On the theme of Gratitude
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HER CHEST
I found out later it was the superintendent who found the hard ugly lump glued into his wife’s small right breast, the same night she conceived their tenth child.
“Goyim,” my mother said. She shook her head when she heard that Estelle was pregnant again.
Most of the families in our neighborhood had a couple of kids. Then there were the outliers—the occasional childless couple, objects of pity. Or the superintendent and Estelle, doing their Catholic duty. My mother looked down her nose at them.
The superintendent didn’t tell his wife about the lump and she would not have been the kind of woman to look at her breasts in the mirror, let alone touch them. The superintendent wept in secret, swiped at his eyes as he pushed his wide broom or sloshing mop up and down the tile halls of the apartment building.
I imagined that each night, when his heavy body rested on top of Estelle, his wide rough hand would return to the breast with the lump, praying to god that he’d been mistaken or that it had miraculously disappeared. I imagined that his touch was gentle, his body balanced on his elbows. My belly tingled when I thought about it.
And then Estelle began to spot and cramp. When everything was said and done, Estelle miscarried and the doctor found the lump and things fell from there. Then everyone in the building learned the superintendent had found the lump first and not said a word. Out of guilt, or shame, he owned up to his secret.
My mother accused the superintendent of crimes against Estelle; it seemed she knew the story in ways I didn’t understand.
“They got it all,” the superintendent said. He beamed.
“That’s what the surgeons always say. They never get it all,” my mother said.
The superintendent told everyone the news, and cried each time, until all the tenants knew of Estelle’s surgery and he was out of tears.
My mother said he’d signed Estelle’s death warrant by keeping his mouth shut, that he wanted Estelle to die.. There was no point in asking my mother what she meant because she wouldn’t talk to me about it. My mother was superstitious and talking about things made them real. It would be bad luck. Secrets were big in our family, and this was a secret so big and real it scared me too.
My mother also believed rape got Estelle pregnant ten times, something I really couldn’t understand. When she didn’t want me to get it, she spoke in Yiddish.
We had lots of books, including the blue-leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica and a Merck Manual, but no Yiddish dictionary. These had most everything I wanted to know. I turned to them when my mother wouldn’t answer my questions. The Merck Manual told me the kind of surgery Estelle had: a radical mastectomy.
They were poor, Estelle and the superintendent and their nine children. They lived in the basement apartment with all the clanging from the radiators and booms from the boilers. Estelle wore threadbare housedresses.
Her breasts seemed tiny sad little things, invisible in her loose garments after suckling nine infants. I pictured the breast they removed as a lump of coal in a wet sock. If they hadn’t gotten it all, what was there left to get? The surgeon had removed the offending breast, its armpit and the muscles in her chest and back.
Estelle seemed transparent after that, like I could see through her, like she was already a goner. But everyone wore a game face, and her fate, like cancer, was something my mother refused to discuss with me.
I had no problem creating my own horrific scenarios. I wanted to grow a beautiful large pair of my own, as soon and as quickly as possible. I spent hours in front of the bathroom mirror with the door locked. I ran my hands over the gentle rise of ribs into the shallow valleys between. I pressed and pushed my puny flesh into something resembling cleavage. I was convinced that anything I didn’t recognize from the day before was cancer. Pretty soon my chest was covered in bruises the size of my fingertips, which my mother discovered. She became hysterical and hauled me off to the doctor to reassure herself there was nothing wrong with me. The doctor suggested she talk to me and explain things.
Six months after they took off Estelle’s right breast, they took off the left, and while they were at it, they traveled south for her uterus and ovaries. My mother was right. They hadn’t gotten it all.
We rarely saw Estelle’s gorked face around the building anymore. When we did, it was the superintendent who pushed her around in a wheelchair. She was all teeth and skull draped in tight skin. Her cancer cells were the busiest part of her, reproducing themselves exponentially faster than any other cell in her body.
Meanwhile, my breasts began to grow, but they were still swimming in a double A training bra that I stuffed with toilet paper. No one at school seemed to notice them, except Joey, Estelle’s oldest son, who was one year older than me. I deliberately stuck my chest out when I saw him.
I knew Estelle’s kids, but they weren’t my friends. They kept to themselves, played together, helped their father around the building while Estelle dressed and fed them all. They avoided eye contact. They played hit-the-penny with a worn Spalding on the street in front of our building, or roller-skated down the five block hill to the park behind our building. I used the same hill, skated every day after school, after homework and piano practice, if it wasn’t raining or snowing.
I wanted to skate with Joey, race him down that hill, but didn’t have the nerve to ask. My best friend was already tongue-kissing her boyfriend and I had to force myself to talk to Joey. I was skinny, with dark hair in a pixie cut and didn’t think I was pretty at all.
I reasoned that Estelle’s kids needed someone to play with besides each other. I was curious and scared and I felt sorry for them and I thought I would be doing a good thing, that maybe I’d be guaranteed safe passage because of doing a good thing.
I finally screwed up the courage and asked Joey to skate with me. We challenged each other to a race down that hill to the park.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice squawked unexpectedly, from soprano to tenor. “I always wanted to skate with you,” he said. I smiled—at his voice and because I was a champion on that hill.
He looked a starving puppy, too happy that I’d asked him, hoping that maybe I liked him, and like all he had were brothers and sisters and a dying mother.
So we got to skating and talking.
“Do you like Elvis?” he asked.
I was ashamed to tell him I wasn’t allowed to listen to rock n roll, only classical. My mother was a concert pianist. Of course I listened to rock n roll when she wasn’t around and I could imitate Elvis’ velvet voice doing Love Me Tender. So I sang Joey a few bars. He was cute in a blond skinny way. He looked at me, at my face not my chest—me, so I sang the entire song.
He was impressed, all goofy smiles.
“My dad told me your mother played the piano really good and I was supposed to
respect her.”
Respect my mother? Weird. She was my mother.
“We should get ready,” I said.
We practiced, tightened our skates into the soles of our shoes, wore the keys around our necks, every day, skating down that hill, one block at a time. Finally we moved off the sidewalk and onto the street. I could see heat sparks flying from our skates. It seemed really steep and a long way down. I crouched. So did Joey. We were bombs and the world at the bottom of the hill was our target.
The day of the race arrived. All the kids in the building turned out. My mother was there.
“Don’t get hurt.” She wagged her pointer finger in my face. “You know I’m not happy about this, don’t you?”
I knew she was as unhappy with my new friendship as she was about the race.
As if to disprove my mother’s contention that the superintendent didn’t care about Estelle, maybe even wanted her dead, he brought Estelle to the event.
Joey and me started together, picking up speed, the thrill of it rushing up and through me. We both screamed and ended the race together, laughing, shaking, hugging—Joey hanging on to me too tight. Since my toilet paper breasts were dissolving in my sweat, I figured I should kiss him so he wouldn’t notice. I leaned my head toward his; his mouth was ready and his tongue tickled the inside of my lips. I would have stayed like that forever, but the superintendent raced by, pushing Estelle in her tipped-back wheelchair. Her head was thrown back and she laughed and laughed. This was the last dance on her dance card and all I saw was love.
Author Biography
Evelyn Sharenov’s fiction and essays have been featured in Glimmer Train, the New York Times, The People’s Apocalypse, Mediphors, Fugue and Etude and other journals and magazines. Her fiction has been a notable in Best American Short Stories. She’s written for Bitch magazine, Willamette Week and the Oregonian. A recipient of both OLA and OAC grants, she resides in Portland, OR.