A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Page 10

  “Where else am I going to go?”

  “No—I need you to support my decision. I mean, if I make that decision. I haven’t decided yet,” she insisted.

  “Yes you have.”

  My mom sighed. She shook her head, looked at me. “You ever drink too much and not know where to put your feet?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, that’s how I feel. I’m out of whack.” She picked the breast up from the dresser and placed it inside her bathing suit, filling the space. She stared at herself in the mirror a moment. “Let’s go,” she said, turning, looking at the game under my arm. “I’m going to win,” she said.

  2.

  I went with my mother to Dr. Morgan’s office for a consultation. The waiting room was plush, ridiculously so, I thought. I sat on the overstuffed velvet couch, my mother on a matching chair. The two of us looked at each other and said nothing. My mother gave me half a smile.

  On one wall hung a framed montage, letters from happy patients, complete with pictures of body parts: a wallet-size photo of a man’s profile, a five-by-seven of a blonde woman’s taut stomach, and another five-by-seven of what looked like a teenage girl, bent over—all I could see was her navy blue bikini bottoms, her good thighs, and half of her face as she twisted herself at the waist and neck to smile at the camera. Her position looked painful, and I wondered how long she had to hold it, to bend like that, before someone snapped the picture.

  A marble coffee table sat in the center of the room. Several unlit candles in exotic holders were scattered about. In one corner stood a lavish fountain with water pouring from a cherub’s outstretched palm. A framed sign on the coffee table read: These candles are decorative. Please do not light them. A candle without the possibility of light, I thought, is a trick, like a breast that’s really a stomach, misplaced fat and skin.

  Next to the cherub was a magazine rack that stretched the length of the wall. I got up from the couch and went to the rack. Every magazine I’d ever heard of was there, as well as several unknown to me. I picked up Cosmetic Surgeon and flipped through it, pausing at an article titled “What’s Looking Good Worth to Los Angeles?” I continued flipping and found one that interested me: “At Risk, In Need.” The piece was about American surgeons who dedicated time to third world countries. Mostly, they fixed cleft palates.

  I sat on the couch with the magazine open across my lap. I glanced at my mother, who was reaching inside her bag, searching for something, then looked back down at the magazine. Several pictures of children with serious eyes and deformed mouths stared up at me from the pages. One small boy appeared shaken, his dark eyes huge and surprised, as if he’d looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe it himself. I was thinking about the boy, his cleft palate. I was thinking about my mother, how her boyfriend, a man she’d liked from school for years and had just started sleeping with right before she was diagnosed, abruptly stopped seeing her. I was imagining my mother tipping over at the grocery store, her body out of balance as she said, a shoulder falling into the canned pears or peaches. I was moving my tongue along the roof of my own mouth, thinking about that.

  My mom pulled some dark green fabric from her bag. She held a needle up to the light and aimed. She threaded the needle and began to sew. It would be a dress or a skirt, that wrinkled pile of green that was in her lap, and I would forever remember her—making something pretty out of nothing.

  I had just closed the magazine when an unnaturally happy and buxom brunette came into the waiting room, holding a clipboard, and calling my mother’s name. “Elizabeth,” she said, “Dr. Morgan is ready for you now.” I put the magazine on the table and looked at my mother, who was folding the fabric and putting it back in her bag. She stood up, held the bag at her side, and asked the woman if I could join her.

  “Sure,” the nurse said.

  “Come with me,” my mother whispered.

  “You want me in there?” I was surprised.

  “Yes”

  “You sure?”

  “I said yes—but I want you to behave yourself.”

  “I’m an adult,” I reminded her.

  “Adults misbehave,” my mother said under her breath.

  “I’ll stay here,” I said.

  “Come with me,” she said again.

  The two of us sat quietly while Dr. Morgan prepared his slide show. I looked at the doctor’s pockmarked face, wondering why he of all people didn’t pretty himself up. Why didn’t he skip one game of golf or elaborate luncheon and have that imperfect skin scraped away?

  He showed us a slide: a woman whose face I couldn’t see, just the thin, bland line of her mouth and hesitant chin—a woman with poor posture, a wrinkled belly, and two thick scars where her breasts had been. The surface was strangely flat; it appeared scooped out and hollow. I would have thought that to go in that far, to dig that deep, they would have damaged the woman’s heart. It amazed me that the concave area could house any organ at all.

  “This is the Before picture, obviously,” Dr. Morgan said, pointing at the woman.

  In the After picture the woman stood up straight with her new breasts. The breasts were big and full, standing up like a teenage girl’s, which only magnified the rest of her, all creases and folds. Again, I saw the thin line of her mouth, this time with lipstick, this time smiling.

  “How fresh were the scars in the previous slide?” I asked the doctor.

  “Rachel,” my mother said.

  “I’m just asking,” I said. “You don’t mind if I ask, do you?”

  “Fresh?” he said.

  “Yes,” I continued. “How long had it been since the woman’s mastectomy?”

  “Double,” he said.

  “I noticed that. How long had it been?” I repeated.

  “Six months.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to wait?”

  “For what?”

  My mom sighed.

  “For what?” Dr. Morgan repeated.

  “Until the area heals,” I said, though that wasn’t what I wanted to say at all. What I wanted to say was: My mother had a huge tumor in her breast two years ago and she’s probably still sick. Under that handmade dress, she’s probably dying, you greedy ass. “Until the woman feels better,” I said quietly.

  “That woman right there feels fine” Dr. Morgan said, pointing again. “Sometimes we team up with the cancer surgeon and take care of aesthetics immediately. As soon as the doctor removes one, I’m there sculpting another.”

  “Like art,” my mom said.

  “Exactly.”

  “How’s it done?” she asked. “And don’t get too graphic, please. I don’t need to know everything.” My mother smoothed her dress out across her legs and let out a little laugh. “I’m not my daughter, that’s for sure—please, Dr. Morgan, keep the details to yourself.”

  He talked about the latest procedure, taking fat and muscle from a woman’s stomach. He jutted his chin at the screen, at the woman. “Here,” he said, “and here too. I take fat from here and make a breast there.” He pointed his pen at the woman’s torso, first at her puffy belly, then at her sunken chest.

  “Amazing,” my mom said.

  Dr. Morgan smiled. “It’s like getting a free tummy tuck.”

  “A bargain,” I said, flatly.

  “I could use one of those. Imagine how good my dresses will look then, Rachel” She smiled at the two of us and patted her small stomach.

  “I’m imagining.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to take them in, do some alterations.”

  “What about the nipple? How do you do that?” I asked.

  “Well, we either take a bit of skin from inside the labia or—”

  “Oh, my,” my mother said.

  “Or what?” I said.

  “Or do without one,” he said.

  “And how about pain?” I wanted to know.

  “Demerol works well. You don’t have to worry because your mother would be medicated those first few days—”
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  “So it’s painful, then? It sure sounds painful. Skin from your labia, huh?” I looked at my mother and raised my eyebrows

  “Well she’ll be uncomfortable”

  “Sounds very uncomfortable. I had a dentist talk to me once about discomfort,” I said. “Do you remember that dentist. Mom?”

  My mom nodded.

  I looked at the doctor. “I had an abscessed molar—he hit a nerve. Nothing uncomfortable about it.”

  “We’ve got effective drugs,” Dr. Morgan said.

  I shook my head.

  “And remember,” he continued, “your mother has already been through a mastectomy, through chemotherapy and radiation.”

  “Nausea, lethargy, pain,” I added.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, as if we were agreeing.

  “No,” I said.

  “No, what?” he wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” I said, realizing that we’d been talking about my mother as though she wasn’t in the room, as though she was a small girl without an opinion. But she didn’t seem to mind, By now she’d risen, from the chair and walked over to the screen. She stood in the slide machine’s yellow glare, her back, shoulders, head and neck partially illuminated. She was bent over, intent, and so close to the woman’s breasts that if she’d opened her mouth, she could have taken a bite.

  3.

  In the car on the way home, I was angry. “What irritates me is that he knows how painful the surgery is. He said it himself: days of Demerol. That’s being in a stupor for days. And the bit about carving up your labia? That’s butchering one area—and a rather important area, I might add—to pretty up another,” I said.

  “That’s optional. He said that I could opt out of that one. I’m sure the breast would look nicer with a nipple, though.”

  “I’d certainly opt out. I’d opt out of the whole damn thing.”

  “Did you see the woman’s breasts?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t even see the scars.”

  “They were there,” I said, stopping at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. I twisted in the seat and faced my mother. “You know they were there, right?”

  “No,” she said, turning away from me. “I don’t know that. I got up close—you saw me. There wasn’t one sign of Dr. Morgan’s good work. He’s a brilliant man, an artist. You shouldn’t be so hard on him, Rachel. You’re full of judgment. I don’t judge people the way you do. Where did you learn that?”

  “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have opinions.”

  “Opinions are one thing, but judgment is another. You were sitting there asking him smart questions, but not looking at the woman. Where’s your empathy?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just saying there were scars there, even if you couldn’t see them.”

  “I’m the one who got right up next to the woman, and I didn’t see any scars.” She was defiant, crossing her arms across her chest.

  “He had to sew something to something, didn’t he? It’s not like he used glue. There’s sewing going on—he had to use stitches.”

  But my mother was busy then, looking out the window at a pair of transvestites or transsexuals, a brunette and a blonde, in matching shorts and halter tops. They sat at a bus stop just feet away, arm in arm. “What pretty girls,” my mother said.

  “They’re not girls.”

  “Well, whatever they are, they’re pretty.”

  The light turned green but I didn’t move. Horns honked. A man hung out his car window and called me a bitch as he sped away in a silver convertible. “I hate Los Angeles,” I said, accelerating too hard. We lurched forward and I quickly shot my arm across my mother’s chest to keep her from hitting the dashboard. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s fine—I’m fine,” she said, obviously still mad.

  “Why can’t you get your treatment at Memorial? Beach Memorial has a great reputation. They’ve got a Woman’s Center.”

  “You know why not.”

  “Is it really because of the movie stars here?”

  “They get better treatment. They stay alive longer because the doctors are very good up here.”

  “It seems to me that a movie star is dropping dead every week, Mom. It’s on the news. They die just like the rest of us.”

  “I trust these doctors,” she said.

  “The scars were there, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Look,” she said. “I just want to get undressed one night and not have to remember the whole thing. I want to forget.”

  “I understand that,” I said. I twisted my neck, making sure my blind spot was clear, and moved lane by lane into the fast lane. It made sense, my mother’s desire to forget. I wished I could forget, too, but there were things about my mother’s breast cancer that I knew and couldn’t stop knowing—the tumor’s size, the lymph node involvement.

  Still, there were moments when even I almost forgot. I’d be laughing with Angela at a bar or coffee shop, talking to my students about their stories or poems, and the tumor would be far away from me. Later, I’d be sitting with my mother, playing Scrabble, or maybe I’d be watching her from across the room, sewing a new skirt, and the tumor would appear behind my eyes. I’d be at the movies, reaching into a bag of popcorn or riding my bike on the beach, and it would show up—a fat, sneaky thing, a stalker the size of a plum.

  4.

  From the lobby window, I could see Angela sitting in the car, waiting, the cigarette’s red cap rising to her lips. I had one hand in the mailbox and waved with the other, motioned to my friend with one finger that I’d just be a minute.

  In the car, I opened the package addressed to my mother from The Beauty Club. It was something we shared—makeup and tips, brow pencils and powder. I thought there might be a lipstick I would like. I had planned to put the lipstick on and show up at my mother’s dinner table, and maybe I’d ask her if I could keep the new lipstick or maybe my mother would just offer it up to me the way she offered everything else.

  Inside the brown envelope was a lipstick, yes, a tube of dark mascara, and a rosy blush—all toys we could share—but on the bottom of the envelope, way down deep where I had to dig my hand in and feel around, was something cylinder shaped and hard, no cosmetic that I recognized.

  We were almost downtown, stopped at a red light, and I was telling Angela that I thought I’d die when my mother died, and I didn’t mean it figuratively. I meant I thought I’d stop breathing and my heart would quit, and Angela was listing reasons to stay alive. “Lemon drops,” she said. “Tacos. You like movies and books,” she said.

  “Not enough to stay alive for them,” I said.

  “Music,” she tried.

  I shook my head.

  “Red wine. Orgasms.” She paused. “A good night’s sleep.”

  “That’s sort of like being dead, though, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “To see how it all turns out.”

  “What turns out?”

  “All of it,” she said.

  I was shaking my head no when I pulled the vibrator from the envelope. I thought about shoving it back inside quickly without telling Angela what it was, but she had already turned to me when she heard me gasp. It wasn’t just the vibrator and thinking of my mother masturbating that upset me, but also that my mother’s boyfriend had stopped sleeping with her, and that no amount of love I gave her could equal what was in my hand.

  It was impossible not to imagine my mother, alone and flushed, using it, her quaking thighs and one heaving breast, her body so incredibly hers then, most aware of itself dying or coming, and I understood that she was a woman who wouldn’t submit passively to one fate without, in that participatory way, remembering the other.

  “How about Mexican food?” Angela said. “Let’s get some of those tacos that make life worth living.”

  “Tacos sound good,” I answered, putting the vibrator back inside the envelope and folding it closed.

  “It’s good that yo
ur mother is still concerned about these things.”

  “What things?”

  “You know, pleasure.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Can we talk about food?”

  “We are,” Angela said.

  5.

  My mom had made her decision. She returned from the doctor’s office, beaming, excited. She put her purse down on the dining room table. She set down her sunglasses and keys, cleared her throat. I was sitting on the couch, reading a student’s short story. Daniel Gilb’s piece was about a quadriplegic teenage boy who loved and hated his father. It wasn’t bad. Daniel was a good writer, bright and passionate, and I was enjoying it. My mother cleared her throat again. “Rachel,” she said. I put down my pen and looked at her. I folded my hands across one knee. I rocked back and forth like a toy horse. “What?” I said. “You made up your mind, right?”

  She nodded.

  “I knew it.”

  “I’m cancer free—”

  “Now,” I interrupted.

  “Yes, now.”

  I rocked again, harder. I stopped myself.

  “It’s not about vanity or even beauty. I know you think so, but it’s not. It’s more about poise.”

  “Poise?”

  “If I’d been small breasted to begin with, who knows what I’d do now. I’d probably just live this way. Maybe I’d get a tattoo like those women in the book you left out,” she said.

  “It’s not a book, Mom, it’s a magazine.”

  “Whatever it is, I am not one of those women. Cheers to them, that’s what I say—but that’s not me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t try to change your mother, Rachel. You always say that I want to change you, but—”

  “I just wanted you to see them.”

  “I saw them.” She paused, then continued. “It’s terrible having a D cup on one side and nothing on the other.” She walked toward me, stood in front of the couch, holding her remaining breast in her palm like an offering.

  “I’m sure it is,” I said.

  “I feel like I’m going to tip over sometimes—literally, fall down.”

  “You’re not.”