The Instant When Everything is Perfect
A Novel
by
Jessica Barksdale
You see everything.
You see every part.
You see all my light,
and you love my dark.
--Alanis Morrisette
For Jesse
One
Mia
Mia Alden is running late because she worked out too long at her club, showering fast and almost bolting out of the locker room without combing her hair. As she passes the last bank of mirrors, she stops and looks at herself. Her mother Sally will be very disappointed with her if she shows up at the hospital looking wet and spiky haired, her face sticky with lotion. So even though Mia knows that her toilette will force her to speed on the freeway all the way from Monte Veda to Walnut Creek, she opens her bag and pulls out her comb, her blusher, her lipstick, smoothing and brushing herself into a decent picture, one her mother will approve of.
Sally Tillier, Mia’s mother, has never left her house without lipstick on, her hair brushed, her clothes neatly pressed. Sally takes walks around her retirement community neighborhood, wearing carefully ironed pastel blouses and khaki pants. Mia, who manages to care and not care about what people think about her, often shops at the Safeway in ripped sweatpants and paint spattered t-shirts. Sometimes (especially now because she’s on sabbatical from her university professorship) she goes to the post office and bank without combing her hair, her short hair a bright blonde whirl on her head.
She cringes when she runs into someone she knows, which is often, because she and her husband and two boys live in the town she grew up in. Most of Sally’s old friends still live in Monte Veda, as do Mia’s former Girl Scout leader, Sunday school teacher, and many of her friend’s parents. And there they all are, it seems, at the post office every time Mia runs in to mail a manuscript to her agent or editor, all of them wanting to know the story of her adult life and to tell them about their children, the children who are now adults, like Mia.
Mia is not a natural beauty. She is the kind of person who can become beautiful when she puts on the right clothes (the kind that shape and smooth her round flesh). She is fond of dark jersey knits and raw silk. She can draw her face into a kind of stunning glamour that washes off at night. When she talks to crowds, she moves fluidly, and every semester, one or another of her students falls in love with her. Mia imagines that when the semester is over, they must wonder what kind of sick enchantment came over them, something powerful enough to develop a crush on a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman.
Her husband Ford says she is a cutie, or, at least, he used to. She can’t quite remember the last time he said those words, holding her tight, whispering, “You’re my little cutie.”
Maybe this is what happens to all long marriages, she thinks. They simmer into friendship, no matter what you do. When she asked Ford a couple years back to go to counseling because things seemed flat, he said, “What do you think we’re supposed to act like at this age?”
Maybe he just couldn’t sustain the habit of endearments. After all, he met her twenty-two years ago when she was thin. At the post office, she’s not cute, not even close.
But today, Mia decides that her mother’s appointment is not the time to test Sally’s patience, so after a wild, fast drive, she sits in the exam room with her mother. Her hair is in order, her lips slightly red and shiny, her eyelashes darkened, her cheeks rosy. She wears black jersey knit pants and a red sweater that, she realizes, shows some cleavage. Now, in an exam room full of medical drawings of mastectomies, she wonders if cleavage is insensitive.
Sally is on the examination table, which is a table unlike any Mia has ever seen. Or, at least, it’s set up differently, the back raised high to support the patient’s back, the sitting area small. In another galaxy, Sally would seem ready for take off, the only thing missing from her sitting position a headset and space suit.
Sally rests her feet on a footstool, clutching closed her hospital gown that hangs huge on her small frame. Even though the cancer is not making Sally feel ill, she seems to have lost weight since last week, her face tight and drawn and gray, the bones just under her thin skin. But though tired, she’s still elegant, crossing her long thin legs on the table, hitting the back of the table with her left heel, as if the repetitive noise will keep away feeling.
Mia has tried to do her best to keep her fear in check ever since Sally called last week.
“I’ve got bad news,” Sally said. “It’s cancer.”
Without warning, Mia began to cry, saying, “Mom. Oh, Mom. This is—I don’t like this.”
“Now really,” Sally said, her voice crackling and tight, the voice she used throughout Mia’s childhood when there were fights and squabbles about clothes or the phone or the car. All three sisters knew that once Sally spoke like that, her words were a noose that could squeeze tight.
So Mia stopped crying, leaned against the wall of her kitchen, and listened to Sally’s plans, everything already divided up into time squares that would be dealt with in precise chronological order.
This is just one of the reasons that makes Mia believe she’s a changeling, a baby wrested from her natural mother and given to a woman of opposite temperament and body type. For months at a time, Mia doesn’t live in chronological time, living in her stories and novels and poems, thinking about them when she’s teaching at the university or at a movie or making dinner.
“Don’t bug Mom,” she heard her oldest son Lucien say once to his younger brother Harper. Mia was sitting on the couch in the living room, a pillow on her lap. She’d been walking somewhere—to her bedroom or the kitchen—and just stopped and sat down to imagine what her characters might do if . . . .
“Why?” Harper said.
“I think she’s writing,” Lucien said.
If Mia still lived at home, Sally would have said, “Don’t just sit there. Go clean your room.”
It’s not just the temperament issues. There’s the parade of physical differences. While Mia’s younger sisters Katherine and Dahlia are tall, wide-hipped, small breasted, long-legged, fine-limbed, delicate like Sally, Mia is like the Polish relative everyone forgot about. She is shorter than her mother by two inches, full-breasted, short-legged. Her wrists and ankles are strong and thick, her fingers round, her body smooth with flesh.
Mia has studied her mother’s and sisters’ bodies since she was nine, noting all the differences. Their collarbones are prominent, straight from throat to shoulder. Hers are arched. Their necks are long and elegant, hers short and full. Their faces are round, hers oval. Their feet narrow, hers wide. Their eyes are so brown they are almost black, hers are gold. Her hair is curly and blond, theirs is straight and, at one time, jet black. Sally went gray at 39, Katherine and Dahlia following suit. Mia’s blond hair is still blond, not a wiry gray hair on her head. Her mother and sisters are nearsighted, all wearing glasses since childhood. Mia has 20/15 vision, is able to make out an exit sign from a half mile off.
Sally was a chemist before marrying David, Katherine is a pathologist, Dahlia an accountant. From as far back as anyone can remember, Sally’s relatives have been doctors or physicists or scientists or business people. Mia writes novels, short stories, and poems, and teaches literature and writing. She’s “the creative one,” a phrase that is always spoken in hushed tones around holiday tables.
And because her father David died when Mia was nine—just when she began to see how different she was—his family is lost to her, all of them dead before David died, nothing but old letters and death certificates and tombstones, no one left to spearhead a search for l
ong lost cousins across the country. A few old photographs show large women tucked into corsets filled to capacity, their noses—like Mia’s—slightly large. But there are no pictures of collarbones or ankles or wrists, these ancestors wrapped in dark silks and muslins from neck to foot. The mystery of who Mia is died with them all.
“I wish he’d hurry up,” Sally says, her dark eyes turning to the nasty slits that in former times would send all three girls running to their rooms. “This hospital. Killed your father. Killed him dead. And this doctor? Groszmann. I hate that name. He spells it funny, though. Anyway, I know too much German to like it. Your grandfather was one hundred percent German. He never had an accent. Not that I remember.”
“Mom,” Mia starts.
“The least he could do is be on time.” She clutches are her robe.
Sally doesn’t look at Mia as she speaks, and for the millionth time, Mia wonders how Sally could have possibly given Mia her name. Mine. It has always seemed to Mia that Sally should have waited for Katherine to use her favorite name. Katherine is the favorite, and she’s not even the baby. Already, Sally’s been boasting about how Katherine read the slide of her biopsy, finding flaws in this hospital’s report. Certainly around the time of the operations, Katherine will fly in from Philadelphia and move next to her mother’s bedside as if she had been in Mia’s position all along—through the first appointments with the Breast Surgery Nursing Coordinator, the surgeon who had initially told Sally that the mass looked “Just fine,” and now this appointment with the plastic surgeon.
Katherine will read the chart, say, “Why did they do that? I’m going to ask right now.”
She will order the nurses around, and then resort to flirting with the doctors—male or female—to get the information she needs. For the moment, that instant, she will be the strong daughter, the able daughter because in a crisis, Sally won’t look too closely at her. Katherine keeps herself for enough away from Sally to avoid being the favorite, to avoid being seen. Katherine is bisexual, though Sally does not know this or pretends to not know it, despite the long years of Katherine coming home alone for vacations and holidays or having excuses of why she can’t visit at all.
Dahlia will be at Sally’s condo with her two children Matt and Mike, her husband Steve staying at home in Phoenix to mind their accounting business. Dahlia, the youngest, will clean and cook and buy new sheets for Sally’s king-sized bed. She will stay just long enough to get Sally comfortable, and then leave, soon followed by Katherine, who will bark out orders in her modulated doctor voice, a voice she must have developed during med school because she certainly doesn’t have to worry about how her patients will react now, all of them dead. Mia will bathe her mother and take her to the toilet and clean her wounds.
“Mom,” Mia says, “it’s just a name. Groszmann is very common.”
Sally rolls her eyes. “I don’t want this. I want them cut off and be done with it. Over. Finished.”
“You haven’t even watched the movie. You don’t know what the doctor will say either,” Mia says.
“I don’t need to know what he says. I know how hospitals work. Don’t forget how I had to be on top of everything with your father. Doctors don’t read slides the way they should. They don’t pay attention. They don’t care.”
“That was a long time ago--” Mia begins.
“Some things never change,” Sally finishes, looking at Mia hard.
There is a quick knock on the door, and then it opens slowly. Dr. Groszmann comes in, almost apologetically, as if he’s interrupting something very private—or he isn’t sure he belongs. Mia understands this stance immediately and finds herself blushing. A blush that starts on her chest and pushes its way up to her forehead. She smiles, hoping that the doctor will imagine she is always this color. Or maybe he will think she’s just run in late, flushed from trying to find parking and running up three flights of stairs.
But he is blushing, too, and even though she can’t see her own face, Mia thinks that they both must be the same, rosy red.
Sally shuffles on the table, her gown crackling, and she flashes her dark mean eyes at him.
“My appointment was supposed to be at 3.30.”
Dr. Groszmann stops looking at Mia, and his face becomes even redder. “I’m sorry. We’re a little backed up today.”
Mia thinks to say, “A rush on reconstruction?” But she doesn’t because she can’t find her voice. She looks at her red Giraudon shoes.
“Mrs. Tillier.” He looks at the chart and holds out his hand. Sally’s eyes widen and she looks up at him and shakes his hand. In that second, Mia can see how scared she is. Mia is scared, too.
Since her mother called, Mia hasn’t wanted to think of what cancer means, what it has always meant to Mia, ever since she was nine and her father died.
How can her mother really be sitting here with cancer? Can it be possible that her mother might die from it? Even though her mother is prickly and very different than Mia, Sally is constant, the voice Mia hears in her head despite herself. She’s the first person Mia calls when something good or bad happens.
“Well, yes,” Sally says, pulling her hand back, adjusting her gown. “Who else would I be?”
Dr. Groszmann turns to Mia, his face paler now, his mouth in a slight smile. His skin is smooth except for a trio of wrinkles at the corner of each eye. She wonders why he doesn’t slip into a colleague’s office and get shot full of Botox during his break. Wouldn’t anyone working in a plastic surgery office be tormented by the tyranny of perfection?
She can feel her stretch marks under her sweater. Her thighs spread onto the chair, both prime candidates for liposuction.
“I’m Mia Alden. Her daughter.”
“The pathologist? It’s here on the chart that the slides went to a daughter.” He seems excited, just like all the left-brained people are when they hear the call of their own. Like Mia’s whole family at Thanksgiving or Christmas talking about beta-blockers or nanotechnology.
Mia shakes her head. “No, not the pathologist. I’m just a writer. I’m not on the chart.”
Dr. Groszmann—it only says R. Groszmann on his white lab coat—blushes again and holds out his hand to her. His hands are red and slightly dry looking, almost painfully so—probably from washing before and after surgery—but strong and soft. Mia lets go quickly.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Thanks.” Mia sits back in her chair, and R. Groszmann sits on his stool, opening the chart again and then looking at Sally.
“So you are going to have a bi-lateral mastectomy?” He asks the question. It isn’t a question at all but fact. Sally stares at him.
“There’s only cancer in one breast.”
Sally shakes her head. “I’m not coming back here in five years and going through this again. Doctor Jacobs said she herself might do the same thing in my position.”
The doctor crosses his legs. “I understand. So have you given any thought about what you’d like to do in terms of reconstruction?”
Mia can’t help it. She touches one of her breasts. She likes her breasts. At this point in her life, Sally’s breasts have turned into little more than two nipples with a pad of flesh underneath them, barely an A cup. Maybe a double A. For many years, Mia wanted her mother’s breasts—or her sisters’, really. Both Dahlia and Katherine have perky little breasts, the nipples just at the rise before the downward turn. Teenaged breasts. Katherine, of course, hasn’t been pregnant or nursed a child, so some of her uplift is from lack of use. But Dahlia returned to her pre-pregnancy shape within weeks of weaning both the boys. And neither she nor Sally has the crosshatch of silvery stretch marks that Mia does.
But Mia would miss her breasts, the way material hugs them, the way they are always there when she looks down. She can still see her boys on her left nipple, the one she weaned them both from. It wasn’t on purpose. She just must have started their last suck on the right, and then put them on the left, their toddler mouths latching on for
that final time.
She looks down now and can see first Lucien and then Harper, eyes closed, tongues tasting the last milk.
Ford likes them too, sucking and kissing them when they make love. One amazing night he began sucking them when she was asleep, and she woke to an orgasm from his pulling, tugging lips alone. When she’s awake, though, she is sometimes annoyed at his suckling, wondering why it’s men who have this solace all their lives, women weaned from comfort before they can even remember it.
“I’m not going to be talked out of having them both come off.”
“I—“ he starts.
“Both off. And then I want some nice breasts. I want to look okay in a t-shirt.”
Sally has always laughed about her breasts, saying they were barely there. Now and then, she turned to Mia at a picnic or dinner party and whispered, “I’m not even wearing a bra. Imagine that.”
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