Later, I am on the edge of the bed, looking at her. She is increasingly beautiful, more vulnerable, female.
“Honey?”
“What?” Her intonation is like a pissy caged bird—cawww. “What? What are you looking at? What do you want?” Cawww.
“Nothing.”
I am washing her with a cool washcloth.
“You’re tickling me,” she complains.
“Make sure you tell her you still find her attractive,” a man in the hall tells me. “Husbands of women who have mastectomies need to keep reminding their wives that they are beautiful.”
“She had a hysterectomy,” I say.
“Same thing.”
Two days later, they remove the packing. I am in the room when the resident comes with a long tweezers like tongs and pulls yards of material from her vagina, wads of cotton, and gauze, stained battlefield red. It’s like a magic trick gone awry, one of those jokes about how many people you can fit in a telephone booth, more and more keeps coming out.
“Is there anything left in there?” she asks.
The resident shakes his head. “Your vagina now just comes to a stop, it’s a stump, an unconnected sleeve. Don’t be surprised if you bleed, if you pop a stitch or two.” He checks her chart and signs her out. “Kibbowitz has you on pelvic rest for six weeks.”
“Pelvic rest?” I ask.
“No fucking,” she says.
Not a problem.
Home. She watches forty-eight hours of Holocaust films on cable TV. Although she claims to compartmentalize everything, suddenly she identifies with the bald, starving prisoners of war. She sees herself as a victim. She points to the naked corpse of a woman. “That’s me,” she says. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“She’s dead,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Her notorious vigilance is gone. As I’m fluffing her pillows, her billy club rolls out from under the bed. “Put it in the closet,” she says.
“Why?” I ask, rolling it back under the bed.
“Why sleep with a billy club under the bed? Why do anything when you have cancer?”
During a break between Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity, she taps me. “I’m missing my parts,” she says. “Maybe one of those lost eggs was someone special, someone who would have cured something, someone who would have invented something wonderful. You never know who was in there. They are my lost children.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she looks at me accusingly.
“Everything.”
“Thirty-eight-year-olds don’t get cancer, they get Lyme disease, maybe they have appendicitis, on rare occasions in some other parts of the world they have Siamese twins, but that’s it.”
In the middle of the night she wakes up, she throws the covers off. “I can’t breathe, I’m burning up. Open the window, I’m hot, I’m so hot.”
“Do you know what’s happening to you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re having hot flashes.”
“I am not,” she says, as though I’ve insulted her. “They don’t start so soon.”
They do.
“Get away from me, get away,” she yells. “Just being near you makes me uncomfortable, it makes my temperature unstable.”
On Monday she starts chemotherapy.
“Will I go bald?” she asks the nurse.
I cannot imagine my wife bald.
“Most women buy a wig before it happens,” the nurse says, plugging her into the magic potion.
One of the other women, her head wrapped in a red turban, leans over and whispers, “My husband says I look like a porno star.” She winks. She has no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.
We shop for a wig. She tries on every style, every shape and color. She looks like a man in drag, like she’s wearing a bad Halloween costume, like it’s all a horrible joke.
“Maybe my hair won’t fall out?” she says.
“It’s okay,” the woman in the wig shop says. “Insurance covers it. Ask your doctor to write a prescription for a cranial prosthesis.”
“I’m a doctor,” my wife says.
The wig woman looks confused. “It’s okay,” she says, putting another wig on my wife’s head.
She buys a wig. I never see it. She brings it home and immediately puts it in the closet. “It looks like Linda Evans, like someone on Dynasty. I just can’t do it,” she says.
Her scalp begins to tingle. Her hair hurts. “It’s as though someone grabbed my hair and is pulling as hard as they can.”
“It’s getting ready to go,” I say. “It’s like a time bomb. It ticks and then it blows.”