“What?”
“He treats me well.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s the world’s most revolting statement, don’t you think? It’s what every woman says about her boyfriend, as if they can’t hope for more. It’s mercenary, too, because what a woman usually means when she says a man treats her well is that he takes her out to nice restaurants and buys her expensive gifts.”
“Is that what you mean?”
Olivia tapped her knife against the plate, and the ping reverberated through the apartment. “It gets hard after a while not having money. It isn’t romantic anymore.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Mia had married rich, Olivia liked to say, and when Mia claimed that that hadn’t been her intention, Olivia said that was precisely her point; it was another example of Mia’s good luck.
Olivia poked at the blueberries on her plate. “I was surprised when you called today,” she said. “I wondered what the reason was.”
“Does there have to be a reason?” Mia lived only a few miles from Olivia, yet she could go for weeks without seeing her. “You can stop by whenever you want to,” Olivia always said, and Mia said the same thing. But Olivia never stopped by. When they saw each other, Mia initiated, and whenever Mia called, Olivia assumed it was with a purpose.
“Olivia, do you know about the Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer gene?”
“It sounds vaguely familiar.”
“There are two genes, actually, and if you have one of them you have a better than eighty percent chance of developing breast cancer and a fifty percent chance of developing ovarian cancer.”
Olivia nodded noncommittally.
“I thought you might mention it to your gynecologist.” Through the front door, Mia could hear a cat meowing, the sound of paws moving down stairs.
“I don’t have a gynecologist,” Olivia said.
“You don’t?”
“I was seeing someone for a while, but he retired, and I haven’t gotten around to finding someone new.”
“You really should.”
“Mia…”
Long before their mother had died, Mia had acted like a second mother to Olivia; now that their mother was gone, she was even more that way. Mia thought of her mother’s words in the hospital. “Swear to me you’ll take care of Olivia.” Olivia didn’t like it when she acted this way, and neither did Mia, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m thinking of testing for the gene.”
“Why? You don’t know Mom had it.”
“But she might have. Or Dad might have it. A father can pass it down, too.”
Slowly the information seemed to settle on Olivia, and she appeared agitated. She turned on the TV and flipped through the channels.
“Please, Ol, listen to me.”
Olivia turned off the TV. Sitting on the couch next to Mia, she looked like a child again, retreating into herself. “You’re saying you want me to test, too?”
And it occurred to Mia that she did want Olivia to test, that if they tested together it would be less frightening.
In the kitchen, Olivia opened the cabinets, and Mia could see their mother’s old china, each plate protected by a piece of green felt. The artichoke plates were there, too. They looked like an experiment in topography, with a trough at the center in which the artichoke sat, and surrounding it additional troughs for the sauce and leaves. It had been a wedding gift from a graduate school classmate, and it had symbolized to Mia her mother’s squandered career, how she’d sacrificed her ambitions on the altar of the dinner party. As a teenager, out of protest, Mia had refused to eat artichokes, and Olivia, who wasn’t protesting, had never developed a taste for them. Yet the plates were front and center in Olivia’s kitchen, and Mia wanted to ask her for one, though she had no idea what she’d do with a single artichoke plate—probably what Olivia had done with the rest of them, which was leave them in the cabinet unused. There they were, Mia thought, the dishes Olivia mooned over, hoping to serve dinner to Kincaid.
“What if you test positive?” Olivia said.
“Then I’ll have a tough decision. There are drugs I can take that might lower my risk. Or I could get a double mastectomy.”
“Just chop your breasts off?”
“I wouldn’t put it so violently.”
“Well, it is violent, don’t you think? Mia,” Olivia said, her voice softening, “would you really do that to yourself?”
Mia was quiet. She had no idea what she would do.
Outside, on the fire escape, two pigeons had landed. They stood side by side, looking out at Avenue B.
Olivia got up to water the plants. She bent over each pot, then moved on to the next one, and from where Mia sat, it looked as if she were bowing to them.
Olivia put down the watering can. “I just don’t think I can take that test.” She looked up at Mia. “It would be useless information, anyway, because I can’t see myself getting a mastectomy.”
“Even if you had the gene?”
“Tell me something,” Olivia said. “If you had the gene and you got a mastectomy, would Julian stick by you?”
“Of course he would.”
“Because I’m not so sure about Kincaid.”
“You’re saying he’d leave you?”
“I just don’t know.” Olivia started to cry, tears rolling down her face, falling onto her plate next to a mound of leftover cream cheese.
“Olivia, honey.” Mia laid her hand on her sister’s arm, but Olivia swatted it away.
“And if I tested positive and didn’t have the mastectomy, I’d spend the rest of my life worrying. I worry so much already. When’s the next audition? Will I land the part? What if I get injured again? Will Kincaid leave his wife? Will I get married to him? Will I be able to have children?”
“You want children?”
“I might.”
“You never told me that.”
“But how can I even think about children when I’m barely getting by on my own?”
“Well, if you did have children…”
“You’re saying wouldn’t I want to spare them what we went through with Mom?”
Mia nodded. Sitting next to Olivia on the couch, feeling the leg of her sister’s sweatpants brush against her, she said, “If this test had been around twenty years ago, Mom might be alive today. Do you know how old she’d be?”
“Sixty-four.” They always called each other on their mother’s birthday, and now that Mia was living in New York they went out for drinks to commemorate it. Sometimes they didn’t even talk about their mother, but they knew without having to say so why they were there.
“Don’t you think about her, Ol?”
“Only all the time.” Olivia opened her jewelry box and removed a locket. It was a photo of their mother, so small it was hard to make out, but Mia recognized her, unmistakably.
Staring at that photo, Mia thought of her and Julian’s wedding, her mother in a wheelchair at that point, her father pushing her down the aisle. It was the last time the family was together; three weeks later, they would gather for her funeral. “Olivia,” she said, “I found a lump in my breast.”
“You what?”
“But I’m okay,” she said. “It was benign.”
“Jesus, Mia, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Imagine how much I scared myself.”
Olivia was sucking on her arm, and Mia recalled Olivia as an infant crying herself to sleep, how she used to suck on her forearm to comfort herself. And in the morning, when their mother went in, there would be little mouth marks on Olivia’s arms from where she’d been sucking.
“Mia,” she said, “what happened between us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when I was small and you would guard my room against intruders? You didn’t even want to let Mom and Dad in. You told me you were my real mother and Mom and Dad were just the hired help.”
Mia laughed.
“I was
crazy about you,” Olivia said. “What little girl doesn’t worship her big sister? But then you went off to college and left me with Mom and Dad. I don’t think I ever forgave you for not going to McGill.”
“Oh, Olivia.”
“I thought of calling you at school, but what was I going to say? ‘How are your classes going?’ I wasn’t interested in my own classes, let alone in yours. ‘Have you met any boys?’ Well, you’d met Julian and that was that, and I wasn’t going to ask about your sex life.”
“You could have.”
“I was fourteen, fifteen, going through my sullen period…”
Mia remembered. She had come home with Julian one vacation and found Olivia holed up in her bedroom with a “Witness Protection Program” sign on the door. For a week, Olivia refused to talk to anyone in the family. One night, she showed up at dinner with a towel covering her head and the words “Ignore Me” taped over the towel.
“Then Mom got sick, and she and Dad were so preoccupied I could have disappeared for a month and they wouldn’t have noticed. I thought it would be easier once Mom died, but it was worse afterward. It was just me and Dad, and we never got along.”
“He was hard on you growing up.”
Olivia shrugged. “He was all right.”
“Herr Doktor Professor,” Mia said. It was what they used to call their father, a man who wore no necktie to work, who hoped that if he dressed informally his students would find him approachable. But it hadn’t worked. His students were intimidated by him, and in a way his daughters had been intimidated, too, even Mia, on whom the burden of his expectations fell. Even now, she thought, he still hadn’t gotten over the fact that she hadn’t gone into physics. Psychology, with its fuzzy intricacies, its emotions blooming like mold, was too soft for him. Everything she was doing that wasn’t what he was doing, he’d assumed was simply a phase. She recalled those nights at the Montreal Forum, how he liked to list the Canadiens hockey players they were watching, Guy Lafleur and Jacques Lemaire and Guy Lapointe and Ken Dryden. Then he would move back in time to the Canadiens of the sixties and fifties and earlier, from Serge Savard and Jean Béliveau to Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, and when he said Richard’s name he would whistle like a rocket.
“You should have seen what he was like after Mom died,” Olivia said. “It was my last year of high school, and I thought if I didn’t come home and make dinner for him, he’d starve himself.”
“And I was in Northington,” Mia said. Not that she hadn’t been mourning, too. But she was miles away, having started her marriage, and Olivia was home, taking care of him. “I should have come back more often.”
Olivia shook her head. “You came back plenty. Certainly more than I would have.” She looked up.
“What?”
“Remember how when you were moving to New York the plan was for you to stay with me?”
“I was looking forward to that.”
“I was, too. And even once things worked out between you and Julian, I thought we’d spend more time together.”
“Why didn’t we?”
“I wish I knew. Your door has always been open to me.”
“Your door’s been open to me, too, Ol. Look at me. I’m here.”
“But you’re the one who’s made the effort. It’s like it’s enough for me to know that I can see you anytime. And now you tell me you had a lump in your breast, and it makes me realize we’re going to die someday and I don’t want to die not having been close to you.”
“We can still try.”
“I don’t know…”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to be close to you, Mia, but I’ve wanted to be close to you for so long and I haven’t been able to do it.” Olivia removed a Popsicle from the freezer and took a bite of it. It was cherry flavored, and a red smudge bloomed beneath her nose, as if she’d misapplied her lipstick.
Picking at the blueberries on her plate, Mia thought of their mother, the fruit czar, who years ago, when they were small, used to count the berries she gave them. She was a stickler for impartiality, and she wanted to make sure the girls got the same amount. Though Mia, five years older than Olivia, would sneak extra berries when her sister wasn’t looking. And years after that, she would sneak them back in the other direction, like someone paying off an unacknowledged debt. She put on her jacket.
“You have to go?”
She nodded.
“Here,” Olivia said, removing another Popsicle from the freezer. “Take one for the road.”
She unwrapped it.
“Red Dye Number Two,” Olivia said. “Remember how Mom wouldn’t let us eat that? No maraschino cherries? They caused cancer.”
Mia smiled dolorously.
She walked up Fifth Street, and when she turned around she could see Olivia’s fire escape. When she first went to school, her mother would stand at the window holding Olivia and they would wave at her as she departed. And years later, when she left for Graymont, they’d been waving, too. When she pictured her family, what she thought of was leave-takings, and here was another one; she’d never been good at saying goodbye.
When she got home, she made an appointment with the genetics counselor. And the following week, accompanied by Julian, she went to the hospital to have her blood drawn.
When the results came back, she was required to retrieve them in person. She sat beside Julian in the same waiting room they’d sat in three weeks before, and the geneticist emerged to greet them.
“Have a seat,” the woman said.
Mia sat in the chair facing the geneticist’s desk, and Julian stood behind her.
The geneticist looked down at Mia’s file. “I wish the news were better. You tested positive for BRCA1.”
“I have the breast cancer gene?”
The geneticist nodded.
“There must be a mistake.” She had tested to rule out the gene, not to have it.
The geneticist, shaking her head, regarded her kindly. “These tests are extremely accurate.”
“How accurate?”
“They’re practically foolproof.”
Julian took her hand.
“What you need to remember,” the geneticist said, “is that this doesn’t mean you’re going to get breast or ovarian cancer. Every person is different, and there’s still a lot we don’t know.”
So this was why they told you in person. Because in Mia’s case there was so much more to talk about, more geneticists, more doctors, more experts to consult. But she didn’t want to talk to any of them right now; the only person she wanted to be with was Julian.
She must have stayed at the hospital for another hour, taking down phone numbers, getting referrals. But later she would recall none of it. The only thing she would remember was embracing Julian, and afterward the walk home, from the Upper East Side down to Perry Street, five miles, she ventured, but she refused to take a cab. They walked, slowly, cheerlessly, passing thousands of people along the way, but it was as if the streets were desolate, for they didn’t notice anyone as they moved from block to block, making their silent way home.
Northington, Massachusetts
“Julian Wainwright!” a woman shrieked. She took Julian in a hug, but before he could determine who she was, she had extricated herself and was doing her best to catch up with her friend, who was running down Rigby Hill in stiletto heels, her pocketbook slamming against her.
“Who was that?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know.”
“She certainly seemed to know you.”
Men in seersucker jackets and women in sundresses dotted the lawn, some with children in tow. A volleyball net had been erected in Allenby Field, and two barefoot couples were swatting a beach ball over it. One of the women was wearing a bikini top with the words “Class of 2000” masking-taped across her spine.
It was June 2005, Julian and Mia’s fifteen-year college reunion.
They hadn’t attended a Graymont reunion before; at their five-year reunio
n they’d been living in Ann Arbor, and at their ten-year reunion they’d been separated. Now they were back together and only a few hours’ drive from Northington—though, in truth, Julian had been surprised when Mia suggested they go, and surprised, too, that he acquiesced so readily. They were getting older, he thought, and more sentimental.
Towels had been folded on the dormitory beds and little mints placed on the pillows, as at a hotel. There was a fan in the room, and Mia turned theirs on high and placed herself in front of it.
Now, having unpacked, they wandered through campus and into town. Megan’s Muffins was gone, as was McNulty’s Cleaners. Northington Paper and Copy was still there, and so was Store 24, but most of the businesses had changed hands, perhaps, Julian thought, several times over.
“Where’s the Bison Bar and Grill?” he asked. It was where he and Carter used to go for cheeseburgers, where Carter and Pilar had gone on their first date.
“It’s a cell phone store.”
“And Burgher’s Burger?”
“Gone, too.”
And where, he wanted to know, was Mr. Kang’s produce store? And Mr. Kang himself? In place of the produce store stood a real estate agency. Mia asked a few passersby what had happened to the Kangs, but no one seemed to know.
“I used to be friends with the Kangs,” she told someone, though really it was Julian who had been friends with them. But she felt as if she had, too, if only vicariously.
At the co-op where they’d lived senior year, they found a group of construction workers patrolling an empty lot.
“Don’t tell me,” Mia said. “You’re putting up condominiums.”
“A bank,” said one of the construction workers. “The students need somewhere to put all their cash.”
They sat down on a park bench; Mia was exhausted. It was fourteen months since she’d found her breast lump, a year since she’d tested positive for the gene. It wasn’t simply that she measured time this way; it was that she couldn’t recall how she used to feel, before everything was fraught with peril. When she’d tested positive, she’d wanted to schedule the surgeries immediately, but Dr. Kaplan told her not to rush. “At least take a few weeks to decide,” she said. “You’re unlikely to come down with cancer in that time.”
Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 26