Early Warning

LILLIAN HAD BEEN SITTING quietly in a corner. She’d never been to this house before, an imposing Colonial on Q Street, and the party was a large one. She had been admiring the paintings, which were realistic, but strange — a donkey standing in a kitchen, a toddler sitting on the crest of a slate roof, holding an apple. When the woman sat down, Lillian struggled to remember her name — Irene — and smiled in her usual friendly way. Irene started in immediately. She leaned toward Lillian and said, “Oh, darling. I have been thinking about you. You’ll never guess what happened to me.”

“I can’t im—”

“So bizarre. I felt a lump right here.” She touched the underside of her left breast. “And, of course, I went straight to the doctor, and he felt it, too. So I was terrified! I went home and told Jason.” Yes, Irene’s husband was Jason. Maybe he worked in the State Department? A rumpled, handsome fellow. “And he was terrified, too. He was so nice to me, all that evening. Very attentive.”

Lillian smiled in a sympathetic way.

“I mean, he put me to bed and brought me tea and you name it. The next morning, he took me for the biopsy, and he sat with me in the waiting room until I went in for the procedure, which they said would take an hour and a half.”

“It’s time-consuming. They have to be very precise,” said Lillian.

“Well, of course,” said Irene. “Anyway, I came out, and Jason was nowhere to be seen. I was a little — oh, I don’t know. So I walked out on the step and was sitting there, sort of dazedly staring around, and here comes this little Toyota, kind of beat up, and it stops at the curb, and out gets Jason, and he goes around to the driver’s side and kisses the girl who was driving goodbye!”

“Good heavens!” said Lillian.

“Yes! He had been seeing her for months! I am telling you, it was the turning point of my life!”

Lillian’s glance strayed, in spite of herself, to Irene’s chest.

Irene said, “Oh well! The biopsy was negative. Everything fine, in spite of all my worries, but I have been thinking of you and your trouble ever since Miriam told me about it all.”

Wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone, thought Lillian.

“But you’re feeling better now. You look lovely. I just wanted to tell you that.”

In the course of the eleven months since her operation (radical mastectomy, fourteen lymph nodes, chest muscle, plus radiation, the new miracle drug tamoxifen, everything, it seemed), she had heard more about the breast-cancer adventures of women she barely knew than she had ever thought possible. The mother who had died at thirty-seven. The grandmother who lived to be ninety-eight, and at her age they didn’t do operations, because cells divided so slowly anyway. The woman who had something called DCIS in one breast, then lobular ten years later. The lumpectomy during pregnancy (this was the worst one, of course). It was someone new every week or so.

Arthur, who had been talking with a colleague maybe ten feet away from her (he didn’t get much farther if he could help it), now went to the buffet and put a few things on a plate. When he sat down next to her, she saw a tiny bacon quiche, a tiny egg roll made of lettuce, and a mushroom stuffed with crabmeat. She ate them one at a time. He said, “Irene must have been telling you about Jason. She gets quite animated when she talks about it.”

“What happened with them?”

“He married a twenty-five-year-old. They now have twins, and she’s pregnant with a third. If you are ever at the Washington Monument and you see a man with a giant paunch and a perfectly circular bald patch, holding hands with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, that’s them.”

“Boys.”

“Very grumpy girls.”

“Not happy-go-lucky like Richie and Michael, huh.”

“Well, so far, they haven’t been allowed to act out their antipathy toward one another, which would be a joyous experience.” He said, “Are you tired?”

All she had to do was sigh, and he helped her up. He put his arm around her. “It’s at least a mile to the front door, but on the way, be sure to look at the little painting by the same artist as these. Very elegantly done window box full of violets, plus hand grenade, the pin right beside it.” But when they walked past it, Arthur turned her head toward himself, and held her more tightly. On the front stoop, nice weathered brick, he sat her in the glider and went to get the car.