People Who Knew Me Read online

  We had to fill out one form. Just one. We had to raise our right hands and swear that everything on the form was correct. And we had to pay fifty bucks, for the processing of the paperwork. The lady behind the desk told us we were next. She looked bored. I wanted to ask how many of these appointments she saw every day.

  The door to the ceremony room opened and two people—a woman with badly bleached hair, dark roots showing, and a man with a gaudy gold chain around his neck—fell out of it, tonguing each other in wedded bliss. The officiant poked his head out and said, “Your turn.”

  The room was about five feet wide, eight feet long. No windows. It could have been a storage closet at one time, a place to keep janitorial supplies. Drew and I stood at the front of the room, with the officiant, facing each other, holding hands. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. We repeated after him, as instructed, said the usual vows regarding sickness and health and richer and poorer, exchanged the gold bands we’d bought from a wholesaler in Queens, and then we were married. Drew’s mom cried; my mom did not. The only times I ever saw my mother cry were when she was drunk and heartbroken. We took a few pictures outside, in front of the courthouse. When it started drizzling, we left for dinner at the Old Homestead Steak House on Ninth Avenue to celebrate. I got my first-ever martini, two olives.

  “What about a honeymoon?” my mom asked, all of us drunk or on the verge of drunk.

  Drew and I hadn’t even talked about a honeymoon. We had no money.

  “We’ll do a trip later,” I said, dismissing her.

  “We have more important things to do first,” Drew added, winking at me like we were partners in crime, in on something together. I’d never felt so mature, so hopeful.

  “Important things?” my mom pried.

  “I want to go to culinary school,” he said. He was sipping scotch. The ice cubes rattled in his nearly empty glass.

  “He’s going to be a chef!” I said, too loudly. I was excited, after all. And I wanted to rub it in my mom’s face that I’d found what she never had—a husband with a plan.

  “And Em is applying to grad school at Brooklyn College,” he said.

  “How are you going to afford that?” my mom asked. She was always the bearer of bad news. On my prom night, she told me that my hair—arranged in some kind of fancy bun—put too much attention on my face.

  “There are scholarships,” I said. “People make it work.”

  My mom didn’t look satisfied and, to compensate, Drew’s mom raised her glass with her shaky hand.

  “Here’s to the future,” she said.

  I looked at Drew as our two glasses clinked. He’d told me once that it was bad luck not to make eye contact when saying “cheers.” Maybe it was the drunkenness, or the distraction of our mothers, but his eyes didn’t meet mine. I didn’t think much of it. We ordered another round. Neither of us would remember how we got home.

  FIVE

  When I moved to California, one of my first orders of business was finding an OB/GYN. I went to Planned Parenthood—which should be called Mostly Unplanned Parenthood—because I had no money, no insurance, and they didn’t ask questions or pass judgments. Dr. Tan was a just-out-of-medical-school doctor. When I asked why she chose to work at Planned Parenthood, she said she wanted to make a difference with her practice. I wondered if tending to a pathetic thirty-year-old pregnant woman was the kind of difference she wanted to make.

  Dr. Tan no longer works at Planned Parenthood. She works with a medical group in Tarzana. I still go to her for my routine annual exams. Well, usually they’re routine. Last week’s visit was not routine.

  “How long has it been like this?” Dr. Tan asked. She was staring at my right breast, touching it lightly with her cold fingers. Usually she spent a quick three minutes on my breasts, checking for lumps before telling me to hop off and get dressed.

  “Like what?” I asked, shifting around on my back, the paper gown crinkling beneath me.

  “Red,” she said. “It’s very red.”

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed. I had. It was kind of itchy, a little swollen. I thought I was having an allergic reaction to a detergent. I’d been on a luckless quest for a new detergent that wouldn’t cause the rash.

  “I don’t know,” I said meekly. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m concerned about this dimpling of the skin, right here,” she said, pressing into a patch of skin on the outside edge of my breast, kitty-corner from my armpit. “I’m going to set you up for a mammogram.”

  I’m forty-three—forty-four next month. I had my first mammogram at forty because Dr. Tan said that’s the protocol: mammogram every year starting at forty. “That must be when everything starts going downhill,” I’d said. She’d laughed.

  “All of my mammograms have been fine.”

  “I know. We should take a look, though, okay? I’ll set up an appointment with the imaging center.”

  She forced a smile that was nothing like the genuine one she’d had when I’d joked about everything going downhill.

  “What do you think it is?”

  I didn’t want to ask the more obvious question: Could it be cancer? I was sure it couldn’t be. There was no lump—no telltale frozen pea under the skin. I’ve done the checks in the shower, just like they tell you to do. I’ve eaten well, for the most part. I’ve been a runner for years. It couldn’t be cancer.

  But then Dr. Tan looked at me seriously and said, “It could be nothing—maybe just mastitis. I can’t know for sure. We have to take a better look.” Then: “It could be cancer.”

  * * *

  There are about twenty women in the waiting room at the imaging center. Some look bored, mindlessly flipping through magazines; some look antsy, crossing and uncrossing their legs, tapping their feet on the cheaply carpeted floor. A technician calls my name and I follow her to a small room. She explains that she’ll be taking a couple pictures of each breast. She wedges the right one, the red one, between two metal plates. She doesn’t appear troubled by the redness, which convinces me that Dr. Tan was overreacting.

  It takes just a few minutes, as she promised it would. She leaves me in the little room so she can share the images with a Dr. Ferguson. I flip through the tattered pages of a two-year-old People magazine, just to have something to do. One article deems Gwyneth Paltrow the world’s most beautiful woman. The next profiles the secret lives of the Boston Marathon bombers. The media has this way of making nonsense important and tragedy salacious. When I get to the back cover, the technician opens the door.

  “Ms. Prynne, Dr. Ferguson would like to talk to you. Go ahead and put your clothes back on and I’ll show you to his office.”

  I get that shaky, low-blood-sugar feeling as I step back into my jeans and button up my shirt. On the way to Dr. Ferguson’s office, I chew off a thumbnail.

  Dr. Ferguson is sitting behind a big oak desk, manila folder files spread across it. He has what I assume to be images of my breasts in light boxes on the wall behind him. They look fine to me, tumor-free, not that I know what I’m looking for. Maybe he’s the kind of doctor who takes time to talk with each patient, even when there is no problem.

  “Okay, Connie,” he says, glancing down at my chart because he hasn’t bothered to learn my name before I came into the room, “what I’m concerned about is the thickening of the tissue in your right breast.”

  He points to the right breast with the tip of his pen.

  “Thickening,” I echo back to him.

  “With the red appearance your doctor noted, we might be dealing with inflammatory breast cancer.”

  We? He has already paired us on a team, against an enemy I don’t even know yet.

  “What does that mean—inflammatory breast cancer?”

  He crosses his arms in front of him, leans back in his chair. This must be his lecture posture.

  “It’s extremely rare—about one to five percent of breast cancer cases,” he says.

  I don’t move or say anythi
ng, so he continues.

  “What happens is the cancer blocks the lymph nodes so you get redness, swelling, pain, itchiness, thickening of the skin.”

  “I thought it was a rash.”

  “That’s the thing with IBC,” he says, giving it a nickname when I’d rather he didn’t, “many women don’t recognize the symptoms as possible cancer.”

  “Possible cancer,” I echo.

  “I want to set you up with a core biopsy. Can you be here tomorrow morning?”

  I was expecting him to suggest next week. Tomorrow morning presents an urgency I’m not prepared for.

  “IBC can be very aggressive,” he says. “We want to catch it early.”

  He doesn’t say, Or rule it out completely. I wish he’d say that.

  * * *

  The list of things Claire needs from me, as her mother, gets shorter by the day. A ride is still one of them. I’ve always arranged my shifts at the bar so I can take her to school and pick her up. My own mother never took on that responsibility. I walked to elementary school and took the bus to junior high and high school. Sometimes I think being a mom is just a chance to show my mother how it’s done, even if she’s no longer paying attention, or never was.

  I’m late today, though. The mammogram appointment went longer than I thought it would. I wasn’t anticipating a closed-door meeting with a Dr. Ferguson. I wasn’t expecting to need ten minutes, sitting in my car in the imaging center parking lot, to collect myself.

  I turn the corner and see Claire before she sees me. She’s leaning against the same light post as always, looking a little uneasy and worried that I won’t show and she’ll have to bear the embarrassment of waiting in the front office with the other forgotten kids. When she spots me, the relief is evident in her smile.

  I can’t have cancer. Claire’s mother can’t have cancer.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say as she sits in the passenger’s seat.

  “No worries. I just came out. I was talking to Mr. Michaels about our math test tomorrow.”

  I have a core biopsy of my right breast. Claire has a math test.

  “Math test already, huh?”

  School started a week ago.

  “I think it’s more for him to see what we all remember from last year,” she says with a laugh. Claire is an easy laugher. I hope she always will be.

  * * *

  Claire sets the table for dinner, our two usual place settings. It’s our weeknight routine: she brings her school bag into the kitchen and sits in her designated chair, knees tucked underneath her, and does homework while I cook dinner—or, rather, arrange dinner. There is a distinction. I just place pre-made, store-bought items on a plate. Claire doesn’t complain; it’s all she’s ever known. I had good intentions of being one of those moms who makes everything from scratch, an intention represented by the stack of cookbooks collecting dust on top of the fridge. I blame Drew. He was the cook, so I never had to learn. And then when I did have to learn, I was too busy raising Claire.

  When she gets up for a glass of milk, Claire flips the calendar on the fridge from August to September. When she was little and didn’t pay attention to calendars, I just skipped September completely—went straight from August to October the way elevators go straight from floor twelve to fourteen. It’s silly. It’s not like it helped me forget what happened that day. I always remember. Time doesn’t heal all, no matter what they say. And tragedies don’t make you stronger. That’s another popular lie. They just make you more hardened, less surprised by misfortune. Then again, maybe I have healed a bit. After all, this threat of cancer startles me so much that you’d think I’d never been tested by life before, never known adversity.

  I touch my breast, in the dimpled area that made Dr. Tan’s brows furrow. It’s warm in that spot, even through my blouse—or maybe I’m just imagining things? Wouldn’t I feel ill if I had cancer? I feel fine. Last weekend, Claire and I ran in the sand and jumped through the waves at the beach. I wasn’t even winded.

  “Earth to Mom,” Claire says, voice raised.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been asking you the same question for, like, five minutes.”

  I’m just standing there at the kitchen counter, a cooked chicken breast in my hand, my original, pre-distraction goal being to cut it up and throw it in a salad.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Can. I. Go. To. Heather’s. This. Saturday,” she says, clearly irritated.

  “Sure, yeah. Sure.”

  “You okay?” she asks, nervously biting down on the eraser end of her pencil.

  I don’t know if it’s normal or good for a child to be concerned for her mother, to pick up on cues of angst. My daughter always has, though. As young as five years old, she brought me soup in bed when I was sick. There’s an unspoken understanding that I am all she has, and vice versa. At least she has friends, though, Heathers in her life. Of course, Heather can’t take care of her if I’m gone.

  “I’m fine, just got some things on my mind,” I say.

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  She bites her lip now, instead of the eraser end of her pencil. She pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them. In that little ball she’s made of herself, it’s painfully obvious how young she still is.

  “No, just boring adult stuff.”

  “Is it money?” she asks.

  Despite all my attempts to shield her from money problems before, she’s heard me on the phone with credit card companies, begging shamelessly for forgiveness of interest fees. She’s heard me tell JT that I’ll be late on rent because I just don’t have it.

  “I can babysit,” she says. “I’m old enough now. Heather babysits her neighbor’s kids and makes fifty bucks a night.”

  “It’s not money, sweetie. We’re fine,” I say, which is true. The bar pays my bills and a little more if I smile big for tips and take a few extra shifts. I’ve never had a lot of money in my life. My mom lived paycheck to paycheck in good years. Drew and I had our struggles. There were so many adjustments coming to California, but thankfully I already knew how to stretch a dollar. Claire and I shop at thrift stores, like I used to do in college. I clip coupons. I pack all of Claire’s lunches in reusable containers. I take toilet paper rolls from the bar to stock up at home. Sometimes I take a jug of orange juice.

  “Okay, well, I’m here, if you want to talk,” she says, releasing her knees and resuming her homework.

  They’ll do the biopsy tomorrow.

  I’ll have the results by Monday.

  And then, if it’s cancer, I’ll have to change Claire’s world as she knows it.

  SIX

  I started working when I was fifteen years old. Before that if you count babysitting the neighbor kids. My mom said I had to earn my keep, so I waited tables, tore tickets at movie theaters, folded clothes at trendy stores. But my first real job was a year after Drew and I got married, when we were forced to come to grips with the reality of being adults.

  “You must be Emily Morris,” the receptionist said as I walked through the doors of Mathers and James Advertising. She was my age, or even younger, with black hair, accented with random strands dyed red, and a big loop ring in her nose. I’d come to learn that it’s hard to tell the difference between people on their way to a concert and people who work in advertising.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “I’m Jessica.” She stuck out her hand confidently, shook mine, and leaned in close, as if to tell me a secret: “We got, like, hundreds of applicants for this position. You are so lucky to be here.”

  I didn’t feel lucky. I wanted to be at Brooklyn College, backpack on my shoulders, notebook in my hand. I’d been accepted into their grad school program for English. According to the welcome letter, I had a future of “immersion in literature from the Middle Ages through modern day, studying and analyzing texts, using different critical and theoretical approaches.”

  But we needed money, Drew and me. One of us would have to get
a job. A coin toss decided it would be me.

  * * *

  Drew had our monthly bills spread on the kitchen table when I came home from the coffee shop one night. He was biting his thumbnail.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m doing the math,” he said.

  Our plan was to live one measly paycheck to the next, to barely get by, in that romantic way young people do. I’d work at the coffee shop; he’d work at the shipyard. That would pay the bills while he went to culinary school and I went to graduate school. We would be poor, but enriched.

  That was the plan.

  I sat at the table, surveyed the bills.

  “What math?” I asked.

  He stared, wide-eyed and unblinking, as if the bills were tarot cards holding the secrets to our future. “I don’t think we can both afford to go to school right now.”

  I had already been accepted at Brooklyn College and Drew had been accepted at the Culinary Education Institute. We would both get some financial aid, but not full scholarships. My mom said it was because we were white. I told her that was racist.

  “School is expensive,” he said, explaining his conclusion. “More expensive than we thought.”

  “Okay, what are you saying?” I asked.

  “We should take turns. One of us goes to school, one of us gets a real job, then switch.”

  He was still staring at the bills. “We’re twenty-three. Our programs are only a couple years. We could both finish school by twenty-seven, twenty-eight this way. In the meantime, we’ll make more money as a couple, start saving, pay off our loans faster…”