by T. Greenwood
My body mimics that girl’s now. It has lost its softness, without the necessity of curves. There will be no babies, so there is no need for hips, and I am returning to the body I remember. In this way, nothing can hide underneath the skin’s surface anymore; I have made certain of that. What was buried is now laid bare, each new malignancy revealing itself as soon as it is born. I am prepubescent in this remembered body. And I wonder if this is how he saw me then. As possibility. As before and someday. He would be sad to see me now, though. He would be sad to know that I am dying.
I remember his fingers more than I remember his face. I suppose that’s because touching was always so much more important to me than anything a face could disclose. His fingers had a way of skipping over my skin like stones skipping across the lake. I remember lying facedown on his bed, the pills of a chenille spread beneath me, feeling like water.
The discovery of the first lump was accidental. I wasn’t looking, having given up searching a long time ago. I found it the way you stumble across a dollar bill on the sidewalk. You know you should stop to pick it up, but it also means pausing, breaking your momentum. It was like this the first time.
In my terra-cotta-colored room, I was naked and alone, my hair wet and tangled from a shower. I was swollen, aware of my breasts and hips and the softness of down. Under covers, I pretended exploration, but it was too familiar. All of this. There were no surprises in my body to be found anymore. Nothing startled me the way it used to. But there was comfort in the predictable rhythms of blood and heart and breath. It was like sleepwalking, this touching. Smoothness of skin, interruption of navel, the edge where skin seemed to stop and then start again, warmth and wetness. My seamstress fingers always working, pushing and pulling at the fabric of my body, the needle moving up and down, precise tension and speed. But when I reached for myself, held onto myself, pretending my fingers were not my own, they stumbled. Remarkably, it wasn’t fear the small knot evoked, but relief: My body could still surprise me. There were still secrets to be found. And I let my fingers linger there, the certainty of what it was no different from the certainty of a new gray hair, wiry and strong amid softness. But later, when the inevitable connections between the lump and the meaning of the lump engaged, I knew my mother had been wrong. Some things are best undiscovered.
It is for this reason that I made myself forget about what I’d found. I left it there. I dismissed it. But, like the ignored weeds in my rooftop garden, it grew. It grew and grew, until finally I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Because of my neglect, it made itself prominent. It demanded attention. It became angry.
Now, in this child’s body, nothing can hide anymore. But somehow, this remembered innocence (of bones and blood and breath) makes what is happening seem almost cruel.
Once, as we lay looking at the lake through his bedroom window, he told me that there was nothing more beautiful than dying. That violence and peace are companions, peace always preceding and following violence. I knew he was talking about his wife. About her skin and bones fractured by the windshield and dash. About the way the air was so quiet around them inside the car as she lay dying. About the absolute silence of glass after it’s broken.
Daddy met Roxanne at the lodge in October, and she looked to me like a fallen leaf. Her skin was brown and weathered. She wore leather pants and scratchy sweaters. She hired him to bartend, even though he didn’t know the difference between vermouth and vodka. When he gave up looking for my mother at the side of the road, he looked for her in the shadows, in places she would never have gone. He must have thought she was only hiding. And strangely, looking for my mother, he found work, something none of us expected. But he also found Roxanne. Autumn, and everything was falling.
I knew Roxanne, because her son, Jake, was in my English class. He was a football player. I sat behind him and stared at the bristly hairs of his military cut, the only marker of where his head ended and his neck began. When there were football games after school, Becca insisted that I sit with her on the rickety bleachers instead of going to Boo’s. She promised that football, cold autumn sunshine, and hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups were somehow critical to our survival at Quimby High. But more often than not we wound up sitting with the football players’ mothers, a high-strung and husky-voiced lot who patrolled the bleachers like angry bees. The Quimby girls circled the track on the periphery of the football field, their movements as choreographed as the players. Becca and I had not yet learned this dance, so we sat with the football moms.
Roxanne was the queen bee. Her hair was the swirled colors of vanilla and caramel ice cream, but she smelled like booze and cigarettes. She kept a flask inside her bright blue parka vest, sipping at it seductively between drags. She winked at me once; I never trusted her. Her eyes were set far apart, and her face looked like an old glove. Jake had the same wide-set eyes, giving him the look of an overgrown infant, or an alien. In English class, I studied the back of his neck. Flaky patches of dandruff made snow on his shoulders. He wore sweaters without T-shirts underneath, and their ribbed collars were stretched taut, synthetic fibers threatening to tear or to strangle. I felt sorry for him then. He didn’t know his mother was sleeping with my father.
If autumn here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the autumn when my father met Roxanne: neon red turned upside down inside the green glass of a beer bottle. Sunlight catching dust, making triangles in the air and on the wooden dance floor of the Lodge, where Roxanne got drunk while Daddy poured liquid sunlight into chipped pint glasses. And later, dawn through ruffled curtains hanging over her bed, when he realized he’d forgotten to come home again.
At night, when it was just me and Quinn, we watched TV, eating from cardboard boxes he brought home from the Shop-N-Save’s deli. I can still taste the pasty dough of batter-dipped chicken swimming in bright pink duck sauce. Potato salad with too much mayonnaise. Later, he would disappear into his room and shut the door. I don’t know what he did in there, but he did it in silence. Not even the sound of the radio escaped. He came out to use the bathroom and then to get a snack, rubbing his knuckles gently across the top of my head on his way to the kitchen, where he would pour a glass of milk and take three Fig Newtons from the package on top of the fridge. “Night, Piper,” he’d say, and disappear again.
I could have been alone in the house on the nights when Daddy didn’t come home. But I’d pretend I’d been sent to my room to study, and would stay up staring at my open textbooks until the air turned cold and almost blue, then fall asleep with the light on.
One Friday night in late autumn when the trees were already bare and the windows were covered with frost, Roxanne came home with Daddy. Through my bedroom window I could see the outline of her sharp shoulders and pointed profile. She’d given him a ride. I figured his truck must have died in town; it was probably sitting in the dirt parking lot outside the Lodge. I stayed in my room when Daddy opened the door and ushered her inside. I feigned sleep when he called out my name.
I pretended that her raspy voice was only the sound of rotten leaves covering the road. Ice in their glasses became the sound of bells, their breathing only wind. But her laughter inevitably exploded into the rumble of a smoker’s cough, her insides rattling, and I listened to the unmistakable sound of Daddy cooing at her. To the sound of her fingers touching Daddy’s collar, chest, beard. I strained to hear their bare feet move down the hall into my mother’s room. But then I heard the front door creak open and the sounds of leaving.
Tears welled up in my eyes, hot and certain, at her departure. I should have known that Daddy couldn’t replace my mother just like that. I should have trusted that he would always love her. He would send Roxanne back to where he had found her.
In the morning, I woke up tangled in my sheets. Outside the sun was bright and cold. Winter was only moments away. I pulled on the brown sweater I’d most recently brought home from Boo’s, my thumb getting stuck in a mothhole near the cuff. I pushed harder, un
til it ripped, until my thumb was sticking all the way through. I left my jammie bottoms on and pulled on a pair of wool socks.
Quinn was at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal, making a fist around his spoon. I sat down across from him, listening for the sounds of Daddy’s shower.
“You workin’ today?” I asked.
Quinn looked up from his cereal and shook his head.
“Feels like snow.” I nodded. Quinn was on the ski team at school. He was always happiest in winter.
“He left with her, you know,” he said.
“What?” I asked, picking up the cereal box, staring at the nutrition label on the side, looking for an explanation that might appear there. Sugar, calcium, saturated fat. But I already knew.
Daddy and Roxanne were both gone, along with all of Daddy’s clothes I had washed and folded and set on top of the dryer. Along with his razor and toothbrush and his deodorant. Along with his winter boots, even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground yet.
Hope. This is my mother’s true and cruel legacy. When I was a child, I hoped she would come back. At thirty, I only hope that I will live. And live and live. This is my inheritance. My endowment, my trust. A handful of sand and broken glass.
When the doctors confirmed what I already knew, I hoped. I listened to their statistics in their cold waiting rooms as my nipples hardened against the rough blue paper dresses. I looked at the charts and diagrams and grim smiles and hoped. We scheduled the surgery and, later, my treatments. I bought beautiful scarves, drank liquid vegetables and fruits. I vomited and imagined cancer nothing more than stomach bile, acidic and expendable. And I hoped.
Even though I’ve stopped going to the hospital for treatments, Becca still brings home articles she prints off the Internet about experimental procedures, about women who have prevailed despite the illness that has battered them. Each story of success and the accompanying picture of the face that belongs to the body inspires a strange desire. Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer. But while hope is elusive, desire is something I can understand. I have wanted and wanted and wanted. I can’t even count all of the things I have wanted. To have. To do. To be. It’s like the familiar longing for a lover; it resides in my heart and in my body. I want to be well again.
Hope has become the same as sunlight. Some days it is warm on my shoulders and back. Some days it’s just gone. It doesn’t worry me, it’s just missing. I know you can no easier lose hope than you can lose sunlight. There is never any doubt hope will return. But I am waiting. There have been too many cloudy days lately.
I’ve started misplacing things and finding them later. Small surprises. Yesterday, I found a pair of scissors in the refrigerator. This morning I found a pincushion under my pillow. It’s making work difficult. I work at home, sewing wedding dresses and prom dresses, making costumes and mending holes. At least the sewing machine is too heavy for me to absentmindedly pick up and move.
I am making a wedding dress for a twenty-nine-year-old widow. Her first husband died of meningitis three weeks after their wedding. It came on suddenly: a fever, then blindness, and then she was alone in a brand-new house with a pile of wedding gifts waiting to be unwrapped. I didn’t ask, but she offered this story to me, almost as if she were sorry. As if she had to explain falling in love again.
She wants a dress that makes her look like Juliet. I went to Boston and bought ten yards of silk chiffon, embroidered with golden thread. When I showed her the bolt, she unrolled it on my living room floor, careful to blow away the dust bunnies before she smoothed her hand across the fabric. And after she had rolled it back up, she held the fabric to her face and started to cry.
“Don’t think I’m terrible,” she said softly.
“I don’t,” I said.
When someone dies, there always has to be someone left behind. She doesn’t know that I am studying her, that she is teaching me the gestures of survivors.
I stopped working when I first got sick, entertaining romantic notions of dying, mostly that it would be my primary obligation. I thought the world as I knew it would stop for me now that I was sick. But dying isn’t the way I imagined it. Credit card companies still want their minimum payments; landlords still want their rent. So my hiatus was short-lived, and I am glad now for the distraction that sewing provides. But even when my hands are busy, my mind is still free. It wanders farther than it used to. I suppose that’s why today I found my tape measure wound around Bog’s dog dish and the iron propping up a row of books on my mantel.
Sometimes I worry about the other things I stand to lose. My faith, my temper, my way. I have lost weight. My hair. Great portions of my breasts. But unlike my scissors and pins, they don’t seem to be coming back. I know that other things will go unless I get better, there is still plenty to lose.
He lost his child. Felicity. He was reluctant to tell me how. It wasn’t as easy as describing the peace in his wife’s face or the way the lights reflected off her seatbelt buckle and the broken windshield, blinding him. Felicity, happiness. I still wonder if he was just trying to tell me that after his wife was dead, he lost his happiness.
Becca, who has reappeared after all these years (an auburn-haired angel from some other time), assures me that I have held on to the most important things. Dignity. My sense of humor. And, most important, my voice. She knows, as I know, because she was there when I found it, that if I were ever to lose it again, I would have to let go. That losing my voice would mean losing hope.
My mother said that I always sang myself to sleep, so there was never any need for lullabies. I know now she told me this to make me believe I could take care of myself. To prepare me for her departure.
She said I began humming Brahms’s Lullaby as an infant, and that later the music became unidentifiable, my own and strange. She said it was terrifying, holding on to me as I sang myself to sleep. I don’t remember singing, but I do remember her arms.
Sometimes I still sing without realizing it. Singing is as unconscious to me as breathing or swallowing or blinking my eyes. Trying to control it is like holding my breath.
After my mother left, I became quiet. For a little while, I thought that maybe she had taken my voice with her, along with the good Phillips-head screwdriver and her only pair of heels. But I must have known she wouldn’t take that away from me, no more than she would take my lungs, my tongue, or my eyes.
This is the way it feels when I sing: colors and then nothing but breath. The color I see is one she kept in a bottom drawer of her cabinet of glass. Holiday. It was the only color she ever made up. When I asked, she pulled a record from the sleeve and touched the vinyl in small, gentle circles. She made me close my eyes and listen. The color I saw then, the color the woman’s voice made, was the same one I felt when I sang. Funny, my mother never found any glass to put inside that drawer. She said the glass would have to be the color of sorrow, and where could you find that?
It was because of Becca. We don’t talk about it now, but I’m certain that she remembers. Becca was the one who convinced me to go to the high school auditorium with her after school that day.
“Please?” she whispered as we stood outside the auditorium doors. “Wouldn’t it be fun?” But I knew what she was really thinking. I knew she believed that inside costumes we might be able to become something other than the Pond kids we were. Becca became an actress out of necessity.
We stood there for several minutes, staring at the mimeographed audition announcement, until finally her face fell, and she shrugged. “Forget it. It was a stupid idea anyway.”
“It’s not stupid,” I said. “But why do you need me to do it too?”
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said softly. Her brown eyes were wide and scared. I knew she wouldn’t go without me.
“All right,” I said, acting more irritated than I actually was.
It was Becca who convinced me. To stand alone on the stage while the Quimby girls sat snic
kering in the dimly lit aisles below me. Convinced me to close my eyes and share the voice I’d been swallowing since my mother left. I remember the sweater I was wearing, an oversized man’s cardigan with chipped wooden buttons and stained cuffs. I remember how cold it was, and the way I let the sleeves cover my hands. I already knew the words to the song. I’d seen the movie a thousand times, so I didn’t need sheet music. I remember the plunk, plunk of Mrs. Jasper’s piano in the wings and the smell of mothballs lingering in my hand-me-down sweater. I also remember the hush that fell like snow when I closed my eyes and opened my mouth and allowed the color of sorrow to escape.
Afterward, I blushed and rushed off the stage, sinking into the chair next to Becca, who was smiling. She squeezed my hand and then went up when her name was called.
After a thousand renditions of “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” Mrs. Jasper stood up from her piano, shielded her eyes, and peered out into the audience. “That’s everybody, Mr. Hammer,” she said.
“Okay,” a voice answered.
“Who’s that?” I whispered to Becca.
“Tenth-grade English,” she said. “He’s going to direct the show.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If Mr. Hammer calls out your name, please come up to the stage,” Mrs. Jasper said.
From the back of the auditorium, Mr. Hammer coughed and then started to read off names. I was nervous despite myself. Suddenly, I wanted this more than anything in the entire world. “Lucy Applebee. Peter Kauffman. Rebecca O’Leary.” Becca squeezed my hand hard and fast and then scurried quickly up onto the stage. “Steve Gauthier. Melissa Ball. Krista Monroe, and Howie Kramer.” My heart sank. And then he said softly, “Piper Kincaid.” I stood up, crossed my arms self-consciously, and walked up the stairs onto the stage.
Mrs. Jasper shuffled us around like mannequins, according to our height. I was the tallest girl. Becca was the shortest.