The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

  Sally wants to cry, but there aren’t tears. Just pain. Her throat hurts; her head aches. The smell of the burned popcorn makes her nauseous. For a second, she imagines this is what the chemo will be like, her body full of sickness, all her cells trying to regenerate, clawing to life.

  “Christ,” she says, rubbing her face and pushing herself up slowly. “Holy cow.”

  Everything in her feels heavy, wrong. Did David feel this way? If so, he never told her, never complained. Oh, how he must have hurt.

  Sally slaps the counter. “Enough!” She closes her eyes, waits, and then opens them and looks out the window. The red bud tree her gardener Rigo planted last year has lost the last of its pink flowers, the green fan shaped leaves open toward the afternoon light. Sally needs air, light, sun, so she puts the popcorn bowl into the dishwasher and walks out of the kitchen. She’s going to take a walk. She’ll put on her turquoise pants and even slather on sunscreen, though the light is almost gone from the sky, though wrinkles and skin cancer are the least of her worries now.

  If she runs into Dick Brantley and Mitzie, she’ll smile, say something nice. Maybe Sally will ask him in for coffee or maybe he’ll want one of the beers she keeps handy for Ford. They will sit in the living room, and she’ll listen to his stories about his wife, find out where he’s going to travel to next. That’s just what she’ll do. For good karma, as Mia would say. For plain good luck.

  Sally is in bed, sitting up with a magazine on her lap, watching the television in her room. She’s popped in the second video, one that her neighbor Nydia Nuñez brought over with a lemon pound cake. This one is entitled Reconstruction: Not a Misnomer.

  “My son-in-law, he’s a surgeon, you know. His hospital made this. I had it for my sister,” Nydia said as she handed Sally the cake and the video.

  Sally wondered how Nydia found out about the cancer, and then remembered the phone call she’d had to make to Vera Lyons, the head of the home improvement committee for the complex. Sally knew she wouldn’t be able to chair the deck paint choice committee now.

  “Oh,” Sally said, gripping the cake gently, the hard video against her chest. “How is your sister?”

  Nydia waved her hand. “Hers was different.”

  How? Sally wanted to ask. How was she different from me? Was her cancer terrible, spread throughout her body? In every lymph node and cell? Was the tumor site huge, over 4 CM? Sally wanted to tell Nydia that her site is only 1.3, small, so small, just like this. She imagined holding up her fingers to show Nydia the tiny, itsy bitsy spot. She wanted to run and get the pathology report, shake it under her neighbor’s nose. Look! Tell me! Tell me that I won’t be like your sister!

  But instead, Sally smiled broadly, thanked Nydia and didn’t invite her in, promising to return the video after watching the entire thing. Yes, the whole thing.

  The breasts on this video are stunning, gorgeous, perfectly shaped. Reconstruction is not a misnomer here, and the narrator does not use the term mastectomy deformity, a phrase that made Sally wince throughout the other film.

  She learns more about saline implants (silicon is apparently just on the horizon again, suddenly not poisonous or toxic anymore) and TRAM flap reconstruction (they look the best). Because the doctors use stomach fat to create the breasts, the good news with TRAM flaps is that along with lovely, more natural breasts, you get a tummy tuck in the process. A two-fer.

  The video whirs on. There are close-ups of the “newly made” breasts, the scars hardly visible; the only difference is in the nipple. No amount of tattooing can bring back a perfect oh-re-la complex. Sally can see that now. But as she watches picture after picture of perfect breasts, she knows she wants to keep her own. She wants to enjoy them, as she hasn’t since—since David died. She might even want to show them to Dick, to make his millennium.

  Sally giggles and looks down at the video box in her hands, turning it over slowly. As she reads the back, she gasps. Beverly Hills. This video was made by a volunteer group for Cedars Sinai Hospital. She shakes her head and then flicks off the VCR. Like her crappy HMO will pay for newly made, perfect breasts. Not in this decade. Even today, she knows that the hospital would kill David all over again, ignoring his symptoms, unable to find the cancer that was crawling around his stomach. Even today, she would be a widow.

  Fuck them, she thinks, using Katherine’s constant command about Republicans, bigots, racists, the un-educated, the rich, the middle class, people who shop at Wal-Mart.

  Fuck them all.

  After her appointment at the OB/GYN, Sally meets Mia upstairs in the Plastic Surgery waiting room. All Dr. Kirsch wanted to do was follow up with her after she stopped the hormones, but the talk before it was awkward and embarrassing because Sally wasn’t sure how to thank him for finding her tumor in the first place, while doing the exam Sally should have been performing monthly at home all along. When he first found the lump, Sally could make excuses for herself. “It’s just a cyst,” she said to herself the day she drove home from her appointment. “A little cyst.”

  But after the biopsy and the terrible results, she is embarrassed, mortified that she missed a lump for a whole year, neglected to do what Dr. Kirsch ordered her to do every month in the shower: Fingers flat, move gently over every part of each breast. Check for any lump, hard knot, thickening.

  Shame, she thought to herself when she heard the biopsy report Shame on you.

  So it was with a great effort that she somehow managed to say, “Thank you for doing such a thorough exam on me,” and Dr. Kirsch nodded, keeping his refrain of, “Once a month, in the shower. Saves lives,” to himself.

  Sally is tired and barely says hello to Mia. After she registers at the desk, Sally sits down hard onto the stiff wooden chair. In Beverly Hills, she thinks, where there are newly made breasts, they must have better chairs. Leather. Stuffed. Comfortable.

  She pats Mia’s knee and then looks at her oldest daughter. Today, Mia looks more pulled together, pretty in the way Mia can be pretty. Her oldest daughter is not beautiful. Not like Dahlia, who managed to get all of David’s and Sally’s best characteristics: long, thick dark hair, thin, agile body, straight, small nose, wide blue eyes. Katherine is of that model, too, but her face is slightly wider than Dahlia’s, her skin not as smooth, her eyes smaller. But pretty. Pretty enough to be married, which she is not. Not even once.

  And there’s more to Katherine’s story, Sally knows that. But it’s Katherine’s to tell, not Sally’s to ask.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Mia asks.

  Sally shrugs, opens her purse to look for a mint, scraping the soft bottom with her hands. “Darn it.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  Sally clicks her purse closed. “All I want is a mint.”

  Mia opens her purse and pulls out a rectangle tin of mints Sally can smell before Mia opens the box.

  “Here, Mom. This will wake you right up.” Sally takes a mint from the box and looks at Mia. Her oldest girl.

  None of the pictures of Mia with her high school dates that clutter Sally’s hallway—photos of junior proms and senior balls—elicit the oohs and aahs from Sally’s bridge friends. None of them say, “What a lovely girl” as they do when looking at photos of Katherine and Dahlia.

  Even now that Mia is a published author and has done readings at Monte Veda Books to a crowd full of Sally’s friends, the comments Sally gets about Mia are in regards to her brilliance and humor and work ethic. At first, the kind of compliments Mia received bothered Sally. She could feel her long dead mother Frona at her shoulder saying, “She’s an attractive girl. If we could just get her to shape up! And that dress, dear. It’s not appropriate for this venue. In front of all these people in cotton. My goodness.”

  Sally often has to shake her mother’s voice out of her head, even now, twenty years since Frona died of lung cancer. She can still feel the slice of her mother’s words when Sally came down to breakfast over fifty years ago. Sally was experiencing her one and only overwei
ght period, an adolescent push toward flesh, her new woman’s body greedy for hips and breasts.

  Her mother untied her apron and stared at her, hissing, “Girls do not wear jeans. And certainly not with your hips!”

  Not only do her mother’s words still ring in her ear, but she can feel the way the stiff denim felt as she pushed the jeans down her plump butt and thighs, the tears in her throat as she tried not to cry.

  Even worse, in the past and sometimes, rarely, now, Frona’s vitriol slips out of Sally’s own mouth, leaving a bruising sentence in the air, one usually directed toward Mia. Frona would cringe at Mia’s hips in pants, and without meaning to or wanting to, Sally has said, “There’s got to be a way for you to lose weight,” and “If you could only get rid of a few pounds.”

  Sally wants to swallow down those words, take them back. She doesn’t know why she keeps hurting Mia this way, hurting this daughter who has always been with her. The daughter who is always there for her. It’s like Frona takes her over like a possessing spirit, uses Sally’s brain and mouth for an instant, and then vanishes, leaving Sally to deal with what remains

  And lately, Sally has felt a bruise on her heart for Mia, something she can’t really articulate, a sadness in her oldest daughter, feeling a pain that maybe Mia doesn’t even notice. Sally isn’t sure what could be wrong. Mia seems happy in her life, especially now that Lucien and all his issues are squared away. Ford is a lovely man, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with their marriage. But at times—in the car at an intersection or at a lunch in between salad and entrée—Sally bite back words before she begins to say something that might hurt Mia, might tell her more than she wants to know. Before Frona can come out of Sally’s mouth.

  Sally pats Mia’s knee again and looks up at the television set that flickers all day long in the waiting room. She knows that if she had to have one of her daughters as a mother, she’d pick Mia. In a heartbeat. Even with all her teaching and writing, Mia has stuck with those boys even when Sally herself would have tossed Lucien overboard. How Mia ever dealt with his psychotic reaction to that drug is beyond Sally. What had Lucien thought as the drug pumped through his brain? That everyone was really a musical note that swirled from him? Mia and Ford sat up with him all night and then got him into the program, the rehab that went on and on and on. And really, who knew what the kid was doing now up at that hippie college?

  Harper’s learning problems? Solved with extra time with tutors and therapists and backpacking trips that cost a bundle. And though she could never tell Katherine this, she is glad that Mia is the one who lives nearby, who will go to the appointments with her, who will take notes and ask questions. Despite Frona’s voice and her own still playing in her head, Sally knows that a small rear end and a handsome skirt are not what is really important.

  “So did you decide?” Mia asks, putting her hand on top of Sally’s. “That movie had a lot of options. I think I’d be confused.”

  Sally looks down at Mia’s solid fingers, feels their warmth under her own skin.

  “Oh, yes. I did. And you should have seen the video Nydia Nuñez gave me. Made reconstruction look like a fairytale. Came out of Beverly Hills. Not a harsh scar in the batch. Bells and whistles. I was surprised they didn’t throw in a face lift at the same time. Cure everyone’s problems all at once.”

  Mia laughs. “I bet they give you a massage before the surgery. Chai lattes. A pedicure.”

  “Well,” Sally says. “I think I’ll be lucky to escape with my life from this place.”

  She is about to say more, and then she realizes what she’s said isn’t funny. It’s the truth, the truth that she and Mia have known with David.

  “Anyway.” Sally folds her arms, feeling her breasts pressed against her chest. “I want a reconstruction, but delayed. Maybe a TRAM flap reconstruction. But later. All that talk about dead skin. Terrible.”

  Mia turns to look Sally in the eye. Sally sees how her oldest child is getting old herself, tiny lines at her eyes. Who will sit with Mia when she is where Sally sits, ill with something or another? For some reason, she doesn’t imagine Ford. Where is Ford? Why isn’t Ford with Mia, taking care of her? Sally’s heart begins to race until she thinks, Harper. Harper will be here. Tender-hearted Harper.

  “Are you sure? You know what you will look like for the months until you have the surgery. Not that I thought they looked so bad myself. You told me you were appalled by the scars.”

  “Deformity.”

  Mia nods. “Deformity.”

  Sally uncrosses her arms and pushes her hair back. “I’ll get one of those—or two of those thingies. You know. Prostheses. Slap them in my bra. That will carry me through.”

  “As long as you’re sure, Mom,” Mia says. “As long as it’s what you want.”

  Sally opens her mouth to say yes, but then closes it and sits back against the hard chair. What she wants is immaterial here because none of her wants will be granted. Since her diagnosis, her wants have been sailing in front of her eyes like tiny ships, all with full sails and plenty of headwind. What she wants is for it to be 1970 or late 1969, months before David felt the first twinge of pain in his stomach. She’ll block the free radical, chemical, virus, or poison that started his cancer. Or if that’s impossible even with all her magic, she wants to come from the future to that date and save him, whisk her husband forward to her time and take him to the swanky hospital in Beverly Hills. She will tell the doctors in their pretty white coats with their state-of-the art diagnostic machines to find the cancer. She’ll know, after all, where it will be. She can tell them where to look. And maybe, if she were able to save him, she wouldn’t be here now.

  Who knew how grief could turn a cell against the body that made it?

  A line has formed at the registration desk because the clerk is flirting with a man, taking her time swiping his card and laughing, tilting her head just so to show off her long lovely jaw line. Two women here for varicose vein surgery turn to each other and cluck, clutching their paperwork. The television flickers on, news, all disastrous. The weather will turn, winds will tear down power lines and delay traffic. The president will start another war, either in some underdeveloped country or here, at home, between gays and straights, conservatives and liberals, businessmen and environmentalists. The Congress and Senate will battle over the budget that is so far in deficit, Sally can’t even begin to imagine what the number would look like written down. Schoolchildren will lose years in a horrid educational system. Katherine will sit at home in Philadelphia in front of the screen and yell Fuck them! Fuck them!

  On and on it will go until the nurse swings open the door and calls out, “Sally Tillier.”

  Three

  Robert

  Robert puts down the recorder, clicking pause, and stares at the chart in front of him. His last patient, Jackie Lagalante, has just had her final check up after her TRAM flap reconstruction. It wasn’t easy. In fact, when Jackie came in for her first consult and then later, after she’d gone through chemotherapy and radiation, she was thin, her bones like hooks under her skin. But she was a good consumer—she’d watched the videos carefully, and saw that the TRAM gave the best results. Breasts that were of her own skin, own flesh, supple, and natural.

  “I want those,” she’d said, the bangs from her wig dipping down over her eyes. “These are the breasts I want.”

  Robert didn’t know what to say, except, “You’re too thin.”

  Jackie stared at him, blinking once, twice. “Then I’ll gain weight. I’ll grow the fat for my own breasts, and you’ll move it from my stomach to the right place. I read about it. It can happen.”

  In his other life, Robert would have said, “Yes,” immediately, assuring Jackie that all of this was possible, and maybe more. These new breasts would be shapelier, better formed, and feel better than anything she could get with an implant. And certainly, this newly grown flesh would be cancer free, not prey to the disease that flowed in her lobes and ducts. He would have
extolled the virtues of nipple tattoo and given out the phone numbers of former patients whom she could call for glowing reports on his technique, bedside manner, and wise counsel.

  But he was not in his other life now, so what he did was to nod and agree with her plan. They could do it. It would work. And her TRAM flap was, as it turned out, successful. But he didn’t promise anything. He never does, anymore.

  He clicks back on the recorder. “Patient was recommended to continue with her onocological check-ups and tests and was told to make an appointment if she notices any tissue loss.”

  Robert turns off the recorder, pushes his hair off his forehead, and picks up the appointment schedule his assistant Carla prints out each morning. Sally Tillier. From last week. Impending double mastectomy. Thin, too, like Jackie Lagalante.

  He puts down the schedule, rubs his forehead. Sally Tillier brought her daughter to her last appointment, probably because of something she’d read in a book about having an advocate. Probably the Breast Surgery Nursing Coordinator counseled Sally to bring another set of eyes and ears to every appointment. Sometimes Robert wants to open the door wide and shoo the family member/advocate out of the door, hustling them and their little notebooks and tape recorders out of the office. Too many eyes, too many ears. But he liked the daughter, felt it in his face when he opened the door, a flush of blood at what? A kindred soul? Someone who might understand what had happened to him? Her face made him want to smile and cry. He recognized her, a complete stranger. “There you are,” he almost said. “Where in the hell have you been?”