Breasts were odd and strange, when you stopped to think about them. Sam had loved to touch them, kiss them, smell them. Her son had nursed on them for nearly a year—they were useful then. Since she was a girl, she had noticed the way young men stared at women, stared at their breasts, became obsessed with them. She smiled to herself. What do I need them for at fifty? And, anyway, I’ve been trying to lose some weight. Isn’t that what she’d told the doctor? He’d humored her by laughing at her joke. “Gallows humor,” he’d said.
She knew her body. She didn’t need a test result, didn’t even need to feel bad to know that there was something wrong. It was like stepping outside and smelling the first cool wind of September, knowing that the season was changing, despite the fact that summer seemed like it might go on forever.
Even a tree knew when it was time to drop its leaves. Even a tree in El Paso.
It was odd—just then—that she should get the urge to have a cigarette. She swore she could smell a cigarette burning in the room. She took in a deep breath and smiled. She’d only smoked a few years, but she’d enjoyed the habit. She’d felt free and young and even sexy when she’d smoked. She’d never felt that way, sexy, like men might want her. Sam had always laughed. He’d showed her a mirror and said, “God, Grace, don’t you see? Can’t you see what the whole world sees?”
“Why would I want to see what everyone else sees, Sam?”
“How can a woman who looks like you not understand?”
“Understand what?”
“You don’t have an ounce of vanity in you, Grace. That’s your problem.”
“I happen to think that the world would be a lot better off if we really looked at what people were instead of what they looked like.”
“Are you telling me you don’t care what people look like?”
“I just happened to have married a very handsome man.”
“Oh?”
“You see, Sam? I’m as vain and shallow as everyone else.”
She could almost hear him laughing. He always laughed. You’re too sincere, Grace, that’s your real fault. He’d been wrong about that. She was more cynical about the world, and more realistic about its corruption, than Sam could ever fathom. It was he who had been sincere.
What would happen if she drove to the store and bought a pack? What would happen? What was so wrong with that? She played the message on the machine over again, the doctor’s voice, tentative. Grace? Richard here. Listen, I have the results of your tests sitting here on my desk. Why don’t you call me in the morning. Maybe you can come in. We’ll talk. He was trying to sound casual, matter of fact, Oh this is nothing. Not to worry. Most doctors were notoriously good liars—a disease they picked up in medical school. But not this one. As luck or fate would have it—though she believed in neither—her doctor went to morning mass every day. She’d seen him more than once, kneeling in the back, his head bowed in prayer. He almost looked like a boy just out of confession, bowing his head and uttering the prayers the priest had given him for his penance, Oh my God, I am heartily sorry. But he wasn’t a boy, he was a forty-something-year-old doctor who was atoning for something he’d done in his past, repenting for sins committed in the name of success or pleasure or sheer selfishness, or he used daily mass as his one moment of quiet in an otherwise too-busy, too-loud, too-fragmented and chaotic day, or he was punishing himself for having a life, a good life, a very good life he just couldn’t believe he deserved, a guilt that could not be unwritten by God himself. Of course, the possibility existed that he was the real thing, a person of faith, a true believer.
In any case, he was a good man, and if she were going to have a doctor at her side, it might as well be a doctor who wouldn’t hide the truth. She didn’t want or need the false comfort of doctors who made a virtue of sparing their patients’ feelings—lying not only to their patients but to themselves because it was easier, the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t let anyone play her that way because she was too smart and had grown up too poor and had fought an eternal war with idiots who mistook poverty for lack of ambition instead of for what it was—the accident of birth. She wouldn’t let anyone play her that way because she was a beautiful woman who had learned not to rely on the shallow fact of her beauty, because she understood clearly that her beauty, like her poverty, was also nothing more than a mere accident of birth. She would not let anyone play her that way because she had worked too hard to be honest, honest not in the eyes of God, who had no eyes, not in the eyes of her friends and colleagues, not in the eyes of her son, Mister, not in the eyes of anyone but herself, the harshest, the severest of judges. She’d had too many clients, hundreds of them, clients who were too good at escaping everything with the lies they told themselves. Houdinis, most of them, with their lies. Magicians. But how could they not lie to themselves when that was all that they’d ever been taught? Did you chastise students for learning their lessons? But she, Grace Alarcon Delgado, had learned other lessons. She had lived her life trying to look straight at things, straight at them knowing that there would come a day when she would look at something so hard that it would look right back and break her. Well, wasn’t she made of flesh and bone? Wasn’t she made to break? Sure. Wasn’t she a woman?
She took one last look at her breasts as she stood before the mirror. There was nothing wrong, to look at them. There was a certain beauty in the surface of things. She understood the seduction. She put her bra back on and buttoned up her blouse. Well, if they have to cut—and then suddenly she wondered what they did with all those cancerous breasts. Did they throw them away in some nearby surgical trashcan? Did they save them, freeze them, put them in some chemical to preserve them so that future medical students and doctors and surgeons could pull them off some shelf and study them as if they were library books? Would they check them out, take them home, keep them for a couple of days, then check them back in? And after they had served their purpose, were they burned along with all the other surgical materials? Shouldn’t they be buried somewhere—all those breasts—buried deep on some piece of holy ground? Hadn’t they been good once? Hadn’t they given life to thousands, to millions? Even dogs were buried or disposed of with more ceremony and respect. God, Grace, stop. Stop it.
She closed her eyes. She imagined herself smoking a cigarette. She imagined taking in the smoke, then letting it out, all her anger dissipating in the afternoon light. She inhaled, exhaled, Sam lighting her cigarette, inhaled, exhaled, Sam’s hand brushing against her breast, inhaled, exhaled. There, there, Grace, all better. She opened her eyes.
She had to hurry. She would be late for morning mass.
Yesterday, you teased us. Do not tease the thirsty—give us rain. After she prayed for rain to end the drought, she prayed for Mister, though she could feel her anger as she whispered his name. She prayed for Irma down the street who’d lost her boy. She prayed for her body, her breasts, her heart. Make me bear whatever comes. Sam had been good at whatever comes.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she found herself staring at the stained-glass window—Jesus walking on stormy waters. “I’m not like you, so give me arms to swim.” She took a breath. “And Jesus, Jesus, bring us rain.”