The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

  Now, Mia thinks, she’ll have to take her mother to the lingerie department at Nordstrom to buy some bras. Maybe some with a little under wire and lace.

  Dr. Groszmann smiles, writes something in the chart, reads a little more. “Have you seen the reconstruction movie?”

  Sally waves her arms. “Of course they were out of everything down at Health Services. They said they’d call, but they never did.”

  Dr. Groszmann nods, his eyes flicking to Mia and then back to Sally.

  “Let me go over your options,” he says. Mia leans in, wanting to know the options, too. Dr. Groszmann sits back and looks at Sally. He is very good-looking but a bit thin. A runner. A workaholic. Too thin for her, of course. It’s possible she weighs more than he does. What does she weigh now? 150? She doesn’t get on the scale these days. In fact, the last time she got on the scale was in the week before Harper was born—more than sixteen years ago--and she tipped the scales at 197. He weighed 10 pounds, twelve ounces, but still. 197.

  Dr. Groszmann weighs what? Maybe 160. Probably less. He would get lost in her bones and flesh, pulled down into her vortex. He’d be sucked into her and made invisible. They’d have to send the search and rescue hounds, she thinks, almost laughing. She puts a finger to her lip and avoids the doctor’s gaze.

  “There’s immediate reconstruction, which would commence the moment the mastectomy was over.”

  Sally nods, the immediacy attractive to her. Mia watches her mother’s lips, sees them twitch in an almost smile at the word. Immediate. Like everything should be. Tears should be over immediately. Grief? Gone. Worry? Vanquished in a second. Move, move, move. You don’t know if you want the dress, the boyfriend, the college, the job? Well, forget it.

  “Delayed reconstruction can take place weeks, months, if not years after the mastectomy,” Dr. Groszmann continues, detailing the potential drawbacks to both the immediate and the delayed. And as she listens, Mia realizes she’s lived in the drawbacks. Too soon, too late. Too fast, not quick enough. She’s been like Sally and then too much like herself, stuck in the fear of moving at all.

  “You’re telling me the skin could die?” Sally asks. “The skin could die?”

  “It’s a rare complication, but yes.” Dr. Groszmann looks at Mia. “The skin gets its nourishment from the chest wall. If there is an expander between them, sometimes the skin can react. And if this reaction necessitates treatment, that could put off the chemotherapy. And if you are going to need radiation—which I think is unlikely—I won’t be able to do an immediate reconstruction at all.”

  “So what do you recommend?” Mia asks, knowing she is supposed to be asking questions. That’s her official role here, the witness, the advocate.

  Dr. Groszmann looks at her, his eyes tired but very blue. He pushes his long brown hair (nicely tied in a ponytail) away from his forehead. In that second, Mia blushes again. He sees her, and his skin pulses rose.

  She looks at her red shoes.

  “Your mother,” he begins, and then turns to Sally. “You seem to be a very practical person. What I’m hearing from you is that your lifestyle is more important to you than time spent in recovery. You like to walk in your neighborhood. You want to travel. To be with your grandchildren. Reconstruction on top of a mastectomy will necessitate a longer recovery. And we haven’t even talked about the stages or types of reconstruction. My recommendation based on hearing what you’ve said to me and to your surgeon is a delayed reconstruction. After your treatment for breast cancer. When you have time.”

  Sally leans forward, listening closely. Mia tries to pay attention, too, focusing on the doctor’s face, listening to his words. She’s here to pay attention, to ask smart questions, to help her mother make the right choices, but what she really wants to do is ask the doctor questions such as, “Are you married? Would it bother you that I am?”

  She wonders what is wrong with her. She wonders if she’s insane. Here she is fighting the urge to flirt with her mother’s plastic surgeon. Her poor mother is sitting on this funky table, her left breast filled with moderately differentiated infiltrating and in situ ductal carcinoma. Breast cancer that has spread and breast cancer that is waiting to spread.

  “Fine,” Sally says, her voice flat. “I’ll have a delayed reconstruction. But I want to know everything. Everything about it. And don’t tell me to watch the damn movie. The woman down in Health Services seems to be functioning on half a brain cell.”

  Dr. R. Groszmann smiles again and almost winks at Mia. Mia feels the heat in her body and shifts on her chair. He leans back against the cabinet filled with gowns and boxes of tissue and cotton balls and latex gloves, and begins talking.

  After he is done telling Sally everything, Dr. Groszmann asks her to take off her robe. He pulls a measuring tape from a drawer in the cabinet and scoots closer to the examination table. All of this, the position he takes in front of her mother’s bent knees, the way his face is directly in front of Sally’s breasts, seems too intimate. Sally’s long lovely back is arched, her head turned toward the window, her breasts as perky as they’ve ever been, nipples erect.

  Mia is uncomfortable suddenly, sad, though she knows that she shouldn’t be. Her mother would be the last to want someone else’s hands on her body. Sally doesn’t need a man to tell her she is beautiful, but just seeing the evidence of a life untouched this way makes Mia want to jump out of her chair and run out of the room. Her left leg starts to twitch, the plastic back of the chair digs in her back. She doesn’t understand how her mother can live in this beautiful body and not long to be touched, to show it off, to enjoy the connection with someone else. Maybe Sally pretends to not care that for thirty-three years she’s been alone, but it makes Mia want to throw herself down and weep.

  In another universe, Dr. Groszmann brings his lips to Sally’s nipple and sucks, pressing his face and forehead into her chest. In that same universe, Sally smiles, pulls him close, and somehow, they manage to fold this table into a place they could lie on. In this universe, Mia is not in the room, just as she was never in the room when Sally pulled her father close. In the thirty-three years since David died, Sally has—as far as Mia knows and, of course, she might be wrong—never sat in front of a man like this, her breasts pushed out, her nipples tingling, her head bent away in supplication. Even though this is an exam, an important one, Sally’s willing body makes Mia want to cry, to call out for the doctor to notice how beautiful her mother is, Sally’s skin pale and unmarked and lovely. She wants to tell Dr. Groszmann to worship her, to lower the table, to make love to Sally right now, but, of course, Mia doesn’t. She looks at the floor, not wanting to see her mother’s swan beauty, her untouched flesh, her imperious smile.

  Dr. Groszmann makes comments to Sally, but Mia adjusts her gaze, noticing the pigeons outside the window, the building opposite, the grey sky hovering over the dry hills.

  

  Out in the hall, Sally stands next to Dr. Groszmann’s medical assistant, arranging for future appointments. She is supposed to watch the movie and then come back to tell the doctor her firm decision. Sally needs to decide soon because her cancer surgery is in two weeks, and if she changes her mind and wants an immediate reconstruction, there will be further measurements.

  Mia leans against the wall, moving out of the way when a clerk pushes a basket full of charts past her. She looks down at the charts, the folders held together with colored tape, the names written with dark black pen. So many sick people, all reduced to words. Soon, her mother will turn into a chart like this.

  “She’s a great candidate for reconstruction.”

  Mia gasps, looks up. Dr. Groszmann stands next to her, a chart in his hand, another patient, another cancerous breast.

  “Oh, that’s good news. Good news is nice.” Mia breathes deeply, trying to hold the wall of blood urging itself up her chest again.

  “Yes,” he says, pushing his hair back, a habit, Mia can see, because there’s not a strand out of place. He looks at her,
and then cocks his head toward the hallway. “Well, see you next week.”

  He holds out his hand again, and Mia takes it, his skin already familiar. She blinks and considers how even if she weren’t married, she would never ever sleep with a plastic surgeon. Her stretch marks chide her. Her thighs laugh. Her wrinkles crow.

  “Right. Next week.” She lets go of his hand, and he walks down the hall. He turns back to her, and she sort of smiles, sort of moves her hand in a wave. Then he knocks on a door and begins all over again what he did in the room with Sally. Another blush. Another mother/daughter wanting answers.

  “Christ,” Sally whispers, taking Mia’s arm as they walk toward the exit into the waiting room.

  “What?”

  “Crap HMO. They hire the most illiterate to run the show. Doctors don’t do anything to keep the boat afloat. Did you see that girl’s teeth? Crooked and brown. Obviously no dental plan here.”

  “Mom,” Mia says, pulling her mother to a standstill. “Did you get your appointment?”

  “Yes, of course. Do you think I’d leave here without it?” Sally starts walking again. “It’s Monday, if you can believe that. And I have the blasted movie to watch before then. You need to come watch it with me. I’ll make popcorn. We can pretend we’re having fun.”

  Mia looks at her watch. Harper will be home from school. Of course, that doesn’t mean much now that he is 16, can drive himself to his tutor and drama practice, but she still needs that cut-off time of 3.30, a way of telling everyone she has to leave, running from curriculum meetings or lunch dates or shopping trips. And when she gets home, Harper is usually not there anyway, so she pours herself a glass of wine and reads the mail.

  And though Mia knows this is wrong, she needs to get away from Sally. From this hospital and all its problems. From the cancer.

  “Harper is home, Mom. I’ll come get the movie tomorrow. We have till Monday.”

  Sally opens the door and they walk past the seated women.

  “Eleven percent,” Sally mutters as they stand in front of the elevators.

  “Eleven percent what?” Mia asks.

  “Women who will get breast cancer. You need to make sure you check yourself. Every month. Don’t forget the mammograms. And ask for a sonogram. After the doctor thought he felt a lump, that was the way they found mine, you know.”

  The elevator doors open, and they walk in. Five years of mammograms didn’t catch Sally’s cancer, though, her breasts small and dense, the flesh the same color on the film as the cancer hiding in her milk ducts.

  “I feel fine,” Sally announces. A man next to her raises his eyebrows.

  “Of course you do, Mom.”

  “I don’t feel like I have this glop growing in me. You know, that’s what the surgeon said. She said, ‘Look at this gloppy stuff.’”

  The doors open on the second floor and the man rushes out. Mia slaps the ‘close door’ button.

  “Katherine would know why it’s gloppy, Mom.”

  “I wish she were here now,” Sally says, her voice a sigh. Mia swallows, knowing well the sound of that longing.

  “She’ll be here for the surgery. So will Dahlia.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  The doors open into the lobby, and they leave the elevator.

  “I hate this place,” Sally says, looking at the scuffed carpet.

  Mia takes her mother’s arm, knowing that they will hate it even more before this is over.

  

  When Mia gets home, Harper has already left for his math tutor. She stands in the kitchen, staring at the counter, smiling as she imagines his afternoon routine. He’s left a frozen burrito wrapper there, and the TV remote is on the dining room table. She can see the ghost of his after-school self sitting there, watching the history channel, biting the burrito without looking at it.

  Unlike Lucien, Harper is a child of habit, though no one would know this from looking into the hump of clothes, papers, books, and magazines on the floor of his room. But he’s methodical in terms of what he does when he comes home, the minutes he spends eating, watching TV, sitting on the toilet with a book, doing homework, playing computer games. Mia can tell time by the sound of him in the bathroom in the morning, by his hard-heeled walk on the hardwood floor coming into her bedroom to say goodbye.

  Maybe he became this way because for his whole life, his brain has misfired on him, turning words backward, numbers upside down, making whole sentences his teachers speak undecipherable. She used to think that Harper in a classroom was like herself in the Paris metro, speaking a French so horrible that she ended up buying a week pass when all she wanted was a ticket to get her to the Gare du Nord.

  He’s been in the resource class since second grade, and now even though he gets good grades and reads for pleasure, he knows that failure can come up suddenly and pull you down without warning.

  While sometimes Mia wants to weep when she thinks of what Harper has gone through just to learn how to read and add and multiply and type, most of the time she thinks of him like a lion, running through life without fear, despite the thorn in his paw.

  Lucien is not like his predictable brother, instead a wild boy, lazy and brilliant, reading all of James Joyce as a freshman and flunking algebra twice. He majored in LSD and marijuana until his sophomore year when Mia and Ford admitted him to an outpatient rehab program that the entire family went to for a year. Now he’s at a very liberal college in Washington state, majoring in literature and writing a novel. He calls her to talk about Ayn Rand, Richard Brautigan, and Niestze; he calls to ask her for money. He smokes only cigarettes now, though, and his written grade reports from his teachers are admiring. After reading phrases in the reports like “he might consider writing book reviews for a little side income,” and “extremely productive, “ and “strong poetic voice,” Mia imagines that Lucien is finally happy, able to stop seeking for the thrill that the drugs gave him.

  Both her boys are beautiful, dark and tall and slim like their father, even if their brains seem to be like Mia’s.

  Mia breathes in and then the phone rings. She looks at the clock, knowing it must be Ford, calling her from his car, stuck somewhere on the Bay Bridge or in the Caldecott Tunnel. Traffic, lately, has become his way of life, forcing him to pull over in Oakland or Emeryville for a drink while the rest of the suburban folk idle and swear in lines of hot cars. But it’s not Ford.

  “How is the old girl?” Kenzie asks.

  “Fired up. Bitchy. Complaining.” Mia takes the phone to the dining room table and sits in Harper’ seat. Kenzie’s phone is scratchy, as if Mia’s best friend is calling her from a cave. Kenzie calls her from everywhere she can get a signal, though, tops of ski resort runs, the Eiffel Tower, a river in Colorado. Mia met Kenzie during Mia’s first class at Cal, Kenzie working at the time in the public relations office at the university. She came into Mia’s fiction workshop for photos of students hard at work.

  “Oh, come on!” Kenzie said to Mia’s students. “Character development can’t be that serious. Your teacher looks harmless enough. Smile for god’s sake! The camera won’t bite you.”

  Now as a freelance photographer, Kenzie travels all over the world and always wants to share everything with Mia, regardless of where she is. Mia sometimes thinks that since Kenzie took Mia’s photograph that ended up on Mia’s first novel, they are bound for life, connected through eyes and image.

  “Well, that’s good. That’s great, really. What did the doctor say?”

  “Where are you?” Mia asks.

  “In the basement. Something’s gone wrong with the plumbing again.”

  “Oh.” Mia sighs.

  “Well?”

  “He was nice. Gave her the options. She has to decide by next week when she goes in for her second appointment.”

  “Was she scared?”

  Mia closes her eyes, trying to forget Sally’s horrified face when Dr. Groszmann told her about the side effects of immediate reconstruction.

 
; “Yeah. It’s not really as easy as they’ve made it sound. You know, go in, come out with perfect breasts. There are a lot of steps.”

  “I’m sure it’s horrible, but I’d go Dolly Parton.”

  “What?”

  “I think she should get giant ones. Make up for all those years of flatness. I would.”

  Mia shakes her head and spins the TV remote on the smooth oak table. “No, you wouldn’t. You like running around without the iron hands of a jog bra. You like your sexy boyish look in a white t-shirt.”

  “You’re right. But I’d think about it.”

  Kenzie shrieks, says, “Hold on,” and Mia can hear running water. As she waits, she wonders how to bring up what happened in the doctor’s office besides the reconstruction talk. All these years, Kenzie has told her date stories, but Mia has never started off the conversation, never had anything to say. Never embarrassed herself like she did this afternoon, her face turning the color of sunburn whenever Dr. Groszmann spoke to her.