The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read Online Free PDF Page B

exact word the plastic surgeon in Breast Cancer: Understanding Your Treatment Options used to describe the downward press of gravity on flesh.
     
    “Observe how the healthy breast droops,” the doctor intoned, as if being cancer free wasn’t enough to exclude the breast from criticism. “And now here’s a photo of how we matched the healthy breast with the reconstructed breast. Look at how symmetrical.”
     
    A red laser dot circled the aureole. That’s something Sally has learned during cancer. How to pronounce aureole. Maybe she’s never actually said the word—was there a need?—but she thought air-e-o-la, like some kind of musical note. Instead, when the doctors talk about the aureole complex, it’s oh-ree-la, the musical note’s sour twin.
     
    On and on the photos went, but none showed the patients’ faces, so it was hard to determine if the breasts matched the women. Sally knows that at sixty-six, she doesn’t want a pair of perky little packages riding under her sweater. How ridiculous would that be? All the men at bridge would stare at her during the rubbers, unable to bid. On her walks, poor widowed Dick Brantley would stare at her even more than usual as she bent down to pat Mitzie, his cocker spaniel.
     
    But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Sally liked Dick, enjoyed his deep voice saying, “Hey, ho, Sal,” when they passed each other on the street.
     
    She shakes her head, pushing away for now her flirtatious fantasy of Dick. She has to think. What she wants, really, is for the doctors to figure out how to suck the offending goop out of her breast and let her go on with what she has. Her flesh. Her nipple. The droop that she earned.
     
    Sally looks down at her left breast, wondering why it betrayed her. And then she laughs, full of her own self-pity. Why would a breast betray her? It was she, most likely, who betrayed her breasts, taking those flipping hormones from the time she was forty-five until the day of the cancer diagnosis. She ignored the reports, the warnings, telling a concerned Mia just last year, “It works. Why stop? Everyone is panicking.”
     
    Now, two weeks since her diagnosis, she’s awash in hot flashes, burning through the night in sweat, her hair thinning even before she can start chemotherapy.
     
    “Christ,” she mutters, picking up her bra and putting it on. Her left breast doesn’t even hurt, not even from the biopsy she had two weeks ago. She feels fine, wonderful, as if she could do two laps around the neighborhood in less than an hour; as if she could do all of Florence or Rome or Paris in one day. There is no evidence of illness except on a slide and in her chart, and for a second, Sally wonders if she could run away from the words that the doctors wrote down to tell her what she is. A cancer patient.
     
    Downstairs in the kitchen, Sally cleans up her popcorn mess. Somehow, she’s never quite figured out how to time the popcorn right, so she burns one bag for every bag she can eat. The air smells like char, a slight haze of smoke clinging to the kitchen ceiling. Sally opens a window and dumps the unpopped kernels into the trash. Her fingers are shaking, and she suddenly slides down to the floor, her breath quick and harsh and full of tears.
     
    David , she thinks, come help me . But then she shakes her head, swallowing back her sadness. It’s impossible. He died before they even invented microwave popcorn. And anyway, he doesn’t know a thing about cancer. Sally’s the one who studied up when he was sick. He couldn’t help her at all.
     
    When David died of cancer, it happened so fast. Spring turned into summer without Sally noticing. Before she knew it, it was one hundred degrees and David was in the ground. Now she can’t even remember what she did in those few short months except for driving to and from the hospital. She must have taken care of her girls, cooked, cleaned, ironed school clothes, fed the dog, watered the yard. But she has no memory