Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (27 page)

I finally drop my hands. The great Breast Goddess has inspired me. I am ready.

This morning when I look at them, I see two mounds of possibility. At this exact moment, there could be cancer cells climbing their way through my skin and into the very tissue that supports my nipples. I could go to my next mammogram, just as my mother did, and see the dark swirls of evil smiling at me from the X-rays. Everything I have and am could change in a second, this second. This very second.

I move first one hand and then the next around the edge of each breast. My skin moves slightly and I focus on feeling, just feeling, each one. Sides, nipples, round top to rounder bottom. I don't remember them as being quite this large, but today they feel huge. Half of the world rests in one hand and half in the other.

I want my breasts to know that I love them and that I like them very much and I want them to know that I realize breast disease is often hereditary but that it does not have to be. My mother's cysts could become my cysts. Her lump could grow into mine. I promise them that I will guard them and protect them and if I ever get the chance again, I will allow them to become the focus of some wonderful physical pleasure.

I want them to know that I appreciate everything they have ever done for me. Fed my babies, held up my sweaters, in the heat of passion made me feel lovely, pointed toward the next direction every time I turned a corner, connected all my female vessels. Their wonderful duties have been endless.

When I drop my hands after my exam and breast honoring, which I promise to do on a very regular basis, I lift my shirt back around my shoulders, but I do not button the edges. I want my breasts to feel the air and see the light and travel with me back to the spare bedroom, where I will gather my clothes before my early-morning shower.

My mother is in bed this very moment, while I am worshipping my breasts, sleepless, I assume, waiting for her trip to the hospital for the biopsy. I am the driver, the support system, pretty much her everything. Bianna and Elizabeth have both given me chants and spiritual paths and special incense and I have used every single thing they have given me, but this morning I also decide to pray. A Hail Mary flies from my lips, a memorized litany that remains meaningless except for the female connection I feel toward Mary—woman, mother, wife—possessor of breasts—and then as I am leaving in the morning darkness, I whisper, “Please, please, please” to anyone or anything who cares to listen. Then I drive.

My mother is actually cheerful when I pick her up. She is waiting and dressed to kill with her long, leather trench coat, black sandals and her hair—which she still wears to the edge of her shoulders and today is turned up in a rather sexy-looking bun.

“Hey you,” she murmurs as she climbs in and kisses me, touching my arm. “Let's get this over with.”

“No shit,” I say to get us laughing, and I move my hand against the bottom of my right breast in a final salute to my mother's breasts and all the fine breasts of women everywhere, and we are off.

At the hospital, my mother is gracious and kind. I would be crawling on all fours if I could, but I hide my trepidation as we pass through the “Hello, Mrs. Callie”s and the first round of instructions and my mother deciding she wants me in the white-as-snow room to watch the procedure. This was not something I have thought about, but I do not hesitate. The Breast Goddess is smiling on me. In I shall go without hesitation—mostly without hesitation.

While my mother undresses, I file through all the hospital scenes that have filled up my life. Births, my son's bursting appendix, the night my college friend Kaye slammed her car into a bridge and she told the nurse to call me first and the night, which I suddenly remember as if it were yesterday, when my brother Grant flipped his bike into a ditch and a steel rod went through his left leg. When I remember it now, while my mother is prepped for surgery, I see something I would never have seen as a young girl.

My father could not go into the room where my brother was screaming for help. I was sitting on an orange plastic chair that had a scooped-out section for my butt, when I looked up to see my father leaning against the wall, his face white.

“I can't,” I heard him whisper.

“You can't.”

My mother said it to him like a fact, like something she already knew, and not a question.

“I can't,” he repeated, even softer and slower.

My mother went into that room and did not come out for a very long time. When she did, hours later, or a hundred days for a little girl, I saw speckles of blood on her arms and down the sides of her skirt. Her hair had fallen out of its sideways loopy holder and hung in tangled locks around her face. My father was in the car. He sat in our car alone the entire time until my mother brought us out and told him that my brother was in surgery and that she would call when she could.

He never looked at her. They never touched. He told us to get in the car, and we drove off and I rolled down the window, stretched out my hands and said, “Mommie.” Just “Mommie” as she walked back into the hospital alone.

My brother still has a limp from that ill-fated bike accident, and I now have a resurrected memory of my mother as the woman in charge and my father as a stereotypical pay-the-bills man who tricked me into believing that he was strong and tough.

I choose quickly—if I can convince anyone that forty-eight years is quickly. I choose my mother. I choose to be like her, just the way I know her this moment: strong, wise, kind, generous and loving. I choose, and then I take a step into the procedure room, where my mother smiles at me and holds out her hand.

During the days we wait for the results, Tomas calls me twice to see how I am doing. He also tells me that his father saw more than a hint of his Marcia in my eyes and wonders if there is any chance that I will come back to Mexico in the next few months.

I stumble in reply. A few months? I am trying to waltz through the next few minutes, three long seconds, a long afternoon. But I tell him I will try, and Tomas, such a gentleman, tells me he is in a position to come to me if there is anything I need. What I need is a U-Haul and a pickup truck to carry my life in a new direction. But I keep this news to myself. Tomas has already done enough. More than enough.

“I will try,” I tell him again, deciding on the spot to omit the latest news about my mother's breast. “If I can, I will come.”

Tomas accepts my promise, lets me know that the sands are shifting on my beach but that all else remains as it was, and I think that there must be a double meaning in what he is saying. Shifting sands is just a small portion of it all. There's a tornado brewing on the edge of my left shoulder that is about to move to the next limb. The sand, I think, is about to turn itself into dozens of intricate castles that can sit up and speak in foreign tongues.

My mother passes this time doing what she has always done. She gets lost in a few games of bridge, cleans, goes shopping for clothes and trinkets that she will most likely take back to the store the next day, reads cookbooks and decides to take a yoga class.

“Yoga?” I ask her from my office phone as I check in on the third morning in a row to see how she is handling the long breast wait.

“I've tried tai chi and a stretching class but I think yoga will help me put my mind on pause occasionally.”

“Mom,” I say impulsively, “are you okay?”

She pauses and I imagine she is standing by the kitchen sink, where she can look out through the side window and across her driveway lined with her beloved yellow flowers.

“I'm terrified. But I can ride it a little bit so it doesn't run over me.”

“Do you want me to come and stay with you?”

She laughs. “And ruin my glorious solitude?”

“Does this mean you are okay?”

“Terribly okay. I've been doing this for quite a while, sweetheart, and I love every moment of being in my own space.”

“Mom, tell me about Aunt Marcia's foundation.”

She takes in a huge amount of air and tells me she has a stable of steady donors who keep the coffers filled and the clinics open.

“We have a network of volunteers throughout Mexico who help do all the work down there, and there is a board of directors that meets once a year, mostly women and some men, from all over the country.”

“Why didn't you ever talk about it? Were you waiting until I was old enough?”

“Don't be sassy. This isn't my foundation; it's your aunt's. I did what I was told. Depending on what happens with this damn breast, you'll be in charge sooner or later anyway.”

“What?” I have jumped up from my chair and my left hand is moving around as if I am conducting an orchestra.

“Well, who did you think was going to do it? You are perfectly capable; it's not difficult. It's terribly important, and if I can do it, a smart woman with two master's degrees can surely steer the ship.”

“She's probably right,” I think to myself; it's just that the news is a bit startling.

“How much?”

“How much what? You sound like your aunt when you talk like that. I swear to God I had her baby for her and that baby was you.”

“Don't be sassy yourself. Money. How much is in the foundation?”

“Close to a million dollars.”

Jesus.

“Meg, we run clinics and pay for doctors and support women with young children. The money has been invested wisely. The next meeting is in November. You'll find out.”

I don't even consider saying no. When I put the phone down, expecting to have a few moments to still my heart, it rings instantly. It's Jane. She's breathless.

“Can I come over? I'm about to explode.”

“Hurry,” I say, and hang up before she says another word.

Jane. Oh, Jane.

She has been on Meg's Let's Move Forward With Our Life Plan A. I have been fast-tracking her since the night I met her at the bar. She calls it “The Life Emersion Program” or “How Meg and Her Friends Taught Me to Breathe.” It's really nothing more than jump-starting what has been idling for a very long time, but for the first couple of weeks Jane needed heavy deprogramming. Bianna has her chanting.

“I am wise. I am wonderful. I can do anything. I can take care of myself. I am beautiful. I have power over every single thing that happens in my life.”

The chanting has become a nice addition to my life as well, and Jane thinks I have saved her, which is terribly ironic considering I have been swept out to sea myself, but Jane just says, “That's what women do.”

That's what women do, if someone needs help, a shoulder, a place to live—we do it.

Jane's news is wonderful. She has found a job.

“It's something,” she tells me, bouncing from one foot to the next. “It's a start, and I will meet people and keep looking and put the house up for sale and move closer to the city and change my name.”

She is talking so fast, I can barely keep up.

“Change your name? Do you want to be Madonna . . . or _____?”

She laughs, which is a glorious thing to hear. A wide chorus that comes from a place fresh, deep, never before touched.

“My last name. I'm taking back my maiden name. It's a statement. A step. Starting over.”

Jane has talked the managing editor of the community newspaper into a job as a reporter. The pay is less than half of what I make, but Jane, for the first time in twenty-one years, will be doing what she has always wanted to do.

“I'm really brave about this now, but I may throw up the first day and pretty much the entire time I am there.”

“I hear it's like riding a bicycle,” I assure her.

We end back at the café where we met, and I listen to her for three hours. I listen and I watch. It is like seeing someone rise from the dead. Jane is back.

“I think you saved my life,” she tells me, taking my hand.

“You did it.”

“I needed help and you helped me. I'm not done, I know that, and I may slip backward again, but, Meg, I owe you, I thank you . . . I haven't had a friend like you in such a very long time. I love you.”

I tell Jane through my own tears that she has also become a great gift to me and that all the things I have told her have bounced right back into my own arms.

“I needed you too, baby,” I say.