“I agree,” Ace said. “That’s what should be done. Do you wish to be awakened before they do the mastectomy?” He spoke to her as if Eliopoulos were not there.
“No, I see no point to that. Once it’s started I’d like it done.”
The decision was made and she never doubted it. For the sake of her life she was convinced it was right. And she had another turn down the spiral. Now she was no longer thinking about saving the breast. Now she was thinking about living or dying. She was where he had begun. He had never cared about the breast, except that she had. He had always worried about life or death.
“Okay,” Eliopoulos said. “I’d like to have you come in Sunday, Sunday afternoon. Check-in time at Union Hospital is three o’clock, I believe.”
“Can I have a private room?”
“We’ll try for that.”
“Oh, Doctor,” Joan said, “I beg of you that I have a private room.”
“We’ll try. I’ll tell them it’s important. Even if you don’t get it the first day, I’m sure we can get one soon.”
“Price is irrelevent,” Ace said, and felt like a fool saying it. So corny, so typical, so middle-class, middle-aged, overweight paterfamilias. The best money can buy. Spare no expense, my good man.
“Monday and Tuesday we’ll do some tests,” Eliopoulos said. “Bone scans, body scans, that sort of thing. Nothing unpleasant, and Wednesday morning we’ll do the biopsy.”
They both nodded. They didn’t ask about the scans. They knew he meant x-ray scans and they knew it was to see if the cancer had spread. They were a long way down the spiral now. Now they were willing to settle for a breast. A simple boob, for crissake. Now they were hoping it was only breast cancer and that it was not infesting her body. Now they were praying for only mastectomy. Each step along the process caused more anxiety. Each diagnosis presented worse possibilities. It was a week now since she’d found the lump. A week of excruciating anxiety. The anxiety and the uncertainty were exhausting. And the jagged descent of her hopes, and the effort to control them left her almost disoriented. Last Friday night, she’d found the lump and gone to sleep, and Saturday, it had not disappeared. Monday, she’d gone to Barry’s office and he had not said, “Oh, it’s just a benign cyst.” Thursday, the postponed mammogram had not dispelled her fears. Today, her talk with Eliopoulos had confronted her with the possibility of metastasis.
For Ace, the descent had lasted only three days, but he had begun farther down the spiral and his mind had never been preoccupied with worries about losing a breast. He felt a little lightheaded as they walked out of the office and into the bright spring day. The fear was a palpable weight in his chest, dragging downward on his shoulders, causing him to slump. He caught himself, and straightened. Two more days and she goes in the hospital. I want this over, he thought. I want somewhere along the line to know something.
They didn’t speak of it, as during that spring they spoke of very little, but they both at one level of consciousness speculated on how much the need to end the uncertainty influenced their decision. To have gone to another doctor and gotten a second opinion, or to have agreed only to a lumpectomy and then found a doctor to do chemotherapy, would have postponed certainty, perhaps for months. We had to know, she thought. We couldn’t have stood that, he thought. Am I giving up a breast just because I can’t stand the uncertainty? she thought. Did I let her go this route too easily because I don’t have the strength to hold out and exhaust all other avenues? he thought.
Their fear was of what they didn’t know. It was a fear of what they might have to undergo, a fear that she might suffer, a fear that she’d be disfigured, a fear that the mastectomy wouldn’t work and the cancer would spread and there would be other operations and other uncertainties. There was fear that she would linger in pain and there was fear that she would die. The fear was very large and varied. Like a conglomerate rock, and binding the conglomerate was the other fear. The fear that they couldn’t handle it. That one would let the other down, that they would both let the children down. The fear that when they met the beast in the jungle, they would fail.
What will I say to her? he thought.
“Ace, I can’t stand this,” she said. Her face was red and tight.
“Yes, you can,” he said. “We’ll do this. We’ll take it a step at a time.” What can I say to her? How can I get us through this? What if she can’t do it? It was very hard to be tough. So much harder to be tough when you really needed to be. When there was something to be tough about. It was much harder to be tough than a lot of people who spoke of it ever had a chance to know.
The feminists. She thought. When you read about this kind of thing and hear people talk about how the sexist pig doctors want to snip off your boob... All that sounds so good. The sexist bastards will never get me. But then when you have a malignant breast and you might die if they don’t remove it and there’s just you and Ace to decide and you feel like you might die from the awfulness of it before the cancer can even get you, and you’re terrified, then it doesn’t sound as simple as they made it.
“Did we do the right thing?” she said.
“Yes,” he did.
“Eliopoulos is right, isn’t he? He’s not just railroading us. You’re convinced, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“The feminists...” she said.
“Fuck them,” he said.
Chapter 9
The denial urge was strong in her as they drove away from the Medical Building. Wednesday I’m having surgery and they will probably take my breast. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it.
“Listen,” Joan said, “I don’t have a thing to wear.” It was a typical remark of hers, no matter where she was going. He almost smiled. “We’ve got to go to Marshall’s,” she said. He turned up Route 128 and headed for the discount store. “We’ve got to get a nightgown and slippers,” she said.
As they walked through the aisles at Marshall’s, Ace pushing the carriage, she was thinking, thinking. Gotta get a robe. If they do it, I’ve gotta get a robe that will obscure the imbalance as best it can. “I don’t want a see-through jobby,” she said. “I don’t want anything sexy.”
“It’s gotta be more sexy than the sweat pants and surplus fatigue jacket you have been wearing,” he said.
“It’s gotta be kind of a utilitarian robe, that could easily be padded out when they do it.” She didn’t say “if,” and he didn’t correct her. Neither had any real doubts, just a very small hope, up there in the corner, almost out of sight.
Marshall’s was a clothing store that sold seconds, samples, and such from bins along the aisles, and had pipe racks everywhere. He hated it there. She loved it. He felt the same itchy boredom he always felt when he shopped with her, a boredom always slightly modified by the pleasure of being, however unromantically, alone with her, out of the ordinary context of home and yard.
He was aware of the garish normalcy of the way he felt, juxtaposed with the desperate purpose of their shopping. ‘The torturers horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree,’ he thought. ‘About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.’ Christ, now I’m quoting Auden.
Joan’s concentration on the choice of a robe represented a kind of lifesaving struggle to proceed normally in the face of a mortal possibility.