The Transformation of Things (23 page)

“Amber’s getting her tits done,” Lisa told me one morning, as I sat at her kitchen table and watched her empty her dishwasher. I was the only one to know what had really happened to Lisa, which, for some reason, made Lisa open up a little bit more about the other women.

The rest of them only knew what Lisa had told them, the story she’d concocted, that she’d simply been dehydrated, too much running around, too much stress, too much exercise (and I thought it was funny that they bought that last part). But why wouldn’t they? Apparently the women had been feeding one another bullshit for as long as I’d known them, probably longer, and maybe I had been a part of that, too, pretending like Will and I had had the perfect marriage, pretending
like I was above having children, like I was the one doing something good in running the auction, when, really, all I was doing was passing the time.

“Barry’s doing it?” I asked.

“His partner,” she said. “Do you think life would be different as a D cup?”

“No.” I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine how that would solve anything. “Absolutely not.” Though I certainly had wondered how life would be different without breasts, how I would feel if I had them taken from me. And that seemed like it would make life eminently different for some reason.

“Barry suggested I get mine done a few weeks ago.” She laughed. “But he was really sweet last night. He apologized. He said he didn’t mean that I needed it, only that he was trying to help.” She paused. “He actually felt guilty about it, as if that were the reason …” She let her voice trail off.

I knew she hadn’t told him the truth, and I wondered if she ever would. It seemed clear to me, having visited her life in dreams, that telling Barry might be the only real way for her to break out of this. She blamed herself for so much, and I guessed that Barry would blame her for nothing, that Barry could make her understand that it wasn’t her fault. And then I thought about Will, about his life as a judge, and how we never told each other anything. “You have to talk to him,” I said. “You have to let him in.”

After my run, I had a splitting headache again, and when I got home, I took two ibuprofen. Then I saw the mail and a note that Will must’ve left on the table when he’d stopped home for lunch.
CALL ME IF
you
WANT ME TO PICK UP DINNER. I LOVE
you. I love you.
Right there in all caps, so bold and so
obvious, it made me want to cry. I picked up the phone and dialed his number.
You have to talk to him,
I’d told Lisa.
You have to let him in.

“Hi,” I said softly, when he answered. “You busy?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Just walking into an appointment.”

“I saw your note.”

“Do you want me to get something?”

“No,” I said. “I have a chicken.” I paused. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Oh,” he said. “Hi. Can I call you back in twenty minutes?”

“You don’t have to call me back. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“You’re not,” he said. “But I have to go.”

“Will.” I said his name forcefully, afraid he might hang up before I said it. I heard his breath, slow and steady on the other end of the line. “I love you, too.”

After we hung up, I noticed the mail on the table. Sitting on top of the pile was a thick manila envelope, the return address telling me it was from
City Style.
As I ripped open the package, I thought about Kat and Grant, pictured them having drinks at a bar, as she leaned into him. And then I wasn’t sure if it was something that I dreamed or something that I imagined, because the image in my mind felt foggy, unclear, which only made my head start throbbing more.

Inside the envelope were the handwritten brides’ forms, and a note written in Kat’s large scrawling handwriting—which simply read:
Deadline: Feb. 14.
I turned the piece of paper over, looking for answers, looking for something else, but that was absolutely all it said.

So she was still sending me work—she didn’t totally hate me. I knew if she wanted to, she could’ve easily asked the intern to write these up, so it sort of felt a little like an apology,
or at least an opening. But an opening for what? I wondered. She obviously didn’t want my advice, and maybe she was over my friendship. In fact, maybe she just felt sorry for me.

I thought about Ara and Sarah Lynne, about Ara’s tiny little fingers on my watch, her warm body in my lap, and then I took the forms from Kat and went to the computer to type them up. I had over a week, but I knew finishing would give me an excuse to talk to her again. Still, I sat there for a while, staring at the blank screen until everything was blurry and my head was pounding again. But nothing came to me, no words at all.

Twenty-six

T
he next week I had my annual doctor’s appointment with Dr. Horowitz. I always dreaded it, something that seemed to creep up on me every February, almost something of a surprise, though clearly it wasn’t. But this year I dreaded it even more than usual because I hadn’t been feeling like myself lately. And as I sat in the waiting room, I had this nervous pit in my stomach that something was wrong, that Dr. Horowitz was going to give me bad news.

I drummed my fingers nervously against the edge of the chair, too terrified to read my copy of
City Style,
though I pretended. I opened it up to Kat’s article, “Fifty First Dates,” which detailed fifty different places you could go on a unique date in the city. I stared at her byline and her photo until it made me dizzy, until I could almost see her frowning the way she had that day in her office.

“Mrs. Levenworth,” the nurse called out, and I jumped,
because it felt like it’d been a long time since someone had called me that.

As the nurse checked my blood pressure, I felt my pulse beating fast and steady in my head, my neck. “A little high.” She frowned.

“It always is.” I laughed nervously. “Doctors make me a little nervous.”

“Oh,” she said. “White-coat syndrome then. Well, I’ll let the doctor know.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that Dr. Horowitz already knew, that Dr. Horowitz had seen me clutching Kelly’s hand in my mother’s hospital room when he’d come in to visit after the mastectomy. That Dr. Horowitz had been the one to first reassure me that my lump was probably nothing, and then, when it was, to recommend annual breast MRIs.

“Jennifer,” he said breezily as he walked in, his easy manner calming me slightly, but not much. “How’s your family?”

“Great,” I said, which didn’t feel like such a lie anymore, though I imagined he must’ve read about Will and thought it was.

“Have you been keeping up with your breast self-exams?” I nodded. “Good. Then let’s check everything out.”

I lay back against the cool table and held my breath as he palpated around my breasts checking for a lump I might have missed.
Please don’t find something. Please don’t find something. Please don’t find something.

“Totally normal,” he said, and I exhaled. “I’ll get you a slip for your MRI, but I don’t feel anything to worry about.” He moved to the end of the table to do the rest of the exam. “Any other problems?”

“No.” I shook my head, not wanting to mention the headache
that wouldn’t go away, or the dreams that wouldn’t stop coming, not wanting to give him a cause to search harder, to find something else.

“And are we planning on getting pregnant soon?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll write you a script for prenatals, just in case. It’s better to start taking them before you conceive. Then as soon as you get a positive test you can call our office and set up an appointment.” He reached for his prescription pad and scribbled on it, then ripped off the page and handed it over. The way he laid it all out, so officiously, so matter-of-fact, it was as if it was all decided for me. He’d written the same prescription last year, but I’d declined it, telling him I was sure I wouldn’t need it yet, that I would call him if I changed my mind. But now I thought about what Lisa had said, about not always remembering to take her vitamins, about feeling that that was to blame for her miscarriage, and though I didn’t think it really was, I accepted the prescription from him anyway.

“I don’t even know if I’ll use it,” I said. “If I’ll ever have a baby.”

He nodded, all business, not reacting to whether I ever would or would not have a child. I imagined the way Will’s eyes would look if I announced that to him, the truth, so openly, and I knew they would mist up, that he wouldn’t even be able to look at me. “How old are you now?” Dr. Horowitz asked, glancing down at my chart.

“Thirty-three.”

“Well, we recommend that if you know you want to have a baby, it’s better to do it before you hit thirty-five. After thirty-five the risk of Down syndrome increases.” He paused. “Not to rush you,” he said, “but sometimes, timing is everything.”
I nodded, thinking about the way people always talked about hearing their internal clock ticking, and I wondered if the sound of mine was just drowned out by something else; fear, maybe. “Are you still thinking about genetic testing?” he asked.

It was something he’d brought up every year since I’d found my lump, the possibility of learning whether I had the breast cancer gene, of learning whether my mother’s cancer was random or whether it was also preprogrammed in me, my destiny. But I’d never been able to decide whether it was better knowing or not knowing, so I always waffled, telling him I’d think about it. Once I’d asked Kelly about it, if she thought about having the test. She’d waved her hand in the air and said, “Oh, Jen, you can’t worry about every little thing. You could be hit by a bus tomorrow.” I’d nodded, but I’d been thinking,
But Mom wasn’t hit by a bus, and getting hit by a bus is not carried in a person’s DNA.

“I don’t know,” I finally answered him, wondering if having the test might just be better than not knowing. What if it was not my destiny to die? What if my mother’s cancer, my father’s disappearing act had been nothing more than a fluke after all?

“I’ll tell you what,” Dr. Horowitz said, looking neither pleased nor displeased about my noncommittal answer. “I’ll write you out the slip for the lab work, and then you’ll have it if you decide you want to do the test.”

So I left his office with two little pieces of paper in my hand, both of them, maybe, having the ability to decide my future.

When I got home, I finished the wedding announcements. I’d been torn between wanting to get them done, to have an
excuse to talk to Kat, and not wanting to get them done, because I wasn’t sure what I would say to her when I did get the chance. Now I had no choice; they were due tomorrow. When I finished, I attached them in an e-mail to Kat, which, even though I’d already rehearsed it in my head all week, I wrote and rewrote three times, before deciding just to simply write:
Sorry. Can we talk? xoxo, Jen.

I sat there and stared at the screen for a minute, knowing she was probably at her desk, that she would probably hear the click of the e-mail and open it up right away.
Please respond,
I willed her.

Exactly three minutes later, she wrote back.
Can we meet for coffee? Downstairs? 3:30?

The train station was empty in the middle of the day, and the train wasn’t crowded either. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, feeling my head throb, as if it had its own painful pulse.
I should call Ethel,
I thought.
She would have something to give me.
I’d been putting it off because I was worried she would tell me it was a side effect of the calming herb, that she might even tell me to stop taking it, and that was something I couldn’t risk doing again. I felt like I needed the herbs now, needed them to figure everything out.

When I opened my eyes, the seat next to me was taken, and I recognized the mother and daughter who sat there. The girl still had her
Goodnight Moon
book, and she held it tightly to her chest. Her mother stared in the other direction, so I couldn’t meet her gaze.

The girl looked at me, and I smiled. “That was my favorite book when I was a little girl,” I said.

She hesitated before speaking, and I imagined that her
mother, who clutched her ever so tightly, must’ve warned her more than once about talking to strangers. But then she said a line from the book, no louder than a whisper, so I almost couldn’t hear her.

I closed my eyes again and heard the same words in my mother’s voice, heard her voice so vividly in my head that it gave me chills.

When I opened my eyes, because I felt the train stopping, the girl and her mother had already stood up and walked away, and the sound of my mother’s voice had once again completely left me.

Kat was already sitting outside the coffee shop when I arrived at exactly four minutes before three-thirty. She was bundled up in a gray wool peacoat with a red scarf, hat, and gloves, and I watched her take a drag from her cigarette.

“Hi,” she said, when she noticed me. She dropped the cigarette and squashed it with her black high-heeled boot. “We can go inside. It’s freezing out here.”