On the subject of elephants, the recovery room feels full of them—a memory of elephants.
There is the cancer elephant: What will the lymph node tell us when it returns from pathology? Another elephant: Where is my missing breast? We have uno not dos. And then my mom’s elephant, that unpredictable beast, which shrinks and grows, sometimes looking familiar, but other times so strange and coarse I think it is actually a rhinoceros—part of a crash of rhinos, or a stubbornness of rhinos.
“Phew,” my mom says when she hears the good lymph node news. “I couldn’t bear checking out of this life without knowing you were going to be okay.”
A gaze of raccoons. A rhumba of rattlesnakes. A float of crocodiles. A rafter of turkeys. A business of ferrets. An exaltation of skylarks. Groups of animals fill the room, and I drift back to sleep.
I haven’t seen under the bandage yet—that foreign land, that new world. It does not seem obviously gory or bruised or swollen. (The surgeon did, in fact, do a great job.) But I don’t know what it is. It looks flat, almost concave—like a lake bed where a memory of elephants once drank. It is an absence, a memory itself.
Right now my emotions around it are waiting as if on a shelf just out of reach. Right now the focus is completely physical, almost geographical. Right now: the drain in my chest, the sore armpit, the way my shirts sag on one side.
But there are all the other things, too—the obliterated sense of femininity, the skewing of self, the strangeness of the body. I can’t quite find the terms to understand that part yet. I guess that’s why this fact is so very elephantine right now. It’s definitely there, but I can’t seem to figure out what to say about it yet.
So right now I train my eye on these dreamlike certainties: A cure of doctors will examine me in the morning. And in the meantime, a cauldron of thunderstorms simmers on the horizon and an anticipation of cocktails awaits some ice.
12. Reconnoitering the Edge
Before he was conscripted into the family investment firm, my great-grandfather Raymond Emerson worked as a civil engineer and surveyor in the American West.
I never met him—he died the year I was born—but my dad remembers him as a strange, brilliant, unsettling—and later demented—man who lost his mind maybe because he was forced to return to the button-down East Coast establishment. Or maybe because he spent a lifetime chewing on an old lead bullet.
My most concrete and only intimate experience of him is the house he designed and built in the 1930s on the side of a remote bluff on an island off the Massachusetts coast where I have spent every summer of my life. It’s a simple house—long and sturdy and rustic with a memorable roofline and ample porches—in a dramatic, isolated spot, with a view almost as expansive as a Western skyline. It looks like it would be more at home perched on a prairie or at the edge of a canyon than staring out at sailboats and Martha’s Vineyard.
When I’m there, I imagine him pacing out the house site on the empty hill—thinking it through in the tall grasses, his feet learning the contours and challenges of the land. The house is clearly one designed by a man who loved the outdoors above all else, and cared less for interiors. It is a portrait of his formidable grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson that dominates the mantel inside.
Just yards from the house there is a drop-off into the Sound that everyone in my family has come to know as a kind of defining edge—where we’ve measured our steps in the dark. Where I’ve measured the thought that in the dark there is no bluff, only me and the noise of the bluff, the luff of the end, the bellow of something else beginning.
Although it is the family of my great-grandmother Amelia Forbes—Raymond Emerson’s wife—through whom the island has been passed down, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to the island at least a few times in his life as a family friend and in-law. I am not sure that he preferred this stark, exposed seashore to his quiet Concord woods, but he wrote his poem “Waldeinsamkeit” here. Waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine solitude and contemplation in the woods. Church in the woods.
Like my great-grandfather Emerson, my mom only started coming here when she married into the family. But nevertheless she has always said she would like to have some of her ashes spread up on this hill. Lately I am imagining this act in more detail.
*
The other night, in a fit of irritation and optimism, I tore out one of my surgical drains, and this evening the last of the Steri-Strips un-gooed itself. Now, for the first time since the mastectomy I am free of all the accompanying apparatus—all the not-me stuff—and I feel like I can finally get a decent sense of the landscape. I am pacing it out. I am reconnoitering the edge.
Here are my untrained surveyor’s notes:
I hadn’t really noticed before, but the scar is a stretched S-shape—kind of a meandering river—snaking about eight inches from my sternum to just under my armpit. John sees a sideways Superman-type S. I see a lazy question mark with no dot. The whole area is numb, so tracing it with my fingers is the disorienting gap between the expected and the perceived. It is not lovely, exactly, but it is—to my fingers—the new world. I cannot stop wanting to know it better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson of course read Montaigne, too—and revered him as an example of healthy skepticism. Skeptic—from the classical Greek skeptesthai: to search, implying searching but not finding. Not a skeptic as in a nonbeliever, but rather, in RWE’s words, “the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own foe.”
“I would rather have a good understanding of myself than of Cicero,” says Montaigne. He writes in great detail of his diet, his bowel habits, exercise, sex, his aches and pains, his kidney stones. “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”
“You may read theology, and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere,” Emerson writes about Montaigne’s work. “Whatever you get here shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging.”
Relentless searching, while at the same time unattached to the outcome of whatever is discovered. John is reading in bed. I shut the door to the bathroom, remove my towel, stand at the vanity.