Woman
We sat face to face on matching white chairs, upon her porch in autumn; she, a third grade teacher. The mother of a classmate of mine from high school. A close friend of my own mother. I, a twenty-something reporter nervously sipping lemonade from one of her clear crystal glasses and breathing in the final summer scents of her roses. I was wondering how to write this story, what questions to ask, how to tell a small town readership that their teacher found a lump on her breast. That her breast had been removed. Not completely comfortable at all with talking of breasts in the newspaper. She had asked for the interview though. Felt the need to quench the rumors of her unexplained absence to her many students and friends. She adjusted her wig as we sat there in silence, and finally pulled it off altogether, laughing as she ran her hand over the newly grown stubble that had been hidden beneath.
"When you take the picture, take it without the wig," She said. "I want people to see me as I am. I'm through pretending."
I nodded, and she continued to talk, and as though sensing my reluctance to ask questions of her, she answered the unspoken ones with much clarity. "You never think it will happen to you," she said. "I was a healthy person. A mother, a grandmother, a wife. I always had regular check ups, everything always seemed fine. I found the lump in the shower one day and I didn't think it was a big deal. I didn't feel sick, it didn't hurt. But you know what they tell you. If you find a lump, get it checked out. So I did. It was cancer."
"When the doctor gave me my treatment options, I was hoping," she continued, "That they wouldn't take my entire breast. That they could just take the lump and everything would be fine. But it wasn't and they did. They took the breast."
She stopped at this, and looked down upon herself, her hand raised up to touch her short hair once more. Then she smiled a smile of beauty and of peace. "I still think I look pretty good though. Took a while to get used to, but really it's fine. All the important parts of me are still here."
"The hair fell out during the treatment," she said. "After the breast. I was ashamed to let people see me this way. I never went anywhere without the wig. One day, shortly after I returned from the hospital, my mother came over early and I had not yet put it on. She looked and me and just started laughing. I was furious that she would actually laugh. But then she told me that I looked just exactly the way I'd looked as a baby. That she hadn't expected to step back fifty years in one morning. It really was funny, the way she worded it. How she kept running her hands over my head and feeling as though she had gotten a glimpse of something that had been gone for a very long time."
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