Meditation 45: An Individual Medley
by Julie Marie Wade
Let’s start in the fly above the stage, that old position Memory always takes (flyperson, fly operator). Now the past is small beneath us, range of pulleys and counterweights designed for hoisting it up, inspecting—or better still, lowering ourselves down into the frozen scene. Remember freeze tag? I loved to play at recess, especially in third grade. It was hard to stop running when someone touched you (momentum), harder still not to wobble while standing in place, child-mannequin with heaving chest, breath not yet returned to it.
When I inspect a memory, I sometimes still forget to breathe.
Today I’ve descended to the proscenium of 1989, unhooked the harness, which clanks about my feet. Remembering is tethering, yes—or the other way around? The classroom had carpet, but I’ll forgive a few inaccuracies if the bulk of the staging is right. Mrs. Moak’s class. Twenty metal desks with lids that raised. Cursive workbooks and pencil cases inside. (I lift one just to be sure.) Oh—and is that a scratch-and-sniff sticker on a Trapper Keeper? Well-done, Dramaturg! Pink Pearls. Ticonderoga No. 2s. Several Pee-Chee folders. Record player on a shelf. Full set of encyclopedias, full tray of chalk, cubbies where we stored our lunchboxes with thermoses or our brown paper bags with boxes of juice.
If I walk over to my cubby right now, I’ll find a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich on still-defrosting bread from the Hostess Outlet. My mother said old bread froze just fine. Plenty of things did. Probably an orange that wasn’t really orange, but a fainter color, like the wan, fluorescent lights flickering above our desks. The gaffers got that right. A stack of Hydrox cookies wrapped in foil. And one giant waxy slab of cheese sliced from an industrial block. Now that was orange—and melting.
She’s left a note of course, my mother, but I don’t want to read it. Lined paper, folded in thirds, the perfect tilt of her penmanship. No, that’s not why I’m here. It’s Book Report Day, and Nine-Year-Old Me is about to give her first presentation—not written, which is what she’s good at, but spoken aloud, in a careful, rehearsed way that’s meant to sound natural, unplanned. This is acting, it turns out: to become the speaker who actually speaks this way. We’ve been warned that reading notes from index cards will cost us, drop of a whole letter grade—and this our first year with letter grades. We are all learning to fear the alphabet.
Mrs. Moak says that she wants us to be “off-script,” playing the part of someone who isn’t terrified to stand at a podium (half-sized, perched on a table at the front of the room), look her fidgeting classmates straight in the eyes, and compel them with a salesman’s suave: “I’d like to tell you about the life and work of Jane Addams.”
And here I am, in early version stereo, palms currently soaking my purple corduroy pants. These are my mother’s fresh find from the Sears Surplus Store, paired with purple turtleneck, brown vest, and brown loafers with pennies wedged inside. No one would have called this outfit fly, but I like it, wish I had a little corduroy cap to doff when I wear it. The pockets are deep, and the pennies are luck, so I stand up and force a bit of swagger when Mrs. Moak calls my name.
That’s when it happens. She’s giving way at the podium while I’m taking a few short strides up the aisle. I’m wearing my pink glasses, one lens three times thicker than the other, and there’s a headband rising like a bridge over my coarse, permed curls. “Your fly’s open,” Mrs. Moak says, in her deep voice that can only murmur or bellow. She doesn’t—maybe can’t—lilt the way that other women do. I keep advancing because I know she isn’t talking to me. Girls don’t have flies--can’t. A fly is that nebulous thing that covers another nebulous thing for which there are urinals in the boys’ bathroom, a slit in my father’s pajamas. That’s a fly, and I don’t have one. How could I?
Crossing stage right, Older Me hears the snickers before she does. Younger Me is clutching the library biography, concentrating so hard on the words she’s memorized that her lips are moving, mouthing. She’s supposed to show the book, reference it without reading from it. So many rules! “Julie, your fly is open,” Mrs. Moak says again, plainly irritated that she’s not stopping, fixing herself before she turns to face the audience.
Now I’m close again, and we’re both frozen, like we’ve just been tagged at recess. A voice is a kind of touch after all. Mrs. Moak is pointing to our zipper, which Older Me can see is gaping wide, a tuft of fabric from the purple turtleneck peeking through. That’s when Younger Me, whose wobble has become a tremble (there’s a difference), suddenly understands the feeling the First Woman had in the Garden. It never made sense before--How would they not know they were naked? Couldn’t they feel the breeze on their skin, the prickle of gooseflesh forming? Sweat is filling our collective socks, making the curls stick beside our ears like sideburns. To touch the zipper is to acknowledge the truth. It feels like an obscene gesture. Eve had to run around and grab the fig leaves because obviously Adam wasn’t going to do it.
How to face anyone now. How to speak of Jane in all her buttoned-up goodness, social-working and Hull House-establishing and not being married—my favorite part. The moment’s preserved: impossible, eternal.
Older Me, crossing stage left, abandons the girl whose hand hovers over her seam. The laughter crackles louder but still seems canned. Reaching inside the brown paper bag with the smiley face drawn on, I fish out the note, which is a prophecy gone wrong: I know you’re going to pass with flying colors today! Love, Mom.
When I inspect a memory, I sometimes still forget to breathe.
Today I’ve descended to the proscenium of 1989, unhooked the harness, which clanks about my feet. Remembering is tethering, yes—or the other way around? The classroom had carpet, but I’ll forgive a few inaccuracies if the bulk of the staging is right. Mrs. Moak’s class. Twenty metal desks with lids that raised. Cursive workbooks and pencil cases inside. (I lift one just to be sure.) Oh—and is that a scratch-and-sniff sticker on a Trapper Keeper? Well-done, Dramaturg! Pink Pearls. Ticonderoga No. 2s. Several Pee-Chee folders. Record player on a shelf. Full set of encyclopedias, full tray of chalk, cubbies where we stored our lunchboxes with thermoses or our brown paper bags with boxes of juice.
If I walk over to my cubby right now, I’ll find a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich on still-defrosting bread from the Hostess Outlet. My mother said old bread froze just fine. Plenty of things did. Probably an orange that wasn’t really orange, but a fainter color, like the wan, fluorescent lights flickering above our desks. The gaffers got that right. A stack of Hydrox cookies wrapped in foil. And one giant waxy slab of cheese sliced from an industrial block. Now that was orange—and melting.
She’s left a note of course, my mother, but I don’t want to read it. Lined paper, folded in thirds, the perfect tilt of her penmanship. No, that’s not why I’m here. It’s Book Report Day, and Nine-Year-Old Me is about to give her first presentation—not written, which is what she’s good at, but spoken aloud, in a careful, rehearsed way that’s meant to sound natural, unplanned. This is acting, it turns out: to become the speaker who actually speaks this way. We’ve been warned that reading notes from index cards will cost us, drop of a whole letter grade—and this our first year with letter grades. We are all learning to fear the alphabet.
Mrs. Moak says that she wants us to be “off-script,” playing the part of someone who isn’t terrified to stand at a podium (half-sized, perched on a table at the front of the room), look her fidgeting classmates straight in the eyes, and compel them with a salesman’s suave: “I’d like to tell you about the life and work of Jane Addams.”
And here I am, in early version stereo, palms currently soaking my purple corduroy pants. These are my mother’s fresh find from the Sears Surplus Store, paired with purple turtleneck, brown vest, and brown loafers with pennies wedged inside. No one would have called this outfit fly, but I like it, wish I had a little corduroy cap to doff when I wear it. The pockets are deep, and the pennies are luck, so I stand up and force a bit of swagger when Mrs. Moak calls my name.
That’s when it happens. She’s giving way at the podium while I’m taking a few short strides up the aisle. I’m wearing my pink glasses, one lens three times thicker than the other, and there’s a headband rising like a bridge over my coarse, permed curls. “Your fly’s open,” Mrs. Moak says, in her deep voice that can only murmur or bellow. She doesn’t—maybe can’t—lilt the way that other women do. I keep advancing because I know she isn’t talking to me. Girls don’t have flies--can’t. A fly is that nebulous thing that covers another nebulous thing for which there are urinals in the boys’ bathroom, a slit in my father’s pajamas. That’s a fly, and I don’t have one. How could I?
Crossing stage right, Older Me hears the snickers before she does. Younger Me is clutching the library biography, concentrating so hard on the words she’s memorized that her lips are moving, mouthing. She’s supposed to show the book, reference it without reading from it. So many rules! “Julie, your fly is open,” Mrs. Moak says again, plainly irritated that she’s not stopping, fixing herself before she turns to face the audience.
Now I’m close again, and we’re both frozen, like we’ve just been tagged at recess. A voice is a kind of touch after all. Mrs. Moak is pointing to our zipper, which Older Me can see is gaping wide, a tuft of fabric from the purple turtleneck peeking through. That’s when Younger Me, whose wobble has become a tremble (there’s a difference), suddenly understands the feeling the First Woman had in the Garden. It never made sense before--How would they not know they were naked? Couldn’t they feel the breeze on their skin, the prickle of gooseflesh forming? Sweat is filling our collective socks, making the curls stick beside our ears like sideburns. To touch the zipper is to acknowledge the truth. It feels like an obscene gesture. Eve had to run around and grab the fig leaves because obviously Adam wasn’t going to do it.
How to face anyone now. How to speak of Jane in all her buttoned-up goodness, social-working and Hull House-establishing and not being married—my favorite part. The moment’s preserved: impossible, eternal.
Older Me, crossing stage left, abandons the girl whose hand hovers over her seam. The laughter crackles louder but still seems canned. Reaching inside the brown paper bag with the smiley face drawn on, I fish out the note, which is a prophecy gone wrong: I know you’re going to pass with flying colors today! Love, Mom.
*
“I’ll be back” is what Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a movie I never saw in a year when I was too young to be watching. Later, in piano school, someone would call out, “I’ll be Bach!” which prompted someone else to reply, “I’ll be Beethoven!” or “I’ll be Schubert!” or I’ll be Rachmaninoff!,” which was especially fun to say. I preferred Burt Bacharach to all the dead composers with their heads carved into busts, longed to shout “I’ll be Bacharach!” over post-recital punch in the social room at Tibbetts Methodist Church, but I was afraid, as happened so often in regular school, that no one would know who I was talking about, and it’s no fun at all if you have to explain. Still, for years whenever anyone sneezed in class, instead of joining the others in a chorus of “bless yous!,” I’d softly coo, “I say a little prayer for you.”
I never learned the context for the original “I’ll be back,” but I knew it was supposed to be said with a menacing curl of the lip in a low vocal register with an Austrian accent. This was confusing, though, since in horror films, everyone warned against saying it: “I’ll be back”—or worse—“I’ll be right back.” The phrase was a portent, the surest sign the girl who said it (and it was almost always a girl) was going to meet her doom in the very next room and/or within the next five minutes of screen time. Everything came down to inflection. A staccato, bubblegum-girl-voice lilting versus a serious, bodybuilder-man-voice growling.
Back then I said “I’ll be back” all the time, not always in emulation or jest, but because I believed it. Where in the world was I going to go? I was no Carmen Sandiego. My parents traveled to Europe before I was born, then let their passports expire. There was talk of taking me to D.C. or New York City, but we never went, partly because of costs, but mostly because of crime. The crime was especially rampant “back east,” they said, but anywhere I might wander without them could certainly tip toward harm.
My junior year we flew three hours backward in time to Honolulu so I could visit my best friend who had recently moved there. Teaching piano, I saved enough money to pay my own way, but my parents weren’t about to let me go alone. “We’ll be back next week!” we waved to the departing minivan. I sat between my parents, their eternal wedge, afraid to write anything in my notebook because of course they were looking over my shoulders. Where else were they going to look? As I re-read the back cover of The Catcher in the Rye, my father leaned over and said, “I could never make heads or tails out of that book, but it seemed like the kid could really benefit from some discipline.” My mother thought Holden Caulfield just needed piano lessons.
That week I stayed with Vanessa on Oahu my parents took a second plane to someplace on the Big Island. Vanessa’s father doled out bus passes so we could roam around without any supervision at all. Glorious! In the mornings, we ran a persistent hill and then a long stretch through Punch Bowl Cemetery. In the afternoons, when rain gushed and steamed and only doves fraternized on pavement, we watched movies in the chilly cinema at the mall: Dead Man Walking and Up Close and Personal. I breached the threshold of a Hooters before backing slowly away. “Sorry, wrong restaurant!” I was supposed to taste pho for the first time, and it was perfect—at the tiny Vietnamese place around the corner from the owl-eyed chain.
One night Vanessa took me to an underground club, which was thrillingly literal. We had to descend the stairs to enter. “Lisa Loeb is playing,” Vanessa kept saying, and I kept nodding like I had any idea who that was. And then she was there, on stage, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a gingham dress that smacked of folk-rock Dorothy Gale—instant crush!—and suddenly every song I had ever heard sounded tinny as an ice cream truck by comparison. “Stay,” Vanessa sighed, leaning against the wall with one sole pressing into it. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” I murmured, then mimicked her flamingo posture. “No--the song. It’s called ‘Stay.’” I blinked hard, and Vanessa threw up her hands. “From Reality Bites. How deep of a rock are you living under?” I was beginning to think it was a boulder.
Back home in Seattle, we didn’t notice at first. Under cover of darkness and jetlag, everything looked right. But in the morning, I heard my father’s keys jangling just before my mother screamed: “Call the police, Bill!” Our car had been stolen from right off the drive. “Hotwired, whatever you call it—didn’t you use The Club to secure the steering wheel?” Now it wasn’t even safe to come back because coming back meant you had first gone away. Had they been casing the place? Were they just waiting for us to leave? “Ma’am, there’s no way to say for sure.”
Years later, I’ll learn that the original Terminator script read “I’ll come back,” but Schwarzenegger changed the line in real-time delivery. Years later, I’ll mutter “I’ll be back” and know I don’t mean it, walking out the door, down the covered path to the waiting car and riding off, not into a sunset exactly, but into a future where raindrops keep falling on my head and I don’t mind. When they found the car, it was abandoned in a ditch after being used in a hit-and-run. Totaled, the report read. I thought my parents would let the car go, but they had it rebuilt exactly: a 1990 blue Honda Accord they continued driving well into the new millennium. Could they do this with a daughter? The day I didn’t come back I walked right past it.
I never learned the context for the original “I’ll be back,” but I knew it was supposed to be said with a menacing curl of the lip in a low vocal register with an Austrian accent. This was confusing, though, since in horror films, everyone warned against saying it: “I’ll be back”—or worse—“I’ll be right back.” The phrase was a portent, the surest sign the girl who said it (and it was almost always a girl) was going to meet her doom in the very next room and/or within the next five minutes of screen time. Everything came down to inflection. A staccato, bubblegum-girl-voice lilting versus a serious, bodybuilder-man-voice growling.
Back then I said “I’ll be back” all the time, not always in emulation or jest, but because I believed it. Where in the world was I going to go? I was no Carmen Sandiego. My parents traveled to Europe before I was born, then let their passports expire. There was talk of taking me to D.C. or New York City, but we never went, partly because of costs, but mostly because of crime. The crime was especially rampant “back east,” they said, but anywhere I might wander without them could certainly tip toward harm.
My junior year we flew three hours backward in time to Honolulu so I could visit my best friend who had recently moved there. Teaching piano, I saved enough money to pay my own way, but my parents weren’t about to let me go alone. “We’ll be back next week!” we waved to the departing minivan. I sat between my parents, their eternal wedge, afraid to write anything in my notebook because of course they were looking over my shoulders. Where else were they going to look? As I re-read the back cover of The Catcher in the Rye, my father leaned over and said, “I could never make heads or tails out of that book, but it seemed like the kid could really benefit from some discipline.” My mother thought Holden Caulfield just needed piano lessons.
That week I stayed with Vanessa on Oahu my parents took a second plane to someplace on the Big Island. Vanessa’s father doled out bus passes so we could roam around without any supervision at all. Glorious! In the mornings, we ran a persistent hill and then a long stretch through Punch Bowl Cemetery. In the afternoons, when rain gushed and steamed and only doves fraternized on pavement, we watched movies in the chilly cinema at the mall: Dead Man Walking and Up Close and Personal. I breached the threshold of a Hooters before backing slowly away. “Sorry, wrong restaurant!” I was supposed to taste pho for the first time, and it was perfect—at the tiny Vietnamese place around the corner from the owl-eyed chain.
One night Vanessa took me to an underground club, which was thrillingly literal. We had to descend the stairs to enter. “Lisa Loeb is playing,” Vanessa kept saying, and I kept nodding like I had any idea who that was. And then she was there, on stage, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a gingham dress that smacked of folk-rock Dorothy Gale—instant crush!—and suddenly every song I had ever heard sounded tinny as an ice cream truck by comparison. “Stay,” Vanessa sighed, leaning against the wall with one sole pressing into it. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” I murmured, then mimicked her flamingo posture. “No--the song. It’s called ‘Stay.’” I blinked hard, and Vanessa threw up her hands. “From Reality Bites. How deep of a rock are you living under?” I was beginning to think it was a boulder.
Back home in Seattle, we didn’t notice at first. Under cover of darkness and jetlag, everything looked right. But in the morning, I heard my father’s keys jangling just before my mother screamed: “Call the police, Bill!” Our car had been stolen from right off the drive. “Hotwired, whatever you call it—didn’t you use The Club to secure the steering wheel?” Now it wasn’t even safe to come back because coming back meant you had first gone away. Had they been casing the place? Were they just waiting for us to leave? “Ma’am, there’s no way to say for sure.”
Years later, I’ll learn that the original Terminator script read “I’ll come back,” but Schwarzenegger changed the line in real-time delivery. Years later, I’ll mutter “I’ll be back” and know I don’t mean it, walking out the door, down the covered path to the waiting car and riding off, not into a sunset exactly, but into a future where raindrops keep falling on my head and I don’t mind. When they found the car, it was abandoned in a ditch after being used in a hit-and-run. Totaled, the report read. I thought my parents would let the car go, but they had it rebuilt exactly: a 1990 blue Honda Accord they continued driving well into the new millennium. Could they do this with a daughter? The day I didn’t come back I walked right past it.
*
Hi, Aunt Linda.
I’m thinking of you today, thoughts which include your death, 20 years now it’s been, and the death of my friend Maureen, a year ago this month. Breast cancer got you; it got Maureen. I’ve always felt it was waiting for me, loitering around the corner from my good health, my vibrant life, waiting to tackle and take me down. Sometimes I treat it like a foregone conclusion—that cancer is coming, that cancer will win.
I don’t know how much you used the Internet before you died. Grandma said you took some computer classes at the library, were thinking of getting back into the workforce once you finished chemo. She said you were happy because you didn’t lose your hair, didn’t feel nauseous most of the time. There’s this thing with Google where, when you start to type your search terms, the algorithm makes suggestions. If you type “breast,” the first suggestion is always “cancer.” That’s how it is in my head, too. I can’t even say the word “breast” by itself anymore. My mind autocorrects to “breast cancer.” Then come pink ribbons. All the donations I’ve made in your name. A Race for the Cure on the weirdest cruise ship ever. My partner and I thought the best way to see Alaska was by ship, and I remembered you once took a ship to Alaska, too—that you loved traveling with your friends, Fran and Marlene. I met them once, but I never knew their last names or where they lived. So many times over the last 20 years I’ve wanted to reach out and ask about their memories of you.
Since you’ve been gone, a lot has happened, and not all of it the way I first described. I didn’t move to Atlanta for graduate school. I moved to Pittsburgh with my partner, the same partner you once met when we were roommates—or so I let you believe. If only cancer grew as slowly as courage. My parents, once they knew who Angie was, made many threats against our life together. I was 23, but I feared them, so I lied about where we had moved. Angie’s sister lived in Atlanta then, and I’d send her all my correspondence in a big manila envelope. Inside were smaller envelopes, each addressed and stamped, which she’d drop in a local mailbox. When letters came for me to her address, she’d simply forward them to Pittsburgh.
I don’t know what the dead know or if they wish to know the truth.
Grandma died—four years after your death. In my letters, I never asked about her life without you, just tried to sound upbeat, to make her think all was well between my parents and me—but with my thesis and my teaching, how could I possibly make it home to visit?
It turns out there is no good way to explain an absence. Even death doesn’t begin to cover it.
Around the same time Grandma died, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. They always ask me at the doctor’s, “Your mother and your aunt—were they sisters?” I tell them no. What I don’t say: sisters-in-law who could barely stand each other. My mother thought you were spoiled and weak. You thought she was controlling and plenty of other things unbecoming a Christian woman. I think you were both jealous of each other. My mother envied your childhood, which was so much cushier than hers. And you envied her adulthood, marriage and motherhood to which you aspired and maybe—likely—to which you felt entitled. I mean, my mother didn’t even pledge a sorority, yet she waltzed off with a handsome, successful, fraternity boy. Outrageous!
My father said you knew there was something wrong with your breast a whole year before you let on to anyone. He said you were ashamed to speak of it, even when your nipple bled and began to invert itself. You were 53 and had never had a mammogram. I’m not judging. We were raised in a fucked-up place (yes!) with fucked-up rules about women’s bodies—as if our bodies weren’t even our own, simply “on loan from God.” Maybe men’s were “on loan,” too, but it wasn’t the same. And since your body didn’t belong to a husband or child, I don’t think you thought it held much value. I don’t think you ever believed a woman on her own was enough. I want to ask Fran and Marlene about this, if only I could find them.
My mother had a double mastectomy in 2009, then reconstruction. She has gone on living—healthy, strong, plenty of other things—and now she’s 15 years deep in her remission. I try to take comfort in that. The cancer didn’t kill her. The cancer doesn’t always win.
I’ve been getting mammograms since I was 35. I watch the nurse write “high risk.” I get the ultrasound. I get the callback for a second round almost every time. My dense, shadowy breasts. Maybe they’re keeping secrets. Poetically, that’s where we keep them, isn’t it? Carried in our breasts. Maybe there’s a letter we’ve never sent, tucked inside a breast pocket. Maybe it’s this one. When I get breast cancer—if—I’m not going to replace them. I decided after reading Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. She described nurses complaining, patients complaining, about her refusal to wear a prosthesis. They wanted her to be a woman who at least appeared to have breasts, to stop making other women uncomfortable with her lack.
I know how it feels to be a woman whose presence makes others uncomfortable, including you, my aunt I’ve always loved. I think you knew before you left this world what kind of woman I am. Sometimes silence is not malice or mercy—it’s simply all we have.
When the metal plates come down hard, I hold my head high, my breath long. I wait for the all-clear that really means until-next-time.
XX
I’m thinking of you today, thoughts which include your death, 20 years now it’s been, and the death of my friend Maureen, a year ago this month. Breast cancer got you; it got Maureen. I’ve always felt it was waiting for me, loitering around the corner from my good health, my vibrant life, waiting to tackle and take me down. Sometimes I treat it like a foregone conclusion—that cancer is coming, that cancer will win.
I don’t know how much you used the Internet before you died. Grandma said you took some computer classes at the library, were thinking of getting back into the workforce once you finished chemo. She said you were happy because you didn’t lose your hair, didn’t feel nauseous most of the time. There’s this thing with Google where, when you start to type your search terms, the algorithm makes suggestions. If you type “breast,” the first suggestion is always “cancer.” That’s how it is in my head, too. I can’t even say the word “breast” by itself anymore. My mind autocorrects to “breast cancer.” Then come pink ribbons. All the donations I’ve made in your name. A Race for the Cure on the weirdest cruise ship ever. My partner and I thought the best way to see Alaska was by ship, and I remembered you once took a ship to Alaska, too—that you loved traveling with your friends, Fran and Marlene. I met them once, but I never knew their last names or where they lived. So many times over the last 20 years I’ve wanted to reach out and ask about their memories of you.
Since you’ve been gone, a lot has happened, and not all of it the way I first described. I didn’t move to Atlanta for graduate school. I moved to Pittsburgh with my partner, the same partner you once met when we were roommates—or so I let you believe. If only cancer grew as slowly as courage. My parents, once they knew who Angie was, made many threats against our life together. I was 23, but I feared them, so I lied about where we had moved. Angie’s sister lived in Atlanta then, and I’d send her all my correspondence in a big manila envelope. Inside were smaller envelopes, each addressed and stamped, which she’d drop in a local mailbox. When letters came for me to her address, she’d simply forward them to Pittsburgh.
I don’t know what the dead know or if they wish to know the truth.
Grandma died—four years after your death. In my letters, I never asked about her life without you, just tried to sound upbeat, to make her think all was well between my parents and me—but with my thesis and my teaching, how could I possibly make it home to visit?
It turns out there is no good way to explain an absence. Even death doesn’t begin to cover it.
Around the same time Grandma died, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. They always ask me at the doctor’s, “Your mother and your aunt—were they sisters?” I tell them no. What I don’t say: sisters-in-law who could barely stand each other. My mother thought you were spoiled and weak. You thought she was controlling and plenty of other things unbecoming a Christian woman. I think you were both jealous of each other. My mother envied your childhood, which was so much cushier than hers. And you envied her adulthood, marriage and motherhood to which you aspired and maybe—likely—to which you felt entitled. I mean, my mother didn’t even pledge a sorority, yet she waltzed off with a handsome, successful, fraternity boy. Outrageous!
My father said you knew there was something wrong with your breast a whole year before you let on to anyone. He said you were ashamed to speak of it, even when your nipple bled and began to invert itself. You were 53 and had never had a mammogram. I’m not judging. We were raised in a fucked-up place (yes!) with fucked-up rules about women’s bodies—as if our bodies weren’t even our own, simply “on loan from God.” Maybe men’s were “on loan,” too, but it wasn’t the same. And since your body didn’t belong to a husband or child, I don’t think you thought it held much value. I don’t think you ever believed a woman on her own was enough. I want to ask Fran and Marlene about this, if only I could find them.
My mother had a double mastectomy in 2009, then reconstruction. She has gone on living—healthy, strong, plenty of other things—and now she’s 15 years deep in her remission. I try to take comfort in that. The cancer didn’t kill her. The cancer doesn’t always win.
I’ve been getting mammograms since I was 35. I watch the nurse write “high risk.” I get the ultrasound. I get the callback for a second round almost every time. My dense, shadowy breasts. Maybe they’re keeping secrets. Poetically, that’s where we keep them, isn’t it? Carried in our breasts. Maybe there’s a letter we’ve never sent, tucked inside a breast pocket. Maybe it’s this one. When I get breast cancer—if—I’m not going to replace them. I decided after reading Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. She described nurses complaining, patients complaining, about her refusal to wear a prosthesis. They wanted her to be a woman who at least appeared to have breasts, to stop making other women uncomfortable with her lack.
I know how it feels to be a woman whose presence makes others uncomfortable, including you, my aunt I’ve always loved. I think you knew before you left this world what kind of woman I am. Sometimes silence is not malice or mercy—it’s simply all we have.
When the metal plates come down hard, I hold my head high, my breath long. I wait for the all-clear that really means until-next-time.
XX
*
Before swag, there were freebies. Little hitch in the lexicon, how thongs became flip-flops almost overnight. Before BOGO, they spelled it out: buy one get one (free). Sometimes the “free” was implied. Your mother rising early, leaving before dawn, waiting for the “giveaways” (first 50 people in line) and the “gifts with purchase” (consolation prize). Return the purchase, but keep the gift. If they ask for it back, say you lost it or used it. Say you gave it away. What are they going to do? It’s a gift! Aren’t gifts supposed to be free of charge? Grow indignant. Demand to speak to a manager. Remind the cashier you’re a valued customer. Accept all discounts applied for your inconvenience. Is there a free gift? Thank you. No need to write to Corporate now.
Before hoarding, there was collecting. It was harmless, maybe quirky, but no one had to know you didn’t buy it new or used, didn’t buy it period. Collecting isn’t the same as stealing. Remember that! Some discards are better than what they sell in stores. Pay attention. What are people tossing out? Is that an 8 or a 3 on the price tag? Looks like a 3 to me, and the customer is always right. Better than bargain-hunting or coupon-clipping—though you did those, too—was raiding the all-you-can-eat-breakfast buffet at the beachside motel. Stuff a muffin in your purse, a banana in your pocket. Complimentary breakfast is the prelude to free lunch. Go to Denny’s, and tell them it’s your birthday. If they ask for ID, say you’re just a kid. You don’t have one. Let your mother corroborate. What mother would forget her only child’s birthday? Of course it’s today! I was in labor for 36 hours. I’m the one whose breakfast should be free! (Maybe they’ll take the hint.)
Volunteer to clean up after coffee hour, then let a church lady say, her doily collar so starched and white it reminds you of a dinner napkin doubling as a bib, “This is never going to keep—why don’t you take it home with you, dear?” Blame your daughter’s big appetite, your growing girl. Blame your husband, who still snacks between meals. Don’t mind if I do! Wonder why there’s always money for big things—a grand piano, an in-ground swimming pool—but not the day-to-day. Rummage through other people’s papers, take their grocery ads (they weren’t going to use them anyway!), then stand in separate lines two registers apart and present your separate coupons. Repeat at store after store. Limit two for this price. Limit four. Fear no limits! Hit every Safeway in a 25-mile radius. For primo deals, enlist your father, too. Another coupon, another purchase. Claim every sale item. Ask if there are more in back. Be the clearance you wish to see in the world. Then stock the storm freezer, stock the pantry. If you buy bulk enough, it’s almost gratis.
Take years to realize it’s not the having but the spending, same inverse ratio you’re learning in math—a bidirectional arrow—how much for how little. Could this be a kind of addiction—getting more and more for less and less? At home: Don’t you psychoanalyze me! (In fact, you are taking a psychology class taught by a former nun who writes on your homework that you demonstrate “an unusual understanding of human motivations.”)
When you were small, your mother took a part-time job at Pay ‘n’ Save, the now-defunct chain. Your father traveled for work all week, and this job was after-hours, so you rode with her in the dark, giddy after dinner, swinging her ring of keys. She let herself in through a side door, only turned on lights over the Card section, and willingly accepted your help. Simple work: pull all the old cards and replace them with new ones. BIRTHDAY. SYMPATHY. GET WELL. CONGRATULATIONS. They left clearly labeled boxes, which you hauled through the aisles from a storeroom. “What do we do with the discards?” you asked, and that’s when you heard it: dis-cards, the cards they had discontinued. (How you loved the language fiercely even then!) There was a bin for recycling, where you were meant to throw them out after completing a careful inventory of each remaining set. “So you log them, and then you toss them?” But she didn’t. She had you pack them up. Every discontinued card into a cardboard (there it was again!) box. In time, hundreds of birthday cards, sympathy, get well, congratulations. Even niche cards for certain holidays. Anniversaries and births and new jobs. You remember she kept saying you weren’t doing anything wrong—they’re not going to sell them now that they’re discontinued!—that nobody would ever have to know. Backing the car around, opening the trunk, stacking the boxes by dome light in an alley puddled with rain. “Hurry! Hurry!” It felt like a getaway. She locked the doors while you buckled into the backseat, then peeled out, faster than free association.
Did your father know about this job? Did someone at Pay ‘n’ Save find out? Was that why, eventually, you never went back, even during store hours, even to shop the best sales or fill out rainchecks or complete a mail-in rebate that made the purchase nearly free? Once, years later, when you brought it up, she brushed past you: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there in her walk-in closet, lining the uppermost shelves, was the evidence: box after box of cards. She never had to buy a card again, simply sent you downstairs to fetch one from her stash.
Wonder if some of them have accrued in value, upgraded to vintage status. Wonder if she has ever heard of Ebay or Etsy. Wonder what kind of profits she could turn with an online store. Know this: her items would be sold as is. She would not accept returns or exchanges. Free shipping? You’ve got to be out of your mind.
Before hoarding, there was collecting. It was harmless, maybe quirky, but no one had to know you didn’t buy it new or used, didn’t buy it period. Collecting isn’t the same as stealing. Remember that! Some discards are better than what they sell in stores. Pay attention. What are people tossing out? Is that an 8 or a 3 on the price tag? Looks like a 3 to me, and the customer is always right. Better than bargain-hunting or coupon-clipping—though you did those, too—was raiding the all-you-can-eat-breakfast buffet at the beachside motel. Stuff a muffin in your purse, a banana in your pocket. Complimentary breakfast is the prelude to free lunch. Go to Denny’s, and tell them it’s your birthday. If they ask for ID, say you’re just a kid. You don’t have one. Let your mother corroborate. What mother would forget her only child’s birthday? Of course it’s today! I was in labor for 36 hours. I’m the one whose breakfast should be free! (Maybe they’ll take the hint.)
Volunteer to clean up after coffee hour, then let a church lady say, her doily collar so starched and white it reminds you of a dinner napkin doubling as a bib, “This is never going to keep—why don’t you take it home with you, dear?” Blame your daughter’s big appetite, your growing girl. Blame your husband, who still snacks between meals. Don’t mind if I do! Wonder why there’s always money for big things—a grand piano, an in-ground swimming pool—but not the day-to-day. Rummage through other people’s papers, take their grocery ads (they weren’t going to use them anyway!), then stand in separate lines two registers apart and present your separate coupons. Repeat at store after store. Limit two for this price. Limit four. Fear no limits! Hit every Safeway in a 25-mile radius. For primo deals, enlist your father, too. Another coupon, another purchase. Claim every sale item. Ask if there are more in back. Be the clearance you wish to see in the world. Then stock the storm freezer, stock the pantry. If you buy bulk enough, it’s almost gratis.
Take years to realize it’s not the having but the spending, same inverse ratio you’re learning in math—a bidirectional arrow—how much for how little. Could this be a kind of addiction—getting more and more for less and less? At home: Don’t you psychoanalyze me! (In fact, you are taking a psychology class taught by a former nun who writes on your homework that you demonstrate “an unusual understanding of human motivations.”)
When you were small, your mother took a part-time job at Pay ‘n’ Save, the now-defunct chain. Your father traveled for work all week, and this job was after-hours, so you rode with her in the dark, giddy after dinner, swinging her ring of keys. She let herself in through a side door, only turned on lights over the Card section, and willingly accepted your help. Simple work: pull all the old cards and replace them with new ones. BIRTHDAY. SYMPATHY. GET WELL. CONGRATULATIONS. They left clearly labeled boxes, which you hauled through the aisles from a storeroom. “What do we do with the discards?” you asked, and that’s when you heard it: dis-cards, the cards they had discontinued. (How you loved the language fiercely even then!) There was a bin for recycling, where you were meant to throw them out after completing a careful inventory of each remaining set. “So you log them, and then you toss them?” But she didn’t. She had you pack them up. Every discontinued card into a cardboard (there it was again!) box. In time, hundreds of birthday cards, sympathy, get well, congratulations. Even niche cards for certain holidays. Anniversaries and births and new jobs. You remember she kept saying you weren’t doing anything wrong—they’re not going to sell them now that they’re discontinued!—that nobody would ever have to know. Backing the car around, opening the trunk, stacking the boxes by dome light in an alley puddled with rain. “Hurry! Hurry!” It felt like a getaway. She locked the doors while you buckled into the backseat, then peeled out, faster than free association.
Did your father know about this job? Did someone at Pay ‘n’ Save find out? Was that why, eventually, you never went back, even during store hours, even to shop the best sales or fill out rainchecks or complete a mail-in rebate that made the purchase nearly free? Once, years later, when you brought it up, she brushed past you: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there in her walk-in closet, lining the uppermost shelves, was the evidence: box after box of cards. She never had to buy a card again, simply sent you downstairs to fetch one from her stash.
Wonder if some of them have accrued in value, upgraded to vintage status. Wonder if she has ever heard of Ebay or Etsy. Wonder what kind of profits she could turn with an online store. Know this: her items would be sold as is. She would not accept returns or exchanges. Free shipping? You’ve got to be out of your mind.