole life, not just half.
It’s a funny thing, fear. How it follows you, changes shape, adapts to each new place and situation. Like furniture, which you carry around and set up in one house after another. It may look a little different in its new place, but it’s still the same stuff.
THE WHOLE NEXT WEEK I was flooded with energy and relief. Contrite, I booked an appointment for a checkup at the Farber. The doctor who’d been running the study on talcum powder had moved to another hospital, but I saw a new doctor named Dr. Muto who I really liked—young, compassionate. I had an ultrasound and a CA125, and everything looked good. I set up a dentist appointment. I vowed to be careful of my health, but not obsessive. I’d be optimistic and unafraid!
I CALLED ANNIE TO THANK her for getting me in to see Dr. Millis. She couldn’t talk long—she was deep in the middle of writing a conference paper—but I was in a good mood and didn’t feel slighted. I had plans, too, I reminded myself. One afternoon I met colleagues from my department. Sacha and I started going to Story Time at the library. Best of all: My mother was coming for Mother’s Day.
I threw myself into getting ready for her. Just because we had ugly shag didn’t mean I couldn’t spruce things up. I cut daffodils from the front garden and arranged them on the dresser in the third bedroom upstairs. I tidied furiously, positioning Sacha up in her favorite new device: a seat on stretchy cords that we clipped to the door frame, allowing her to bounce up and down on her own two feet, burbling and approving my efforts.
Sacha was five months old.
Five. I’d always liked that number: the compact unit it made, its rhyming perfection (Alive! Strive! Thrive!).
Five fingers to a hand.
That Sacha turned five months old in the fifth month of the year made it even better.
Here is a hand. Here are five fingers. One hand checks to see how the other hand is doing.
Getting ready for my mother’s arrival, I renewed our house-hunting efforts. I was freshl
y optimistic. How hard could this be? A friend from graduate school had moved to Afghanistan with CNN. Another was in China. Annie’s grant proposal had been accepted. People manage! “It’s not rocket science,” I told Jacques—something I say when I’m feeling determined, or self-critical, or both.
We could do this. We could find a house.
Jacques claimed to have only one criterion: The house had to have “a useable backyard.” In fact, once he actually saw a place, a long list of other requirements came back to him. But in the abstract, the yard was what got emphasized. It had to be on the exact same level as the back door. He wanted to be able to open up the back door and step right outside, the way you could at his parents’ house in Johannesburg. “Déjà garden,” as Julie said when I told her about this. In Cambridge, for whatever reason, this particular combination of house and yard was proving hard to find.
“In your price range,” Sandi added pointedly.
“Maybe,” I said one night, not long after our visit to Dr. Henneker, “we should branch out a little. Look in Brookline and Newton as well as Cambridge.”
I was the one who’d been fixated on Cambridge, but I was starting to think having a place to park and good schools might be more important than being near Harvard Square. Not to mention finding that elusive “useable backyard.”
“OK with me,” Jacques said, deep in the paper. “Either one—Brookline or Newton.”
The Forever House was as good as ours.
I called Sandi to share our newfound flexibility, but she didn’t sound as pleased as I’d expected.
“Newton’s also pricey,” she warned. “There isn’t much on the market right now. And so many other people are looking in your price range—”
She always made that sound bad: your price range.
She typed furiously on her computer. “Wait a minute! Found something!”
I was jubilant. You see? I said to the silent, witnessing gods.
“Three bedrooms . . . good street . . . ‘useable backyard’. . . and it’s the right price range . . .” She was starting to sound excited. “I wonder why—”
“Oh,” she said. Her voice fell.
“What is it?” I demanded. What gem was she keeping from us?
“It’s your house,” she said with a sigh. “The one you’re renting.” The House with the Green Shag.
Maybe Newton wasn’t the answer to all our problems, but I wasn’t deterred. My mother was coming. It was spring. The lump in my breast was only a galactocele. I might have health anxieties, but I was determined to choose happiness—even if it came with shag.
“BOMMA IS COMING,” I CROONED to Sacha, inspecting made-ahead dinner options in Whole Foods. I picked Chicken Selection Number Two, Lemon Piccata. With a little parsley sprinkled on top, I thought it would look homemade. “Bah,” Sacha said back, with a look that could’ve meant anything.
My mother hadn’t visited us yet in Boston. The last time she’d seen Sacha was when she came to help Jacques back in DC. She hadn’t seen me since Christmas, and I couldn’t help thinking, as I brushed my hair and put some makeup on, that I’d improved, looks-wise. Supposedly the last ten pounds of baby weight would come off the minute I stopped nursing. From the side, especially if I sucked my breath in, I looked almost like my old self.
And Sacha! Sacha was of course unrecognizable. So grown-up! And to hear the little sounds she’d started making! I couldn’t wait to show my mother how far we’d come.
My mother got to our house late Friday afternoon, climbing out of the cab, exuberant, as if it were still Christmas and she’d never really left. She scooped Sacha up, and in exchange, I took her familiar rubberized Travel Tote, packed to the gills with baked things and frozen miniature bagels from “the good deli” in Birmingham. “They’re great for teething,” my mother informed me, giving Sacha’s foot a knowing squeeze. Sacha made a sound like a burble, patting my mother on either cheek. How, I wondered, do babies know? Sacha went to my mother with such instinctive ease. In Whole Foods, when the woman at the cash register tried to touch her arm, she’d screamed.
“Of course she knows me,” my mother said, staring deep into Sacha’s eyes. “What do you think? We’re strangers?”
There was so much to show my mother. The shag. Sacha’s hanging bouncer. Our stacks of boxes. Our backyard, thawed out now but still marshy, so when you walked across it, you left footprints. I took Sacha and carried her from room to room, my mother behind me, exclaiming, noticing, and I had that visceral sense that now she was here, things mattered. It was like my mother connected the dots and made a picture emerge. Through her approving eyes, what we had here looked worthwhile.
I kept up a running stream of patter, aware even as I was going on that I was overdoing it, she couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Why was it so important for me to show her every last detail?
“Mellie,” my mother said at last, after I’d started to show her the listing sheets Sandi had given us—houses we’d looked at and drooled over, but couldn’t afford, or houses we’d looked at and hated—“do you have any tea? I’d love a cup, if you do.”
I was abashed. What kind of a host was I? I went through the choices: Lemon Zinger. Oolong. In the end, she wanted plain old Lipton’s: weak, with lemon. But by the time I’d made it, she’d changed her mind. Maybe a nap was a better idea, she said.
She was a little tired, she admitted. She’d been overdoing it—the trip out to the Northwest, grading all her students’ research papers.
“And you know how when you’re tired, little things hurt more?” she said.
Her side had been bothering her. Every now and then she probed it with her finger, a frown crossing her face.
“I think I pulled something, putting my bag in the overhead bin on the flight today,” she told me when I caught her examining herself later, T-shirt shucked up, in the small mirror over Sacha’s changing table.
“What do you mean? Can I get you an Advil?”
Usually, my mom didn’t like taking anything for pain, but, yes, she said she’d take some Advil. Two, she added, as I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinet for something other than infant teething drops.
IN BOSTON, SPRING IS CAPRICIOUS. It’s cold, raw, damp, it feels like it’s never going to get warm, and then suddenly heat blows in from nowhere, and you’re still pale and pouchy and wearing your winter coat and your boots and the mercury shoots from fifty-seven to eighty in a single day. The lilacs burst from buds to full color in a matter of hours, and dazed flies loop on dizzy orbits.
Saturday morning was hot and humid. Our house was still in winter lockdown, Ice Melt bags instead of potted pansies at the door.
Jacques and I flew into action, pushing up storm windows, rolling sagging porch furniture out from the garage. Jacques had his shorts on, a butterfly of sunburn flaring across his nose. My mother sat at the kitchen table stirring her coffee, watching us. She wasn’t herself.
I suggested taking Sacha for a walk, but my mother wanted to wait until the most recent dose of Advil kicked in. At lunch I caught her probing her side again with her index finger, like the Caravaggio portrait where Saint Thomas slips his finger into Jesus’ open wound. Only my mother was both the probe and the wound.
Two hands. One hand sees how the other is doing.
“Are you OK, Mom?” I asked her.
Her face was clenched and inward-looking, what my sisters and I called her “reading” face. She didn’t answer.
“Is your side still bothering you?” I asked, but she shook her head, reaching past me for Sacha.
After lunch we took a walk after all, up to the private school at the corner where the girls played lacrosse. Later, we drove around and I showed her some nearby houses we’d looked at and rejected, and she seemed like herself again, making fun of them, propping me up, noticing all the clever things Sacha was doing that nobody else seemed to see.
I’m glad you’re here, I wanted to tell her.
But I didn’t. We didn’t re
ally say things like that, my mother and I. Instead, I made her tea—iced, today, and she actually drank it—and we sat outside and fanned ourselves and fanned Sacha and looked out over the steamy backyard and talked about Julie and Jon’s baby and the Fourth of July and the plans for Charlevoix.
Before I knew, it was Sunday, Mother’s Day. Typical for our family, we spent half of it at the airport. I think I must have hugged her too hard at the departure gate, though, because when I pulled back, she winced.
Planning was our thing. We talked about what was coming next like we could see it all before us: shimmering, like a bright planet coming into view.
Turning Over
MILESTONES.
At six months, your baby may be able to turn over on her own.
Turn over: to examine or review. To prepare, as in turning over a garden, or a new leaf.
To change position. To start over.
Halfway through the year, time turns, the days get longer. One evening in late May I was outside walking with Sacha in her stroller, Bacchus panting alongside, and I realized it was past seven and it wasn’t dark yet, and I was almost stupefied by the wealth of it—the lengthening light, the smell of barbecue, and the soft whirr of sprinklers, the sense of things opening. In a month it would be the solstice, and there’d be the subtlest of turns, from now on the days will get shorter, ever so slightly, a faint shadow under the brightest burden of flower, the realization that it couldn’t last, light and warmth would gather to a zenith, reaching that point only to begin, second by second, to drop away.
FOR WEEKS, SACHA HAD BEEN trying to turn over. This task dominated her world now. She’d forget about it for a while, playing with a toy or laughing at Bacchus, but the minute I laid her down she’d remember, her face tightening with concentration, arms sticking out on either side, rocking back and forth on her belly.