So a few weeks before I left my sister called to tell me that her chemo schedule had changed. That’s because at the time she was supposed to start the doctors discovered that her white blood cells weren’t at the proper level. My sister’s husband is a doctor, and their devotion to modern medicine is unswerving. Theirs is a household of prescriptions and appointments and voicemail messages from the offices of various doctors with various specialties calling to confirm appointments, cancel appointments, reschedule appointments, discuss test results, talk about prescriptions.
I asked my sister if she wanted me to reschedule my trip, which could have been done easily. “Oh no,” she said. “There’ll be no shortage of things to do.”
On Friday afternoon, after a particularly slow start, we wound up at Dillard’s, the flagship store at one of the city’s several relentlessly beige shopping malls. This mall, like the others I saw, was comprised of hundreds of long, horizontal lines, so neat and even that I wasn’t convinced the buildings weren’t an artist’s rendering until the sliding glass doors parted and we entered. My sister, whose hair is gone, wanted to buy a few scarves. She also wanted some earrings, clip-ons, because the holes in her earlobes are prone to infection. “I need to feel a little more feminine,” she told me as we looked though the scarves, hundreds of them in all colors and patterns and textures. I picked one, ivory colored and crinkled, and wrapped it around my head and looked in the mirror. My sister told me once again that I do look an “awful lot” like our father looked right before he died, so I took the scarf off and put it back on the shelf. Do you know what it’s like to be told you started looking like someone just before he croaked? My father was a handsome old man and all, but it’s a bit disconcerting, hearing that.
We decided to go over to the jewelry section, and that’s where we struck up a conversation with a woman in a black dress, yellow boots and lots of glimmery, clunky necklaces and bracelets and earrings. My sister explained to her that she’d lost her hair and her boobs, so she was in the market for scarves and earrings. “Oh yes,” said the woman. “You have come to the right place, exactly the right place.” My sister asked the woman how often she works out, and the woman said hardly ever. “You’ve got real nice biceps,” my sister said, to which the woman said, rather proudly (and who could blame her?), “Well, in 1997 I was Miss Fitness.” Three scarves and two pairs of earrings later, we left. Miss Fitness had shown my sister how to properly tie a scarf as I sat at the makeup counter on one of those tall, prissy stools with chrome legs and white upholstery, watching her moves, which I thought were unimpressive. “That’s exactly how you do a bandana!” I said during the scarf demo, and then felt like an ass, immediately. I thought Miss Fitness was a bit obnoxious, but she did help my sister, and she said something as we were leaving that stuck with me. “Just remember to have fun with this,” she said to my sister, who thanked her for her help. I never thought of breast cancer as anything you’d have fun with, but for a few minutes I didn’t contemplate other things I'd never put in the fun category either, like the surgical removal of body parts, followed by injecting an already compromised systems with toxins. Instead of thinking about those kinds of things, my sister and I had a few laughs as we drove out of the parking garage and headed for the grocery store.
