This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  I waited for James in a wheelchair by the hospital entrance. I saw him pull the car into the pickup zone and watched him sit for a few moments, palms held up against his eyes. He looked like a child counting to ten in a game of hide-and-seek, waiting to begin the work of finding where everyone had gone.

  August 26th

  I slept well last night. I was swaddled, really, the wounds were so tightly dressed.

  I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but what I saw yesterday when the nurse checked my chest — what I didn’t see, really — made my stomach drop. This was not at all how I’d expected breastless to look, even though I’d planned their departure, agreed to it, even fought for and insisted on it. I felt I’d been excavated. They’d really taken up more of me than I’d realized, those breasts.

  September 4th

  The home-care nurse was satisfied that the drainage has slowed to a near-stop, so she put the packs of peas James had frozen ahead of time on each side, to numb the pain I’d feel while the tubes were removed. First the left, then the right, she said. Take a deep breath! She pulled and pulled and pulled until the tail end of the first one was in her hands. As she continued pulling the plastic out of me, the sensation produced was like the sting of a rug burn, but it also tickled. Very odd. It was wonderful to be free of the bottles.

  I’m free of nipples, too. No more telltale signs of being cold. Just blood-crusted lines with black stitches like a teacher’s felt-tip slashes across the page of a badly written essay.

  nine

  There were times throughout my marriage when I wished I could pack a bag and take off, alone. I was missing the freedom of being elsewhere, or of planning to be elsewhere: of being in an entirely different culture and country and time zone, of hiding out in the open, being invisible to all and unreachable by anyone I knew. A speck on the planet. An individual, not half a couple. Not that I felt subsumed, or that our marriage was complicated; it wasn’t. Yet sometimes, with James, I felt that I was. Too complicated, I mean. For him.

  Life with James started out simply, as a fuck-fest, and that aspect of our relationship remained steady for years. Sometimes when I close my eyes and pleasure myself now, thinking of all the games we played in bed, I pretend James is in the room with me. I imagine him at the end of the bed, watching me, getting hard, while I tell him about my youthful forays and forages — about those times when, bored with the bone-coloured, ridged handle of my mother’s ancient and forgotten hair dryer, I’d look in drawers for candles, in the refrigerator for carrots, in the basement for a rubber-handled screwdriver.

  We fit so perfectly together, physically, James said; with me, he wanted to keep coming and coming. Simply seeing his face at my door made me wet. We’d rarely make it to the bed, and we’d thrash around on the floor. Because there was only so much newness to be found in each other’s bodies, we eventually fell into a routine. It was reliable and fun for a very long time. I might come again if James tied my wrists to the leg of the bed. Sex with Ted had been missionary, mostly, with kissing for foreplay, and it was over when he finished. But oh, how James loved to pleasure me. And with James, for the first time, I was able to think of Ted’s escape as my own arrival.

  I can’t imagine having sex with anyone ever again. I couldn’t let any man know my body as intimately as James did. Not now. I don’t think I could feel the same way sexually with someone who hadn’t known me when I was in my prime, as they say. When I had more parts to me.

  Where do they put parts of people to rot, to decompose — to turn into elements, minerals, sediment?

  Occasionally I feel a twinge of pain in my chest, like a phantom limb. I’ve been missing them lately, those pieces of myself. When I think of them, of those symmetrical slices, I still see bloody, lumpy mounds bleeding out into the stainless-steel bowl, punctuated with nipples like brown eyes. A Cyclops, each one, circular sacks of skin-covered fat, the vascular system beneath branching out in fine, spidery lines, spreading toward the outer sawn-off edges like back roads on a map leading to nowhere. I can see them so clearly that it’s as if I’d watched the operation happening to someone else.

  ***

  After the mastectomy, stuck at home and forced into idleness, I thought about how busy my life had been when Ted and I were together — about all the miles I travelled and the weeks I spent away from him, away from home. We’d spent as much time apart as together, but time didn’t feel that way as we were living it.

  On those work flights, a few minutes before descent, I’d look out the airplane window and see geometric patterns of fields, forests, serpentine lines of water and thin veins with cars following one another in slow motion, like ants, and I’d think nothing going on down there matters all that much. It dawned on me that I’d been freed of the constraining hyper-self-consciousness I had been living: I felt myself shrink within the cosmos, and the sense that I was an insignificant element settled my mind. “Sanguine,” that was how I’d describe the floating relief that came over me at these times, though when I tried to tell Ted about it he said I wasn’t making sense, because “sanguineous” means bloody, and “exsanguination” means bleeding to death. The next time I flew, I thought about those words when the feeling of lightness arose, and I wondered if they made sense in the medical context, too — if bleeding to death would induce a sense of relief at knowing you were about to disappear.

  On my way home from one of my last trips to Asia, I fell into a deep sleep and sat still for so many hours in a row that, on waking, my ankles had completely disappeared. My feet were connected to stove-pipe calves that I didn’t recognize as my own. Ted met me at the airport and insisted, when we got back to my apartment, that I put my feet up on pillows piled high on the bed. He knew enough about the risk of blood clots to insist I take a baby Aspirin, and he served me salty vegetable broth to get me to pee as much as possible. He stayed overnight, and I felt safe again, secure in Ted’s love for me. I couldn’t admit that the return of this feeling, and of my being aware of this return, meant that I did not always have it, anymore, with Ted.

  Once I’d used up all of my sick leave post-Ted, I expected the travel for work would help to keep my mood on this side of sad, at least in public. I had to take my professional self on the road, to function every day among hundreds of new people, agents and parents and students and hopefuls. I had to keep my numbers up. Keep moving, keep moving like a shark, I told myself every morning. Keep moving or you’ll die. Nancy had offered me an office job, because she was worried and wanted to keep an eye on me, day to day. At first I said no, no way, because accepting it would mean reinventing myself, turning myself into someone Ted had never known, someone he wouldn’t recognize when he wanted me back.

  ***

  I was restless and wanted to go back to work by week two post-op, but Nancy swore she wouldn’t let me into the building if I turned up. James had planned to stay home well past Labour Day, though teachers at his school were supposed to be on site for meetings and classroom prep, but on Tuesday morning I convinced him to go. “Gina is coming over today, remember? I’m fine, James, really I am. You need to get back to your regular life. We both do.”

  While I waited for Gina, I imagined travelling alone again, to somewhere I’d never been — to Morocco or Tunisia, perhaps, where I’d ride camels and be swathed in reams of coloured cotton cloth. And when I got home, James would be his old self again.

  The week before, I’d busied myself reorganizing closets and dresser drawers, making piles of clothes that no longer fit me: dresses with darts that accommodated bosoms, scoop-necked blouses that suggested cleavage. When Gina arrived, I asked if she’d take them to the Goodwill on her way home. “I might have to shop in the boys’ section for work blazers from now on!” I said. “All that teenage angst I suffered, wanting breasts like yours — and now look at me!” Gina didn’t laugh, poor girl, so I tried again. I bent over at the waist, tilting to the right, to the left, to the right, and asked her to guess what I was doing, but she couldn
’t. “It’s the Dance of the Blood Bottles!” I said, but that only made her cry. “You’re my hero, Mazzie,” she said. “You’re so brave.”

  But it wasn’t brave, what I did. I’d taken no risks. What was so brave about being middle-aged and married and facing the world sans mammaires? Smart, that’s what it was. Brave is something else altogether. Brave is accepting what you thought you couldn’t, and finding a way to live with it.

  ***

  The rugged brown scabs fell off in segments once the dressings were removed, leaving exposed red lines the width of a thick magic marker. But they aren’t red anymore; they’re more fuchsia, now that they’ve faded. I hear that for some women, they even disappear completely, but I hope that doesn’t happen to me. Compared to what the cyst operation left me with, over twenty years ago, these scars are thin and tidy. They’ll gradually become mere echoes of the incisions they once were.

  ***

  Much of my last September with James — what I thought were the early days of returning to normal — is missing. I lived it without the kind of attention that makes an experience stick. My memory faded and now those days have disappeared.

  ***

  Months after James died, I finally surrendered and joined Facebook. I knew I shouldn’t look for Ted, but I did. His last name is very unusual; only two matches turned up when I searched, and one belonged to a seventy-five-year-old man who was not his father. The photo associated with the other had been taken from a distance, so it was difficult to make out the person’s face. If this was Ted, he was wearing a turban and a djellaba, and standing in the entry to what looked like a cave carved into the side of a mountain.

  “Bear, is that you?”

  Message sent.

  I went on a Message binge, sending Friend requests to Tanis, to work colleagues, to other older friends — people I hadn’t thought of in years, like Beau. Notifications from people I’d dated or befriended and then grew apart from, as people do, were not the distraction I needed, because they reminded me of the person I had been when I was young and discovering new writers, ideas, possibilities. The person Ted fell in love with.

  Beau looked the same in his Profile picture. He has a deep-brown complexion that he used to play up with his wardrobe of jewel-toned capes and scarves and matching belt-and-boot sets. We had similar tastes and spent more than a student should on things like ceramic wine cups, clear, pale-green Moroccan tea glasses, globe-shaped paper lampshades, and Mexican jewellery. The day we met in the hallway outside our Old English class, he was wearing mustard-yellow jeans, and a shock of thick, wavy black hair covered half of his fine-featured face. He had a curious sexual aura about him, a femininity combined with a sultry voice and the kind of confidence that swivelled heads.

  Beau’s mother encouraged his fashion experimentation, but she had begun to worry that it stood for other preferences too; she thought I was her last hope, the one to save her son, and she loved me to pieces. But Beau didn’t want saving. He thought he did, but then he met Tim — whom he seduced right out of the seminary — and confessed it all to me.

  After that, we thought that being partners-in-domicile could work. Beau and I talked about living in a big, partially partitioned house, so each of us could have whatever dalliances might come along. I thought that I might be happy in that arrangement: secure without jealousy, nominally traditional. We even talked about raising children, adopted or petri-dished, together. He’d call a baby boy, should we have one, Professor Godbole.

  But Beau stayed with Tim, and I met Ted. Ted nicknamed him Bozo. I should never have laughed at that, but I did.

  ***

  The boys I knew in high school said that Josh was an airhead, though no one had said that about him before he started to model. Josh didn’t care what people thought. He often made fun of his newfound profession himself. He’d act out hockey scenes for me, as if reacting to checks on the ice: “No, not the face — hit me anywhere but the face!” At his agent’s urging, he had to stop playing hockey — to protect his major asset, he said. Gradually, as his earnings went up, he paid more and more attention to taking care of his body, and gave out a lot of advice on nutrition, skin care, rest.

  Josh was especially unrelenting in his campaign to stop me from suntanning. He’d discovered an oil-free lotion in the States called “For Faces Only,” and he told me to wear it year-round to protect myself, even on cloudy days. It was unscented, but it had its own clean, fresh smell, like iced tea, and when I said I liked it, he gave me his last tube. I didn’t want to use it up, because he was leaving for Europe soon, and smelling it brought him back to me.

  I haven’t sun-worshipped since university, but I went shopping for sunscreen when I was planning to take Gina’s young kids to Ontario Place. I found the same oil-free product that Josh used under a different name; I bought it, though it was five times more expensive than other brands, and it smelled exactly the same. Exactly. I was in the drugstore, inhaling it, and boom, there I was, standing on the driveway at my parents’ house, watching Josh as he reached into his car for the tube he kept in his glove compartment, aware that the neighbours would see him handing it to me and giving me a kiss. By the next summer he’d be gone, writing letters from Italy.

  ***

  I exchanged letters with Prof. L. after I graduated from Western and moved back to Toronto. We lived only two hours apart, but Prof. L. didn’t like speaking on the phone, so our relationship became epistolary. His letters, unlike his conversation, were very personal. He told me about his social life and the women he was dating (friends still working on their degrees told me which ones were students); he talked about the complicated bond he had with his elderly mother, who had not yet forgiven him for not becoming a lawyer twenty-five years before. I told him about the relentless trips for work, movies I’d seen, Indian restaurants with terrific tandoori chicken, and my trials with Ted. Writing to him was a very private activity. It felt a little like cheating.

  There was a different kind of intimacy in the letters Josh and I used to exchange. It was like keeping a tennis game going: when I opened his latest letter, our connection was in the palm of my hand, but once I let go and sent a reply — lobbing the envelope, dropping it into the red mailbox — the next stroke was his.

  Finding an envelope from me in his mailbox could lift Josh out of the bad moods he’d slip into so easily that they frightened him. He said my missives enlivened him, and he needed that. He had “crazy genes” — his mother’s legacy. I made him laugh, he said, like no one else. “You’re like meshuga medicine for me, Mazzie.”

  I was proud that my pen-and-paper performance made such an impact on Josh. So I confess that I did not throw a life preserver out to him, or wade into those trenches of despair he hinted at. I made him laugh instead, as if that were enough. I didn’t tell Josh I recognized the territory he was in, and I did not take those glimpses of his gloom seriously. Each letter I crafted was both a link between us and a piece of the wall I was erecting between us. The invented version of me prevented Josh from getting too close, from knowing me too well.

  ***

  Prof. L. told me that he knew when I was depressed because the “I” fell away from most of my sentences:

  – “Saw Interiors last night. Liked it.”

  – “Will pack for Beijing after this.”

  – “Wish Ted had more time for me.”

  – “Remembering my mother today.”

  I didn’t fuss over wording or set up my sentences for effect in my letters to Prof. L. I’m not sure why that was the case. I pared my words, shared raw shreds of my life in shorthand, like a scientist’s log or some kind of anti-diary.

  ***

  I found the five-volume set of Virginia Woolf’s diaries in a bookstore on Queen West, and it took months for me to finish reading them. I came up with a bio-medical/-graphical theory that I shared with Prof. L. I knew about Woolf’s depressions, of course, but in the diaries I noticed a pattern: her worst days seemed to be cyclic
al, and every three or four weeks she described an immobilizing despair. Over and over again, volume after volume. Did no one ever think of that link? None of those doctors or intellectuals or female lovers of hers? Perhaps she’d thought of it herself but considered it unseemly to connect her moods to hormones, emotions to menstrual fluctuations, to pre- or peri- or otherwise bloody cycles of time — at least in writing.

  Prof. L. didn’t respond to my diagnosis of Virginia Woolf, other than to say there might be an article in there somewhere.

  ***

  The July before my double-M surgery, a couple of months after the diagnosis, James showed me an article in National Geographic about new discoveries in the Burgess Shale. He’d always taught his students about fossils found in the Rockies, and he seemed eager to work the news of recent finds into the curriculum for the fall. He was grinning when he showed me the colour plates in the magazine: it was the trilobite that excited him, he said, because it suggested the beginnings of an early head.

  That day, I thought that James was over the worst of it, whatever it had been: sadness about my health or a mid-life reckoning with his own mortality. I held great faith in the picture of that ancient rock that contained an impression of a life form from five hundred million years ago. It was a sign that my husband was on his way back to me. But he wasn’t, not yet. The pounding in his chest and the suffocating panic would fell him, again and again that August and into the fall, well after my surgery had been successful. James likened it to an invisible feral cat that would pounce if you got too close to its den.