The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

  “God,” Kenzie says, back and panting slightly. “Plumbers. So what else happened? Then I’ve got to go.”

  “Well, the doctor was nice.”

  There is a hitch in the conversation, and Mia can almost hear Kenzie smile. “My god! You slut.”

  “I know. It was sickening.”

  “What does he look like?” There is a bang, the sound of metal on metal. A door slams.

  “Too thin, too long-haired, too soft-spoken.”

  “You want him. Shit! There’s a foot of water in here. God damn it. I’ve got to go. Listen,” Kenzie says, and Mia listens. “Are you there?”

  “You told me to listen.”

  “Smart ass. Sally girl is going to be fine.”

  “I know,” Mia says. “She always has been before.”

  “I’ll call you later. First I need to swim out of here. Bye.”

  Mia clicks off the phone and stares out the window at the bird feeder. An angry flock of purple finches screams at each other, and Mia wonders if she should take the feeder down. Last year, she got rid of the hummingbird feeder because of the aerial wars two males engaged in the entire summer, buzzing right by people on the deck, swooping past with their high pitched needle-beaked whines. Despite everything she knew, she couldn’t help but imagine a guest lanced through the cheek by a bird drunk on sugar water. So she took down the feeder, pretending not to notice the two males sitting on opposite branches for weeks, waiting.

  She stands up and walks over to hang up the phone, the plastic suddenly heavy in her hand. Of course, Kenzie is right. Sally will be fine. She has to be. Both doctors think there is little chance the cancer has spread to her lymph nodes, and the cancer has taken years to grow, a slow, plodding cancer. Even Katherine agreed. When Mia complained to her sister that the surgeon was going to wait three weeks to operate, Katherine sighed.

  “Oh, don’t get dramatic. That cancer is going no where.”

  “How can you tell? Can’t something escape right now and sail up into her lymph nodes and get spread around just like that? How can anyone say one little cell isn’t going to make giant headway in three weeks?”

  “Look, I read the initial path report. Carefully. This cancer isn’t going to be more than stage one, stage two at the most.”

  “How can you tell that from a piece of paper?” Mia asked.

  Katherine sighed again and started talking in that condescending, slightly exasperated doctor voice Mia hated. She talked about aggregate dimensions of the sites and surgical margins and mitotic activity. After a few minutes of this, Mia gave up and decided to believe her sister. Why not? Sally was Katherine’s mother, too, and if Katherine thought it was okay to walk around with cancer in her milk ducts, who was Mia to argue?

  Mia walks into her room and stares at her bed. Since she’s been on sabbatical, she hasn’t taken one single afternoon nap. Not one. Usually during a semester, she would find herself sneaking in here at 3, falling down on the bed and sinking into a deathlike slumber until Harper came home. Since she isn’t reading student papers or going to meetings or driving to campus, she isn’t tired in the afternoons any more. But today her body feels like someone has scrubbed it clean with steel wool, her insides jittery and quaking and trembling. As she stands at the foot of the bed, she has sharp, quick worries about Sally, then Ford. There seems to be more wrong than what’s on the surface, than what’s obvious. Her heart races. Her eyelids ache. Her stomach pulses. With her coat still on, she sits down and then lies down, closing her eyes against the afternoon light. In a minute, she is asleep.

  Her dream makes no sense because she does not play baseball or like baseball or think about baseball, not ever. The game is as far from her mind as the NASDAQ or quantum physics. But in this dream, she is on a team that has recently hired a player with a disability. Someone tells this to Mia, and she nods, knowing about disabilities. She thinks with a sudden, quick pain about Harper and his reading difficulties, and turns to look at this person in left field. She can feel her gasp in her head and body. This person is covered tight in some kind of white plastic wrap. Underneath the covering, Mia can see this person move, arms and legs shifting. In a way, the movements of this person’s body under the wrap remind her of what her stomach looked like in late pregnancy when the babies turned, a wall of arm pulsing across her abdomen.

  Suddenly, a ball cracks off a bat and flies high. It’s headed right toward the wrapped person, and somehow, the person catches it. She watches the person, her gaze coming closer and closer to him, his very body making her feel like she’s trapped and suffocating. But she can’t stop watching. All his body parts seem to scrabble around inside the wrap as he tries to find the ball. And then there is stillness. The person has found it, a round lump under the wrap. Mia finds herself moving closer to the person, staring at the ball right there on the person’s chest, when suddenly, she is the one in the wrap, she is the one that can’t see, can’t hear, can’t move freely, and then she wakes, gasping, her heart pounding against the cage of her ribs.

  Ford and Harper are at the table, finishing the last of the chicken pelaponese. As Mia picks up the empty dish from the table, Ford smiles but his eyes focus on the kitchen wall as he talks.

  “That was really good,” he says, twirling a fork on the table, his face vacant.

  “Thanks,” she says, taking a plate to the sink and turning on the water. But what she really wants to say is, Where are you? What Mia wants to know is what he won’t tell her. But because this weeknight family dinner is rare—he’s often traveling for business during the week—she doesn’t want to start something they can’t finish, pulling Harper into the mix.

  “Mom?” Harper says.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need twenty dollars. My English class has adopted a family in Oakland.”

  Ford sits back in his chair and looks at Harper. “Don’t you usually do that at Christmas?”

  “Mr. K forgot. So we decided to do it for Easter.” Harper puts down his fork. “Oh, not Easter. We have to call it a spring break gift. In case they’re like Muslim or something.”

  Ford puts his hand into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. He arrived home late as he often does these days, and he’s still in his suit pants and white button-down shirt. His tie curls like a snake on the kitchen counter next to the colander. His dark bangs stand up straight from his forehead.

  “Here.” He slides a twenty across to Harper.

  Harper nods, his eyes on his plate. “Thanks.”

  “I wish someone had adopted us when we were in college. Or even later. We could have used a benefactor,” Mia says, thinking about the apartments they lived in, the worst one just after Harper was born. The plumbing drained right into the ground below the house. Mold grew like wild green hair in Mia’s shoes in the closet.

  Ford shakes his head and wipes his mouth. “You are such an exaggerator. It wasn’t that bad. Don’t make this into a scene for one of your novels.”

  She knows he doesn’t like to think of those days, so long ago and so different from how they live now. In fact, when she brings up the stories of the horrible apartments and the horror of months with thirty-one long days between paydays, he quickly changes the subject. But back then, surrounded by moldy shoes and parades of ants coming up through the floorboards, how could either have imagined this house in Monte Veda, Ford’s wonderful job with Baden Randolph Myers? When Lucien was a toddler and Harper a baby, how could they have envisioned Mia at the university and then an author? Maybe they had dreams, but the reality was night school and buckets of dirty cloth diapers, disposable too expensive to buy.

  And strangely, they are living the dream they both conjured up so long ago—two healthy children, a nice home, plenty of money, great careers. But somehow, they forgot to think up later dreams, other goals, future plans. What is the story for their old age? What are their plans for five, ten, twenty-five years from now? It’s as if the plot of their lives stopped, leaving them where the sequel s
hould begin.

  Mia opens her mouth as if to ask, but then thinks of Sally and David. Maybe it’s best to let the future stay a blur. In case it doesn’t even show up.

  Harper finishes eating and stands up. He unfolds forever, his body long and lanky, the tallest Alden boy, taller than Ford. He is on his nighttime path, homework, IMing his friends, shower, sleep. He doesn’t seem to notice his parents, but he touches Mia’s shoulder as he passes her at the sink. Her baby. Her last baby, a man now.

  “So how was it?” Ford asks, his elbows on the table. “What’s your mom going to do?”

  Mia sighs. “She has to decide by Monday. But it looks like she’ll wait to heal from the first surgery before she goes ahead with the reconstruction.”

  “Does the doctor seem good?” Ford takes his last sip of wine, stares at the empty glass, and then pours another to the top of the thin, crystal glass.

  “He’s nice.” She shrugs. She looks at her husband. His shirt sleeves are rolled up, the neck of his shirt open. If she were to squint, he would be the young man she met her sophomore year of college, the one who rode his bike in winter wearing shorts. He would be knocking on her apartment door, asking if he could borrow the phone, he and his roommate upstairs too poor to get one for themselves.

  He was the first man to want her so aggressively, asking her out over and over until she said yes. And if she’d been disappointed with how it felt to be with him in bed, everything else about him made up for that lack of feeling. His kindness, his warmth, his desire for her, his commitment to their “unwanted” pregnancy, of Lucien. What a wonderful father he was, is, always has been, to both Lucien and Harper.

  Sometimes before bed, Ford undressing slowly in their room, sighing about something from his day, Mia wants to ask him where he is. Where have you gone? she wants to say. Who are you now? She wants him to ask her, too. Maybe she would tell him then how she feels, but his sighs pass without her saying a word, and then they are in bed and then they are asleep.

  But she knows she really doesn’t have to change anything about their marriage. It could go on for years just like this. He is a good man, a lovely man, even if most of the time, she feels as if she is sleeping with her brother.

  Once Kenzie said, “It’s a myth that one person can give you everything you need. Is one person supposed to keep you mentally and physically challenged at all times?”

  “That’s the way we’ve decided it should be.”

  “There’s always self love, sweetie,” Kenzie said, laughing. “There’s always a quickie at the Harlot Hotel.”

  Mia snorted. “There’s not a lot of support out there for going elsewhere for sexual pleasure. We call that adultery.”

  “So? And anyway, here’s the other thing. Honesty is overrated. Don’t forget that. Say it over and over to yourself over and over before you leave the house in the morning.”

  Now, as Mia looks at Ford, she knows that if she ever tells him the truth, if she ever says, “You know, Ford, I love you so much. But I want something. I’m not sure what it is really. A feeling. A pulse. I think I want to go outside our marriage for sex. You mean well, but you just don’t do it for me,” she thinks it would kill him.

  Ford takes her hand. “It will be okay. Your mom will be fine.”

  She looks at her husband and hopes he’s right. She hopes it all will be okay.

  Two

  Sally

  Sally stares at herself in her bedroom mirror. She’s taken off her blouse and her bra and turned on all the lights in the room. Now she stands a foot away from the mirror, looking at her breasts. She lifts up one arm, watching her breast rise, seeing the pale white smoothness of her underarm. Then she drops that arm and lifts the other, the healthy breast bouncing up, this underarm just as pale.

  Her breasts seem exactly the same as always, not much different since she weaned Dahlia. The nipples are large, brown, distended, the flesh below them saggy. Droopy was the exact word the plastic surgeon in Breast Cancer: Understanding Your Treatment Options used to describe the downward press of gravity on flesh.

  “Observe how the healthy breast droops,” the doctor intoned, as if being cancer free wasn’t enough to exclude the breast from criticism. “And now here’s a photo of how we matched the healthy breast with the reconstructed breast. Look at how symmetrical.”

  A red laser dot circled the aureole. That’s something Sally has learned during cancer. How to pronounce aureole. Maybe she’s never actually said the word—was there a need?—but she thought air-e-o-la, like some kind of musical note. Instead, when the doctors talk about the aureole complex, it’s oh-ree-la, the musical note’s sour twin.

  On and on the photos went, but none showed the patients’ faces, so it was hard to determine if the breasts matched the women. Sally knows that at sixty-six, she doesn’t want a pair of perky little packages riding under her sweater. How ridiculous would that be? All the men at bridge would stare at her during the rubbers, unable to bid. On her walks, poor widowed Dick Brantley would stare at her even more than usual as she bent down to pat Mitzie, his cocker spaniel.

  But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Sally liked Dick, enjoyed his deep voice saying, “Hey, ho, Sal,” when they passed each other on the street.

  She shakes her head, pushing away for now her flirtatious fantasy of Dick. She has to think. What she wants, really, is for the doctors to figure out how to suck the offending goop out of her breast and let her go on with what she has. Her flesh. Her nipple. The droop that she earned.

  Sally looks down at her left breast, wondering why it betrayed her. And then she laughs, full of her own self-pity. Why would a breast betray her? It was she, most likely, who betrayed her breasts, taking those flipping hormones from the time she was forty-five until the day of the cancer diagnosis. She ignored the reports, the warnings, telling a concerned Mia just last year, “It works. Why stop? Everyone is panicking.”

  Now, two weeks since her diagnosis, she’s awash in hot flashes, burning through the night in sweat, her hair thinning even before she can start chemotherapy.

  “Christ,” she mutters, picking up her bra and putting it on. Her left breast doesn’t even hurt, not even from the biopsy she had two weeks ago. She feels fine, wonderful, as if she could do two laps around the neighborhood in less than an hour; as if she could do all of Florence or Rome or Paris in one day. There is no evidence of illness except on a slide and in her chart, and for a second, Sally wonders if she could run away from the words that the doctors wrote down to tell her what she is. A cancer patient.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Sally cleans up her popcorn mess. Somehow, she’s never quite figured out how to time the popcorn right, so she burns one bag for every bag she can eat. The air smells like char, a slight haze of smoke clinging to the kitchen ceiling. Sally opens a window and dumps the unpopped kernels into the trash. Her fingers are shaking, and she suddenly slides down to the floor, her breath quick and harsh and full of tears.

  David, she thinks, come help me. But then she shakes her head, swallowing back her sadness. It’s impossible. He died before they even invented microwave popcorn. And anyway, he doesn’t know a thing about cancer. Sally’s the one who studied up when he was sick. He couldn’t help her at all.

  When David died of cancer, it happened so fast. Spring turned into summer without Sally noticing. Before she knew it, it was one hundred degrees and David was in the ground. Now she can’t even remember what she did in those few short months except for driving to and from the hospital. She must have taken care of her girls, cooked, cleaned, ironed school clothes, fed the dog, watered the yard. But she has no memory of anything but the corridor outside David’s hospital room, the slick linoleum, the smell that jammed itself down her throat—cotton sheets washed in water too hot, ammonia, alcohol, plastic, rot.

  And then, like that, it was over, life pushing on, and Sally had to keep going. She didn’t want to, but how could she stop? She had three girls, nine, six, and three. There was the in
surance money to figure out, the will to go through, and David’s clothes and belongings to deal with. Before she knew it, the children were a year older. Then two, then ten, all Sally’s worries of the future shielding her from the present. Mia was in college, suddenly pregnant, her life gushing way past the predictable lines Sally and David had imagined for her when she was little. At least Katherine never did anything like that, complicating her life so quickly, and Dahlia had followed Sally’s suggestions perfectly, waiting exactly two years after graduating before marrying Steve, who from all accounts still seems perfect for her. So when had Sally had the chance to think about David and illness and death? By the time the girls were out of college and into their lives, Sally’s life with David seemed like a dream she’d once had, a book read long ago on a summer beach, the memory soaked with sun and forgetfulness. But it was a book she still couldn’t put down.