All You Could Ask For A Novel

I remember the sweet sixteens so well.

It’s a stage you go through as a girl, at least where I come from. Some of the girls use their sixteenth birthdays as coming-out parties, debutante balls. I started to be invited to those parties around the time I was twelve. They were so glamorous, it was like being invited to the Oscars every weekend. I had to have a different dress for each event, which meant there were times when I needed two or three in a month, and that lasted about four years.

The next stage was when all my friends started to marry. That was another regular cycle, beginning when I was twenty-two. Scott and I must have attended thirty weddings and I was a bridesmaid in at least half of them. It became a ritual, choosing the bridesmaids’ dresses, complaining about the colors behind the bride’s back, organizing showers in strip clubs and tea salons. Hair and makeup and hosiery and tears; that lasted three years.

The next stage came very quickly after that. That one was babies. Jill Armel was the first of my group to become a mom. We were so young at the time, and clueless; four of us went to visit her in the hospital just hours after she gave birth. I’ll never forget what she looked like, exhausted and pale. She had been in labor for eleven hours. I asked her cheerfully: “How are you, sweetheart?” And she grumpily replied: “I haven’t peed in two days.” That woke me up a little.

It got easier from there for us, my group of girls, who, one by one, took turns trading in our horrible bridesmaid dresses for equally horrible maternity jumpers and overalls. I think I spent $4,000 in one year at Liz Lange Maternity and I wasn’t even pregnant. They were gifts. It was, once again, the stage of life I was in.

The stage that came next was awful. It began in a steady flow when we reached our thirties, all of us young moms, when one by one our parents started to die. I remember it was David Michel’s dad who went first, only sixty-one, cancer of the liver. He was an oncologist himself, very prominent in our town. I recall Mother could not bring herself to attend the funeral. “He was such a kind man,” she said, “I feel I knew him my entire life.” I certainly had. All the mothers and fathers of my group were like family to me, and, one by one, they started to go. A heart attack here, a kidney failure there, they came in a wave. They’ve slowed some since, they still come now and again, but not as often as they did back then.

And so, as I sit here tonight, introducing myself to you in a state of horror, shock, denial, fear, sadness, and guilt, what I cannot help thinking is that I hope I am not the beginning of the next stage for everyone else. I have this terrible image of my friends gathering for drinks ten years from now, reflecting on this stage of their lives, the stage when their friends started to die. And it’s me they’ll be talking about, the way I talk about Jill in the hospital. I can almost hear them now. “Brooke went first, breast cancer,” they’ll say, dabbing their eyes with tissue. “Poor thing, she was only forty.”

I don’t have any idea what the etiquette is here. I have prided myself all my life on knowing the proper thing to do. That was Mother’s favorite word when I was a girl, “proper,” she could use it in almost any context.

At a proper dinner party, we would never be seated together.

A proper response would be, “Yes, thank you, Daddy.”

Please hold your fork properly, a girl without table manners is like spring without sunshine.

Table manners were a big deal. Starting when I was six, I attended lessons in etiquette where I was taught the proper way to behave at a social function. I was there while most of my friends were receiving religious instruction. For my mother, proper behavior was a religion.

I know some girls would have rebelled against a childhood like that but I did not. Quite the opposite: I liked it. I liked using the proper fork for the first course at dinner. I liked knowing the proper way to respond to an invitation. I liked all of it and I still do: life is much easier when you know the proper way to behave. That’s one of the things that make this so tough right now. I haven’t the faintest idea what the proper response is to being told I have triple-negative breast cancer. It’s happened so quickly I feel as though I’ve been watching it happen to someone else, like a character in a book, a character I feel really sorry for right now.

I’m a woman who has two doctors in my life, a gynecologist and a pediatrician, and of the two I see the pediatrician, Dr. Marks, by far more often. He’s young and handsome and funny and sweet; I’ve often thought he was the sort of man I would have an affair with if I ever had an affair. (Which I would not, by the way, not ever.) I happened to mention to Dr. Marks about a month ago, when we casually bumped into each other at the drugstore, that my husband had just turned forty and that I would be forty in a few weeks. And he, because he is this way, asked if I had scheduled my first mammogram. I said I’d thought of it, and he made me promise I’d call my gynecologist that same day. And perhaps because he was just so cute, I did as I was told. A week later I was in the office of Greenwich Radiology, with my shirt off.

“Can you tell they’re real?” I asked the technician, looking for a laugh as he maneuvered my chest in the least sexual way I could ever imagine.

“Yes, I can.”

“I’ve been thinking of getting implants,” I said. “Would that make this more difficult?”

“Not really, no.”

“I guess I just tend to talk a lot when I’m nervous,” I said.

“Nothing to be nervous about,” he said, as he squashed my breast into the machine, which was shiny and cold and smelled of the spray I used to use to clean the dust off record albums. “Nothing at all.”

Turned out he was wrong about that.

If I really was a character in a book, then at the start of the next chapter the radiologist would be telling me he sees a shadow, something really small, too small for me to feel, he would be surprised if I could feel it. It’s a solid area on the ultrasound, which needs to be biopsied. He is asking me if I want to call my husband first. I say no. I’m not really listening. Or, I am listening but not hearing, it’s not registering. It is as though it is happening to someone else. There is nothing very real about being told you have cancer, even if you are a character in a book.

Then the radiologist is cleaning an area at the outside of my breast with a cotton pad, soft and wet and cold, and there is a needle in my breast, and I am having a sonogram-directed biopsy. It hurts, but not enough to make me cry. I’m not sure I could cry anyway. I am having trouble just breathing. And then, just like that, I am in my car, on my way home. There will be no results for forty-eight hours. Blessedly, my husband is away. He’ll likely call late tonight. I’ll deal with that when it happens. First I need to get through dinner.

The kids are home when I arrive. One of them needs help with homework, the other is upset because “Connor called me stupid.” These are real issues for them. They need me, and as always I am there for them. I help with the math, and have a talk about what are and are not appropriate words to use with our friends. “We don’t use the word ‘stupid,’” I am saying. “It isn’t proper behavior at school.” In my own head, I hear my mother’s voice.

I had planned to make salmon for dinner, but now I am in no mood for all the fuss, so instead I put a pot to boil on the stove. Pasta with olive oil, a little butter, parmesan cheese. I know both kids will eat it happily. I don’t even make a vegetable, which I normally insist they eat if they want dessert. Aside from that, I feel as though I am behaving perfectly normally until my daughter bursts that bubble.

“Mommy, you seem sad,” she says.

I am seated at the dinner table. The children are on either side of me, eating. I realize I don’t even remember setting the table, straining the pasta, mixing in the butter, sprinkling the cheese, pouring the milk.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I say, with a smile that comes more easily than I would have expected. “I guess I just miss Daddy, that’s all.”

“Why aren’t you having any wine?” my son asks.

“I don’t know, sweetie, I thought I might not drink any wine for a little while.”

My two children exchanged looks. “Mommy,” Jared says, after a moment, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

That makes me laugh and it makes me cry, both at the same time, and I ask the kids to excuse me and I run to the powder room and turn the faucet on full blast. I am pretty sure it drowns out the sounds of my crying.

I don’t even remember going back to the table, or what I said, or how I explained my tears to the children. The next thing I know they are fast asleep in their beds, and I am in the small hallway that separates their rooms. I can see them both resting peacefully in the shadows. There is no sight on earth more beautiful than my sleeping children. They are perfect and they are all mine.

“What more could a woman want?” I ask, aloud.

Then the phone rings. I am ready for the call. It will be Scott and I know what he’ll want. And I will give it to him. It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, actually, quite the opposite. It sounds like something very normal, and right now normal sounds really good.

“Hey, big fella,” I say as seductively as I can manage, sinking between the sheets of the bed we share. “What can I do for you?”

The conversation doesn’t last long, it almost never does. Then I am alone in my room in the dark, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. And I am thinking of a book I love, with a heroine I love. The book is called The Hotel New Hampshire, and the girl is named Franny. And one time when Franny is sad and someone asks if they can do anything for her, she says: “Just bring me yesterday, and most of today.” And I realize now that is exactly what I want. Yesterday, and most of today.