The Wednesday Sisters (28 page)

J
UST AS THE SUN
was lightening the horizon a few Sundays later, with the park still deep in shadow, Kath said, out of nowhere, “The lady’s stepson, her husband’s son? He hauled that poor lonely ol’ widow right into the courtroom.” She was staring off into space, to where it seemed you could almost see the mansion still standing there in the dim morning light, behind the majestic palm. “With her husband, his own father, barely cold in the grave,” she said. “And her daughter barely dead, too. He liked to left her without a penny.”

Linda, sitting next to Kath, put her arm around her and rested her head on Kath’s shoulder. She’d abandoned the braid but still wore the cap, her hair perfectly cut underneath. “Lee’s not going to leave you with nothing, Kath,” she said. “And even if—”

But Kath was already pulling away, shrugging Linda’s friendly head from her shoulder. Linda’s hat shifted. And so did her hair.

Brett said, “Oh,” her small mouth puckering as she stared, startled, at Linda, who was grabbing at her shifted hair as if Kath had wounded her.

Kath, not noticing, looked wounded, too, her face screwing up so that her big chin stuck out bigger, almost as though she wanted someone to take a swing so she could swing back. “You don’t have any idea, Linda!” she said. “You and your perfect relationship with your perfect husband, you don’t—”

She stopped as suddenly as she’d started, and, like the rest of us, stared at Linda still grasping her cap.

“Linda?” Kath said. “Oh, Linda.”

The first hint of sun cut through the branches of the trees lining the east side of the park, subtle red across the eyesore of rocky dirt. It was Linda’s hair under that cap, but it wasn’t. It sat not quite straight on her head.

I saw then how gaunt her face had become, how hard her cheekbones jutted against her skin.

She straightened her cap and her hair together, then crossed her arms in front of her. “It’s from the chemotherapy. It makes you lose your hair sometimes.”

She didn’t cry. She just sat there, a defiant look in her blue-green-purple-gold eyes.

I didn’t cry, either. None of us dared cry.

“So,” she said. “So.”

The lump hadn’t been nothing; she’d lied to us about that.

Yes, she knew she ought to have had it looked at immediately, she ought not to have waited the three weeks until her trip, but she’d found a doctor in New York who wouldn’t make her consent to a one-step, who wouldn’t insist on doing an immediate mastectomy while she was still under anesthesia from the biopsy.

“I couldn’t face that again,” she said. “I did that last time, going under knowing I might come out with . . .” She looked away to the empty playground, to the jungle gym where Anna Page had hung upside down that day all those years ago now, her sandy dress falling over her face. “With no breasts at all,” she said. “With no chest muscles. With arms that might be swollen and achy the rest of my life. And I couldn’t tell Jeff until I knew what we were dealing with. I just couldn’t put him through that again.” Turning to Kath now, her eyes searching. “Every doctor in this whole town knows Jeff. Word would have gotten back to him, you know it would have, Kath.

“I wanted to make the decision myself. I couldn’t imagine leaving it up to some man I’d never met before, who would have no idea what it would feel like to . . .” She swallowed hard. “To lose a breast.”

She’d read the same
McCall’s
piece we’d all read about Shirley Temple Black, who’d refused to consent to a mastectomy before she knew what the biopsy showed:
I wouldn’t have it that way
—that’s what she’d written, and that’s how Linda had felt, too.

“And I couldn’t know for sure what I’d want to do until I knew how bad it was,” Linda said.

She’d read that most doctors thought any woman who had anything less than a radical mastectomy was being unforgivably foolish. Unless they took out the whole breast and the surrounding muscles and lymph nodes, they couldn’t be sure they’d gotten all the cancer. But she’d read, too, about a doctor in Cleveland who thought a lumpectomy—cutting out only the lump and leaving the rest of the breast alone—was as effective as a radical for some women. “More effective, even, because he thinks the lymph nodes help your immune system fight the disease.”

“Dr. George Crile,” Brett said. “There was a piece on him in
Reader’s Digest,
about studies in Finland and Canada showing five-year survival rates for lumpectomies equaled those for radicals. It discussed a new study just beginning here in the U.S., twenty-two hospitals participating in randomized pools.”

“I think I saw that fella on the
Today
show,” Kath added nervously.

“Randomized?” Ally whispered.

“You’re blindly assigned to one of the treatment groups,” Brett explained.

I looked off to the palm tree still standing in the old mansion yard, wanting to say
Don’t do that, Linda, don’t let your treatment be decided randomly, luck of the draw.
Wanting to say this couldn’t be helping Linda, all this talk. But they
were
talking at least, while I sat mutely imagining Linda in that coffin for real, Jamie and Julie and J.J. in the front pew, having no idea that
dead
meant they’d never see their mommy again.

Linda had gone to Memorial Sloan-Kettering on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not far from where her brother and sister-in-law lived. Her sister-in-law kept J.J. and the twins while she went to the hospital for the preliminary tests: X-rays and blood samples, an electrocardiogram, a lung-capacity test. She was evaluated by a surgeon, a radiologist, and a chemotherapist. They agreed to go in and do the biopsy, tell her what they found, and let her participate in the decision about what to do about whatever it turned out to be.

“One lump,” she said. Like the first one, but not.

She’d been saying no to herself all along: No, it’s not a lump I’m feeling, it’s just fibroid tissue or something, like the last time. No, I’m fine, really, even if it is a lump; look how well I’m running. When they said yes, it was malignant, she wanted to say no again, but she was all out of denial.

“I had them”—she waved a hand in front of her chest—“take out the whole thing. But not the muscles, not the nodes.”

She couldn’t tell Jeff about the lump at first. She didn’t tell him until the night before the biopsy. He was in Boston, but she called him that morning from her brother’s apartment and told him he had to come to see her in New York. She couldn’t even say why over the phone, but he hadn’t questioned her. He’d been up all night at the hospital, and still he didn’t hesitate. “I have a gunshot wound in post-op, but I can get someone else to cover,” he’d said, and she’d told him if he could get there that evening, that would be soon enough.

“It’s just a breast, right?” she told us, her voice cracking. And it had been bottled up inside her for so long that it all came out in a gush. “A breast,” she said. “Just a breast. You wouldn’t think it would be so . . .”

I thought she’d cry then, but she didn’t.

“So hideous,” she whispered. “There is nothing sexy about me at all anymore. I’m just hideous.

“I grew up the child of the sick mother, and then the child of the dead mother. I couldn’t imagine going back to that. I couldn’t imagine putting my kids through that. I couldn’t take that chance. I’m healthier, though. I’m so much healthier than my mother was to start with. I could run ten miles. And I caught it earlier. My mom, she was . . . When they cut her open, it was just . . .” She waved her hand again, a gesture that said
everywhere,
her mother’s cancer had been everywhere.

“They said consider chemotherapy. They don’t really know if it will help, but they’re having success with it in treating other”—she closed her eyes and took a deep breath—“other cancers.”

Fast-growing cancers, where a high percentage of the cells are always in some phase of division, Brett explained later. The drugs had to hit the tumor cells while they were dividing; that was when they were most vulnerable, easiest to knock out.

“I was past no by then,” Linda said. “I said of course I’d have the chemotherapy. Sure, I’ll have this first poison on the menu, and the third one, too, thanks. And I just decided I wouldn’t have any of the bad side effects they talked about, the nausea and depression and . . .” She touched her head. “And this.”

She cut her hair off the night she got home from New York, while Jeff was back in Boston explaining what had happened, telling the folks at the hospital that he could stay only until they could find a replacement for him. She took the scissors and sliced her braid across at her neck. She went to a hairdresser the next day and had it fixed so it looked nicer, and she attached her braid to her hat. It wasn’t until her hair started falling out in clumps that she took the braid to a wig maker, a woman who, when Linda entered the upstairs shop in San Carlos, was fitting a Hasidic Jew for a wig to wear after she married, because only her husband was allowed to see her hair after her wedding day. “I guess they know how often a man falls in love with a woman’s hair,” Linda said to us. “The girl had eyebrows and lashes,” she said. “I was jealous of that, of her dark eyebrows, her dark lashes, of her knowing they wouldn’t fall out.”

She felt sick after the chemo—which was being supervised out here; Jeff had lined her up with the best doctor at Stanford—but she’d been given a drug to help curb the nausea. She wasn’t living days with her head over the toilet; she wasn’t unable to get out of bed. Maybe J.J. and the twins were watching more television than she’d like, maybe dinner too often came from a box—“Let’s hear it for Hamburger Helper,” she said—but some things just couldn’t be helped.

“The doctor said some people think smoking marijuana helps, but I couldn’t imagine explaining that to a neighbor stopping by to borrow a cup of sugar,” she said, and with a break in her voice, “much less to my kids.”

Brett handed Linda her cap back, and Linda put it on.

“Jeff didn’t fall in love with me,” she whispered. “He fell in love with my hair.”

And you could see it all then, like the aha ending we are always striving for in what we write, the of-course-I-should-have-seen-that. The braid first. The cutting off of the braid and yet holding on to it, too. Gaining control over this thing she couldn’t control, or trying to.

“He won’t leave you,” Kath said quietly.

It was clear from the pooling in Linda’s eyes that this wasn’t a new idea to her. Worse, she believed he
would
leave her, he would want to every time he saw the gash across her chest where her breast had been. Maybe he wouldn’t move out right away because that would be unseemly, but he would want to and he would do it eventually, he wouldn’t be able to help himself.

“Jeff won’t be going anywhere,” Kath insisted. “Lee would, but not Jeff.”

There was no discussing it, though. Linda was ashamed: her body had betrayed her. She was terrified that Jeff would come home one day and announce he’d rented an apartment, just as Lee had. And as much as I wanted to assure her otherwise, I knew I would feel as she did if all that was left of my breast was an ugly scar.

Brett, beside me, had not said a word in a while, I realized then; she’d hardly looked up from her lap. She had taken her gloves off. It was a shock to realize it—as shocking as if she’d stripped off her navy sweater and bell-bottom slacks and stood stark naked before us.

The conversation halted, everyone looking at Brett now. Linda looking at Brett’s hands, though the rest of us quickly looked away.

We’d seen, though: her fingers all there, but the skin warped, as if it had melted and run, like candle wax or a lava flow. Her left hand more scarred than her right, the little finger bent slightly, as if she couldn’t quite straighten it all the way.

“I burned them in a chemical explosion when I was twelve. I hadn’t thought through what would happen if . . .” She blinked once, twice, her leaf-bud gaze fixed on Linda, who alone still stared at Brett’s bare hands. “I guess it was an accident,” she said.

She was silent for a long time. We were all silent, the only sound the flapping wings of the birds, big ugly black crows landing, gathering to peck at the grass seed that had, once again, been spread across the scar of dirt.

“Not even an accident, exactly,” Brett said, her voice uncertain, as if this was something she’d only just realized, something she’d stuffed deep inside herself and kept hidden there, even from herself, all these years. “My brother dared me. He never dreamed I could make such a dramatic bang.” She intertwined her scarred fingers. “He’s as badly scarred as I am. In a different way.”

Linda’s gaze lifted from Brett’s hands to her thin little face.

“Chip says he loves my hands,” Brett said, seeming to be speaking only to Linda now. “He loves me more for my hands. He says he can see that twelve-year-old girl I was, showing her brother she was so much smarter than anyone could imagine.

“Jeff loves you, Linda,” she said. “It isn’t your hair or your breasts he loves. It’s the person you are. Just like Chip loves me.”

It seemed we’d been sitting there for an hour, for two, for a lifetime, but the sun had not yet crested the tree line. The sky was still the soft color of dawn.