*
“I have no guard or sentinel but the stars,” said Montaigne, noting how the heavily guarded homes of his neighbors were frequently attacked—and his was not. “My home is closed to none who knock upon its gate, with only a doorman as guardian—and ‘guardian’ only in the old-fashioned sense; he serves less to defend my fate than to present it with greater elegance and grace.”
Montaigne would have sent my sentinel home as well, I guess—off into the misty, Aquitaine night. No locks, for him. No guards, no food tasters.
I’m rereading the Montaigne biography. Age thirty-eight was a big year for him as well: Following his father’s death a couple years earlier, he retired from public life in Bordeaux, where he had been a well-known statesman, sequestered himself on his family estate in the countryside, and started work on his famous essays.
“Don’t you think it’s wild that Montaigne never had a food tester—given how politically prominent he was during such a fractious time?” I ask John.
“It’s very him. Montaigne the Stoic,” he says. “I bet your Puritan ancestors wouldn’t have had food tasters either. Nothing cures a dose of poison like a stiff upper lip and a brisk walk.”
John loves Montaigne as much as I do. He’s the first person who told me to read him. “But really, I think it’s only serious despots that have food tasters. The Emperor Claudius, Hitler, Vladimir Putin. Probably Donald Trump. The guilty ones.”
I slip down an Internet rabbit hole one morning reading about the life of Margot Woelk, the only one of Hitler’s fifteen food tasters—his conscripted “poison brigade”—to survive the war. She’s almost a hundred now:
“The food was delicious . . . asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine,” she tells the interviewer about their menu in the bunker. The wild, fresh flavors of peacetime. “But . . . we could never enjoy [it].”
An armed bus would pick her up each morning from her mother-in-law’s house, and she was taken to a barracks in a nearby town where the food was prepared to be taken to Hilter’s Wolfsschanze headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair. The tasting took place each day between 11:00 a.m. and noon.
She remembers crying in terror with each bite, seated with the other single Aryan girls around a wooden table guarded by the SS. For two and a half years. Sometimes girls would drop to the floor in agony, but it was from anxiety not poison.
Seven decades later, Margot has apparently kept the habit of eating in tiny, cautious bites. In one article I find, she is nibbling the crumbs of a coffee cake as she talks to the journalist.
Although she never saw Hitler in person, she says she despised the person she risked her life for every day. He was a really repugnant man. And a pig.
I was led here by the metaphor—let the castle be unlocked—but now I can’t hold it straight. Am I Hitler? Or is Hitler the tumor? This isn’t even a metaphor, is it? It’s only a different hard story. But Margot and I have one thing in common: our bodies. Our bodies are not our own. Hers was requisitioned by the SS; mine by illness, medicine.
*
“Where will your breast go,” Freddy asks, “you know, after they cut it off.”
“Probably a drawer in a basement lab somewhere at Duke,” I say. “Well, they keep the tumor for future testing, but I guess they maybe throw out the breast.”
John teases me later. “That’s a great image for a kid to have in his head. Emotional Trauma for five hundred please, Alex.”
“What in the world was I supposed to say?” I ask. I never know what I am supposed to say. Honestly: neither does John. We look into getting therapists for the kids. “It would be so awesome if someone knew the right things to say,” I text Ginny. Ginny’s kids are two years older than mine. Her daughter, eleven, on the cusp of understanding everything. “Amen,” she says.
After the surgery, when John and I walk together down a corridor at Duke, he’ll sometimes make his voice all high-pitched and eerie. “Niii-na, where are you? It’s your breast here. I miss you. Hellllp meee, Niii-na.”
*
Try to see without understanding. The first time I see a surgical drain up close is about a week before the mastectomy in the breast clinic waiting room. I have no idea what it is. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. A very young woman, maybe twenty-five, chatting with the receptionist, with two clear bulbs clipped to a glittery belt on her jeans, a liquid-filled tube looping down at her hips on each side and then disappearing up under her shirt. They are filled with a brilliant orange-red fluid that looks like Gatorade. She starts to laugh really hard, then catches herself, touching the juice-filled bulbs tenderly. “Aw, man,” jokes the receptionist. “Sucks when you can’t even laugh.” Our arms crossed over our chests.
11. Memory of Elephants
Like a school of fish or a pride of lions or a murder of crows, a group of elephants is called a “memory.” A memory of elephants.
Nothing thunderous in that phrase—nothing like what is suggested by a herd of elephants or a parade of elephants. More like elephants drinking from a low lake at sunrise. Or a spot where elephants used to be drinking, but are no longer. Something enormous and consuming and ethereal.
Not unlike anesthesia, really, which—as the absence of all sensation—leaves you with incisions and deep aches and crisp bandages you cannot empirically account for and are therefore compelled to make sense of by conjuring a collection of massive and unshakable dreamlike certainties.
Surgery goes smoothly. Beforehand, my parents slip upstairs before my mom’s appointment with Dr. Gasparetto to send me off into the spinning nothingness.
John is right next to me when I wake up—and then fall back asleep—and wake up again—and conk out again. His mom has flown in from Oregon to watch our kids back in Greensboro. “They’re doing great,” he says. “They’re having a blast. They haven’t asked about you once.”
He massages my hand, smiles at my dopiness, and makes fun of me on social media: Nina is doing great and she’s higher than a Gary Busey convention. Her first description of her “new body” was to look down her hospital gown, look up, hold up one finger and say “uno; not dos.”
The sound of the Pirates playing an evening game on a distant TV in a distant universe seems to sift like light through the hospital blinds as I slowly reenter the world.
And then there is my surgeon peering down at me, telling me what an excellent job he has done and that my sentinel node looks negative and making jokes I can’t follow even though I’m pretty sure they are the same jokes he was making before surgery.
*