Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo and the various interventions, injections, indignities and treatments. When I got sick, our youngest child turned herself into a horse: silent and untamable, our Horse-child now only whinnies and neighs. Before that, though, she went through a phase we called Interesting Facts. “Interesting fact,” she would announce, and then share a wonder with us: A killer whale has never killed a person in the wild. Insects are high in protein. Hummingbirds have feelings and are often sad.

So here are some of my interesting facts. Lupron, aside from ceasing ovulation, is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the purple blossoms of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. My eyebrows fell out a year after finishing chemo. And long after your tits are taken, their phantoms remain. They get cold, they ache when you exercise, they feel wet after you shower, and you can towel like a crazy woman, but still they drip.

Before my husband won a Pulitzer, we had a kind of deal. I would adore him, even though he packed on a few pounds. And he would adore me, even though I had a double mastectomy. Who else would want us? Who else, indeed. Now his readings are packed with young Dorothy Parkers who crowd around my man. The worst part is that the novel he wrote is set in North Korea, so he gets invited to all these functions filled with Korean socialites and Korean donors and Korean activists and Korean writers and various pillars of the Korean community.

Did I leave out the words beautiful and female ?

You’re so sensitive to the Korean experience, the beautiful female Korean socialite says to my husband.

Oh, he’s good about it. He always says, And this is my lovely wife.

Ignoring me, the beautiful female Korean socialite adds, You must visit our book club.

If I could simply press a button every time one of them said that.

But I’m just tired. These are the places my mind goes when I’m tired. We’re four blocks from home, where our children are just old enough not to need a sitter. On these nights our eleven-year-old son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement — his history teacher allows him to write his reports graphically. (San Francisco!) Our daughter, at nine, is a master baker. Hair pulled into a ponytail, she is flour-dusted and kneading away. The Horse-child, who is only seven, does dressage. She is the horse who needs no rider.

But talk of my children is for another story. I can barely gaze upon them now. Their little outlines, cut like black cameos, are too much to consider.

My husband and I walk in the rain. We don’t hold hands. I still feel the itch of vinblastine in my nail beds, one of the places, it turns out, that the body stores toxins. Have you ever had the urge to peel back your fingernails and scratch underneath, to just wrench until the nails snap back so you can go scratch, scratch, scratch?

I flex my fingers, rub my nails against the studs on my leather belt.

I knew better, but still I asked him: “How long would you wait?”

“Wait for what?”

“Until after I was gone. How many months before you went and got some of that twentysomething kayak sex?”

I shouldn’t say shit like this, I know. He doesn’t know a teaspoon of the crazy in my head.

He thought a moment. “Legally,” he said, “I’d probably need to have a death certificate. Otherwise it would be like bigamy or something. So I’d have to wait for the autopsy and a burial and the slow wheels of bureaucracy to issue the paperwork. I bet we’re talking twelve to sixteen weeks.”

“Getting a death certificate,” I say. “That has got to be a hassle. But wait — you know a guy at city hall. Keith Whatshisname.”

“Yeah, Keith,” he says. “I bet Keith could get me proof of death in no time. The dude owes me. A guy like Keith could walk that death certificate around by hand, getting everyone to sign off in, I don’t know, seven to fourteen days.”

“That’s your answer, seven to fourteen days?”

“Give or take, of course. There are variables. Things that would be out of Keith’s control. If he moved too fast or pushed too hard — a guy could get in trouble. He could even get fired.”

“Poor Keith. Now I feel for him, at the mercy of the universe and all. And all he wanted to do was help a grieving buddy get laid.”

My husband eyes me with concern.

We turn in to Frank’s Liquors to buy some condoms, even though our house is overflowing with them. It’s his subtle way of saying, For the love of God, give up some sex .

My husband hates all condoms, but there’s a brand he hates less than others. I cannot take birth-control pills because my cancer was estrogen-receptive. My husband does not believe what the doctors say: that even though Tamoxifen mimics menopause, you can still get pregnant. My husband is forty-six. I am forty-five. He does not think that, in my forties, after cancer, chemotherapy and chemically induced menopause, I can get pregnant again, but sisters, I know my womb. It’s proven.

“You think there’d be an autopsy?” I ask as he scans the display case. “I can’t stand the thought of being cut up like that.”

He looks at me. “We’re just joking, right? Processing your anxiety with humor and whimsical talk therapy?”

“Of course.”

He nods. “Sure, I suppose. You’re young and healthy. They’d want to open you up and determine what struck you down.”

A small, citrusy ha escapes. I know better than to let these out.

He says, “Plus, if I’m dating again in seven to fourteen days—”

“Give or take.”

“Yes, give or take. Then people would want to rule out foul play.”

“You deserve a clean slate,” I say. “No one would want the death taint of a first wife to foul a new relationship. That’s not fair to the new girl.”

“I don’t think this game is therapeutic anymore,” he says, and selects his condoms.

Interesting fact: Tamoxifen carries a dreaded class-D birth-defect risk.

Interesting fact: My husband refuses to get a vasectomy.

He makes his purchase from an old woman. Her saggy old-lady breasts flop around under her dress. The cash register drawer rolls out to bump them.

My friends say that one day I’ll feel lucky. That I will have been spared this saggy fate. After my bilateral, I chose not to reconstruct. So I have nothing, just two diagonal zipper lines where my boobs should be.

We turn south and head down Cole Street.

The condoms are wishful thinking. We both know I will go to sleep when we get home.

Interesting fact: I sleep twelve to thirteen hours a night.

Interesting fact: Taxotere turns your urine pink.

Interesting fact: Cytoxan is a blister agent related to mustard gas. When filtered from the blood, it scars the bladder, which is why I wake, hour after hour, night in and night out, to pee.

Can you see why it would be hard for me to tell wake from sleep, how the two could feel reversed? Do you hear me trying to tell you that I have trouble telling the difference?

“What about your Native American obligations?” I ask my husband. “Wouldn’t you have to wait a bunch of moons or something?”

He is silent, and I cringe to think of what I just said.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You’re just tired,” he says.

The rain is more mistlike now. I hated the woman who read tonight. I hated the people who attended. I hated the failed wannabe writers in the crowd. I loathe all failed wannabe writers, especially me.

I ask, “Have you thought of never?”