Obviously, Sunday was the day for “bargaining.” While they sat up in bed, reading articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times about Reagan and Ford being too old for the presidency and Bush having swiped all of Ford’s voters, and now this John Anderson fellow, whom Arthur rather liked — but at any rate, the Republicans had overcome the contentiousness between the right wing and the rest of the Party (they passed sections back and forth) — Lillian did quietly wonder what she would give up in order to avoid the coming ordeal. Maybe the house? No eggs? No steak? No Brie? No buttery popcorn? She shifted around on the bed, and Arthur offered her an article about the difference between people who draw the drapes and people who throw up the blinds: light-house people, dark-house people. Lillian enjoyed the article, but was there anything she should have done differently? Detergent? Breast-feeding? She could think of nothing else that was not human sacrifice, and if you came right down to it, that did seem to be the bargain that religion dealt in, didn’t it? Someone must die so that others may live. Mary Elizabeth? Tim? Lillian sighed, and Arthur said, “You okay, honey? You want another cup of coffee?”
Lillian said, “No, thanks. One’s enough today.” Really, she did want another cup of coffee, and when Arthur came back into the bedroom with his second, the fragrance was seductive. But giving up coffee was a start. Maybe.
Monday, she pretended to be asleep with her head buried in the pillow, and then, after Arthur left, she sat up and let the tears and sobs flow. It was all too easy to imagine herself dead, and it wasn’t good. She herself would be beyond sensation, she was pretty sure, and if not, then she felt she had done nothing to deserve punishment (through no virtue of her own — she had been taught to be a good girl, and she had been a good girl). But what Arthur and Debbie, especially, and maybe Janet and Dean would do without her, she literally could not imagine. Debbie called her every day; Arthur followed her around whenever he was not at work, and when he was at work, he called her in the morning and in the afternoon. Dean called her when he was worried about something, and Tina called her when she was excited about something. There was nothing oppressive about these calls — she loved them. They were the currency of news flowing freely, buoyed with jokes and funny stories, bits from TV, magazines, school. As soon as she thought of something funny or strange, she thought of who might enjoy it more, and called them — they did the same. But they would not as readily call one another. She was the switching station, the spot where information flowed to and from. Claire’s situation was shocking, now that Paul had refused to sign the papers and accused her of destroying her children and threatened to find a judge who would make sure she ended up without a penny, but wouldn’t Lillian’s own departure be even worse in its way, something her family could not make the best of? It seemed like this all day, all the way up to the moment when she mixed the mashed potatoes from the night before with an egg yolk and formed them into little patties, which she then breaded and fried, and then she thought maybe she was making too big a deal of this.
She dreamt all night about a scene she might have seen in a movie, though which one she could not remember. A man is sleeping while his sheepdog is driving his sheep over a cliff. He keeps looking over the cliff at the dead sheep, again and again; how he woke up was not in the dream. She dreamt it, then she dreamt herself telling about it, then she dreamt herself telling herself that it was only a dream. But she kept looking over the cliff at the corpses of the sheep.
When she woke up, she knew there was nothing to be done, and she felt okay all that day. She cooked Arthur’s breakfast and kissed him on his bald spot while he was eating and did the dishes and put some laundry into the machine and sorted through packets of flower seed from the year before and exclaimed with Debbie about Carlie’s putting together a twelve-piece jigsaw puzzle all by herself. Then she got in the car and drove to the doctor.
Lillian’s doctor was an experienced gynecologist — older than she was, and possessed of a competent, reassuring manner, neither forbidding, like Paul (and they should have foreseen how he was going to treat Claire by the way he upbraided parents whose babies got ear infections), nor at death’s door, like Dr. Craddock, whose nicotine-stained fingers Lillian still remembered with a shudder — and he hadn’t been much of a one for washing, either, Lillian thought. But Dr. Champion was simultaneously clean as a whistle and reassuringly smooth. With his wife and nurse, Kathryn, standing nearby, clucking gently under her breath, he carefully but firmly felt the swelling and also the surrounding tissue, and also the other breast. He looked in her file and quizzed her about a few things, including her mother and grandmother. Then he tapped his pencil on the desk and said, “I am sure this is a fibroadenoma — a harmless and common thing. It feels like that to me. All we have to do, really, is keep an eye on it for three to six months. Try not to think about it, and certainly don’t worry. Eileen will make you an appointment for the summer.”
So, Lillian thought as she drove home, this was the death-and-resurrection part. She felt nothing for the moment, but she knew that when she got home she would walk out among the tulips, which were brilliant and profuse this year, all colors, but especially the purple ones whose petals came to a slight point and opened outward. Among the tulips, she would take a deep breath, and plan dinner, maybe steak and caramelized sweet potatoes, and she would be very glad when Arthur got home, and probably she would laugh even more at his jokes and kiss him a few more times and hold his hand during The White Shadow. But though she might tell Arthur about her visit to Dr. Champion, she would never tell him what she had imagined so vividly these past five days.
—
IT WAS DEBBIE who arranged the intervention. Looking back, Lillian could see that her daughter had planned it for a while, and Lillian had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. First Debbie talked them into renting a house for August on Fire Island; she had gotten Henry to find the place. It would have been expensive, Lillian didn’t know how much, but it was near the beach, and certainly cooler in its ocean-swept way than McLean. Then, apparently, on their first evening, Debbie sent Lillian with Hugh and the children out to the beach for a sunset stroll, during which she ambushed Arthur and confronted him. He admitted that he knew that Lillian was supposed to go back to the doctor, but he hadn’t pushed her — he hated doctors himself and felt she should be free to choose, just like with anything else. But of course all of his arguments fell to rubble when faced with Debbie’s blazing righteousness. That night, in bed, he didn’t say a word to Lillian about what was coming. She should have been suspicious when Henry came for the weekend — when had he ever been a fan of family life? If Carlie or Kevvie neared him, he extended a hand and shifted his legs so that they wouldn’t touch his perfectly pressed trousers with dirty fingers. For presents, he brought them books—Oliver Twist and The Borrowers, not entirely suitable for a five-year-old and a two-year-old, however well meant. Then, Sunday night, no one got up after supper except, at a signal from Debbie, Hugh, to put the kids to bed (it was a late supper), and when Lillian made a move to take her plate to the kitchen, Debbie said, “Mom, we all need to talk to you about something.”
Lillian could not imagine what this was, given Debbie’s highhanded tone, but she did sit down.
Arthur, who was around the corner of the table from her, wouldn’t look at her, but he snaked his hand under the table and grabbed hers. Debbie said, “We all have talked about it, and we agree that you have to go back to the doctor.”