The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [9]
Our mother nodded. “It’s early, you see. But I found a lump—what was it, a month ago?” She looked at our father for confirmation, the quiet ease of cooperative conversation they had developed years ago. He nodded.
“A month ago?” Rose’s voice cracked. She set down her teacup, hand shaking. “Why didn’t you call me? I could have . . .” She trailed off, unsure of what she could have done. But she could have done something. She could have taken care of this. She took care of everything. How had she missed this? A month, they’d been going to doctors and having quiet conversations between themselves, and she hadn’t seen it at all?
“We’ve been to the oncologist, and it’s malignant. It doesn’t look like it’s spread, but it’s quite large. So they’re going to do a round of chemotherapy before surgery. Shrink it down a bit. And then . . .” Our mother’s voice caught and trembled for a moment, as though the meaning behind the clinical words had only just become clear to her, and she swallowed and took a breath. “And then a mastectomy. You know, just get the whole problem dealt with.” She said this as though it were something she had woken up and decided to do on a relative lark. Like going on a cruise, say, or taking up tennis.
“I’m so sorry,” Jonathan said. He reached across the table and put his hand over our mother’s, squeezed. He was so elegant in his sympathy. “What can we do?”
Rose stared wildly around the restaurant, at the gilt and red and paper placemats. This is what she would remember, she knew, not the fear in our mother’s eyes, or the pounding of her own heart, but how desperately tacky this place was, how cheap it looked, how the chopsticks had not broken properly when she had separated them but splintered along the center. This is what she would remember.
But when the shock passed, it had become something, forgive her for saying it, something of a relief. Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed. A reason to turn Jonathan’s abandonment into something important. So the next day she broke her lease, packed up her things, and moved back home, uninvited.
It wasn’t until she had been home for a while, had straightened out the little messes around the house and helped our mother through the first rounds of chemotherapy that the shame of her situation had hit her. How humiliating to be living at home again. If she told people that she had moved back to help care for our mother, of course they would nod and sigh sympathetically. But still, where was she? Living with our parents? At her age? She felt like a swimmer who had been earnestly beating back the waves only to find herself exhausted and just as far from shore as when she had begun. She was lonely and tired.
Embarrassed even by the thought of herself in this rudderless life, she flushed and stood impatiently from the window seat, where she’d been staring in irritation at our mother’s wildflower garden. The garden had, in the way of wildflower gardens, grown out of control. Our mother loved it—the way it drew butterflies and fat bees, the dizzy way the purples and yellows blurred together as the stems tangled—but Rose preferred her gardens to be more obedient.
She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favorite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices—disorder and literature—captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate. Our father, of course, limits his reading to things by, of, and about our boy Bill, but our mother brought diversity to our readings and therefore our education. It was never really a problem for any of us to read a children’s biography of Amelia Earhart