Talk Before Sleep (10 page)

Finally, I did believe her. Michael
was
fine, and so was she, and, apparently, so was Eric. Two weeks after Ruth left, he began dating one of the paralegals he worked with. “She’s a dweeb, Mom,” Michael had told her. “She’s never funny.”

“Is she pretty?” Ruth asked, and Michael said, “Gag me, Mom. What a woofer. Red hair.
Freckles.”

Ruth’s apartment was small, but it was beautiful—high ceilings, lots of windows, a fireplace in both the bedroom and the living room. She lined up pieces of pottery on the mantles, hung her artwork above that. She painted her walls delicate shades of pastels: peaches; blues; pale, pale yellows. At a garage sale, she found an Oriental rug made only more elegant by its fading colors and thinning nap, and she put it on her living-room floor. She kept white birch logs in her fireplace, baskets of beautiful rocks and seashells on her coffee table. Birds’ nests lodged above doorways, in corners on open kitchen shelves. At night, she burned candles, several of them grouped together like lit bouquets. I loved being in her apartment. As soon as you walked in the door, you relaxed. It was a woman’s place, plainly and un-apologetically. It seemed to me to breathe, to wipe its hands on its apron and welcome you in, inquiring immediately as to your spiritual well-being.

She took a job at a software company, something in marketing. This meant that we could no longer spend
long afternoons together, but we talked every day and saw each other at least one night a week. It was on one of those nights a full year later that she told me about her lump. “Come with me to get the biopsy,” she said. “Maybe I’ll feel weird after, and I won’t want to drive.” Then, looking at my french fries, she said, “Are you going to finish those?”

I pushed my plate toward her. “Aren’t you scared?”

She waved her hand in dismissal. “I’ve got lumpy breasts. I’ve been through this before, no big whoop. Slice and dice, hardly a scar left behind. It’s never been anything before. It won’t be this time, either.”

“Okay,” I said.

She looked up. “It
won’t
be!”

“Okay, I believe you! What time?”

“Nine-thirty,” she said. “Want to go out and look at fabric afterward? I’m taking the whole day off.”

“Of course,” I said. Ruth and I could spend hours in a fabric store. She was the only woman I’d ever met whose fascination for those places matched mine. The colors. The quiet undercurrent of industry. The tactile pleasure and smells of jewel-colored silks, calico cottons, wide-wale corduroy, pristine interfacings. We enjoyed looking through pattern books, especially when they got old and you could feel the history of so many hands on them. We loved the racks of buttons, all with personalities: shy pearls, flamboyant rhinestones, sensible round navy-blue buttons, lined up three in a somber row—Ruth said if they were little girls they’d all go to Catholic school. Every time we went there we admired the expensive scissors kept behind a glass case, and one
Christmas I finally gave Ruth a pair. She made a house for those scissors—lined a drawer with burgundy velvet and kept nothing but them there. I was a novice at sewing and struggled through each thing I attempted. Ruth made a raincoat, fully lined suits with invisible zippers, slipcovers for her sofa out of gorgeous French florals whose very presence on their five-foot-long bolts intimidated me. When winter came, we built huge fires and spent hours piecing together quilts on her bedroom floor. The wind rattled her windows and occasionally, with thrilling gusts, pushed itself into the room with us. But we were warm and distracted, sitting in our turtlenecks and flannel shirts and sweatpants and thick socks. Our hair was secured up off our faces with chopsticks and we were listening to moody jazz on the radio, drinking cocoa, and making art that would last for years. We were protected.

Of course we didn’t go to a fabric store that day. Because the lump was not nothing.

I was in the waiting room, watching television and reading magazines, looking at my watch with greater and greater frequency. It was taking too long. Finally, the surgeon came out and called my name. I followed him to a corner of the room. He began speaking, but he wouldn’t look at me, and I felt every part of myself grow stiff and cold. “It’s not good,” he said and I began nodding like an idiot.

I
stayed with her that night. Both of us crowded onto her little bed, like sisters. “Aren’t you at all scared?” I asked, just before we fell asleep. She had reacted to her diagnosis as though she’d encountered a minor road detour. She hadn’t wept. She hadn’t looked anxiously about. Her hands stayed still, resting half open on her lap. Her only movement was to cross her legs and lean back in her chair. A moment passed. Then she sighed and said, “Shit.” And then, leaning forward again, “So. How are we going to get rid of this?” The surgeon said she should come to his office in a few days and discuss it. Ruth looked at me and I nodded yes I would go with her.

“I know whatever happens, I’ll get through this,” she said that night. “I know I’ll be fine. I just
know
it. Don’t you feel that, sometimes, a kind of absolute sureness?” I could smell her shampoo, feel the slight pull her weight created on her side of the bed. I could see the dim outline of all her things around us, her furniture, the art on her walls, the restless flutter of her curtains in the night air. In her jewelry box, bracelets and earrings waited, in her cupboard were unopened cans of soup and boxes of spaghetti. Mail came addressed to her; her voice was on her answering machine; she had a savings account and a checking account and ice skates she used every winter. Where could danger fit in her busy life? I turned my pillow over, flipped my hair up to feel the coolness against my neck. I relaxed. Because I believed her.

“I guess I do have some real sureness about some things,” I said. “I know I won’t die on a plane. That’s why I’m never afraid to fly.”

Ruth yawned, then said, “How do you think we do know that stuff?”

“Grace,” I said.

“What?”

“Grace. I mean, I think that’s what grace is, the messages we get. Only we miss most of them.”

“Grace is ‘God’s loving mercy toward mankind,’” Ruth said. “I learned it in Sunday school.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” I said. “They’re merciful, those messages. If only we could understand them.”

R
uth wore a black knit dress to meet with the surgeon. I wore a purple sweater over my jeans, having heard that it was a healing color. I tried to tell Ruth to change when I picked her up.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well … ”

She strode over to the full-length mirror in her bedroom. “Does this look bad? Is my stomach sticking out?”

“No. It’s just grim, black. Funereal. It might bring bad luck.”

“Oh, bullshit. I look fabulous. Let’s go.”

In the car, Ruth told me about having seen Eric the day before. “He came over and tried to offer his regrets,
you know. I was actually sort of glad to see him. I was telling him about what the deal was, and I asked him if he wanted to see what they’d done, you know, the biopsy site? I don’t know why. I think I just wanted to man-test it, see if the next time I sleep with someone they’ll be freaked out about a scar on my boob. I mean, this one was a decent cut.”

“So what did he say about it?”

She laughed. “He didn’t even look! I started to pull my shirt up and he said, ‘Ruth, do you mind?’”

“Good old Eric.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’s squeamish.”

“Maybe he’s a jerk.”

When we arrived at the doctor’s office, Ruth and I sat together on one side of a massive desk. The surgeon came in, unfamiliar-looking now in a dark-brown suit. He sat opposite us, folded his hands on top of the desk, raised his eyebrows. Then he sighed nearly imperceptibly.

Uh-oh, I thought.

“So,” he said. “How are you, Ruth?”

She laughed.

He smiled, embarrassed, then said, “Has this … sunk in a little over the last few days?”

She shrugged. “Well, I guess so. I think it’s just the suddenness that’s the problem. I mean, I’m fine. I’m really healthy. I ran three miles the morning before you cut me. It’s like you’re doing dishes or something and the phone rings and somebody else answers it and hands it to you and says, ‘It’s for you. It’s cancer.’”

The doctor stared at her, attempted an empathetic nod.

“Of course, I know I’ll be fine and everything; it’s just kind of a shock, that’s all. I woke up the past two mornings and thought, wait, what’s wrong, something’s wrong. And then I remembered.”

He looked down at her file, pulled out a paper, cleared his throat. “We got the full path report back,” he said.

Ruth opened her purse, got a stick of gum. “And?”

“Well. It’s not too good, Ruth. What you have are the most aggressive kinds of cancer cells—highly undifferentiated. And of course, you’re premenopausal.”

“I certainly am,” she said, nudging me with her elbow. She wasn’t understanding. I thought I remembered that breast cancer acts worse when you’re premenopausal. I stared straight ahead.

“You might want to consider a mastectomy,” the doctor said. “Under these circumstances, most women do. The other choice would be a lumpectomy. Either choice will be followed, of course, by chemotherapy and radiation therapy. We’ll need to check your nodes. That will be the best prognosticator. We’ll hope it’s not there. If it is … well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

She sat quite still, then turned to me, held out her pack of gum. “Want a piece of this?”

I shook my head no.

“Take some,” she said, and I did.

L
.D. meets me at Ruth’s door. “Did you bring it?” she asks.

“What?”

“Hot fudge.”

I hold up the gigantic container.

“Wow. I didn’t know you could buy that much.”

“You can now.”

“Let’s go,” she says, and starts for the kitchen. “Ruth’s really hungry. She’s eating like crazy.” She turns around to look at me. “This is it. I think she’s turned the corner. I swear to God. I think she’s getting better. I’m bringing her some more of those Chinese pills. And we need to get her out more. She can make it. I know she can.”

I wish I had L.D.’s unwavering hope. Sometimes I think I’m starting to get close to it, and then I remember standing beside Ruth only a couple of weeks ago while her doctor showed her her chest X rays, her CAT scan. We’d been taken to a little room with light boxes so we could see them, and her doctor was pointing out all the pathology. A radiology resident had been in the room when we came in, looking at Ruth’s films, and his face changed from curiosity into something resembling fear mixed with pity when Ruth’s doctor introduced her to him. The name on the films! Here! He actually stepped back after he said hello, as though she were contagious. I stepped closer to her, stared at him defiantly.
But after she shook his hand, Ruth ignored him, looked instead at pictures of her own lungs.

“This,” her doctor said, beginning his horrible lecture, “is the cancer in your lungs, Ruth. This whiteness.” He pointed here, there, everywhere. Then, defeated, he put his hand down at his side. “I mean … it’s just a snowstorm in there.” He wasn’t being cruel. Ruth had insisted that she be shown these things. “I want to see it,” she said. “Then I can visualize it going away.”