Free Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Page B

stared straight ahead.
    “You might want to consider a mastectomy,” the doctor said. “Under these circumstances, most women do. The other choice would be a lumpectomy. Either choice will be followed, of course, by chemotherapy and radiation therapy. We’ll need to check your nodes. That will be the best prognosticator. We’ll hope it’s not there. If it is … well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
    She sat quite still, then turned to me, held out her pack of gum. “Want a piece of this?”
    I shook my head no.
    “Take some,” she said, and I did.

L .D. meets me at Ruth’s door. “Did you bring it?” she asks.
    “What?”
    “Hot fudge.”
    I hold up the gigantic container.
    “Wow. I didn’t know you could buy that much.”
    “You can now.”
    “Let’s go,” she says, and starts for the kitchen. “Ruth’s really hungry. She’s eating like crazy.” She turns around to look at me. “This is it. I think she’s turned the corner. I swear to God. I think she’s getting better. I’m bringing her some more of those Chinese pills. And we need to get her out more. She can make it. I know she can.”
    I wish I had L.D.’s unwavering hope. Sometimes I think I’m starting to get close to it, and then I remember standing beside Ruth only a couple of weeks ago while her doctor showed her her chest X rays, her CAT scan. We’d been taken to a little room with light boxes so we could see them, and her doctor was pointing out all the pathology. A radiology resident had been in the room when we came in, looking at Ruth’s films, and his face changed from curiosity into something resembling fear mixed with pity when Ruth’s doctor introduced her to him. The name on the films! Here! He actually stepped back after he said hello, as though she were contagious. I stepped closer to her, stared at him defiantly.But after she shook his hand, Ruth ignored him, looked instead at pictures of her own lungs.
    “This,” her doctor said, beginning his horrible lecture, “is the cancer in your lungs, Ruth. This whiteness.” He pointed here, there, everywhere. Then, defeated, he put his hand down at his side. “I mean … it’s just a snowstorm in there.” He wasn’t being cruel. Ruth had insisted that she be shown these things. “I want to see it,” she said. “Then I can visualize it going away.”
    Next her doctor showed her slices of her brain from the CAT scan. “It’s here,” he said, pointing again. “And here.” Then, in a voice we could barely make out, “And … here.”
    “Jesus,” Ruth said.
    “Yes,” he said. “It’s impressive.” He was using the vocabulary of medicine. He was hiding. He showed her her liver, her besieged spine.
    “So,” Ruth said. “You’re absolutely sure we should stop the chemo? It won’t help at all?”
    He shook his head.
    “Radiation?”
    “No.”
    “Nothing, really
nothing
you can do, Howard?”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She sighed, looked at the radiology resident, by now skulking like a rat in the corner. Then she smiled at me, oh, this radiant smile. “Want to go to the movies?” she asked.
    We went. We found a comedy and we went. And on the way there, Ruth said, “Now, don’t think this iscrazy, okay? I’m actually sort of relieved. Now it’s just up to me. It’s all under my control. I always felt so helpless when they were giving me all that stuff. I mean, with the chemo, you know, I would watch it drip in and look around the room and read stupid magazines and I just felt … I don’t know, it felt wrong. I was always real nervous. Scared to death. I couldn’t do any of that visualization, couldn’t see the chemo as this good, gold stuff that would save me. I never did, Ann, even when I told you I did. And when I got radiation and this huge machine was hanging over me and all the technicians had to leave the room and stare at me from the booth … I can’t tell you what that feels like! You’re so much at the mercy of someone