The Instant When Everything is Perfect (3 page)

He holds out his hand again, and Mia takes it, his skin already familiar. She blinks and considers how even if she weren’t married, she would never ever sleep with a plastic surgeon. Her stretch marks chide her. Her thighs laugh. Her wrinkles crow.

“Right. Next week.” She lets go of his hand, and he walks down the hall. He turns back to her, and she sort of smiles, sort of moves her hand in a wave. Then he knocks on a door and begins all over again what he did in the room with Sally. Another blush. Another mother/daughter wanting answers.

“Christ,” Sally whispers, taking Mia’s arm as they walk toward the exit into the waiting room.

“What?”

“Crap HMO. They hire the most illiterate to run the show. Doctors don’t do anything to keep the boat afloat. Did you see that girl’s teeth? Crooked and brown. Obviously no dental plan here.”

“Mom,” Mia says, pulling her mother to a standstill. “Did you get your appointment?”

“Yes, of course. Do you think I’d leave here without it?” Sally starts walking again. “It’s Monday, if you can believe that. And I have the blasted movie to watch before then. You need to come watch it with me. I’ll make popcorn. We can pretend we’re having fun.”

Mia looks at her watch. Harper will be home from school. Of course, that doesn’t mean much now that he is 16, can drive himself to his tutor and drama practice, but she still needs that cut-off time of 3.30, a way of telling everyone she has to leave, running from curriculum meetings or lunch dates or shopping trips. And when she gets home, Harper is usually not there anyway, so she pours herself a glass of wine and reads the mail.

And though Mia knows this is wrong, she needs to get away from Sally. From this hospital and all its problems. From the cancer.

“Harper is home, Mom. I’ll come get the movie tomorrow. We have till Monday.”

Sally opens the door and they walk past the seated women.

“Eleven percent,” Sally mutters as they stand in front of the elevators.

“Eleven percent what?” Mia asks.

“Women who will get breast cancer. You need to make sure you check yourself. Every month. Don’t forget the mammograms. And ask for a sonogram. After the doctor thought he felt a lump, that was the way they found mine, you know.”

The elevator doors open, and they walk in. Five years of mammograms didn’t catch Sally’s cancer, though, her breasts small and dense, the flesh the same color on the film as the cancer hiding in her milk ducts.

“I feel fine,” Sally announces. A man next to her raises his eyebrows.

“Of course you do, Mom.”

“I don’t feel like I have this glop growing in me. You know, that’s what the surgeon said. She said, ‘Look at this gloppy stuff.’”

The doors open on the second floor and the man rushes out. Mia slaps the ‘close door’ button.

“Katherine would know why it’s gloppy, Mom.”

“I wish she were here now,” Sally says, her voice a sigh. Mia swallows, knowing well the sound of that longing.

“She’ll be here for the surgery. So will Dahlia.”

“Yes, I know.”

The doors open into the lobby, and they leave the elevator.

“I hate this place,” Sally says, looking at the scuffed carpet.

Mia takes her mother’s arm, knowing that they will hate it even more before this is over.



When Mia gets home, Harper has already left for his math tutor. She stands in the kitchen, staring at the counter, smiling as she imagines his afternoon routine. He’s left a frozen burrito wrapper there, and the TV remote is on the dining room table. She can see the ghost of his after-school self sitting there, watching the history channel, biting the burrito without looking at it.

Unlike Lucien, Harper is a child of habit, though no one would know this from looking into the hump of clothes, papers, books, and magazines on the floor of his room. But he’s methodical in terms of what he does when he comes home, the minutes he spends eating, watching TV, sitting on the toilet with a book, doing homework, playing computer games. Mia can tell time by the sound of him in the bathroom in the morning, by his hard-heeled walk on the hardwood floor coming into her bedroom to say goodbye.

Maybe he became this way because for his whole life, his brain has misfired on him, turning words backward, numbers upside down, making whole sentences his teachers speak undecipherable. She used to think that Harper in a classroom was like herself in the Paris metro, speaking a French so horrible that she ended up buying a week pass when all she wanted was a ticket to get her to the
Gare du Nord
.

He’s been in the resource class since second grade, and now even though he gets good grades and reads for pleasure, he knows that failure can come up suddenly and pull you down without warning.

While sometimes Mia wants to weep when she thinks of what Harper has gone through just to learn how to read and add and multiply and type, most of the time she thinks of him like a lion, running through life without fear, despite the thorn in his paw.

Lucien is not like his predictable brother, instead a wild boy, lazy and brilliant, reading all of James Joyce as a freshman and flunking algebra twice. He majored in LSD and marijuana until his sophomore year when Mia and Ford admitted him to an outpatient rehab program that the entire family went to for a year. Now he’s at a very liberal college in Washington state, majoring in literature and writing a novel. He calls her to talk about Ayn Rand, Richard Brautigan, and Niestze; he calls to ask her for money. He smokes only cigarettes now, though, and his written grade reports from his teachers are admiring. After reading phrases in the reports like “he might consider writing book reviews for a little side income,” and “extremely productive, “ and “strong poetic voice,” Mia imagines that Lucien is finally happy, able to stop seeking for the thrill that the drugs gave him.

Both her boys are beautiful, dark and tall and slim like their father, even if their brains seem to be like Mia’s.

Mia breathes in and then the phone rings. She looks at the clock, knowing it must be Ford, calling her from his car, stuck somewhere on the Bay Bridge or in the Caldecott Tunnel. Traffic, lately, has become his way of life, forcing him to pull over in Oakland or Emeryville for a drink while the rest of the suburban folk idle and swear in lines of hot cars. But it’s not Ford.

“How is the old girl?” Kenzie asks.

“Fired up. Bitchy. Complaining.” Mia takes the phone to the dining room table and sits in Harper’ seat. Kenzie’s phone is scratchy, as if Mia’s best friend is calling her from a cave. Kenzie calls her from everywhere she can get a signal, though, tops of ski resort runs, the Eiffel Tower, a river in Colorado. Mia met Kenzie during Mia’s first class at Cal, Kenzie working at the time in the public relations office at the university. She came into Mia’s fiction workshop for photos of students hard at work.

“Oh, come on!” Kenzie said to Mia’s students. “Character development can’t be that serious. Your teacher looks harmless enough. Smile for god’s sake! The camera won’t bite you.”

Now as a freelance photographer, Kenzie travels all over the world and always wants to share everything with Mia, regardless of where she is. Mia sometimes thinks that since Kenzie took Mia’s photograph that ended up on Mia’s first novel, they are bound for life, connected through eyes and image.

“Well, that’s good. That’s great, really. What did the doctor say?”

“Where are you?” Mia asks.

“In the basement. Something’s gone wrong with the plumbing again.”

“Oh.” Mia sighs.

“Well?”

“He was nice. Gave her the options. She has to decide by next week when she goes in for her second appointment.”

“Was she scared?”

Mia closes her eyes, trying to forget Sally’s horrified face when Dr. Groszmann told her about the side effects of immediate reconstruction.

“Yeah. It’s not really as easy as they’ve made it sound. You know, go in, come out with perfect breasts. There are a lot of steps.”

“I’m sure it’s horrible, but I’d go Dolly Parton.”

“What?”

“I think she should get giant ones. Make up for all those years of flatness. I would.”

Mia shakes her head and spins the TV remote on the smooth oak table. “No, you wouldn’t. You like running around without the iron hands of a jog bra. You like your sexy boyish look in a white t-shirt.”

“You’re right. But I’d think about it.”

Kenzie shrieks, says, “Hold on,” and Mia can hear running water. As she waits, she wonders how to bring up what happened in the doctor’s office besides the reconstruction talk. All these years, Kenzie has told her date stories, but Mia has never started off the conversation, never had anything to say. Never embarrassed herself like she did this afternoon, her face turning the color of sunburn whenever Dr. Groszmann spoke to her.

“God,” Kenzie says, back and panting slightly. “Plumbers. So what else happened? Then I’ve got to go.”

“Well, the doctor was nice.”

There is a hitch in the conversation, and Mia can almost hear Kenzie smile. “My god! You slut.”

“I know. It was sickening.”

“What does he look like?” There is a bang, the sound of metal on metal. A door slams.

“Too thin, too long-haired, too soft-spoken.”

“You want him. Shit! There’s a foot of water in here. God damn it. I’ve got to go. Listen,” Kenzie says, and Mia listens. “Are you there?”

“You told me to listen.”

“Smart ass. Sally girl is going to be fine.”

“I know,” Mia says. “She always has been before.”

“I’ll call you later. First I need to swim out of here. Bye.”

Mia clicks off the phone and stares out the window at the bird feeder. An angry flock of purple finches screams at each other, and Mia wonders if she should take the feeder down. Last year, she got rid of the hummingbird feeder because of the aerial wars two males engaged in the entire summer, buzzing right by people on the deck, swooping past with their high pitched needle-beaked whines. Despite everything she knew, she couldn’t help but imagine a guest lanced through the cheek by a bird drunk on sugar water. So she took down the feeder, pretending not to notice the two males sitting on opposite branches for weeks, waiting.

She stands up and walks over to hang up the phone, the plastic suddenly heavy in her hand. Of course, Kenzie is right. Sally will be fine. She has to be. Both doctors think there is little chance the cancer has spread to her lymph nodes, and the cancer has taken years to grow, a slow, plodding cancer. Even Katherine agreed. When Mia complained to her sister that the surgeon was going to wait three weeks to operate, Katherine sighed.

“Oh, don’t get dramatic. That cancer is going no where.”

“How can you tell? Can’t something escape right now and sail up into her lymph nodes and get spread around just like that? How can anyone say one little cell isn’t going to make giant headway in three weeks?”

“Look, I read the initial path report. Carefully. This cancer isn’t going to be more than stage one, stage two at the most.”

“How can you tell that from a piece of paper?” Mia asked.

Katherine sighed again and started talking in that condescending, slightly exasperated doctor voice Mia hated. She talked about aggregate dimensions of the sites and surgical margins and mitotic activity. After a few minutes of this, Mia gave up and decided to believe her sister. Why not? Sally was Katherine’s mother, too, and if Katherine thought it was okay to walk around with cancer in her milk ducts, who was Mia to argue?

Mia walks into her room and stares at her bed. Since she’s been on sabbatical, she hasn’t taken one single afternoon nap. Not one. Usually during a semester, she would find herself sneaking in here at 3, falling down on the bed and sinking into a deathlike slumber until Harper came home. Since she isn’t reading student papers or going to meetings or driving to campus, she isn’t tired in the afternoons any more. But today her body feels like someone has scrubbed it clean with steel wool, her insides jittery and quaking and trembling. As she stands at the foot of the bed, she has sharp, quick worries about Sally, then Ford. There seems to be more wrong than what’s on the surface, than what’s obvious. Her heart races. Her eyelids ache. Her stomach pulses. With her coat still on, she sits down and then lies down, closing her eyes against the afternoon light. In a minute, she is asleep.

Her dream makes no sense because she does not play baseball or like baseball or think about baseball, not ever. The game is as far from her mind as the NASDAQ or quantum physics. But in this dream, she is on a team that has recently hired a player with a disability. Someone tells this to Mia, and she nods, knowing about disabilities. She thinks with a sudden, quick pain about Harper and his reading difficulties, and turns to look at this person in left field. She can feel her gasp in her head and body. This person is covered tight in some kind of white plastic wrap. Underneath the covering, Mia can see this person move, arms and legs shifting. In a way, the movements of this person’s body under the wrap remind her of what her stomach looked like in late pregnancy when the babies turned, a wall of arm pulsing across her abdomen.