Taking Breath by Kathleen McCall

T A K I N G B R E A T H
By Kathleen McCall

had a dream about you, he says.

You did? Tell me. She is lying on top of him on the couch, with her nose in his neck. She can feel his pulse, his heat. He wants something.

He shifts slightly. No, I don't think so.

Oh please, tell me. She'll play, a little. He wants to tell her, and he wants to be coaxed. She feels this balance as though they walk the edge of a blade together. Perhaps he will and perhaps he won't. Perhaps if she is good enough, or the words are right. Or it doesn't matter what she does, and the decision has been made in his head already.

He grins. Maybe another time.

You're not going to tell me, are you? She has lost, but counters her loss by announcing his own decision to him. Tomorrow, if she asks, he will not remember. Perhaps there never was a dream.

He says, I think I've forgotten it anyway.

She found the lump last week, in the shower.

"Oh, you don't need to see Dr. Reynolds. You need to see a surgeon. Dr Reynolds refers his patients to Dr. John Sharp. You should make an appointment with his office."

No, no, she thought, there must be some steps here, something a little more gradual that is supposed to happen. Did I sleep through the part where I see my own doctor, the man whose hands have been on my breasts so many times, while I lay keeping my breathing normal and wondering whether I should look into his face or away? When was that part, where he says it's probably nothing, Sheila, but let's get it checked out. Let's. How did I get cast adrift in a world of steel and blades and doctors with names like Sharp?

She made the appointment.

She once worked for a company that gave raises every three months. Sometimes you got one, sometimes you didn't. But the possibility was always there.

Her husband had worked there, too. That's where they met. They would come home on raise day, and the one who got the raise would take the other out to dinner.

The first time they both got a raise on the same day, hers was bigger. She bought dinner. He pushed his food around on his plate.

Later, they divorced.

"Hmmmm. Yes. Well. You can do two things. You can wait to see if it goes away on its own, or you can have it removed and biopsied now. Sometimes these lumps just go away on their own. If it doesn't go away in a few months, we could do the biopsy. But if it gets any bigger in the meantime, you would have to come in immediately."

Bigger. She feels it getting bigger as he speaks. It is already so big that it has eclipsed her life, the other things she has always found important, has bulged into her thoughts while driving, showering, talking on the phone. Is it bigger? It's bigger, isn't it?

"I want you to take it out now."

At times she wished she could be a born-again Christian. All the born-again Christians she knew were happy. Maybe not happy, but they had a purity and kindness somehow. They were good.

But how did one get in the club? If she could suspend disbelief long enough to hope for her own immortality, why then was her heart unwilling to believe that some omnipotent benefactor would guide her life for her? Or might already be doing so?

At other times she would think, we stand naked before God. And that was the core of it; to stand naked and loved.

He marks her with a purple felt pen. She makes a joke about USDA prime, but he doesn't laugh. She has a cold. She wants to be somewhere else than under this white drape with a purple circle drawn under her nipple.

"Turn your head," he says. "Don't breathe on my clean field". She turns her head. She feels the tears roll, but can't raise her arms to wipe them away.

The needle stings, hard. Her eyes and mouth water in metallic sympathy. The scalpel pulls in odd and nauseating little tugs. It does not hurt.

He has told her he will explain each thing he does, but he says nothing. She wants to ask about a scar, but perhaps that would insult this man, this surgeon. A scar does not matter, but somehow she needs to ask a question that can be answered now. She wants him to give her something, for what he has taken.

She had borne two children.

The most awesome thing about pregnancy and labor had been how they really went along without her. Her thinking self had been superfluous to the process. She read everything she could find about pregnancy, but it didn't matter if she knew or not. She felt she'd joined the ranks of women marching as far as she could see behind her and in front of her, fulfilling the destiny of her internal organs.

Labor had been like that too. It didn't really matter if she breathed, or yelled, or didn't. If she knew what stage she was in, or if she wanted to go home, or if she threw up. She just happened to be the single thing left between her child and its date with the outside world.

"We'll call you with the results," he told her. We'll. He wouldn't, though. The office staff would; doctors do not make their own phone calls.

Can't I call you? But she knows she can't. The results won't be there yet, whenever they say they will be. They won't be able to find her chart. They won't know who she is, and while she waits and listens to how important her call is, she will begin to wonder herself. There will be too many breaths between "Hold please" and "Mrs. Burns?" Or there will be space for too many breaths, and too few breaths to take.

As a child, she played the cello. When the band instruments had been offered, she had chosen that one. Not because of its beautiful voice or her love of its gentle curves, but because girls who played the cello were allowed to wear pants to school.

But she had not reckoned with carrying an instrument taller than she was. She had to stop and readjust every block on the way to school. It was heavy. It was awkward.

She had given it up within months. And gone back to wearing dresses.

Once, she remembered yelling. Yelling at the top of her lungs, angry beyond control. She had also thrown a full plastic container of salsa across the kitchen. In the release of her anger, in the tomato bloodbath and the blood heat of her hateful words, she had felt a purity. To feel only one single emotion, clear and loud and real. And to give it voice.

She had cleaned salsa for days, under the refrigerator, on the walls, inside cabinets. And never been sure whether she should be proud, or ashamed.

Now, she wished she had yelled louder.

"Mrs. Burns? This is Nancy from Dr. Sharp's office."

She didn't have time. She hadn't had enough time. She should have made more choices, dreamed more dreams, breathed deeper, sung louder. Reached farther. Grabbed harder.

"We have your lab results. It was a benign cyst. You won't need to come back in, but Doctor wants you to schedule a mammogram within six months, instead of one year."

If he will not tell her his dreams, then she will dream her own.