Chapter 7 My Schrödinger’s Breasts
7
My Schr?dinger’s Breasts
The upcoming weekend hangs over my week like a dark cloud, and by Friday, I’ve sat through six meetings—that should’ve been emails—as Sam’s Current Girlfriend. But since the bereavement policy for the niche transportation consulting firm I work for doesn’t extend beyond immediate family members anyway, it’s a distinction without a difference.
My work is a four-block walk from my apartment and connected via skyway, a series of climate-controlled footbridges allowing Saint Paulites to walk most of downtown without ever going outside. It’s a miracle in a cold snap, or in the rain, or on a day like today, which is both cold and rainy.
Josh Rosen looks at me and our other officemate Patty Tanaka over the Newton’s cradle on his desk. “Kyle wants a word. Do you guys mind?”
He attempts to make direct eye contact with both of us while clacking away on his keyboard, but only I—the middle desk in our U-shaped configuration—look up. Josh is a fantastic, if loud, touch typist, while Patty methodically hunts and pecks.
The sharp clink of the metal paper clip Josh flicks onto Patty’s desk breaks through her noise-canceling headphones. She finally looks up to ask, “Is Josh kicking us out?”
Josh is the HR rep for our regional office. He used to have a private room for personnel matters, but as we outgrew our cramped space, our boss, Daniella, pushed Josh into a shared office with Patty and me.
It’s an open secret within the office that we’re in desperate need of a newer, larger workspace that doesn’t have an ill-tempered bird nesting in the front entry light fixture. Nevertheless, no one’s in any real hurry to relocate.
We’re on the fourth floor of a 1920s hotel that was repurposed into mixed-use office space, retail, and high-end condominiums sometime in the nineties. Aside from the occasional use of industrial gray carpeting—no doubt covering devastatingly gorgeous hardwood—the developers mostly stayed true to the art deco design, due to its historic significance as a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald may or may not have passed out drunk a few times and possibly wrote a bit of The Beautiful and Damned .
Nearly all old buildings in Saint Paul make similar claims.
Still, there’s something inspiring about working to improve access to a city in a space that’s rich in its history. I wouldn’t want to be doing this work in a soulless office park, even if it meant Josh never again had to kick me out into the hallway when a coworker was overcome with the burning need to discuss break room food injustices.
I grab my phone and a notebook to look busy in the windowed conference room. Patty and I are team leaders who perform efficiency assessments, conduct feasibility studies, and present recommendations for improving services while cutting operational costs to our clients. Patty works primarily for our private developers on parking, traffic planning, and driveway locations, whereas I typically work on prospective government projects that rarely ever find funding.
Nothing we do can be done without our computers, but I flip a page in my Moleskine and pretend I’m doing something terribly important for the benefit of any supervisors passing our windowed room. When I was toiling away in Intro to Civil Engineering and Econ 101, no one told me how much excelling in a professional setting came down to looking the busiest.
Patty pulls out a spiral notebook and turns to a blank page. “Are you flying home for Thanksgiving?” she asks.
“Not until Christmas. I’ll probably work on Thanksgiving again.”
Patty shakes her head like this simply won’t do. “You better take an incredible vacation this year, Alison. I’m serious. You’re only young once.”
In another life, Patty might have been an inaccessible art curator with her eco-friendly dresses, cat-eye glasses, and gray-streaked dark hair. In this one, she’s the mom of our office—reminding Josh to pass around cards for birthdays and lecturing me about work-life balance.
“Sam was planning a big trip to Chile after the holidays. I was supposed to go too…” Before he realized I didn’t belong, I almost add.
Patty’s eyes go soft. She waits, giving me the space to say more about Sam, but I don’t.
“Speaking of trips,” I deflect, “how was Phoenix? You were visiting your sister, yeah? Or was it your cousin?”
Patty looks over her shoulder before leaning forward in her seat. I lean forward too, anticipating something juicy.
“I didn’t visit my family last Friday,” she starts, and I try not to let my face fall at how unscandalous this scandal is.
I’m fake-dating a dead man, Tanaka. The bar for tantalizing tidbits is set pretty high.
I stare at her in hopes she’ll rise to the occasion.
“I was interviewing for a job with the hotel chain I consulted for this summer,” she explains. “And yesterday, they made an offer.”
A luxury hotel chain hired us when they started to expand into the northern Midwest. Patty led the project and provided parking plans and layout recommendations. Clearly, the company loved her ability to make parking solutions sound somewhat interesting.
“That’s amazing, Patty!”
“Yeah?” A smile breaks free from her lips. “I thought you might be excited about one fewer desk in your office.”
“No. I’m sad about that part. I’ll have to kill time in conference rooms all on my own.”
“I’m recommending you for my job,” Patty confides. “Goodbye, government and public transit assignments.”
“But I was hired for my public works background.” I’m partially overstating it. I was hired because I revealed myself as a train geek in my urban planning freshman seminar and my professor—a transportation systems engineer and fellow rail enthusiast—volunteered himself as my advisor and connected me to an internship with this consulting firm.
I’m not a train conductor, as my six-year-old self dreamed of, but I’m providing research and insight into how expanding public transportation can serve communities who need it. Public transportation can connect people in a way that facilitates equity and community. I’m not sure I’d find the same fulfillment planning airport parking lots.
Patty sighs. “You do all of this work for these large-scale projects that never get funded. How many years did you put into that express train red-tape nightmare? With developers, you’ll get to travel outside of Minnesota. You’ll make corporate contacts. It’s a way bigger playing field.”
I can’t articulate why the positives of Patty’s job don’t sound like positives to me. After all, opportunities, travel, and connections are what most ambitious people look for in a career.
“I’ll think about it.”
“No pressure,” she assures me. “But I have to say, I thought you’d be more excited.”
Josh’s knock against the glass interrupts our conversation. “He’s gone.” Josh looks left and right before he mimes strangling himself.
He can hardly wait until our office door is closed to spill. “I hate that you guys aren’t HR.”
“Does Kyle still have a bee in his bonnet about ‘reply all’ emails?” Patty prods.
Josh types so furiously, smoke should be pouring from his keyboard. “I can neither confirm nor deny,” he says.
Underneath his buttoned-up corporate drone appearance, Josh is a massive gossip. I suspect it’s why he went into HR. A healthy penchant for gossip is my favorite trait in officemates, but since Josh is cursed with a confidentiality requirement, our meeting postmortems require a bit of inference.
My inbox dings with a new email from HR detailing the grievances of an “anonymous” concerned team member on email reply etiquette.
I snort. “Josh! Let Kyle get back to his desk before you unmask him as the email hall monitor.” I’m 87 percent sure Kyle steals my Sharpie rollerball pens when I leave for the day, but he’s still a person.
“If someone wants to waste my precious time detailing their every minor issue to HR, they should be named and shamed. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m personally upset about email etiquette or deviating from the fridge cleaning schedule.”
Patty’s index fingers are poised above her keyboard for her tiny game of whack-a-mole. “Joshy, no one suspects you care about the chore wheel. We see how little effort you put in when it’s your turn.”
“And everyone knows if it weren’t for Kyle, you’d be on Reddit all day,” I pile on.
Josh never ceases typing as he raises his eyebrow in challenge. “Oh yeah, Mullally? As opposed to all the time you spend logging self-help books on Goodreads? The dry-erase board behind you is reflective.”
“Leave her alone. She’s had a tough week.” Patty steps in as mother hen.
I change the subject. “Josh, do I have enough vacation stored up to go to South America in January?”
“You? Probably. You never go anywhere.”
“You’re going on the trip? Is it for Sam?” Patty’s heart is in her eyes, as if this might be a display of doomed romance and not whatever indescribable part of me needs to do something like this even if the idea of backpacking through mountain ranges without access to plumbing makes me shudder.
“Maybe.”
On my way out the door for the day, I pop into my boss Daniella’s office to let her know I’ll be leaving early for an appointment.
“Put yourself on my cal next week to talk about Patty’s position,” she says, because Daniella Torres is the kind of corporate American who chops one syllable off of words for efficiency and uses synergy unironically.
The coffee in my stomach turns at the thought of meeting with Daniella to discuss a promotion I’m not sure I want, but that’s a problem for Next Week Alison. Between packing my ex’s apartment, playing the bereaved lover in front of the actually grieving best friend, and the ovarian ultrasound I nearly forgot about, This Week Alison’s dance card is full.
For lunch, I eat a sad, wet turkey sub—it’s been sitting in the office fridge for so long, I don’t dare calculate its age—and pass the jealous faces of my coworkers who incorrectly assume I’m leaving early to enjoy a long weekend in the crisp afternoon air. Instead, I drive to the imaging center, fantasizing about alternate Friday afternoons for alternate Alisons with unremarkable breast tissue and ovaries.
Dragging my feet into my semiannual ovarian ultrasound, I flop onto a gray couch with uninviting wipe-clean fabric. I try to occupy myself with my phone but am immediately foiled by a text notification from my mom. It’s a link to an article, showing only the title: “Facing Hereditary Risk: Why Are These Empowered Women Preventatively Removing Their Fallopian Tubes?”
Irritation swells in my belly at my mom’s obvious ovarian agenda. She stopped ramping up to brCA chitchat long ago, preferring to open with some variation of “Remember your ovaries? They aren’t safe either.”
I stuff an AirPod in my right ear; press play on my latest audiobook, featuring a man who shakes himself awake from his unfulfilling life by quitting his job to bike from Oregon to Patagonia; and hide my mom’s message in my pocket—out of sight, out of mind—until a nurse in scrubs calls my name. A giant diagram of a woman’s reproductive organs greets me on the other side of the double doors.
As someone who’s had mammograms, breast ultrasounds, and chest MRIs multiple times per year for the past six years, I’m no stranger to an unpleasant examination. Still, the ovarian ultrasound takes the cake.
The problem with this exam is that ovaries are hard to image, making ovarian cancer difficult to detect. But since my brCA mutation is linked to an estimated 46 percent risk of developing ovarian cancer in my lifetime, frequent ovarian ultrasounds are a necessary evil until I remove the spiteful little sacks.
After I change into a gown, the ultrasound tech gestures for me to lie back on the exam table, which looks like an unholy marriage of gynecological stirrups and a La-Z-Boy, and starts in with the transabdominal ultrasound. The warm gel on my belly does nothing to offset the overall chill of the cold, dark room. We stay there for a couple of images before it’s time for the main event: the transvaginal ultrasound. A transvaginal ultrasound involves inserting a long, thin wand—covered with a plastic sheath and conducting gel—into my vagina. Fun, right?
What makes this experience so uncomfortable is not the length of the procedure (no more than ten minutes) or even the size of the ultrasound wand (though it’s not small). It’s how the ultrasound technician roots around my body in search of each ovary.
“Excited for the weekend?” Marie, today’s ultrasound technician, asks.
Am I excited to pack my dead ex-boyfriend’s belongings with his friend who obviously doesn’t want me around? No.
But since I’ve never met an ultrasound tech who wanted an honest answer during transvaginal chitchat, I say, “Oh, sure!”
Marie starts slow and optimistic, but her movements become more desperate as the time drags on. The wand moves inside me like it’s an oversized couch and I am a doorway, the ultrasound tech the determined moving crew. To the right. No, left. What if we try it at an angle like…? No, push it up from the bottom. Use your back. Pivot!
“Alison, dear. I can’t find your right ovary. Can you lower your leg to the floor so I can try from another angle?” Her eyes crease with a pitying smile.
In this position, I’m poised to make direct eye contact with Marie, something neither of us wants. My pulse quickens as she roots around with greater gusto, and I stare down the painting behind her head—a lake motif so bland it’s as if the room’s designer was worried hotel art would be too provocative.
The procedure eventually ends, and Marie hands me a towel to mop up the leftover gel before leaving me to put my underwear back on.
“Your doctor will review the findings with you over the phone sometime next week,” Marie tells me as she closes the exam room door behind her.
···
Since my mom artfully pried my appointment time out of me when we last spoke, I should’ve expected she wouldn’t wait for my call. Still, bitterness coils in my chest when I see her name light up the screen before I’ve even unlocked my front door.
“Alison!” she shouts into the receiver. “I don’t have long. I’m on episode two of the Kentucky cult documentary.”
“ You called me, ” I answer, fiddling with my key in my dead bolt.
I live in a historic brick building in Saint Paul originally renovated to house artists. Now it’s mostly occupied by government workers, young professionals, and the occasional minor league baseball player.
My front door bounces off my tiny entry table when I open it too far. The large windows, high ceilings, and exposed brickwork once made the studio feel spacious and airy when it was empty. It wasn’t until I tried to fit a table into the kitchenette that I discovered a studio was too small a space for an average-sized human to spend most of their waking hours.
Every piece of furniture is nearly touching another piece of furniture, as if I arranged the whole room for the world’s most straightforward game of The Floor Is Lava. I shimmy myself between a kitchen chair and the vintage table I rescued from a rummage sale to hang my coat on a wall hook.
“Right, right,” my mom responds. “It’s just as well. This episode has been about a bunch of people doing yoga in a strip mall. I’m not missing much.”
I toss my keys into a little ceramic bowl. “Next episode, they take over a school board. Then it gets really nuts.”
“Oh, I know them!” I have to pull the phone back from my ear because of the volume of her shriek. “A few years before Emma was born, I went to a meeting. Everyone wore wool scarves inside . It was so odd. I never went back.”
I find this completely unsurprising. My mom was the Forrest Gump of 1980s cults. If a cult was recruiting, my mother had a brief encounter with them. My sister and I have a few theories on this, ranging from benign to conspiratorial—what if Mom is the actual cult leader?
The most likely answer is that my mom is both the perfect and most disastrous recruit. She’s outgoing, she’s trusting, and she wants to please people, but unlike the ideal recruit, she loves herself precisely as she is and has no desire to reach nirvana at your expensive weekend retreat. Also, she detests a sign-up sheet.
When she exhales, I can hear her mentally ramping up to the real purpose of her call. “What were the results of the ultrasound?” Enough small talk.
I kick off my boots one at a time. “And here I thought you’d called to talk about true crime.” I hoped we could have one conversation about something other than my cancer risk, but who was I kidding?
She tuts. “Alison.”
“My doctor hasn’t reviewed the results yet.”
“My doctor always called right away.”
“I’d hope so. You had cancer. I just don’t have boobs.”
I swear I can hear her roll her eyes. When she pauses, I pounce before she can fill the quiet herself. Neither of us has ever been able to hold a silence. It slips between our hands like a wet bar of soap.
“I went on a beautiful prairie hike yesterday after work,” I say to fill space.
“You told Emma you were lost in ‘Murder Field.’?”
I did tell her that. The thing about the prairie in the early winter: it’s just dead, hard ground. The waterlogged soil turns to solid dirt with the steep drop in temperature. The trees are naked. The sky is gray. It’s the perfect setting to find a body in the cold open of a prestige crime drama, so, naturally, I shared my location with my sister so my family would have closure in the event of my disappearance from the barren wasteland abutting a rural highway.
“I didn’t realize you discussed anything about me aside from the present state of my tubes and ovaries.”
I want to be able to talk to my mom about all aspects of my life—my ambivalence about this job opportunity; my reinsertion into Sam’s life, or death rather; and this overwhelming sense that I’m living all wrong—but since my diagnosis, I haven’t been able to keep her off the topic of removing my body parts like we’re trapped in a continuous game of Operation: Hereditary Cancer Edition.
We used to have light conversations about celebrity makeups and breakups. Now when my mom calls, it’s always the same. We’ve been trapped in a cancer loop for years. I worry sometimes that once my ovaries are gone, we’ll have forgotten how to discuss anything else.
“These things are important, Alison. You need to take advantage of your chance to mitigate your risk.”
“I know,” I respond, because I have the gift of living without cancer and don’t get to waste it.
“Why don’t you see my doctor when you visit for Christmas? She really is the best.”
I saw her doctor for the results of my genetic test when this all started six years ago. Before I sat down in front of a neon graffiti Warrior painting in that petal-pink office, my breasts were Schr?dinger’s cat—both the breasts I’d always known and ticking time bags, plotting to destroy me when I least suspected it.
“I have my own doctor,” I counter, plopping onto my bed.
“Fine. Fine,” my mom says, and I can practically hear her hand waving dismissively at me across the line. “Then ask your doctor about that fallopian tube study I sent you. Can you at least do that for me?”
“Sure, Mom,” I sigh.
“Good.” Her relief smacks me in the ears. “Imagine how great you’ll feel when you don’t need to worry about cancer anymore. You’ll be so much happier once this is behind you.”
I hear the click of a binder on her end of the line and the flip of the printed medical journal articles. She drones on about studies at Mayo. Risk, hormones, and abnormal cells reach my ears, but I’m not listening.
Instead, I’m wondering what my mom talks to my sister about. Does she read these articles to Emma and complain about my inaction? Or does she have a relationship with her that has nothing to do with genetic mutations?
For a split second, I picture my other breasts, the ones that were never plotting against me and only wanted to be held close to my chest in a wired balconette bra—a kind of bra that’s been verboten since my mastectomy. What would my mom say to those breasts? I’d bet those boobs know nothing of egg extractions and oviducts.
Lucky bastards.