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?”
Deceased and Desisted
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.
A Guide to Patient Pain Levels
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 kno
w 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.
“Forget something?” Tess asks the white-haired woman on her way to the bank of lockers.
“My face.” She chortles. “I was halfway to the bus stop when I remembered.” She snaps the lipstick back into the gold tube and is out the door again with a chipper, “Happy trails!”
That leaves just Tessie and me now in the pink room. She figures I’m there to change out of the hospital uniform I was wearing during the procedure into my street clothes.
After she slides the shower curtain shut behind her, I sit down on the locker-room bench outside the changing area and tell her, “You might want to start thinkin’ about how you’re gonna handle all this if it works out for the worst. This is one of those times that I’ve found hope comes in real handy.”
I chose that remark because the reappearance of Francis wearing the fox stole has brought Tess’s gammy to the forefront of her mind and that’s something she would’ve told her granddaughter under these circumstances. If only she was still alive, what a comfort Caroline Finley would be in the predicament my friend finds herself in.
She’s not only alone and frightened, because she skipped Will’s delicious breakfast offering this morning—she’s starving. She could really go for one of those marshmallow and peanut butter sandwiches their gammy would make Birdie and her on the Sunday summer afternoons their daddy would drop them off to visit his parents in their little stone country house before he died.
Once they had polished off their lunch, dirt-hating Birdie would retreat into the house to play Gin Rummy with Boppa, and Tess and Gammy would get to work in the garden. Her grandmother was the one who taught her how to pull together tussie-mussies. The darling bouquets whose origins go back to buttoned-up-tight Victorian times when lovers would use them to send coded messages. Especially, the stirrings-below-the-waist type, which might explain why roses (passionate, romantic love) were such big sellers back in those days.
Alongside the large garden where flowers and a few radishes, carrots, pole beans, and wandering prickly stalks that bore pumpkins her beloved grandchildren carved into silly faces around Halloween, there was a precious plot that Caroline Finley tended in honor of her daughter, Alice, who had passed on years ago. Those who were still able to wrap their arms around their children had told her that time heals all wounds at the funeral, but she knew they were wrong. Her loss would not be diminished by the tick of a clock, if anything, its roots would sink deeper. She needed a way to tend to it. So she planted baby’s breath for purity and lily of the valley for humility and shy Alice’s favorite—pink peonies—drooped proudly for bashfulness. She nurtured the garden not with the expectation that it would somehow alleviate her suffering, but simply to honor her departed daughter, and mark the passage of sunrises and sunsets until she would be reunited with her again.
Of course, it being the 1950s, a time that death, and just about any other trauma was treated with a firm, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach, Caroline didn’t discuss her grief. She buried it beneath common sense subjects like cleaning and baking while they toiled in the garden together. But my Tess, a curious and sensitive child who had found out early in life that forewarned is forearmed, was compelled to ask, “What made Aunt Alice so sick and die anyway? Can you catch it?”
Her grandmother, who had been gathering green beans into her yellow checked apron at the time, responded to the question by dropping the whole kit and caboodle, pressing Tess to her bounteous breasts, and saying through tears that came as fast and unexpected as a spring shower, “Time to say a rosary for our dearly departed.”
They left their muddy shoes at the backdoor of the ranch house, washed the dirt off their hands at the kitchen sink, and after they collected Birdie from the parlor, the three of them padded to their grandparents’ feather mattress to hold their beads beneath a picture of Jesus displaying his sacred bleeding heart that was an exact replica of the one that Tess passes as she searches the hospital halls now for Jill.
Room #121 was where she’d been instructed to meet the nurse to discuss the results of the pathology report, but Tess is not having much luck staying in the here and now. The smell of disinfectant has shifted her mind into reverse again. She’s being reminded of Birdie now. And how she’d cut one of their last telephone visits short because it was almost four o’clock and she needed to clean out the hinge holes in the back of her washing machine with Q-tips and witch hazel.
Her sister was born on the fussy side of the blanket, so Tess isn’t exactly sure when Birdie escalated into compulsive cleanliness. She thinks it might’ve been about a year after their mother married Mr. Gallagher. Louise told the girls, “It’s official,” on the ride home from the legal adoption proceedings at the Milwaukee courthouse. “Leon’s your father now. You can be arrested if you don’t call him Daddy.”
Being the fastidious person that she was, their mother wasn’t done housecleaning. When the girls showed up at the breakfast table nine days later to jelly doughnuts and two glasses of Ovaltine, she wished them a cheery, “Happy birthday,” and slowly withdrew an envelope from her capri pants and set it down next to her pack of L&M cigarettes that Tess was sure she smoked because they were her mother’s first two initials. She recognized their gammy’s handwriting and reached out for the card, but her mother’s hand slapped down hard. “You won’t be seeing them anymore. Don’t call or write to them either. It hurts Leon’s feelings.” Louise deposited the card that Tess knew would have eleven dimes scotch-taped to the bottom into the trash can under the sink, thought better of it, and slipped it back into her apron pocket. “Think of Caroline and Al as deceased and desisted. Like your father.”
At first, the girls didn’t think they could face a life without the Sundays afternoons they’d spent with their funny boppa, who’d been a fireman in his prime, but now spent his days in a bank protecting money and pulling practical jokes on the tellers, and their gammy, who loved to garden and could make a mean leg of lamb. But, in time, the memories faded, and the Lord’s Day became like any other. And as weeks turned into months, as summers passed and winters arrived, the sisters could barely recall anymore the way Boppa would pass out gum that turned their teeth black, or how their gammy would prepare a Nativity scene each Christmas and since she wasn’t that great of a baker, the holy tableau would always come out looking like blobs of dough looking religiously at other blobs of dough.
It wasn’t until many moons later—New Year’s Day of last year—that forty-seven-year-old Birdie, who was still living in Boca Raton, and grappling with unresolved grief over the loss of her mother, got it into her unbalanced head that if she couldn’t have Louise anymore she’d replace her with the next best thing. “We found Daddy in the cemetery, didn’t w
e? Now I’m going to find Gammy, not dead, but alive!” she told her big sister way, way too excited on the phone call from Florida.
Birdie’s resolution greatly concerned Tess. For when she failed to find Gammy, who had to have passed on years and years ago, she would be devastated and pay dearly. Her symptoms would ratchet up ten notches. She didn’t experience the breaks with reality with the same frequency she’d once had, but when she did, they were doozies. She would call Tess, usually in the middle of the night, to report something like, “Guess who just visited Birdie? Marie Antoinette!” Since she’d always refer to herself in the third person when she was experiencing a delusion, Tess had no problem recognizing when Birdie had a meltdown, and, of course, the high improbability of the dead Queen of France dropping in on her sister in Boca Raton was also a tip-off.
Tess was stumped during the disturbing calls at first, but through trial and error, she’d stumbled upon the most effective way to reel Birdie back to the here and now. It was quite simple, really, as so many profound ideas are. All she had to do was dig a little deeper. She would say, “No kidding! Wow! Marie Antoinette? Was she speaking French?” The questions would be met with a hollow silence on the end of the line, but then her sister would say softly four times, “Birdie doesn’t remember,” and then Tess would tell her she loved her and remind her to take her green pills.
When the end of January drew closer and nothing more was mentioned about the search for their long-dead grandmother, she thought that Birdie had forgotten all about finding her because her OCD brain had latched onto something else, so Tess relaxed some, well, as much as she can relax.
On February 2, six weeks after she had brought up the preposterous idea, Birdie called early to make sure Tess had received her four Happy Groundhog’s Day cards because commemorating every holiday, no matter how inconsequential, was one of her compulsions.