LINDA CAME TO THE NEXT Wednesday Sisters meeting with a piece of writing she wanted to share with us, something she'd written before she'd gone to New York. I took it home and read it, then read it again: Linda packing up J.J. and Jamie and Julie the morning she found the new lump, loading them into the car to search through bookstores. She knows what a radical mastectomy is, but what does it mean, really? How does it look? It's what they did to her mother, a double radical; they cut both her mother's breasts off, she knows that, but she doesn't know, she has never seen.
There are alternatives now: a modified radical mastectomy and radiation therapy. But what do they mean? How is she to have any idea which choice to make if she has to make a choice? None of it sure to save her life, anyway. A double radical, and still her mother died.
She wanders through Kepler's Books on El Camino, through Stacey's on University, through Books Inc. at the mall, but there is no book on breast cancer that she can find, nothing that shows her what a breast looks like when it's gone.
Back home, she calls the American Cancer Society, but the disembodied woman on the line is curt. Severe disapproval in her voice: Books with photos like that for anyone but medical personnel? But Linda grabs on to that one phrase, “medical personnel,” and she is already hanging up the phone, already loading the children into the car again, promising them just a few more minutes looking at books and then ice cream as she heads for the Stanford bookstore, where Jeff gets his medical texts.
The volume of books at Stanford is overwhelming, though. She doesn't know where to start, and she can't ask anyone, she simply can't. But she won't have time to do this after she's in the hospital, so she starts paging through volumes: photos of children with cleft palates, children with measles and mumps, children with unspeakable diseases of the skin. She puts that volume back, moves to another aisle, finds old people with gout and kidney disease. She fumbles her way to books on oncology, where she finds photos and drawings of diseased lungs, small spots on skin that are not good news, polyps in colons and tumors on ovaries. Still, she cannot find a photo of a breastless chest. And the children are insistent now: It's time for ice cream, she has promised no more than fifteen minutes and it has been twenty-five, Julie says. Linda is sorry the twins have learned to tell time, sorry she has given them her watch.
She turns to Lee Montgomery. Yes, to Kath's Lee. She feels the guilt of it, the disloyalty. Lee will know and Kath won't. But he is the only person she knows who can and will sit and explain to her the options and what they mean. He will let her take all night to get the words out if she needs to. He will tell her where she should go to have it looked at. And Lee, she knows, is discreet. He will never tell a soul, not even Jeff. Especially not Jeff.
I wept as I read, and as I reread, and then I called Kath.
“We've got to do something directly,” Kath said. “And I'm not talking about making casseroles.”
But what? That's what the conversation came down to. But what?
THE NEXT WEEK, Linda wrote of the sterile, obsolete-magazine anonymity of the surgery waiting room, of imagining this would be the way she would spend the rest of her life, what little rest of her life there might be. She remembered how her father had never looked at her mother after her surgery. How her father hadn't looked at any woman after that, not even his daughter.
The third week, five exquisite pages of Linda sitting naked and alone at her makeup mirror, watching in the soft light of the frosted round bulbs as her own hand raised the sharp silver blades of her sewing scissors to the long twist of her hair. I wept as I read. As I reread. The simple act of cutting a braid off—what it meant to take control of this thing before it took control of her.
And the fourth week: eight heartbreaking pages that started with the alarm going off the morning of the mini-marathon, Linda waking and realizing that she couldn't run, that she couldn't bear to spend a moment away from Jamie and Julie and J.J. on this last day before her biopsy. Realizing, too, that she had to tell Jeff.
It was early, but she picked up the phone and called him, found him at the hospital, working the overnight shift. She asked him to please come to New York, it was important. Then she went into the bedroom the twins were sharing at her brother's apartment and woke them. “We're in New York,” she said. “Let's go explore!”
She gathered J.J., and she took them all for breakfast at the Plaza Hotel: waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. And she told them. First thing, over the waffles and whipped cream, she told them so they would have the whole day to ask questions. She waited until the waiter had served them, until they'd eaten and it didn't look as if they could handle another bite. She waited till the waiter refilled her coffee cup and took the check and the money away, returned with the change, so that they wouldn't be interrupted. She made them all look at her, then. She made Julie and Jamie put their forks down; they were playing with the uneaten strawberries, threatening to begin flinging them across the room. She supposed they sensed something was up. She wished, as they set the silver forks on the edges of their plates, that she had three sets of silver, that if anything happened to her they would each have that, a set of silver that had been their mother's, that would touch their fingers every day of their lives.