The Wednesday Sisters(94)

I thought she'd cry then, but she didn't.

“So hideous,” she whispered. “There is nothing sexy about me at all anymore. I'm just hideous.

“I grew up the child of the sick mother, and then the child of the dead mother. I couldn't imagine going back to that. I couldn't imagine putting my kids through that. I couldn't take that chance. I'm healthier, though. I'm so much healthier than my mother was to start with. I could run ten miles. And I caught it earlier. My mom, she was . . . When they cut her open, it was just . . .” She waved her hand again, a gesture that said everywhere, her mother's cancer had been everywhere.

“They said consider chemotherapy. They don't really know if it will help, but they're having success with it in treating other”—she closed her eyes and took a deep breath—“other cancers.”

Fast-growing cancers, where a high percentage of the cells are always in some phase of division, Brett explained later. The drugs had to hit the tumor cells while they were dividing; that was when they were most vulnerable, easiest to knock out.

“I was past no by then,” Linda said. “I said of course I'd have the chemotherapy. Sure, I'll have this first poison on the menu, and the third one, too, thanks. And I just decided I wouldn't have any of the bad side effects they talked about, the nausea and depression and . . .” She touched her head. “And this.”

She cut her hair off the night she got home from New York, while Jeff was back in Boston explaining what had happened, telling the folks at the hospital that he could stay only until they could find a replacement for him. She took the scissors and sliced her braid across at her neck. She went to a hairdresser the next day and had it fixed so it looked nicer, and she attached her braid to her hat. It wasn't until her hair started falling out in clumps that she took the braid to a wig maker, a woman who, when Linda entered the upstairs shop in San Carlos, was fitting a Hasidic Jew for a wig to wear after she married, because only her husband was allowed to see her hair after her wedding day. “I guess they know how often a man falls in love with a woman's hair,” Linda said to us. “The girl had eyebrows and lashes,” she said. “I was jealous of that, of her dark eyebrows, her dark lashes, of her knowing they wouldn't fall out.”

She felt sick after the chemo—which was being supervised out here; Jeff had lined her up with the best doctor at Stanford—but she'd been given a drug to help curb the nausea. She wasn't living days with her head over the toilet; she wasn't unable to get out of bed. Maybe J.J. and the twins were watching more television than she'd like, maybe dinner too often came from a box—“Let's hear it for Hamburger Helper,” she said—but some things just couldn't be helped.

“The doctor said some people think smoking marijuana helps, but I couldn't imagine explaining that to a neighbor stopping by to borrow a cup of sugar,” she said, and with a break in her voice, “much less to my kids.”

Brett handed Linda her cap back, and Linda put it on.

“Jeff didn't fall in love with me,” she whispered. “He fell in love with my hair.”

And you could see it all then, like the aha ending we are always striving for in what we write, the of-course-I-should-have-seen-that. The braid first. The cutting off of the braid and yet holding on to it, too. Gaining control over this thing she couldn't control, or trying to.

“He won't leave you,” Kath said quietly.

It was clear from the pooling in Linda's eyes that this wasn't a new idea to her. Worse, she believed he would leave her, he would want to every time he saw the gash across her chest where her breast had been. Maybe he wouldn't move out right away because that would be unseemly, but he would want to and he would do it eventually, he wouldn't be able to help himself.

“Jeff won't be going anywhere,” Kath insisted. “Lee would, but not Jeff.”

There was no discussing it, though. Linda was ashamed: her body had betrayed her. She was terrified that Jeff would come home one day and announce he'd rented an apartment, just as Lee had. And as much as I wanted to assure her otherwise, I knew I would feel as she did if all that was left of my breast was an ugly scar.

Brett, beside me, had not said a word in a while, I realized then; she'd hardly looked up from her lap. She had taken her gloves off. It was a shock to realize it—as shocking as if she'd stripped off her navy sweater and bell-bottom slacks and stood stark naked before us.

The conversation halted, everyone looking at Brett now. Linda looking at Brett's hands, though the rest of us quickly looked away.

We'd seen, though: her fingers all there, but the skin warped, as if it had melted and run, like candle wax or a lava flow. Her left hand more scarred than her right, the little finger bent slightly, as if she couldn't quite straighten it all the way.