said Mitch, don’t whine.
I could hear her chewing on something, a ballpoint pen, probably. I pictured her with blue marks on her lips, another pen stuck in her hair.
It’s close to Thanksgiving, I said. Why don’t we wait and both go home then?
You forget—they’re going down to Florida to be with Nana.
I don’t have time to go right now. I have a job, you know. I do have a life.
I don’t have time to argue about it, I’m studying, Mitch said. I knew she was sitting on the floor with her papers scattered around her, the stacks of casebooks sprouting yellow Post-its from all sides, like lichen, Mitch in the middle with her legs spread, doing ballet stretches.
I heard a background cough.
You’re not studying, I said. Neil’s there.
Neil isn’t doing anything, she said. He’s sitting quietly in the corner waiting for me to finish. Aren’t you, sweetheart?
Meek noises from Neil.
You call him sweetheart? I said.
Are you going home or not?
Do I have to?
I can’t come over there and make you go, Mitch said.
The thing was, we had both decided, some time ago, to take turns going home every now and then to check up on them. Our parents did not need checking up, but Mitch thought we should get in the habit of doing it anyway. To get in practice for the future.
After a minute Mitch said, They’ll think we don’t care.
Sometimes I think they’d rather we left them alone.
Fine. Fine. Do what you want.
Oh, all right. I’ll go.
I flew home on a Thursday night, and though I’d told them not to meet me at the airport, there they were, both of them, when I stepped off the ramp. They were the only still figures in the terminal; around them people dashed with garment bags, stewardesses hustled in pairs wheeling tiny suitcases.
My mother wore a brown coat the color of her hair. She looked anxious. My father stood tall, swaying slightly. The lights bounced off the lenses of his glasses; he wore jeans that were probably twenty years old. I would have liked to be the one to see them first, to compose my face and walk up to them unsuspected, like a stranger. But that never happened. They always spotted me before I saw them and had their faces ready and their hands out.
Is that all you brought? Just the one bag?
Here, I’ll take it.
Lisa, honey, you don’t look so good. How are you?
Yes, how are you? You look terrible.
Thanks, Dad.
How are you? they said, over and over, as they wrestled the suitcase from my hand.
Back at the house, my mother stirred something on the stove and my father leaned in the doorway to the dining room and looked out the window at the backyard. He’s always leaned in that doorway to talk to my mother.
I made that soup for you, my mother said. The one where I have to peel the tomatoes and pick all the seeds out by hand.
Mother. I wish you wouldn’t do that.
You mean you don’t like it? I thought you liked it.
I like it, I like it. But I wish you wouldn’t bother.
It’s no bother. I wanted to.
She was up until two in the morning pulling skin off tomatoes, my father said. I could hear them screaming in agony.
How would you know? You were asleep, my mother said.
I get up at five-thirty every morning to do work in the yard before I go in to the office, he said.
I looked out at the brown yard.
I’ve been pruning the rosebushes. They’re going to be beautiful next summer.
Yes, they will.
Lisa, he said, I want you to do something for me tomorrow, since you’re here.
Sure. Anything.
I want you to go with your mother to her doctor’s appointment. Make sure she goes.
OK.
She doesn’t have to come, my mother said. That’s silly, she’ll just be bored.
She’s supposed to get a mammogram every six months, my father said, but she’s been putting it off and putting it off.
I’ve been busy. You know that’s all it is.
She’s afraid to go. She’s been avoiding it for a year now.
Oh, stop it, that’s not it at all.
She always finds a way to get out of it. Your mother, the escape artist.
My mother crossed her arms over her chest. There was a history. Both her mother and an aunt had had to have things removed.
It’s the same with all her doctors, my father said. Remember the contact lenses?
That was different. I didn’t need new contacts.
She stopped going to her eye doctor for fifteen years. For fifteen years she was wearing the same contacts. When she finally went in, the doctor was amazed, he said he’d never seen anything like it, they don’t even make contact lenses like that anymore. He thought she was wearing dessert dishes in her eyes.
You’re exaggerating, my mother said.
Mitch—I mean Lise, my father said.
He’d always gotten our names confused; sometimes, to be safe, he just said all three.
She’s afraid to go because of the last time, he said.
What happened last time? I said.
I had the mammogram pictures done, she said, and then a few days later they called and said the pictures were inconclusive and they needed to take a second set. So they did that and then they kept me waiting for the results, for weeks, without telling me anything, weeks where I couldn’t sleep at night, and I kept your father up too, trying to imagine what it looked like, the growth. Like the streaks in bleu cheese, I thought. I kept feeling these little pains and kept checking my pulse all night. And then finally they called and said everything was fine after all, there was just some kind of blur on the first X-rays, like I must have moved right when they took them or something.
You were probably talking the whole time, my father said. Telling them how to do their job.
I was probably shivering. They keep that office at about forty degrees and leave you sitting around in the cold in a paper robe. The people there don’t talk to you or smile; and when they do the pictures they mash your breast between these two cold glass plates like a pancake.
My father looked away. He had a kind of modesty about some things.
My mother said to me, All those nights I kept thinking about my mother having her surgery. I kept feeling for lumps, waking up your father and asking him to feel for lumps.
Leah, my father said.
He didn’t mind that. I think he might have enjoyed it a little.
Please.
Didn’t you?
Promise me you’ll go, he said.
She’s not coming, she said.
The next day we drove to the clinic an hour early. My mother had the seat drawn as close to the steering wheel as she could get it; she gripped the wheel with her hands close together at twelve o’clock. She looked over at me as often as she looked out at the road.
There were