Jane Smiley - Early Warning

She dreamt all night about a scene she might have seen in a movie, though which one she could not remember. A man is sleeping while his sheepdog is driving his sheep over a cliff. He keeps looking over the cliff at the dead sheep, again and again; how he woke up was not in the dream. She dreamt it, then she dreamt herself telling about it, then she dreamt herself telling herself that it was only a dream. But she kept looking over the cliff at the corpses of the sheep.

When she woke up, she knew there was nothing to be done, and she felt okay all that day. She cooked Arthur’s breakfast and kissed him on his bald spot while he was eating and did the dishes and put some laundry into the machine and sorted through packets of flower seed from the year before and exclaimed with Debbie about Carlie’s putting together a twelve-piece jigsaw puzzle all by herself. Then she got in the car and drove to the doctor.

Lillian’s doctor was an experienced gynecologist — older than she was, and possessed of a competent, reassuring manner, neither forbidding, like Paul (and they should have foreseen how he was going to treat Claire by the way he upbraided parents whose babies got ear infections), nor at death’s door, like Dr. Craddock, whose nicotine-stained fingers Lillian still remembered with a shudder — and he hadn’t been much of a one for washing, either, Lillian thought. But Dr. Champion was simultaneously clean as a whistle and reassuringly smooth. With his wife and nurse, Kathryn, standing nearby, clucking gently under her breath, he carefully but firmly felt the swelling and also the surrounding tissue, and also the other breast. He looked in her file and quizzed her about a few things, including her mother and grandmother. Then he tapped his pencil on the desk and said, “I am sure this is a fibroadenoma — a harmless and common thing. It feels like that to me. All we have to do, really, is keep an eye on it for three to six months. Try not to think about it, and certainly don’t worry. Eileen will make you an appointment for the summer.”

So, Lillian thought as she drove home, this was the death-and-resurrection part. She felt nothing for the moment, but she knew that when she got home she would walk out among the tulips, which were brilliant and profuse this year, all colors, but especially the purple ones whose petals came to a slight point and opened outward. Among the tulips, she would take a deep breath, and plan dinner, maybe steak and caramelized sweet potatoes, and she would be very glad when Arthur got home, and probably she would laugh even more at his jokes and kiss him a few more times and hold his hand during The White Shadow. But though she might tell Arthur about her visit to Dr. Champion, she would never tell him what she had imagined so vividly these past five days.

—

IT WAS DEBBIE who arranged the intervention. Looking back, Lillian could see that her daughter had planned it for a while, and Lillian had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. First Debbie talked them into renting a house for August on Fire Island; she had gotten Henry to find the place. It would have been expensive, Lillian didn’t know how much, but it was near the beach, and certainly cooler in its ocean-swept way than McLean. Then, apparently, on their first evening, Debbie sent Lillian with Hugh and the children out to the beach for a sunset stroll, during which she ambushed Arthur and confronted him. He admitted that he knew that Lillian was supposed to go back to the doctor, but he hadn’t pushed her — he hated doctors himself and felt she should be free to choose, just like with anything else. But of course all of his arguments fell to rubble when faced with Debbie’s blazing righteousness. That night, in bed, he didn’t say a word to Lillian about what was coming. She should have been suspicious when Henry came for the weekend — when had he ever been a fan of family life? If Carlie or Kevvie neared him, he extended a hand and shifted his legs so that they wouldn’t touch his perfectly pressed trousers with dirty fingers. For presents, he brought them books —Oliver Twist and The Borrowers , not entirely suitable for a five-year-old and a two-year-old, however well meant. Then, Sunday night, no one got up after supper except, at a signal from Debbie, Hugh, to put the kids to bed (it was a late supper), and when Lillian made a move to take her plate to the kitchen, Debbie said, “Mom, we all need to talk to you about something.”

Lillian could not imagine what this was, given Debbie’s highhanded tone, but she did sit down.

Arthur, who was around the corner of the table from her, wouldn’t look at her, but he snaked his hand under the table and grabbed hers. Debbie said, “We all have talked about it, and we agree that you have to go back to the doctor.”

“Whatever for?” said Lillian; honestly, she didn’t right then know what they were talking about. She had gotten used to the lump, in the sense that she never let herself either think about it or touch it, and though Arthur had found it once and asked her about it (which was why she did tell him about her appointment with Dr. Champion), she never let him touch it again. What was withholding sex for, if not abjuring pointless worry?

“You know what for,” said Debbie, and of course now she did. This was where Henry took over. “Really, Lillian, I can’t believe you’ve let this go this long, and even though normally I would not consider it any of my business, I do think it’s critical that you see someone.”

“We’ve made you an appointment,” said Debbie.

“How dare you!” said Lillian, but that was what an intervention was for — the same thing had happened to Betty Ford, though about drinking, not about going to the doctor. Lillian said, “Arthur has to go, too.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Arthur.

“No, I mean, you have to go for a checkup, too.” She said, a little self-righteously, “He hasn’t had a checkup in a decade.”

Then, seeing his downcast face, she was flooded with regret.

The doctor was in the city; they took the ferry the next morning. Hugh was to keep the kids, and Debbie was to wrangle Lillian, as if she were a rogue calf heading for the back pasture. But Lillian gave her no trouble. As long as Arthur was along. And of course the whole experience was torture, starting from the moment they squeezed her left breast and then her right one into that machine, the way the nurse kept pushing her in more tightly until the platform was digging at her ribs, the way she had to hold her breath and stand absolutely still, and the nurse barked at her every time she had a stray thought — stray thoughts apparently caused her to twitch. Her breasts ached — not equally, but equally enough so that Lillian convinced herself for about five minutes that nothing was wrong with the one that wasn’t wrong with the other. The nurse wouldn’t allow Arthur into the mammography room, and then the doctor came out and invited him into the consulting room, looking him in the eye, but not Lillian. That was the clue right there. Young doctor — Neil Feigenbaum. Maybe forty, maybe not. Debbie remained in the waiting room, as if guarding the door. Yes, there was a large mass; yes, they needed to do a biopsy. Today was Monday. Would she mind coming back the next day? He was associated with NYU; they could have the biopsy done there. Arthur, that old betrayer, kept nodding, and saying they would be there at eight in the morning. Finally, Lillian said, “That means a six a.m. ferry.”

Arthur gave her a long, strict, and affectionate look. He said, “We’ll think of something.”

When they returned to the waiting room, after signing some papers, Debbie was just hanging up the phone the nurse’s station had let her use, but Lillian didn’t think to ask whom she had been calling — no doubt Hugh. It was not Hugh, though — it was Andy. As soon as they emerged into the heat of First Avenue, here came Andy, and Lillian realized that Dr. Feigenbaum must be Andy’s gynecologist. Andy gave her one of her limp hugs and said, “Oh, let’s have lunch.” She walked them along, chatting the whole time about Emily and Janet and Michael and Loretta (“My goodness, she keeps him in line”) and Richie and “that nice Jewish girl.” (“So ambitious. I’m sure our bloodlines could stand an invigorating infusion of Jewish blood. But I say nothing. I just bite my tongue.”) The restaurant was dark and old-fashioned, with elderly waiters who did everything with a napkin folded over one arm; Lillian half expected their attentive eighty-year-old to wipe her chin. So it was true, she thought, and now she would have to go through the five stages of grief all over again, or maybe only four of them, because she didn’t foresee any opportunity for denial, now that Debbie knew, and Andy, and soon Henry and Frank and Claire and Janet and Hugh and Jared. Arthur did not let go of her; even sitting at their table, he was practically on top of her without perhaps realizing it. Andy and Debbie kept talking — Andy about Emily, and Debbie about Carlie and Kevvie. They sang a sort of chorus. Everything Andy said about Emily reminded Debbie of something about Carlie or Kevvie, and so they traded solos. Lillian ordered the crab cakes with aioli, and Arthur (she watched him closely) ordered the scampi, and it was good, so he ate almost all of it. Debbie ordered something and wolfed it down. Andy ate a single artichoke, very delicately grasping each leaf between her fingernails, plucking it off, and dipping it in pure olive oil with just a little sea salt added. For dessert, she did a kind thing, Lillian thought — she ordered two helpings of the crème brûlée and four spoons. Crème brûlée seemed designed to promote denial.