Sleeping Tigers (2 page)

Maybe Dad was right and I was on a downward spiral toward a raggedy, husbandless future. Should I have stayed with Peter? At the very least, I could count on Peter to come home for dinner on time. As an added plus, he always remembered to pick up the dry cleaning.

Over the past three years, our relationship had crossed one commitment threshold after another without stumbling: dating, engagement, then living together, a process that forced us to whittle down our glassware and linens to fit into a single apartment’s built-in shelves.

As Karin saw it, I’d stepped onto a conveyor belt to matrimony, moving along without thinking because it was all so easy, and because I had celebrated my thirtieth birthday in a subdued state of panic three years ago, the month before Peter and I met. She was right. Yet, I already missed elements of my sensible life with Peter. Days with him were calm. Predictable. Sweet. Contented, mostly.

We played Scrabble and chess, held dinner parties, spent weekends exploring Vermont, talked about getting a dog. It was almost as if we’d already put our courtship, wedding, and children behind us, and were now companionable retirees in our golden years. Without Peter, I was afraid that I’d become that quintessential stereotype, the old-maid teacher with chalk on her sweater, ink on her upper lip, and seasonal dangling earrings–bats, candy canes, bunnies–to complement my embroidered holiday sweaters.

To distract myself from this dire thought, I read the labels of Karin’s mind-boggling array of bath oils lining the shelves: Eucalyptus Dream, Peppermint Pep, Calming Camomile. “What about Lascivious Lime?” I yelled at Karin from the bathroom, stripping off my clothes. “Got any of that?”

“Coming right up, Toots!” a man shouted up from the yard below.

I scrunched beneath the window and yanked the shade shut, then ducked into the tub. I settled for two caps full of Peaceful Plum.

“How do you look in red?” Karin popped in, dangling a sleeveless dress the size of a tube sock.

“I’m not wearing that. I’m a respectable elementary school teacher.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to look like one,” Karin scolded. “What were you planning to wear tonight?”

I nodded at my neatly folded khakis and t-shirt, which I’d left on the chair in the bathroom. She wrinkled her nose and plucked the clothes off the chair between two fingers, removing them from the room like a dead rat.

“Hey!”

“Hey, yourself!” she shouted back. “I’ll return these in due time. For God’s sake, Jordan. You dress like a woman on safari studying elephant dung.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Karin reappeared in the bathroom, shaking her head. “The only women in San Francisco who dress the way you do are the ones in the Marina, and they can’t help themselves. Trust me on this one. I’m going to hide all of your clothes until after the party. And promise me you’ll use the condoms I’m putting in the pocket of your outfit.”

“I will not have sex with a stranger!”

“They won’t be strangers. Every single person at this party tonight will be a friend of mine. Did you reach Cam, by the way? Can he come tonight?”

“No. What’s going on with him, anyway? Have you seen him? My parents are frantic.”

Karin shook her head and reminded me that she’d only spoken to Cam once last year, when he got back from India. “He called to see if I knew of any jobs at the hospital, but he never followed through. That’s not surprising, though. I’ve never been Cam’s favorite person. I’m too abrasive for a dreamy pot head like him.”

I piled bubbles up to my chin and let my arms float upward. “Is he still, do you think? A pot head?”

“Who knows? So many people are on Klonapin or Zoloft these days, I don’t think nearly as many need to smoke dope.” Karin left the room again and came back a few minutes later to display a black knit jumpsuit for my inspection. “How about this? Very chic! Very retro!”

“Very Catwoman. Very not me.”

“Well, you’d have to wear a body shaper to smooth out the profile,” she admitted.

“Forget it. I enjoy my oxygen too much.”

Karin sat on the toilet and arched her back, her thick black hair moving like an animal curling along her shoulders. She had on tight jeans and a black tank top. Suddenly, I felt self-conscious and vulnerable in front of her, sitting naked in her tub. My own hair was the pale brown of underdone toast and hung below my shoulders, its bushy tendencies tamed only by headbands. Soon my face would sag beneath the weight of all this hair, like an ornament hung on a Christmas tree branch too scrawny to support it.

I was taller and thinner than Karin, but curvier, too. My breasts bobbed about in the water like a pair of tennis balls and it was all I could do not to cover the left one, the breast that still bore the scar of my surgery six months before. I’d gone in for a routine mammogram that turned out to be anything but. The radiologist had outlined little white flecks on the film, raising his eyebrows in a way that made me think I might be in for something.

I was: the white flecks were actually calcifications clustered in a pattern around a small tumor, he’d said. “Maybe benign, maybe not.”

Two weeks later, I was in the mammography room again, having what the radiologist breezily called “a needle loc” in preparation for a biopsy. This procedure made me feel like a radio-controlled car, with a long wire shot straight through the side of my breast and technicians controlling my every move.

The mammography staff, perhaps determined to take my mind off the wire, explained the hazards of their profession, like the time one of them flicked the switch to squeeze the mammography machine’s plates shut, and accidentally trapped the head of another technician between the plates instead of the patient’s breast. Meanwhile, the two women opened and closed the metal plates against my breast, flattening it up and down, side to side, working the machine like some sort of exotic sandwich-maker.

Afterward, one technician patted my arm. “There, now. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked.

“Only when I imagined kissing my breast goodbye,” I replied, just to see her wince.

There followed the biopsy, more waiting, and then the diagnosis–yes, breast cancer; no, it hadn’t spread outside of the tiny pinpoints of light in the milk ducts–and surgery. Then more waiting for the results of the lumpectomy. Five interminable days later, the call had come.

“We got it all,” the surgeon crowed over the phone. “Clear margins all around!” No need for radiation or chemo, he said, going on to pronounce me “cured” before hastily adding, “Well, not that there’s really any such thing as a 100 percent cure, is there? With cancer, we can only say 99 percent. Still, pop the champagne while you can.”

That one episode had lasted just a few short months of my life, yet I had gone from 0 to 60 mph during that time, looping through the entire Rocky Mountains of my emotions. Of course I was terrified of dying. At the same time, I felt newly awake: things that had mattered so much to me before—PTO meetings, fund raising for the school science trip—shrank to gnat-like proportions, while things I hadn’t thought about in ages—like my brother, and why he’d dropped off the family radar screen—suddenly seemed vitally, achingly important. I felt relieved to be in the clear, yet oddly guilty about dodging the breast cancer bullet this time, while others in more difficult circumstances—a neighbor down the street with three young kids, for instance—hadn’t been able to beat it.

Now, scarcely six months later, there was nothing left to show for my experience on the outside but this ugly scar: a raised line half as long as my palm and still red, like a dogwood branch laid against the side of my left breast. Inside, however, I felt that I might never be the same.

When it was all over, Peter wouldn’t touch that breast at all. He simply treated me as if I were the one-breasted woman we were both afraid I’d become. What had prompted me to leave Peter in the end wasn’t boredom or the fact that he wasn’t as interested in me physically, but the idea that, if he couldn’t handle this kind of scare, what would happen to us if the breast cancer returned and a surgeon couldn’t tell me to pop the champagne?

I explained this to Peter as I broke off our engagement. He accepted the ring I returned with a curt nod, no argument. He was probably relieved.

I had told Karin all of this through weekly phone calls coast-to-coast. Her response was as pragmatic as I had expected—one reason I loved Karin was that she always, always told the truth, as boldly as possible.

“I understand that you’re upset, but really, Jordy, did you think you’d be the one person in the whole world who never got cancer?” she had asked. “Don’t you dare wallow! The surgeon says you’re clean, which is as good as medicine gets. It’s a lesson in mortality, sure, but use it to toss the dead-wood and get on with your life.”

I knew that, by “deadwood,” Karin was referring to Peter. I also knew that Karin was busy with a single woman’s preoccupations, just as I had been before. Love, work, and everything else in Karin’s future still stretched before her like a straight, smooth highway.

Despite being my best friend, Karin had yet to realize what I now knew: each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can’t predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws. Having to face the tiger’s presence inside myself was what made me finally leave Peter. It was also what drove me to seek out Cam and Karin: I felt an intense need to reconnect with what little family I had, and to live a bold, truthful life that went beyond the carefully orchestrated domestic existence I’d shared with Peter.

Karin was still talking about Cam. As far as she remembered from their last conversation, my little brother was working a part-time job in Berkeley and sharing a house with a group of people she’d never met.

“Cam always was different,” she said, reaching into the medicine chest for a pair of tweezers. “He’s nothing like my three brothers, all gung ho about sports and money.”

It was true. Cameron was the family dreamer and video gamer, while I carried the itchy mantle of Responsible Oldest Child. Cam had earned better grades than I did in college, but he dropped out senior year to travel and work odd jobs.

Meanwhile, I went on for my master’s degree and found a job, preparing to marry, provide grandchildren, and show up for Sunday dinners. Eventually, I would be called upon to puree my parents’ dinner in a blender and push their wheelchairs around the block. I didn’t resent Cam, exactly; I only wondered why he’d turned out one way, while I was another.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! Stop thinking! Leave yourself alone!
I commanded, and sank into the bath water until I wore a crown of bubbles in my hair.

Karin made me leave her apartment an hour before the party. “Take a walk or grab a coffee. You can’t be both the guest of honor and the first arrival.”

“I’m not just the honored guest,” I reminded her. “I’m also the cleaning crew and caterer.” Still, I humored her and left the apartment, aimlessly wading into the inky purple night. I wore the outfit Karin had loaned me–tight black leather pants, high black leather boots, a turquoise leotard top, and beads that clacked against my breast bone–only because she had hidden my suitcase.

I followed Dolores to 24th and then turned left into Noe Valley, where I was soon mingling with the wine bar crowd. The feathery tops of the palm trees were etched black against the sky. A few lights glimmered in the houses, and I saw a woman moving about in her second-floor kitchen. A man read his newspaper by kerosene lantern on the rooftop garden just to the left of her.

From Noe Valley, I continued up a hill so steep that it made my calves ache, then descended into the Castro, where the gay bars were buzzing and the windows were flung open to the night. The sight of so many beautiful men snuggled together on the benches in one ferny bar sent me into a deep gloom.

What was I doing here, walking alone in someone else’s ill-fitting clothes, with only a plastic tourist map for comfort? I wondered where Cam was, and fervently wished that my brother would miraculously appear to save me from showing up solo at the party. I checked my text messages again, but still nothing.

I stopped to catch my breath in front of a diner surrounded by drag queens in fantastic wigs, long eyelashes, and short skirts. Their horsey muscular legs tapped impatiently on the sidewalk as they waited in line on the sidewalk for dinner booths. No doubt about it, they had more fashion sense than I did. Better make-up, too. And where did they get earrings that size?