Keening
At my back, twenty or more women filled plates from dishes on a countertop. I unbuttoned and opened my blouse over the nylon whiteness of my Barelythere. As the women behind me talked, I pulled silky fabric over the mound of my right breast. Modestly plump, it spilled toward my girlfriend Cindy and our friend June.
The party behind us hummed with the music of women’s voices and the yack of a sports announcer. A World Series game crashed noisily through a pre-Halloween gathering of our lesbian community. The guacamole I brought sat green and unperturbed in a bowl among the offerings. A plastic skeleton clad in a bridal gown stood sentry, singing a scratchy, “I’ve been dead for sooooo long . . .”
I faced away from the party. At sixty-something, June’s white hair played elegant tricks above her sturdy nurse’s hands. My breast—rosy hot, the nipple chocolaty—gazed unaroused into her pragmatic blue eyes.
“What do you think, June?” Cindy asked. My slim, dark-haired lover’s concern billowed like a ghostly sheet.
June’s fingers slid along the diamond shaped redness unfurling across my flesh. “How long have you had this?”
“Three weeks.” I flinched as her fingers probe.
“It started up here,” Cindy said, tracing the blushing edge.
“But then it spread,” I said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really. Except when you push on it.”
“So this doesn’t feel erogenous?” June said, smiling.
I grinned. “Not like when my nipples seem wired to my clitoris.” A look passed between Cindy and me—a brief eye kiss.
“I envy you,” June said. “My breasts don’t work that way. You’ve got an infection,” she said. “You need to go to Prompt Care and get antibiotics.”
Cindy nodded as I tucked my breast back into the Barelythere. She’d heard what she wanted, and I knew she and June were right. This was not a time when my stubborn reliance on good nutrition and a positive attitude would work.
Five hours later, Cindy and I walked out of Prompt Care with a prescription for Keflex and a diagnosis of non-lactating mastitis. “A breast infection when not breastfeeding is unusual but not unheard of,” the doctor said. I already knew my right breast behaved curiously. It quivered in arousal but also keened in grief.
When my mother died, my breast tingled with a milk let down—the prickling clamor that signals time to suckle the baby. My breast cried again when my running coach died and when my son’s friend was killed in a car accident. My milk ducts equate grief with suckling, a confusing equation calculated astonishingly in my breast. On the day my father died, the reckoning sensation began hours before I received the news.
My milk glands first keened when I was left alone with three small children. I was grieving my absent husband, who was working far from home. Fever cloistered me in the corner of the couch where, snuggling my infant son, I issued instructions to the older children about eating cereal and bringing me cold compresses. Electric sensations converged with sadness as my son suckled; tears fell on his downy head.
I left his father twenty-two years later when I fell in love with Cindy, when surges of unaccountable desire opened in my bones and crept to my flesh. Vast grief dampened my joy. Leaving that man meant killing the family we had created—meant I was guilty of abandonment, a nuanced term in my generation, a faithless sin in my adult children’s minds. One child was able to love me in my newfound difference. The other two decided to love the sinner but not the sin.
Despite three days of antibiotics, my breast stayed hot-pink. I suspected the flush was sorrow tiptoeing through my maternity, but Cindy and June had lit cautionary flares. I called the nurse practitioner at Women’s Health for another opinion and made an appointment for late the next afternoon.
“I’m glad you came,” Claire said, after assessing the symmetry of my breasts and reviewing my history. “I’m not saying this is cancer, but I want to get a biopsy. Inflammatory breast cancer is frequently misdiagnosed as mastitis. It’s rare, and not something that shows up on a mammogram. Not all breast cancer involves a lump.”
“I knew there was a reason to call you,” I said.
“I’m going to refer you to a surgeon—Dr. Meir,” she said. “He’s the only guy I entrust with a breast. It’s too late to get him now, but I’ll have the receptionist call in the morning.”
“I’m not worried about losing a breast,” I said.
“Not if it means living,” she replied.
I walked out into the dark. It was after six on my youngest son’s twenty-fifth birthday. I wasn’t invited to the family celebration, but I had sent my gift by mail and called him in the morning. Driving home, I watched a crescent moon rise from behind shadowy foothills. I drove toward the sliver of white, romanticizing mastectomy. I recalled a portrait of Deena Metzger naked from the waist up—one breast beaming, the other taken by surgery, replaced with a tattooed garland of flowers. I remembered a photo essay in amagazine. Striking black and white photos showing a woman’s breastless chest, marked with thin curvaceous scars; two pictures of women bald from chemotherapy. I can do this, I thought.
Cindy was gone to a night class when I got home, so I made ramen soup and logged online to look up inflammatory breast cancer (IBC). By the time Cindy returned, I knew that only one percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have IBC. I knew this cancer is always classified as stage IV at diagnosis, and the median survival rate is three years. By the time Cindy got home, I was scared. She knelt before me, laying her head in my lap to weep. I smoothed her curly hair.
Later in bed, I imagined myself lying in a hospital, my daughter on one side and Cindy on the other. I imagined my illness mending the ragged tear between me and my children. Cindy’s flannel pajama leg pressed against my bare leg as I imagined my children thinking I deserve the ravages of cancer. My foot rested on top of Cindy’s. I imagined our friends coming to our aid, driving me to chemo, so Cindy could work. I pictured myself bald, wearing colorful scarves and crazy hats. My eyes were closed, but I was awake.
In the morning, I called Women’s Health about the referral. The receptionist said she would call me back. I waited on the couch, lying beneath a comforter until the phone rang.
“You have an appointment for next Thursday.”
“No!” I said. “That won’t do. If this is cancer, it can’t wait that long.” My voice was shrill. “I need to see him sooner.”
My hands shook when I hung up. I dropped the phone into the folds of the comforter. The cat, lying amidst its tucks and swells, stared with yellow eyes. She wasn’t familiar with this scary voice. Neither was I. We remained still, looking at each other, until a muffled ringing broke our connection.
“He can see you on Monday,” the receptionist said.
At work, I imagined an invisible baton passing among my colleagues: Steve, who died of lung cancer; David of leukemia; Mac from a brain tumor; Terry who was battling ovarian cancer; Morgan who survived uterine cancer. I remembered walking in Relay for Life–our team name Colleagues for a Cure. Paper bags encircled the football field, each holding a lighted candle and bearing the name of a victim or a survivor. I remembered June’s name on a bag. I’d never asked about her cancer.
I worked outside on the weekend, raking leaves beneath the mulberry trees. In a lower limb, a battered nest hung forlornly, awash in yellow light. When a leaf fell, I stopped to watch. Cindy came and led me inside through the strains of Enya streaming from the stereo to a bathtub ringed with candles. She helped me undress, and we slipped into frothy water. Lying between her glistening thighs, candlelight flickered and fragrance rose on the steaming mist. Her heart pounded at my back, a river of hope pulsing through me. My rosy breast waited with its bewildering message beneath bubbling foam.
Cover photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash
About the Author
Patricia Harrelson is a writer deep in the fall of life. At 76, she has four siblings, three adult children, fifteen grandkids, an ex-husband, and a female spouse, all of whom find their way into her writing. With three-quarters of a century in her rearview mirror, many humans, a variety of pets and creatures, and a fair bit of the world make their way into her work. She’s published three nonfiction narrative books and writes about arts and entertainment for regional publications in Northern California where she lives.
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