Experiment in the Essay #9: Lumps in Mind, #52essays2017
Some days, it's hard to think. I could blame it on the sky, or the way sleep is an inefficient janitor in scuffy shoes. I could blame it on memory and emotion-- say, of my son's birth, or my mother sobbing so hard when she turned 40 she had to leave the table. But these things didn't happen last night, nor yesterday. Last night I bathed my kid from a tupperware waterfall and cried with him when the water drained out of the tub, because he wanted it back. Then we went to bed, with wet hair, and I sang the wrong words to a song I didn't know well until he fell asleep; even that degraded into humming. The lump in my throat rose and colonized my head. And now it's morning, the gray pushing through the space in the blinds where the light usually appears in a vertical line, like the spine of a magical creature standing in the window.
"Think": The word even sounds clunkier than the act is supposed to be, those clean neurons firing, ideas like the scaffold for a skyscraper, not a house drawn on an etch-a-sketch by a toddler. When I was young, in elementary school, I'd look at words the teacher wrote on the board until they deteriorated. THINK. THINK. Language was just a thing that could and would, eventually, fall apart. I made each of the sounds, and saw something I recognized faintly. But the nature of the sign as interloper-- to be just a sign, to be arbitrary, and so to do its job-- was as evident as a flat-chested person wearing a bra stuffed with balled up tennis socks. We are not real breasts, the lumpy fakers call out to the would-be groper. THINK. When my husband comes home late, he cups my small breast in his hand and gives me a kiss and I blink at him from the bed. He thinks I'm asleep and sometimes I am, the janitor pushing his mop in the hallway of my mind.
I roll over and look at the wall, the baby sleeping horizontal, with his head abutting my low back. I imagine even the most engine of an intellect-- say, Susan Sontag's, or Obama's-- must, some mornings, awaken only as sharp-edged as a lint ball. THINK. FEEL.
My thinking feels like an overripe plum. It leaks weak juice when pressed, flesh mush, the sides dent, you know, the way a metaphor does when taken too far or too hard or left in a basket with a banana overnight.
My thinking may be an overripe plum, of which a bite will leave you disappointed-- but my breast has a tiny hard pebble, like the seed of a plum, smaller, the seed of a cherry, and smooth. Which is really what I wanted to say, what I didn't want to touch, what I hoped I was not touching. The grief of what we lose, which is everything, but right now makes itself into concrete shapes-- plum, mop, window-- floated to my throat, like a bottle bobbing around the perimeter of water. Sadness, the colonizer. At the end of a long day of thinking, I find the lump while I'm nursing my son to sleep, lying on the bed, his hand stroking and fiddling with my nipple in this way that will embarrass him when he is older, so I'll never bring it up.
Gynecologists have often said to me, apropos of nothing, "You have nice breasts!" or "What pliable tissue!" This is not the same thing as, say, your crush complimenting your rack; I don't have a rack, I have two small mounds. What the doctors mean is that the tissue is easy to investigate, not particularly fibrous, or whatever makes our breasts hard to know. It means they can check for lumps easily and feel good about themselves, like they've been thorough, like the self-congratulatory sense you feel when you actually wash out your peanut butter jar before recycling it.
I find the lump lying on my back, my son's mouth slack, his hand twitching as he begins to dream-- in the morning, he'll always say it was about lions, when I ask if he dreamed about lions. You're supposed to check your breasts monthly, around the same time every month; but I check mine in a panic of remembrance every few months, on whatever day I remember, sure cancer took the chance to sneak in there and roost, and now is crowing, cawing, calling. My period has always been irregular anyway. I can't clock anything by it. Not even itself.
Ah, now the lump is red (in my mind of course), like some varieties of plum. The lump in my throat, I mean. Two nights ago, after a long day of thinking, I dreamed about my period coming back, an old friend I've missed, in fat red drops, brick red, into the toilet. And I was amazed by it and watched it come, as I did when I first started menstruating again not long after I'd met my husband. I called him "the period whisperer." He said, "You should be able to be a mother if you want to." We were eating dinner. He had told me about one of his paintings, the menstruating goddess, who sat in a forest surrounded by lush endangered plants, bleeding onto a fat wasp. She was in full frontal, long hair akimbo, breasts loose and large, everything large the way we usually imagine Mother Earth is no pipsqueak. An old man bought the painting from a gallery in New York City and had it shipped to Florida. His wife, enraged, made him send it back. It remains under wraps in the gallery, no one's property, everyone's origin.
The lump is near the right armpit and it moves around when I prod it, which -- I am assured by 15 different websites, checking on my phone in the dark-- means it's NOT cancer. I understand for the first time why people avoid going to the doctor, even once symptoms present with the bluntness of a metal bat. Or why they go to websites first to test out their fearful hypothesis, to preview possible horrors. Their fingertips fumble, fondle, moving pebbles. The breasts respond in code.
The first time I take my son to the beach, to the bay, we sit in the mild curl of small waves, waves that are done being waves before they've any heft-- and sink our palms into the pebbly sand. He picks up and drops pebbles for hours. I think about how, bored on the beach as a kid, I gave each tiny rock a personality, a will, a want to be picked up and palmed. Their color and shape suggested how to personify, and I did it rabidly as the sun adjusted its angle, tired, inching closer to the water like every sane thing does. The sun makes it hard to think, easy to play. The bay and maybe even the whole world rises up to meet it like the breast of a bosomed person lying down-- with the inhale. I'm quite sure this is how the goddess was first conceived of, somebody on the water line looking out at the horizon, aching to suckle anything, even a ripe plum.
But what did I know, I was just a kid, thinking. The pebbles rumbled in my bucket and later I'd wash them in the sink and coat them in vaseline and fill glasses with them, and set the glasses up around the house, until there was nowhere else to perch rocks and no more glasses and collectively they began to smell like something, like rotting flowers.
You can't tell me, therefore, that a rock doesn't flower, and that the tiniest rock, say, one in your breast that is definitely not cancer, can't grow, develop a web of roots, act, for all attempts to think around it, like a living thing.
Once you know something, you must live with that knowledge. If you don't know, you can tell yourself whatever you want. Your story can be mushy or firm, there is no contrary one. You can leave your story all night beside a banana and when you check on it, anxiously, in the morning, it will not have turned brown, or cave in with rot. You can lie in bed all night with your son, awake and thinking, fearing you know something awful, counting pebbles from your childhood, remembering your mother's sobs, the intubation jammed in your throat, that boyfriend who put pebbles down your bathing suit top, and then unknotted it so the top fell off and the pebbles cascaded onto the sand. It could be like that, I think, the bits of the world we've collected leaving a lump in our throats.
Forgive me, I've eaten the plums that were in the icebox. But they were so delicious.