MARY AND O'NEIL Read Online Free PDF

bear he always left for her), rose again, and treated herself to a breakfast of sausage and French toast, glazed with syrup and stamps of yellow butter. She expected not to want it once it was made, but found the opposite was true: she was unaccountably ravenous, and for the time it took her to eat her breakfast, that was all she did and thought about—sliced the toast into squares, the sausage into cylinders bursting with watery fat, forked it all onto her waiting tongue. She chewed, swallowed, reloaded; if she had been capable of it, she would have licked the plate. Then when she was finished she rinsed her plate and called her doctor and told him what she knew; by two o’clock he had his hand there, and told her not to be afraid.
“Concerned,”
he said, scribbling, not really looking at her. He was a plump man, bald and flatfooted, a doctor who actually still made house calls. She had known him for years, and now he wasn’t looking at her. “I’d be
concerned,
for now.”
    There were other doctors then, and more appointments—the ultrasound and mammogram, and the visit to the radiologist in Cooperstown to read the films, then back to Dr. Bardin and the consensus that the surgeon was the next person to see. Serious medicine, she discovered, was a kind of maze, a series of hallways down which one traveled; at the end of each was a door which one opened, hoping to find it locked; but as long as they opened, one was forced to go on. And yet, somehow, through two terrified weeks, she has told Arthur nothing. On Tuesday next—four days from this moment in the foyer, waiting for Arthur to appear so they can drive to New Hampshire—the surgeon will evaluate her; the mass will be aspirated, and then there will be a surgical biopsy, and decisions to be made. Her story will come out. Why hasn’t she told him? Her lies are not elaborate; it has proved simple enough to explain why she will be away for an afternoon, to let slip over breakfast or watching television in the evening some vague announcement about a meeting with the State Library Association in Ithaca or a booksellers’ convention in Binghamton (Arthur, glancing up from his paper or the program, his eyes distracted, saying,
Well, okay, thanks for letting me know, why are you even telling me?
), all to account for the three or four hours it takes to drive to a new doctor and back, and of course the mileage on her car. She is saving him, of course, from her bad news, waiting until she knows something one way or the other; she is letting him live his life for now because she loves him. But the truth is—and she has to admit it—that the longer she remains alone with the knowledge of what is happening to her, the longer she herself is saved. Under the flat institutional light of the doctor’s office there was “a mass” and a “cause for concern,” there were “treatments” and “courses of therapy,” the problem was confined to “the affected breast,” which in turn was the property of “a white female, married, 54, no family history.” (She had peeked at the radiologist’s chart.) Nowhere, at no time, has she uttered the word
cancer,
nor heard it used. The breast was “affected.” The mass was “palpable.” The patient was “married.” She, Miriam Burke, was something—some
where
—else.
    But where? Outside, beyond the smoked glass of the library foyer, the sky is so white it seems to tremble, poised on the very edge of snow. Leaves whirl in the parking lot, nearly empty now of cars, a temporary oasis of calm tucked between toddler story-hour and the full-blown hurricane of the after-school rush. Miriam looks at her watch and sees that it is noon, on the button. Where is Arthur? She is already wearing her coat—she had expected to find him, waiting at the curb, twenty minutes ago—and the dry heat of the foyer has begun to close in on her, dampening her frame with perspiration. Should she go back in and call? And if no one answers—if he