Better Times

by Batkie, Sara;

  “Would you quit with that, please?” Nan asked, as she stubbed it out on the rim of her plate.

  “Well, you’re not giving me much choice, are you?”

  “You think it can’t happen twice in one family?”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  She had spoken with concern but Nan could sense the disappointment that lingered just behind it. She was a bad patient. Something in her had failed. She didn’t have to say anything for Pippa to know it. She left her mother to her thoughts, to the wilted cigarette, to the babies that could be cupped in her hands, confident that this bad day would soon be replaced by another.

  “It’s there!” Nan insisted to Dr. Hargrove at their next appointment.

  “What’s there?”

  “My breast,” she said. “My breast is back.”

  “You know,” Dr. Hargrove said, “this is a relatively common occurrence. In almost half the cases, actually. No different from an amputee with a phantom limb.”

  Amputee. Nan’s bones went brittle at the very word. Amputees were for twenty-four-hour news coverage and war movies; they were human-interest stories, heroes. They were rebuilt with metal; their bodies became bionic. She had no such hope.

  “Let’s check your progress,” Dr. Hargrove said. “Tell me if it hurts.”

  She began rubbing her finger over the grooves of the scar, as if it were a palm she could read a fortune in. Nan didn’t know whether to be shocked by the suddenness of the gesture or the coldness of the doctor’s skin, which penetrated the thin plastic sheath of her gloves. Nan felt the ripple of a wedding ring and tried to imagine the type of man Dr. Hargrove would marry. A weak one, certainly, as most married men were or became. Perhaps an old patient she had somehow been persuaded to cure for life.

  Abruptly Dr. Hargrove peeled off her gloves and dropped them in a biohazard bin. The future, it seemed, was not promising. “Well, you didn’t mention any pain, which is a good sign,” she said. Nan felt that old scrape of fear in her stomach that she used to get when she was called on to give an answer in school. Was there supposed to be pain? Was there pain she had missed? Could she take the test over again?

  That night the itch returned and then refused to leave. Nan knew she was being punished for her unpleasantness. She pled with the vengeful breast. She tried babying it, rubbing the area with a cloth and powdering it. When that didn’t work she grew angry, threatened it. Once she stood in front of the mirror, holding a pen knife, not to reopen the wound but to test the apparition above. Finally she could do nothing else but lie on the couch and try to ignore the friction of the fabric against the breast that stirred but would not wake.

  The next day Nan picked up the phone and heard Dr. Rob. “How are you?” he asked. Then he added, “I’ve been meaning to call.”

  “Why? You’re not my doctor.”

  “I know that.”

  Nan felt that combination of lethargy and curiosity that was always aroused by calls from bad dates. The men were no longer of interest to her but their reasons for contacting her were and she approached them studiously. She assumed they’d found the evening as terrible as she did. She wondered what she’d done to encourage them.

  “What is it?”

  “I’d like to see you again.”

  It did not seem she was being asked.

  Nan was out of practice at being presentable. On the day of the date she didn’t fiddle too much with her hair, hoping to stave off its loss a little longer. She was already beginning to look like one of those sad-eyed dolls whose owner has washed, cut, and combed her plastic mane beyond repair. She rouged her cheeks, mascaraed her eyes, perfumed her neck to mask her medical scent. But she didn’t want to look perfect. She wanted to look like herself, or at least the self she remembered once being. Finally she slipped the falsie in, that fleshy pad that gripped her like a hand and made her feel like a teenager grappling in a backseat. She grimaced as she felt it struggle for control over its invisible, unyielding rival. Once the breast had quieted she was ready.

  She heaved a small sigh of relief when she opened the front door. Dr. Rob didn’t look perfect either. There was still the same thin hoop, the same shock of black arm hair only half-hidden by his rolled up sleeves. Out of the harsh florescence of the exam room he no longer seemed robotic. Instead there was something wolfish about him, but not in any sense that made her want to back away. He clutched a small bundle of peonies to his chest, so excessive and arterial red that it looked like a beating heart.

  “Could you eat?” he asked, as they made their way to the car.

  The question startled Nan. In the months after the operation she had treated her meals with the same structured disinterest as an anorexic. She would eat but there were rules. No eating where she slept, for example. It reminded her too much of the hospital. She could eat meat but nothing flesh-colored. Fish was tricky and she’d given up on chicken completely. No, she couldn’t eat, not in front of him. He peered at her now and it took her a moment to realize it was because she had stopped moving.

  “Drinks then?”

  Nan was still on her pain medication and hadn’t had alcohol in several months. She wasn’t quite sure what it would do to her. But she liked the possibilities this offered.

  “I think I could do that,” she said.

  “I know a bar near here. We can walk to it.”

  The walk was about eight minutes. It took them ten to find something to talk about. It was the first warm day of spring; people were shedding things all over. Side by side on the street, moving past parents with baby strollers and intensely sweating joggers, conscious of the closeness of their bodies, it was easy to believe better things were pushing them forward.

  It was not a romantic place. The music was loud, the lighting infernal. Seated over two glasses of wine it was impossible to ignore how little they had to say and it was an effort not to just sit and appraise one another. Nan felt like she was doing a bad impersonation of herself. A cruise ship comedian, two drink minimum. She took a long sip of her wine. It went down like cough syrup and settled on her stomach like a balm.

  Dr. Rob filled the space with perfectly timed fingernail taps on his glass. Nan felt it reverberate in the nerves of her teeth. She bit down on her tongue and felt the shock travel half the length of her spine before it branched off and fizzled out in the dull lumps of her breasts. She must have winced because he stopped and asked, “Is something wrong?”

  “No.” She put a hand to her head and when she pulled away several strands of hair came with it. She shook them free quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed. They drifted to the floor, to be picked up and carried off on someone else’s clothes.

  “This feels weird, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not really our first date,” he said. “It’s not even a date. Is it?”

  “You called me. I’m not going to define it.”

  “Fair enough. Better that we don’t, anyway.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Define it,” he replied. “Do you need another?”

  Instantly a burst of warm clouds filled her head. “Please,” she said.

  As he turned to order another round, Nan noticed the fingernail he had finally stilled. Caught in the light, she could see that it was bisected by a thick half-moon scar. Nan reached over and ran her thumb over the defective nail. The mark was smooth. It had merged with the rest of his body. He jumped at her touch but she had already retreated.

  “What happened there?” she asked.

  “My brother caught it in a window when I was twelve,” he said, running his own finger over it as if he hoped to rub it away. “I cried. And never heard the end of it. Doesn’t look so bad now, though. I’ve seen worse.”

  Nan felt something snap inside but it was too quick for her to recognize what it was.

  “So have I,” she said. She was already drunk; she could tell by the way the words fell from her tongue like lemmings off a cliff, each one a little heavier and quicker to die. “I assume this inju
ry has been the most significant moment of your life?”

  “That’s a pretty ridiculous assumption, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I’m making it anyway.” She took another sip of her wine and this time her phantom breast scrambled under its viscous weight, like something fighting to keep its head above water.

  “Significance in life is overrated,” Dr. Rob said. “If we’re going by the life markers that everyone else considers important, I’ve already hit them all. I got married too young, was divorced before I graduated college. I went to medical school, like my mother wanted. Then she died. But I’d like to think I still have other things to do.”

  Nan was terrible at meeting other people’s mothers. She always felt she was intruding on something, had dug herself into some private burrow of mother and son she didn’t know the way out of. She never got the jokes. She never properly appreciated the meal. It made Nan think she was sleeping with a stranger.

  “What did she die of?”

  “Cancer,” he said.

  “Breast?”

  “Throat. You ever hear someone who’s had their voice box removed? It’s like listening to someone who’s already died.”

  The bartender was lingering by their emptied drinks. Dr. Rob made a curt gesture toward him as if he were dismissing an overeager dog. Nan didn’t like the way he was looking at her now, with the same sterile concern that had accompanied her first prognosis.

  “Listen,” he said. “I understand. I know how something like this can come to define your life. I know it defined my mother’s.”

  “I’m not dying.”

  “You’re lucky. But I don’t think it’s healthy to ignore how close you came.”

  Nan grew so angry that she was almost giddy. Her left breast seethed right along with her. She felt it swelling, as if it had been stung by a hundred wasps. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry about your mother. But losing her doesn’t mean you know more about grief.”

  “No. But being a doctor does give me some insight into the process.”

  “If you didn’t call me as a doctor, then please don’t talk to me as one. You’re not very good at it.”

  “Right now I’m trying to remember why I called in the first place.”

  He drained his glass in one gulp. Nan watched his Adam’s apple bob, a common enough occurrence but one she so rarely observed that it felt intimate. She had the sudden urge to reach out and stroke his throat. Typical of her, to notice his handsomeness only in his resentment. She was always noticing the good things at the wrong times. Looking at him now, she ached in unexpected places.

  “I think we should go,” Dr. Rob said. He sat with his shoulders hunched up to his ears. She could have knocked him over with a toothpick if she’d wanted. And he probably would have stayed down.

  The walk back to the apartment was even quieter than the one to the bar. At the door, he brushed her cheek with his and shook her hand. He didn’t say it was nice or that they would do it again soon, because it wasn’t and they wouldn’t. In the morning, she found she had scratched at her scar in her sleep. Her fingers were crusted with blood.

  At their next appointment, Dr. Hargrove tried to make Nan’s breast disappear. Nan pressed her body against a full-length freestanding mirror, her naked chest bisected by the glass, as the doctor moved her right breast in a slow, determined circle. They were tricking her brain, Dr. Hargrove said. The itch would subside if her body believed the lost breast had returned to her. But first, her brain would have to see it.

  Nan tried to keep her gaze fixed on the image in the mirror as she’d been instructed and not on the obscuring glint coming off Dr. Hargrove’s glasses, the jaw she clenched to stifle a yawn. She had the sour-sweet smell of overripe cherries. It came overwhelmingly from her embossed red lips. They had never been this close before. There had always been a desk or something else between them.

  “Do you feel any change yet?” Dr. Hargrove asked, indicating with her eyes Nan’s irritated left side as she continued to massage the right. Nan tilted her neck to better see her cupped breast below her, the nipple tipped upward like the nose of a curious dog, and beside it, that same breast reflected in the mirror, a bobbing double, a weightless simulacrum.

  But she couldn’t concentrate. She kept wondering what would happen if a nurse walked in, if Dr. Hargrove would blush and pull away from her like a man would or nod, smile, and continue on with the business at hand. Nan had never felt less sexual and more exposed in her life.

  “Are you ready?” Dr. Hargrove didn’t wait for an answer before taking Nan’s right hand and placing it where her own had just been.

  Her instinct was to knead the breast like she was searching for the knot of another tumor. Eventually she found a rhythm that was close enough to pleasing to keep steady. But it was useless. Every time the phantom breast seemed close to being lulled, it flared up again. The flesh and fat beneath her hand remained stubbornly inert.

  “I don’t think it’s working,” Nan said after a few more minutes of spiritless rolling and lifting.

  “Maybe if you had a partner?”

  Nan looked down the length of the mirror, at the wan frozen lump on the right and the jagged pink stripe on the left, and felt a great wave of exhaustion break over her. Looking back on all her friends of the past few years, she remembered bodies and grasped for names, recalled arguments and forgot the people involved. She knew everyone in halves and, she suspected, by the halves not worth knowing. They’d done what she’d asked at the time, to leave her alone. She could hardly ask more of them now.

  Nan returned to her apartment and to work at the local TV station. Her coworkers, smug-looking women who clung to past grievances and circled her like sharks, gave her cards and bright pink balloons. “Like the ribbon,” one of the anchorwomen said. Nan put typos in the teleprompter. The itch remained.

  She gave the mirror therapy a few half-hearted tries but every time she pressed her body against the glass, her left side would grow unmanageable, clawing and clinging like a fidgety child she couldn’t set back on the ground. Instead she indulged herself in fantasies of stripping naked in public places, in front of children and elderly couples, of laughing and weeping as they looked away or covered her up.

  One day Nan went to Pippa’s apartment for dinner and saw a “Cancer Free!” banner taped up in the kitchen. Her mother sat alone at the table, her hands palms down on the wood as if she were trying to steady herself. “I quit smoking last week,” she announced. “But I’m still trying to figure out what else to do with my hands.”

  “What about knitting?”

  “Too matronly. I could see myself buying a little dog though. Let it sit on my lap, stroke it whenever I got the urge.”

  “That could be good therapy, actually. As long as you didn’t end up strangling it.”

  “I’m trying gum right now,” she said, opening her mouth to reveal a mushy pearl tucked in her teeth.

  “You look good, Pippa,” Nan said, and after she did, she realized it was true. Something warm had settled under Pippa’s skin. Indeed, despite her stance, everything about her seemed to have settled. Her shoulders were looser, her eyes were sharper; she even smelled better. And her calmness had seeped its way into the room itself. Without all the ashtrays around, it seemed somehow less breakable.

  “I don’t think I’ve looked this good since I stopped seeing your father,” Pippa said. “He hated smoking. I think I started doing it as a way to justify leaving him. I could smoke. What freedom! Men make us do such stupid things.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Nan said.

  “Oh don’t worry,” Pippa said, reaching out to pat her hand. “You seem to have avoided stupidity so far. I’m proud of you.”

  “For that?”

  “Among other things,” she said.

  When Nan called Dr. Rob to ask him on another date, his initial response was “I don’t think I want to.” His voice had taken on the taut, wounded timbre of a spoiled child.

/>   “Well, do you think or do you know?”

  “Well,” he countered, “what did you have in mind?”

  “Whatever you want,” she promised. “My treat.”

  When the day arrived, Nan prepared with less fastidiousness than before. The only ritual she truly relished partaking in was the setting of the falsie, whose usual pinch and protest made her prematurely nostalgic for when the phantom breast would be gone.

  Dr. Rob chose a torridly Italian place, fraught with candlelight and bas-reliefs, and ordered the third most expensive thing on the menu. Nan avoided his face and watched as he cut his steak into egalitarian cubes. After chewing and swallowing each individual piece, he would take a sip of his water and swish it around in his mouth. She felt the itch returning, a darting pin never pricking in the same place. She wondered if he was being deliberately irritating.

  “I went into remission, you know,” she said, as the waitress set down two cups of coffee.

  He pulled two sugar packets from the dispenser and opened them at the same time, then dumped it all into his cup, letting the pile sift to the bottom instead of stirring it.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You deserve it.” He emptied the cup and the waitress was there to fill it before he even set it back down. He nodded in thanks.

  “So,” Nan said, wanting to break the silence, “is your mother the reason you became an oncologist?”

  “I’d wanted to do pediatrics. But it turns out I don’t have the right interpersonal skills.”

  “What do you mean?”