The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [58]
—•—
You notice the swell of one of your breasts, and notice it again weeks later. When you direct his hand to it, his eyebrows slant into worry. He says, "You even swell swell," but he is the one who insists you call your gynecologist in the morning.
She sends you to a surgeon, who doesn't like what he feels. A few mornings later, the surgeon does the biopsy. The pathology lab will have your results in a week.
Meanwhile, your boyfriend reads Dr. Love's book and reports that the odds of getting cancer at your age are almost one in three thousand. He says, "You're not the one."
You keep telling yourself, "This is only a test," but that week of waiting for the results is an unrelieved high-pitched tone. Then you are told that it is a real emergency.
Too late, you realize that your body was perfect—every healthy body is.
After the initial devastation, you're calm. You watch his rage from the eye of your own storm. His "Why you?" seems beside the point, and you say so.
You say, "You're not helping me."
He will make calls, make dinner, make jokes; he will say that a modified radical sounds like a Black Panther who has moved to the suburbs and belongs to a food co-op.
When you decide on plastic surgery to reconstruct your breast, tunneling your latissimus muscle and fat and skin from back to front, he will call it the tunnel of love.
In post-op, he will tell you he is honored that you threw up on him. He will stay with you in the hospital all day, every day, and as late as he can at night. After visiting hours, when the night nurse says he has to leave, he will hide there with you, closing the curtain partition and keeping his feet up on your bed.
He will even get along with your brother. The two of them will take turns reading to you until you fall asleep or the night nurse brings a security guard.
You can feel how much he loves you. For a second, you think maybe if he can just hold on to you like this, he'll keep you from falling off the earth, out of this life.
—•—
After your first chemo treatment, before you lose your hair, he will take you wig shopping. He'll make it fun, and annoy the saleswoman by trying on wigs himself. You get one that looks like the hair you still have, and another like the hair you wished for as a teenager. Long and streaky blonde, it is a wig Tina Turner might have worn in the bad old days with Ike, and he makes you laugh by singing, "Left a good job in the city ..."
He will buy a satin pillow, which is supposed to slow the breakage and loss of your hair. Maybe it does, at first. Then there's a clump in the drain. A nest in your brush. You see more and more and more of your scalp. You wear a baseball cap all the time, even in front of him—especially in front of him.
When you can't stand it anymore, you ask him to shave your head, and he says he will be honored to be your hairundresser.
He will bring a shaver and temporary tattoos, for what he calls your new headstyle.
The moment before you take off your cap, you cry: "Don't ever remember what this looks like."
"Honey," he says, "I'm the man who loves you."
He sets up two bourbons and two beers, and goes to work. Every few minutes, he turns off the shaver to see if you are okay.
Afterward, the two of you look in the mirror. For less than a second, you see your hideous, hairless self—but right away your survival instinct kicks in and tells you the opposite: you are uniquely beautiful.
When you smile, so does he. "Very cool," he says.
He offers to shave his own head, in solidarity, but you say no. You don't want anyone mistaking you for latecomer disciples of Heaven's Gate; heaven is the last place you want to go, spaceship or no.
He clips pictures of dazzling black basketball players with shaved heads and tapes them to your