Before I Go (2 page)

I know it’s vain, and so very inconsequential, but I love my hair. And while I tried to be all “strong, bald woman” last time, it just honestly wasn’t a good look on me. Some people can carry off bald. I am not one of them. My chocolate mane has just started grazing my shoulders again—it’s not quite as thick or polished as it once was, but it’s long. It’s feminine. And I appreciate it more now after having lost it once. I sometimes catch myself petting it, nearly crooning like I do when I stroke Benny’s wiry fur.

Good hair.

Nice hair.

Stay, hair.

I also adore my breasts, which is why I didn’t let Dr. Saunders lop them off last time. A lot of women go for it. Just take them! Just to be safe! They’re just breasts! But I was twenty-three, and didn’t want to part with them. Why couldn’t the cancer have been in my thighs or my never-quite-flat-enough stomach? I’d have happily given those up. But please, for the love of God, leave my perfect, C-cup, make-most-men-do-a-double-take perky tits.

It’s not like I was making a bad medical decision. A big article in
Time
came out right after my diagnosis, touting the results of a large study in Houston that found women who opt for a preventative double mastectomy have about the same recurrence rates as women who don’t. I never read
Time
. I saw the article on the way to my sociology of crime class while I was peering over the shoulder of the student seated next to me on the bus. It’s an omen, I thought. And when I brought it up to Dr. Saunders, he agreed that while the study was preliminary, the findings seemed solid—the choice was up to me. Now, four years later, sitting here with cancer once again, the random sighting of a magazine article doesn’t seem so much like fate as it does me just believing what I wanted to believe so I could do what I wanted to do. I should have let them take my breasts. I shouldn’t have been so vain.

I finish brushing my teeth and take one last glance in the mirror.

My hair.

My perfect breasts.

I inhale. Exhale.

It’s just cancer.

I LIKE THE still of the morning. I’m alone in the house but revel in the reminders that I’m not alone in the world. Jack is gone, but
his presence is still palpable. The indent on the bed, where his body warmed the sheets, beckons me. Maybe I could crawl in just for a second, I think. What is it about an unmade bed that’s so tempting? I resist the urge, pull up the comforter, and smooth out the wrinkles. Then I fluff Jack’s pillow, erasing the evidence of a good night’s sleep and leaving it fresh for tonight’s slumber.

I gather three pairs of his worn socks from the floor beside the bed and drop them in the hamper. Then I glance over at the open suitcase on the floor beside our dresser. Every year Jack and I celebrate February 12, the day—after months of chemo and six weeks of radiation—that Dr. Saunders called and said I was officially cancer free. Last year, for the third anniversary, we planned a quiet dinner for family and friends at my favorite restaurant. Jack was supposed to reserve the private room at Harry Bissett’s, but the morning of the party when I called to ask if we could bring our own champagne, the manager said there was no record of our reservation. Jack had forgotten to make it.
Seriously, Jack? No reservations at H.B. Call everyone and tell them the party is off,
I texted him, furiously punching out each letter on my innocent iPhone.

When I pulled into our driveway that evening, I was still so frothing with anger, I barely noticed the cars lining the side of our narrow street. But when I walked in the back door, a chorus of voices shouted “Happy Cancerversary!” and my wide eyes took in the buoyant faces of our family and friends. Not only had Jack invited everyone to our place for an impromptu keg party, he had even ordered a few trays of chicken fingers from Guthrie’s and lit the Clean Cotton Yankee Candles that I only take out for company. “I love you,” he mouthed from across the kitchen where he was pouring my mom a glass of white zinfandel—the only wine she’ll drink. I nodded, my cheeks flush with heat and my heart full of affection for my absentminded husband who, like a cat, somehow always manages to land on his feet.

This year, Jack surprised me by announcing he had planned an
overnight trip for us. It’s rare that I get to spend more than a few hours alone in the company of my overworked husband, who’s one of a few overachieving individuals who’s concurrently getting both his DVM and his PhD in veterinary medicine, so I’m particularly excited. We leave in two days, and my side of the suitcase is neatly packed, sweaters rolled, jeans folded, underwear and socks tucked into the mesh pocket. Jack’s side is empty. I’ve been reminding him to fill it every night this week, even though I know he’ll wait till the last minute, throw everything in Saturday morning, and then inevitably forget something important like his toothbrush or contact lens solution.

I let out an audible sigh. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a half-empty, sweating glass on Jack’s nightstand. I pick it up, rub the water ring off the pressed wood with the palm of my hand, and walk the glass into the kitchen.

When we first moved in together, I balked at Jack’s lack of order and cleanliness. We were a newlywed cliché, though we weren’t even married yet.

“I’m not your freakin’ maid!” I spat during a particularly heated argument.

“I never asked you to be,” was his cool reply.

We were opponents on a battlefield, neither one wanting to lose ground. Jack’s stance was that clutter and mayhem didn’t bother him; he wasn’t opposed to cleaning, he just didn’t think about it. I argued that if he cared for me, he would think about it and pick up after himself. Every dirty plate that I came across, every jacket or pair of shoes that didn’t make it back into the closet, was a tangible insult. “I don’t love you! I don’t care about your feelings! I’m purposefully leaving my coffee cup on the bathroom sink to get under your skin! Ha!
Ha-ha-ha!
”

But like most people who decide to stick it out for the long term, I slowly learned to accept that his messiness was just that—messiness.
It wasn’t a personal attack. And Jack made a halfhearted effort every now and then to straighten the mountain of papers on his desk in the study that threatened to avalanche onto the scuffed wood floor—and on really good days, he even remembered to return used dishes to the kitchen.

But they never quite make it into the dishwasher.

A cool draft greets me as I pour the dregs of multicolored milk from Jack’s impromptu cereal bowl into the sink and load it into the dishwasher. I look up at the row of windows over the faucet, admiring their aged beauty while lamenting their inefficiency. Not only do they have the original glass panes from 1926, the year our house was built, the wooden frames around them have been painted so many times that many of them don’t close all the way, leaving cracks where air sneaks in. They need to be completely replaced, but until we can afford that costly solution, I’ve just decided to caulk them shut. Job number thirty-seven on my interminable list of tasks to keep our Spanish bungalow from being deemed uninhabitable.

When we were house hunting two years ago, I immediately fell in love with its rounded doorways, red-clay-tile roof, stone front porch with black ironwork handrails, and yellow stucco exterior. I pictured myself lazily eating hunks of Manchego cheese and drinking wine under the large olive tree in the backyard. Jack wasn’t as charmed.

“That’s not an olive tree,” he said, shattering my fantasy. “And this house needs a lot of work. The townhome was move-in ready. Fresh paint and all.”

I shook my head, thinking of the arched nook in the hall and the antique phone I would find at a flea market to set on the recessed shelf. “This is it.”

“I’m not going to have the time to do everything this house needs,” he said. “You know what my schedule’s like.”

“But I do. I have time. You won’t have to lift a finger. I promise.”

He tried again. “Did you see the yard? I don’t think there’s a blade of grass to be found in all those weeds.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said quickly. “You’ll see.”

He sighed. Jack knew me well enough to know once I set my mind on something, I wouldn’t be deterred. He shook his head in defeat. “Only you,” he said.

I smiled and snaked my arms around him, pleased with my victory.

“It will be perfect,” I said.

But it was not perfect. Shortly after we moved in, I realized what Jack had first intuited (though I never would admit he was right)—it wasn’t just a little TLC that the house needed. It was a lot. After I painted all of the interior cake-icing walls, got new air filters, pulled weeds in the yard, pressure washed the exterior, hired a handyman to build a new set of stairs on the back deck, and scrubbed, polished, and dusted everything in sight, our heater exploded. Into flames. Five months later, the air conditioner followed. Then a pipe burst, flooding the basement, and that’s when we uncovered a mildew problem that had just been lying in wait behind the walls. And after putting out all those fires (literally, in the case of the heater), I still have a laundry list of little tasks I need to complete that I keep on the door of our fridge, like hiring an electrician to come install GFCI outlets, putting a new backsplash in the kitchen, buffing the original hardwood floors, and of course, caulking the won’t-shut windows.

I finish loading the dishwasher and sponge down the counters. Then I grab a bag of baby carrots out of the fridge along with the lunch I had packed the night before and my daily to-do list and put it all into my shoulder bag, which I ease over my head and sling across my sweater-clad chest. Winter has behaved more like an early spring this week, so I leave my favorite black down coat in the hall closet, even though it’s February.

I exit the house the same way Jack did, opening first the heavy
wooden door with the handle that sticks and then pushing my way out the screen door. I let it slam behind me, delighting in the squeak of the rusted hinge, as I do every day. It sounds like summer, which has always been my favorite season.

I walk down the back steps to our one-car driveway. Whoever gets home last has to park on the street—usually Jack. I glance next door to Sammy’s house. Her porch light is still on, so she probably stopped somewhere for breakfast after her shift. I’m a little relieved, because as much as I like her, she talks a blue streak, and a simple hi always turns into a fifteen- or twenty-minute fairly one-sided conversation (hers). And today I have just enough time to drive to campus, park my car, catch the university bus, and make it to the psychology building before class starts.

I navigate my Hyundai Sonata through the backstreets of my tree-lined neighborhood until I get to the baseball stadium. In the spring, if we’re in the backyard, we can sometimes hear the crack of leather meeting wood and wonder if it was one of our Georgia Bulldogs or the opposing team that swung the bat. Neither one of us cares about sports enough to ever check and see who wins. It’s one of the first things I loved about Jack—that unlike every other guy in this town, he didn’t spend his Saturdays in the fall tailgating and guzzling beer and saying things like, “Coach has got to stop running that blitz every third down.”

Like most other southern universities, Athens is a football town. It’s also a college town by every sense of the definition. The thirty-five thousand students who attend the university make up a third of the city’s population. When summer comes and the students pack up their belongings to head home or to study abroad in Amsterdam or the Maldives, the frenetic energy that fills every coffee shop, bus stop, and bar from September to May dissipates. The city seems to breathe, luxuriating in the space it has to stretch its arms until school is back in session.

But today, the energy is full and present as I slowly drive past throngs of kids loping to their classes, filling sidewalks, haphazardly crossing streets. I marvel at how young they look. At twenty-seven, I’m only a few years apart from the seniors, so I can’t explain why it feels like lifetimes. Is it marriage that’s aged me? The cancer? Or the realization and acceptance of mortality—something most college kids haven’t quite wrapped their still-developing brains around?

Fortunately, I’m not the oldest in my master’s program. A graying forty-something woman named Teresa sits near me in my Advanced Theories of Stress Management class. I imagine she’s a divorcée and this is her
Eat Pray Love
experience. She’s going back to school! Getting her counseling degree! Making something of herself! Jack says that’s unfair. That maybe she just lost her job in the recession and is trying out a new career path.

Whatever the reason, I guess everyone has their story for why they are where they are. Mine, of course, has to do with the cancer. I started chemo right after graduating, and deferred my acceptance to my master’s program for a year. But the next fall, when my treatment had long been finished, I still wasn’t ready. My body was tired.

“Take a few years off,” Jack said. “We’ll get married. Have some fun.”

That’s how my husband proposed to me.

I accepted.