The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley

Author:Susan Conley [Conley, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59520-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Tuesday marks one week since my mastectomy, and I walk downtown to buy flaxseed at the health food store in Bath. I’ve read that it helps stave off cancer. I’m busy now looking for a cure. For an elixir. I’m trying to keep the sadness at bay. The walk takes ten minutes and it’s my longest since the surgery. People go in and out of the local bank and Wilson’s Drugstore, but there’s no larger white noise here, just the sound of wind and the river down below.

Beijing was so loud—the crashing of bulldozers and cranes and the screeching of truck brakes. I pass a woman I recognize on the sidewalk, the mother of a friend from middle school who says she’d heard I was in China. She asks me if the Chinese people were nice to me. I smile because I never know how to answer this question; it always seems beside the point. I want to say that there are so many other things I could tell her about China.

On Wednesday, my friend Katie flies up from Brooklyn to see me. We take a slow walk down to the river. There’s an explosion of tulips and hydrangeas and trellis roses along the way. After lunch in a café, we stand under a lilac tree in my parents’ driveway and we talk about cancer and about our love for our children. And it feels like we can talk for days. Then Katie says, “I love the smell of lilacs. It’s spring to me.”

I smile and say, “Yes. That’s it.” I am so glad she’s come. I’m done talking now. Exhausted. And happy we can sit in the backyard quietly now and watch.

I’m learning that cancer tends to live in a wordless place. On Saturday, a friend of my mother’s named Judith arrives. I’ve been wearing the hospital corset for almost ten days, and it’s begun to make grooves and small sores in the skin along my rib cage. Judith has just finished her EMT shift for the Brunswick Fire Department. She has me sit on the couch so she can unzip the front flap of the corset and unpin the plastic tubing and remove the pouch attached to the tubing that holds the pink runoff. Then she begins to rub cream on my skin. She doesn’t talk, except to say that the doctors made the corset too tight. It feels good to have the thing off.

I’ve come to feel as if I’m bobbing in a lake where only people with cancer swim. It’s a big lake. My husband is sitting by my side on the floor next to the couch holding the tubing while Judith massages me. But he is not in the lake. Only people with cancer can be in the lake. So where Tony is could best be described as on the shore waiting for me to come back. Maybe he is rummaging in the forest for wood to make a fire to keep us warm. But the biggest surprise of all is still that Tony is not in the lake.

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