American River Review 2019 - Flipbook - Page 76
am. Chaos freak, maybe. I was thinking more about how
well I liked the doctor’s personality, which is a piss-poor
way of making medical decisions, as Cindy pointed out.
Maybe I would just end up with a doctor with a parrot on
his shoulder, one who laughs at my jokes and apologizes
nicely for screwing up.
“It’s probably just a cyst,” the radiologist had told me
when he did a preliminary read of my mammogram.
“The uneven fuzzy edges could just be debris.” It gave
me a whole different sense of what breasts are made of. I
pictured my characteristic gesture of brushing crumbs off
my bosom after a meal, thinking for a second that a few
sesame seeds or cracker crumbs could have fallen into my
cleavage and become lodged behind my nipple, but that
couldn’t be what he meant by debris. And then, turned out
it wasn’t a cyst after all.
I lay in bed that night next to Ron, cuddled up to his
warm sleeping body, but then I had to push away. Ron
says when I get a hot flash, I throw him across the room,
but that’s an exaggeration. I might shove a little, but I
can’t help it. That rising heat, starting in my chest and
spreading out from there, feels like a conflagration to me.
And the only cure for being too hot is cooling off, which
you can’t do in close proximity to Ron, who is as warm
as the inside of a polar bear. Nancy offered to get me on
a hot flash prayer list once, but I declined. I think she put
me on there anyway, hoping that God would overlook
my disbelief and deliver me from the flames. Which was
sweet but dumb. Maybe God wanted the hot flashes to
teach me a lesson, like “Don’t get too comfortable.”
Ron and I have been married for forty years, and as I
lay there that night, it didn’t seem very long, not nearly
long enough. We first met in 1967 at a laundromat
near the university when I couldn’t make the change
machine work and was doing a little whammy-dance
on it to coerce it into releasing the magic coins. Ron
had a sock full of quarters, a kind heart, and a deck of
cards, so we did laundry and played gin rummy. I am
a natural gin rummy player, which means it’s hard for
me to find anyone to play with. Ron worked at it but he
didn’t have the killer instinct. He wanted to win, but he
was soft-hearted about wanting to see the other person
lose. So he missed all the opportunities to deliberately
thwart the other player (me), who was doing her best to
frustrate his every option. Ron said it was proof that I was
competitive. “It’s just gin rummy Oklahoma-style,” I tell
him. “That’s the only way I know to play.”
Ron was tall with fair hair falling into ringlets down
his back, like an archangel, I thought, like a super-angel.
I wasn’t great looking, myself, having brown hair,
brown eyes, and freckles. Polka-dots, really. But I had
enthusiasm going for me. I was so glad to be free of the
waiting-by-phone kind of high school dating that I was in
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the process of turning into one of those duck-on-a-Junebug, ready-to-roll hippy chicks that made the hip world
go around, made forty-year-old college professors quit
shaving and let their hair grow out, made the music make
sense. Rock me all night long, the songs said.
We were young and wild then, so after the last clothes
dryer had been emptied, we went back to Ron’s apartment
to smoke a little dope and consummate the affair. I believe
we called it balling. Or screwing. Or getting it on. Our
clean clothes sat in their separate baskets at the foot of the
bed in his little apartment like domestic witnesses to our
debauchery. I lay in his arms in his sleeping-bag-covered
bed and told him, in some sort of throwback to the ideal of
virginity, which I have never understood, then or now, that
he was my third guy. His face lit up and he said, “Today?”
I wished I could have said yes, but no. Ever. Then we
folded our laundry together, talking about the Grateful
Dead and Frank Zappa, and then we consummated again,
with our pristine clothes now primly folded like a greataunt’s lips.
Ron and I were inseparable after that, except for the
time he took off for Denver with exotic, black-haired,
flashing-eyed Carmina. Two weeks later he came back
alone, exhausted and broke, but not sorry. In the end, I had
to forgive him, because in all honesty I would have done
the same thing if it had been me she had beckoned with
her patchouli-scented magic instead of him. We were back
together then, but now, forty years later, we’re just still
together.
All night after the diagnosis I found my restless mind
moving into horrifying fantasies about my medical future.
It didn’t make me feel better, so I changed the channel,
going back to the Sixties when right and wrong seemed to
be more about affiliation than anything else, when all the
boys had long hair and beards because it was the moral
thing to do. I can’t remember why. Maybe because they
looked like Jesus. Or maybe because it freaked out their
parents for them to look daguerreotypes come to life. All
the girls had long hair parted down the center and tucked
behind their ears. It worked for me since I had always
had straight hair, straight as a string, my mother used to
say. Long hair. Long dresses or bell-bottom jeans. Colors
everywhere. It’s hard to convey how uniform we were,
how predictable in our shared eccentricity.
The Sixties were great times, dirty, lost, and drugaddled as we were. The important thing was that we were
freed from the constraints of the Fifties, the steel bands of
conformity, dress codes and girdles and Sunday school,
where they taught us to be as rigid and passionless as
mom and dad. They had tried to mold us into nice little
Fifties people as children, but when we stepped out the
door into near-adulthood, they lost control and we found
each other. It was glorious.
