The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (11 page)

She’s just about completed the required admittance forms when she hears, “And how are you this fine morning, Mary Ann? Gettin’ any?”

Tess’s head jerks up. She recognizes the high-pitched voice. On three-inch heels, Babs Hoover has come tottering through the door of the center pushing a metal cart loaded with magazines and various sundries. Tess shrinks into the folds of her puffy red parka, brings the clipboard up to her face, and remains perfectly still so as not to garner any attention. She’s vowed to keep her illness a secret and the last thing she needs this morning is the biggest blabbermouth in all of Ruby Falls noticing her and asking,
What are you doing here? Oh, no! Don’t tell me you have cancer!

Circling her emotional wagons, quick-witted Tess has already come up with a response if Babs
does
come wheeling by. She’ll tell her that she has procured a position at nearby University of Wisconsin’s psychology department and she’s at the Women’s Center to do some research on the effects breast cancer has on one’s sex life. She’s sure the second Babs hears the word
sex
, whatever else she has going on in her brain will be shoved to a back burner. The gal loves to brag about how often she and her husband, Ernie, owner and proprietor of Hoover’s Hardware, do the “tongue and groove.”

Babs chats a bit longer with the pretty receptionist, drops off a few gift items on the desk, and says, “Well, I’m off to labor and delivery.” She wiggles a pint-sized plastic champagne bottle filled with candy. “We have four ladies about to pop their corks. See you next week.”

That big mouth Babs didn’t notice her fills Tess with a relief that’s thick enough to eat. Keeping her potential illness quiet isn’t only about protecting Haddie’s or Henry’s delicate emotional states, she’s also concerned about the family business. True, the diner has been one of the mainstays in town for over sixty years, and she’d like to believe that her sickness wouldn’t affect business, but let’s be honest, no matter how you plate it, cancer does not go well with a Super-Duper Blessing burger, an order of fries, and a chocolate shake. Much too real for customers who love the joint because it allows them to slip into carefree yesteryear without hardly trying. The diner suffering financially? Tess
wouldn’t
let that happen. Not only for the obvious bill-paying reasons, but for the further stress it would put on her marriage. She couldn’t relive those months she and Will had fought so viciously after he borrowed the money to build the diner’s party room. Rationally, she realized it wasn’t his fault that the room took some time to catch on. But with all the hours he worked to make sure that it did, he was barely home. He wasn’t there for her and the kids, and that brought up feelings she had toward the other important person she hadn’t been able to count on—her mother. She threatened numerous times to leave him. (Of course, the both of them knew she wouldn’t. She could never leave anybody.)

“Theresa Blessing?” The nurse who’d come through the double doors is a smart-looking, mid-forties gal with a short, layered haircut, and muscular arms.

“God bless,” I tell her as she gathers her things, but she’s too focused on what she believes to be her gallows walk to let my words sink in. I need to keep an eye on her, but I can’t come on too strong. She’ll get scared and block me out if I do, so I artfully deactualize and follow her.

After the nurse introduces herself as Jill Larkin, Tess asks her to please call her by her nickname on their walk to a conference room where they perch in brown vinyl chairs. She used to have a bit in her stand-up routine about Nauga’s and their hides and she’s about to use the old joke as an icebreaker, but the nurse shuts her down with a curt, “Do you have any questions before I take you back to prepare for the procedure?”

“How big is it?”

Jill peruses the file that’s lying in front of her and says, “1.4 centimeters.”

That could be as small as a penny or as large as a silver dollar. Tess isn’t good with numbers, better with visual aids. She asks, “What makes it
look
like cancer?” She’s been picturing a Hershey’s Kiss that’d been left on the dashboard of her car in August. “I mean, how can you tell that’s what it is as opposed to something else not so bad?”

“The shape,” Jill says. “The edges of the tumor are jagged.”

That’s the first time the T word has been mentioned. It makes Tess think of number eight on her To-Do List. Die.

She’s just about to ask the nurse if she can tell by looking at the tumor how long she has to live when Jill pushes back her chair and says, “If you don’t have any more questions…let me show you where you can change.” She leads a tense Tess down a hall into a sugar and spice and everything nice locker room. Like she’s giving a tour to a potential recruit, the peppy nurse says, “I’m sure you’re aware that pink is the official color of breast cancer.”

The disease got a secret handshake?
Louise snipes.

Jill gestures toward stacks of pink robes and gowns. “When you’re ready, you can take a seat in the waiting room.” She points to an alcove. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

There’re only three of us in the locker room. Tess and me, and an old lady with fly-away white hair who’s in a stage of either dressing or undressing.

Tess says, “Hello,” to the woman who reminds her of an elderly version of Miss Kitty from
Gunsmoke
because she’s got this sort of Wild West look about her, and hurriedly snatches a gown and robe off the pile and slides the dressing room shower curtain shut behind her. She dressed thoughtfully this morning. Beneath the blue crew-neck sweater Will had given her this Christmas, she slipped on one of Henry’s white T-shirts that reeks of the Polo aftershave he’s been dousing himself in. She fingers the mother-of-pearl heart earrings that her daughter had given her on her most recent birthday. As she slips the bra straps off her shoulders, she averts her eyes so she will not see her breasts in the mirror, especially the traitorous right one.

On the other side of the pink curtain, the wrinkly woman is rambling on the way the old do because they’re fully aware that people stopped listening to them eons ago.

“When I was younger,” she hollers, “my cups runneth over!” She snorts. “Now my bellows look like empty saddle bags after a long dusty ride ’cross Kansas.”

Tess is uncertain if the old lady is speaking to herself or to her. Or if she’s speaking at all. Did she imagine that she’d just called her breasts
bellows
?

As the Finley sisters grew older, they found they had little in common with the more-carefree kids in the neighborhood and they gravitated toward a group of girls who swore, filched cigarettes from their older brothers’ packs, and rolled their school uniform skirts up at the waist to show off their knobby knees in an attempt to get a boy to grin a half-crooked smile of shy interest. After their last class at Blessed Children of God School, the six pack of seventh-grade “bad girls” would convene at the neighborhood hangout—Ma’s.

Overflowing bins of malted milk balls and red wax lips (Birdie’s favorite) and BB Bats and gummy raisins and other earthly delights nudged one another aside in the glass cases that sat in what had once been the living room of Mrs. Alvina Malishewski, a first-generation double-wide Pole, who’d had the genius idea to turn the front half of her house into a candy store after her taxi-driving husband was murdered by unknown assailants outside the Greyhound bus station.

The kids would alert Ma she had customers by hollering back into her kitchen, “We need candy!” until she’d come out from between the blue curtains smelling like kielbasa and mumbling “
Cholera
,
cholera
,” damn it…damn it…’cause
Password
was on and she had a crush on Allen Ludden.

The group of girls would dig into their candy on the store steps as they’d talk about the things adolescent girls do.

“Holy cow, Cindy Berlman’s bellows are gettin’ huge. When she pledges allegiance to the flag, her hand is a foot away from the rest of her body,” Tess said one afternoon as she munched on a stick of red licorice.

Gina Maniachi, a pint-sized Lollobrigida, cracked back, “Cindy’s
what
are gettin’ huge?”

Tess was thrilled that she’d finally bested worldly Gina, who just yesterday had explained to the girls that 69 wasn’t only a number that came between 68 and 70, much to all of their disgust. “You know…her
bellows
.” Tess cupped her hands in front of her chest the way the eighth-grade boys did.

Gina mimicked the gesture and began laughing so hard that she swallowed her piece of Dubble-Bubble.

Tess cringed. Had she made another anatomical pronunciation error that Gina would razz her about? Last month, she had inadvertently called a vagina, a “vageena,” because how was she supposed to know they were pronounced differently?

Gina snorted, “They’re not called
bellows
, you
goomba
, they’re called
ninas
,” and she went off in another peel of derisive laughter that made Tess feel not quite as cool as she would have liked. On the other hand, she was thinking, it was pretty dumb that Gina’s bellows were named after one of Christopher Columbus’s ships, but that’s the Wops for you. All of ’em think the world revolves around ’em. “What the hell are
bellows
?”

Tess was too embarrassed to tell Gina that’s what her gammy had taught her and Birdie to call their breasts, so she grabbed her sack of candy, her sister’s hand, and slunk off those candy store steps in a disgrace that the Maniachi girl wouldn’t let her forget about for months.

My friend’s blast from the past is interrupted by the sound of the main locker room door opening, and Jill the nurse saying loudly and affectionately to the elderly woman, “See you tomorrow, Francis. Enjoy the rest of your day,” and then she calls out loudly, and not affectionately at all, “Mrs. Blessing? Tess? We don’t want to keep the doctor waiting, do we?”

A crisply dressed man with a broad forehead and crew cut extends his hand and says as Tess enters the procedure room, “Good morning, Mrs. Blessing. I’m Dr. Fred Bannister. I’ll be performing your biopsy today.”

Jill helps her onto the table, slides a pillow under the left side of her face, and asks if she’s comfortable. Another nurse who identifies herself as Linda says something about mood lighting as she dims the switch on the wall. I’m there too. Tess couldn’t miss me if she wanted to. I’m standing out like a slice of devil’s food cake amidst all the meringue. When I give her a finger wave, she blinks and thinks, Who is that? Oh, it’s the woman who showed me the way to the center and sat next to me in the waiting room. I thought she was another patient.

Dr. Fred leans over Tess and says, “The first thing I’ll do is inject a numbing agent into your breast, then I’ll slide a needle down to the mass and extract some cells.”

She had been managing the worst of the fear so far, but the tide has just taken a turn for the worse.

She tells Dr. Fred with a quivering voice, “The anesthetic doesn’t have any epinephrine in it, does it? I’m not allergic, but I can have ah…very unpleasant reaction to it.” Since she has excessive amounts of adrenaline running through her veins on account of the PTSD, if the doctor injects more, she’ll get so amped up that she’ll become capable of harming one of these nice people if they try to restrain her when she jumps off the table and runs out of the room the way she did at the dentist’s office two months ago.

Jill steps in to intercede. “You must be numbed. The pain would be unmanageable.” She makes a move for her pocket and removes a laminated rectangular strip.

Tess’s eyes dart between the faces and the syringe in the doctor’s hand. How could she put this in a way they’d understand without going into a drawn-out explanation. She has to say something, she doesn’t feel right about not warning them. “You can give me the shot as long as you know that I could turn into a number ten with a twist.”

She clamps her teeth and takes a quick inventory of what’s going on in her mind as the doctor lowers the plunger. When he withdraws the needle, he asks, “Okay?”

Amazed to find that her mind doesn’t feel like the scene of a heinous crime the way she thought it would, she tells him, “So far, so good, but stay on your toes,” because even though she isn’t freaking out right now, she knows from experience that could change in the next breath and she wants to give him a running chance.

Since I’ve moved to the head of the table, Tess can’t see me, which is why she assumes that it’s Jill who’s running a satiny palm across her forehead while she coos reassuring words as Dr. Fred gets to work. He passes the bit of the tumor that he removed to the nurse who had been in charge of the lighting in no time at all. “Linda will run the slide up to pathology,” he tells his patient. “We should have the results by the time you’ve finished dressing.”

When she steps back into the locker room, the old-timey lady, who she thought would’ve been long gone, is leaning into the mirror over the sinks on her tippy toes spreading lipstick the color of an American Beauty over barely-there lips. Tess’s gammy had a fox stole like the one she has draped over her shoulders.