The Breast Sketch

It serves us so well.  And then it doesn’t.  It doesn’t obey, it finds new ways to remind us of what we are and what we are not.  We are young, we are attractive, we are mothers and grandmothers, we are human.

I sat upstairs in my home in South Lebanon.  It was warm so it must have been summer.  People were just waking up from their afternoon naps.  The sun was still up and Rabab’s three boys were outside making noise and fighting.  Billboards across the country sported images of women’s breasts substituted by watermelons, peaches, cherries.  Advocating self exams.

Rabab came up to talk.  Most people avoid my apartment, they know it is a place where I can go to escape whatever is going on down below.  To be free of the need for interpreters and just look through my old stuff, the things that have been left there over time by me and my children.  I go through these things when I am there and contemplate a lot of things.  The material world, the time we’ve spent there, the time I want to spend there in my old age and the place I am headed after death and ressurrection.

I remember one winter and it was very cold.  I was still drinking back then.  I’d go upstairs and the brothers would come up and we’d drink.  Wine and Arak.  We’d laugh so loud there could be no doubt in those below that we were not in control.  That day I’d taken the kids to the graveyard and we’d messed around by the graves scaring each other, some of the graves collapsing, some of them covered by photos in glass boxes.  We came home and my eldest was there doing her work for university.  The propane heater barely kept the frigid room warm even though all the doors that could be closedd were closed in order to heat the smallest area possible. 

I poured a gin and some coke and settled in for a nice evening.  The kids went to bed and by then I’d had another gin or two.  I went to bed nice and cozy with my bedroom door open and my son out on the couch, one daughter with me and the other secluded in the middle room. 

I drifted deep into sleep…..when the visitor showed up.  He’d been in my dreams before…just a shadow. Once he took me to see my ancestors.  The kids still tease me about that night journey.  Porter Hopkins they say, Porter Hopkins, one eighth Cherokee as all white people do.  There are no white ancestors so we have to make up some Injun ones.  Common practice where I come from in Arizona.

In the dream I saw an enormous wave closing down on me.  Inside of it were several children being tossed around by the force of the tidal surge.  The visitor said, “Save them.  They are going to die.”  I woke up with such a start that my heart was going over 150 beats a minute.  Not my normal but I woke up and there was my son standing at the door saying his stomach was upset and then he vomited.  I got up and cleaned him up, cleaned up the floor but my heart still beat out of control.  I put him to bed in my bed and went to the kitchen to try to get control of my heart that was easily doing 175 by then.  It just wouldn’t stop and I thought of the disrespect at the graveyard that day where we’d fooled around to scare each other.  Could that be the cause of my distress? I thought about the gin and Allah punishing me for my indiscretion.  I’d rather not believe that.

I heard my son get up again and moan a bit.  He was stumbling out the door and I grabbed him to get him to the toilet.  He didn’t make it though and covered the floor.  I cleaned him up again and he was so lethargic.  My heart completely wildly out of control.  The guilt just overwhelmed me for neglecting my children, teaching them wrong instead of right.

I returned to the bathroom and began to clean the mess.  I knew something wasn’t right and knelt on my hands and knees and began sobbing.  Sobbing for the sins, sobbing for the indecencies and the destruction caused by my chemical abuse.  Just sobbing out loud.

My eldest came out of her room and asked me “Mom, what’s the matter?”  She seemed just fine.  I told her, “go get your grandmother, something isn’t right”.  I didn’t want to disturb her at 3 in the morning but was helpless to solve the problem. Just helpless and losing control.  Perhaps I was going insane?

Em Melhem came charging up the stairs and threw open the door.  She said only one word and it might has well been death.  GAZ.  Propane.  She threw open the windows and doors to air out the salon and bedroom where my youngest two children still slept and would have slept for an ever if not for the visitor in my dream who said, “Save them.”

It was years later and Rabab came in and we sat across from each other in the kitchen.  She already had a left mastectomy.  Her hair was back and she was looking good.  It was over.  She was a survivor. We both were.  I had already apologized to her for my indiscretions of years before when she was left to worry down below while her husband and his brothers and I got drunk and laughed late into the nights. Apologized for making her feel uptight, for being a good muslim, for being the kind of person who could hold her tongue.

She wanted to talk to me about an implant.  It was heavy on her mind and I suppose she felt a little guilty wanting to look like everyone else, to stop stuffing her bra or wearing baggy clothes.  I am not sure but I imagine it is the same for all people who have an amputation of a body part.  They miss the normalcy of that.

I told her sure, they can take skin from your belly, your back.  They can tattoo you some nipples, they can do wonders “nowadays”. 

Suddenly, she asked me to see her.  To look.  I said sure.  I’m a nurse, I do that all the time.

Rabab lifted her top to show me what was left.  I swallowed so very hard.  I was unprepared, I was honored and then I was simply devastated.  Just devastated for Rabab.  I didn’t cry though.  I waited until she left and then called Pat Porter, my brother’s wife in America who had already had implants, already been there, done that and was doing fine.  I cried to her and could not contain my feelings.  She offered advice that I cannot remember now and it doesn’t matter.  There is no road map as they say for such things.  There are just no easy answers.