Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 5

There wasn’t a mammogram tomorrow. Tuesday night Norma Holloway, who worked in X-ray, called to say that the technician was sick and the appointment had to be canceled. Joan was frantic. Angry. Betrayed.

“You cannot cancel this, Norma. I can’t have this canceled. I must have it.” Norma was a neighbor. They had been friends for years. She felt her anger build, knowing as it built that it wasn’t Norma’s fault. She was just the messenger. And even in her desperation she was evasive. She still wanted her lump a secret. So she wouldn’t speak of her lump. “I have been led to believe that a mammogram is imperative.”

“Joan, what can I do? The technician won’t be in.”

Joan hung up and called Barry’s office. She is close to tears. The closest so far. She is betrayed. Gee, I’m really being a good kid. I’m doing it all. I’m keeping it to myself. I’m going through with the job and the speech and, goddamn, Norma calls me up and says it’s canceled. Is the technician sick as I am? How sick can she be?

She is teary on the phone with Barry’s office. The secretary is kind and prompt. “I’m sure we can get you another appointment,” she said. “Let me call and I’ll call you right back.” She did call right back. The appointment was Thursday; Joan would have the first appointment.

In a way it was good. Now Wednesday would be free and she could have her company and deal with Ace’s speech and all without complication. One more day. You could always do one more day. You could always get through one more day.

Wednesday, April 16

They got the boys off to school. And were in the kitchen drinking coffee when she told him that her doctor appointment had been postponed. She’d warned him that she would have to go for another cauterization of her vaginal bleeding today, and now she said it would be tomorrow. “Nothing serious,” she said.

He was leaning on the counter and she was sitting on one of the stools and he shook his head.

“What’s going on?” he said. “There’s too much hustling around to the doctor and too many little tests and too much oh-nothing-serious. What’s wrong with you?”

She said, “Just some breakthrough bleeding, like I told you.”

And he said, “No. There’s something more. We’ve been together too long for me not to know something’s up. Don’t bullshit me. It’s always better to know than not to know.”

Jesus, she thought, he thinks I’m walking around with vaginal cancer. He’s got the look. It’s now. Speech or no speech. I’m going to have to tell him. Later, looking back, she wondered why the speech had loomed so large. She felt so strongly that he should have serenity and stability before making it. Yet she realized now, it didn’t mean that much to him. She just thought it did. Things had different proportions for her that spring. The opportunity to fulfill responsibilities seemed to be somehow a stay against dissolution. For her to function, there had to be something that mattered other than the lump in her breast. Other things had to be important, so she could do them, otherwise the lump would consume her. But that she understood later. Then, in the kitchen, she knew only that the speech was vital, but that she had to tell him.

And she said, “Listen, I’m going to level with you. I do have a problem. It’s a lump in the left breast and they have to x-ray it to find out what it is. And I hope it’s not malignant.”

And he said, “The odds are pretty good, aren’t they?”

And she said, “Yes. They are pretty good. My mother didn’t have breast cancer and neither did my sister or my aunts. It doesn’t run in the family and that makes the odds better. And I’m not menopausal. That helps the odds.”

He didn’t seem too shaken. In fact, she thought, he looks a little relieved to know the truth.

And he thought: Lots of people survive breast surgery. Look at Happy Rockefeller. Look at Betty Ford. If she’s got it, it doesn’t mean shell die.

He said, “Everyone assumes if they have something it’s the worst. It’s not that it’s so likely, it’s that it would be so terrible. I do too. But that doesn’t mean it is the worst. It’s just as irrational to assume it’s cancer as to assume it isn’t. All you have are odds, and the odds are good.” He knew he was saying the truth, but the part of him that didn’t care about knowing, that part felt numb. ‘Rose, thou art sick,’ he thought. ‘The invisible worm that flies in the night.’ But he hung on to the numbness. It forestalled panic, and there was in him a consciousness of that and a deliberate commitment to the numbness. At least for now.

She said, “I know that. I’m handling it. I’m all right.”

And he patted her on the backside, as he did perhaps fifty times a day. It was a gesture characteristic of their relationship, equal parts camaraderie and love. She went to make the beds. He went to the package store for beer and wine. There would be people back after the speech and they’d drink.

The day organized them and carried them along. The speech at a local restaurant went well. The ladies were responsive, and the ham in him rose to their response. He enjoyed himself, getting laughter mixed with nervous ohhh’s, as he made insulting remarks about his wife. “Life has no narrator,” he said, “unless perhaps you’re married to Joan Parker,” and he looked over amid the laughter and saw her face bright and animated and thought about the lump. She was smoking, although she’d quit for more than a year. He knew why.

I can smoke a couple of cigarettes, she thought. You’re allowed a couple in this kind of trauma.

“It comes at you random,” he was saying, “haphazard. And the writer’s job is to take the random happenstance and order.”

It’s good, she thought. It’s damn good. Am I sitting here listening to it with breast cancer? Is it possible I have cancer? Cancer. Cancer. Impossible. People with cancer are sick. Really sick. She remembered her father who died of prostate cancer when she was nineteen. The circles under the eyes, the dry heaves. The skin-and-bones body. That’s what cancer is. Look at me. I’m Harriet Health for crissake. How can I have cancer?

As she thought this she heard the speech and watched the ladies respond and felt good for him and was struck as she had been and as she would be so frequently that spring by the capacity to separate out the things that frightened her and the things that pleased her and to respond simultaneously to both.

The speech ended and they went back and sat in the sun-flooded family room and drank some beer and wine and had a good time. Later in the afternoon Joan and Eileen went shopping. Bill and Ace stayed with the beer.

As they shopped Joan went through the fantasy of telling Eileen. My friend Eileen. I will say, ‘Hey listen, Eileen, I have something to tell you. I have a lump in my breast’... Eileen is not ready to hear this. She has to shop. She’s busy. What does she need from breast cancer? She’ll have to dredge up the proper feelings and respond the proper way. She’ll have to say, ‘I’ll help you through this. I’ll stay by your side.’ They are in Marshall’s and Eileen is trying on clothes. Joan looked in the mirror and thought, maybe Jude, maybe I should tell her. That was even more enticing. Jude is a nurse. Maybe she knows something. Maybe she can tell by looking. Maybe she has a magic way. Eileen comes out of the dressing room with a denim jacket.

“What do you think?” she said and turned slowly.

“Too big,” Joan said. “It’s nice but it’s too big.”

I can’t tell Jude. I don’t want John to know. I don’t want any males to know. Especially I don’t want any men to know. Don’t think about it. Wait for the mammogram.

The Marshes came for dinner with the Ganems and it was ten-thirty before they were through cleaning up. Joan was exhausted. Ace lay on the living-room floor, talking to Daniel. The phone rang. Joan answered.

“Mrs. Parker, this is Sharon Taylor, in your Child Development Class?”

“Of course, Sharon. How are you?”

“Oh, Mrs. Parker, I’ve got a terrible problem.”

Welcome to the club.