“Jesus Christ. I won’t tell Eileen until Wednesday. Will you call me and tell me as soon as you know?”
“Yes.”
“If I tell Eileen she’ll be upset as a bastard. I won’t tell her until you’re sure. She’ll want to come right home.”
“Tell her not to. There’s no need.”
“She’ll be punchy coming out of anesthesia,” Judy said. “She’ll have a lot of medication and she won’t feel like visitors for at least a day, maybe more.”
Ace got two beers out of Judy’s refrigerator and gave one to Bill. They drank the beers and talked a little and the pain never left Bill’s face. When the beer was gone he took the kids and left.
“I bet he’s glad he stopped off,” Ace said.
“Poor Bill.”
“When Joan has the surgery I’d like you to special her.”
“Of course.”
“I think she needs a woman, and I want to be sure someone’s there.”
“Yes, that will be good. That way if she is in pain I can go right down and get the medication and make sure she gets it as soon as she can have it.”
“She worrying about looking bad in your eyes when she’s coming to and acting crazy.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know. But she worries about stuff like that.”
They were quiet.
“Can I count on you to special her as long as she needs it,” he said. “I don’t mean like four hours, I mean as long as it takes?”
“Oh, Ace, of course.”
“I expect to pay.”
“Oh, Ace, fuck off.”
“No, I mean that. There’s no reason to not get paid.”
“Shut up.”
“Jude, you’re supposed to be cheering me up and making me feel better.”
“Then don’t be an asshole.”
“We’ll talk about it later. How did John react?”
“He couldn’t believe it. He kept saying ‘Joan?’ I mean it was like, Joan’s too lively and, you know, healthy.”
“Vital,” Ace said.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Words are my game,” Ace said.
“He couldn’t get over not knowing last night. I think he felt bad about that, but he understood why.”
It was starting to get dark outside Joan’s window and she couldn’t see the neat yards in back of the small houses very well anymore. A nurse opened the door and stuck her head in. She was a young nurse with long brown hair and sharp pretty features. She scanned the room and saw no tray.
“Have you had supper?”
Joan shook her head. “No, I haven’t,” she said, trying to keep any hint of martyrdom out of her voice.
“Well, that’s a mistake; somebody hasn’t been on the job. I’ll get supper right up to you. Why don’t you pull that table over and I’ll be right back with a tray.”
Her head disappeared and Joan heard her rubber-soled shoes thumping down the corridor. She pulled the table over and swung it around in front of her. The nurse came back in with the supper tray, the white skirt of her uniform whipping as she walked.
Supper was a slice of roast veal, whipped potatoes, carrots, and cottage cheese with pineapple. Joan ate it all. My stomach doesn’t know I have cancer. I’m eating like a cow. I’m also having continual diarrhea from fear and losing weight anyway. I may as well eat while I can.
After she had been discovered nurses dropped in all evening.
This is a terrific group of nurses, Joan thought. But it’s my ailment too. There’s something about breast cancer and mastectomy that brings women closer to me. There’s a feeling almost of sisterhood. My God, me and Ti-Grace Atkinson — Sisterhood. But it was there, a sense of specialness, of a woman’s mystery, that men, even Ace, could not entirely share. Mingled with the fear and the terrors of disfigurement and dissolution, there was a sense of new doors opening, and a new sense of femalehood. If I make this, I’ll have to think about that. For now she knew that her care was warm and supportive and superlative. She discovered that she didn’t know how nurses were at all.
Sunday night Ace called his mother and father and told them what he knew. They were calm about it. His mother knew several people who’d had mastectomies years ago and were fine. He felt somehow calmer talking to them. Some things you never lose, he thought afterward, remembering his mother’s calm voice on the phone. Parents still make you feel secure. We never completely give up on Santa Claus.
Chapter 15
Monday, April 21 and Tuesday were a blur of tests. Body and bone scans were simply x-rays of various kinds from various angles. They were painless. Monday afternoon Edgar Mitchell, a plastic surgeon, dropped by and sat in the yellow plastic-covered armchair by the window and talked with Joan about reconstructive surgery.
“John asked me to stop by and talk with you,” he said.
It took Joan a moment to realize that John was Dr. Eliopoulos.
“Oh yes, I remember asking him about reconstruction.”
“Well, it is entirely possible,” Mitchell said. “I have not done it yet myself, but I would very much like to. It’s a very interesting trick.”
“They implant something, is that right?”
“Yes, a small sack of inert jell is anchored and the new skin is grafted over it. The jell can’t drift, not like an injection. It is, as far as I’ve heard, entirely safe, and not a very big operation.”
“How about the nipple?”
“That can be done too; not everyone bothers, but if you wanted it, we could graft skin from, say, the labia and rebuild the nipple and its areola.”
“When you say it’s not a big operation, how big?”
“Perhaps overnight.”
“How soon could it be done?”
“Oh, a year or so after the original incision has healed and everything is in order.”
“I don’t have to decide now?”
“No. I will talk to John about this and when he does the surgery he will keep it in mind. If he has to take the breast he will have reconstruction in mind.”
Mitchell was a stocky, solid, Scotch-looking man with dark hair speckled gray and dark-rimmed glasses. He smoked a pipe.
During the two test days Fred Shmaese dropped in as well. Shmaese was an oncologist from Lynnfield. They knew each other slightly at the time, and he came, informally, to talk with Joan. He sat on the edge of the bed, a solemn, formal, skillful man with strong opinions, and talked with her about breast cancer, and mastectomy and tumors in general and also about the state of education and the direction the world found itself running in.
Like Dr. Mitchell, Shmaese did not say she was going to undergo mastectomy, but it was tacitly assumed, and the calmness of the discussion with Fred, as it had been with Mitchell, was to make the illness and the surgical act seem more ordinary. The focus of all conversations on what-we-do-after-the-breast-is-gone. When the time came she was ready and fully prepared to wake up from anesthesia with the breast gone. Whether that was an artfully orchestrated preparation for surgery or not she was never sure. But by Tuesday night she was looking long past the surgery on Wednesday to concern for lymph node involvement. Her concern was steadily less with her breast and more with her life.
Monday morning Ace took the tapes and drove to Endicott College. Joan’s class was in a small white clapboard building surrounded by trees on the east slope of a hill. It seemed isolated from the rest of the campus. There were three classrooms in the building, one devoted to a children’s school and two for college courses. He went in carrying her two briefcases and the tape recorder. The department supervisor was a woman, the students were women. It was a very female place and he was struck by that. He was a bit out of place there. Judy Martin was uneasy with him, attempting to banter with him in a light girlish way. Is it because I’m male? he thought, or does she always do June Allyson? I hope not. She doesn’t have the build for it. In the classroom the girls looked puzzled. And he felt a little outsized, inappropriate.