On the night we celebrated twenty-four years of marriage, he said, “It took me a week of negotiating on eBay to get this vinyl.”
I wanted to enter into the festive mood with him, but my upcoming surgery had been the deafening subtext of every conversation since my diagnosis, and I couldn’t quiet it now.
As the album began to spin on the turntable, I said, “Nate, can we talk?”
“We’ve done nothing but talk. Tonight, we dance.”
“You didn’t marry me.”
He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard me clearly. “Come again?”
“You didn’t marry two-weeks-from-now me.”
He dropped his head for a moment. I vaguely noticed that he was past due for a trim, his usual crew cut softening into graying brown curls. His shoulders were broader now than when we’d first met. His skin more lived-in and leathery from exposure to the elements on his construction sites. “Cee . . . come on.” I thought I heard a trace of exasperation in his voice, but his brown eyes were just as solidly calm as they’d been since the phone call that had upended our lives.
I couldn’t blame him for feeling frustrated. We’d had this conversation a dozen times, but I needed to have it again—to be sure he understood how this surgery would change me. And probably us.
I forged ahead. “You married someone—you chose someone—who was all woman. All her body parts accounted for and functional.”
“Cee, I didn’t marry you for—”
I put up a hand. “Let me finish. Please?” When he nodded, I went on. “I know we’ve already talked about this. But I just—” I took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes. “I need you to tell me again that you get how different I’ll be. How . . . rebuilt I’ll be.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I shook my head. I needed to say it all. “The reconstruction—it’s going to take months to finish it. And when it’s done . . . There will be scars. There will be nerve damage. There will be discomfort, and—I probably won’t look or feel like the Ceelie you married. I guess I need you to know that I’ll understand if . . .”
I couldn’t put into words the fears that had slithered their way into my courage as surgery day approached, eroding it so subtly that I was just beginning to identify the dread. Years ago I’d given up on becoming a mother—infertility forcing me to relinquish what I’d always considered a foundational piece of being a woman. We’d decided together to try treatments and, after multiple failures and devastating miscarriages, I was the one who’d finally decided I was done—with the treatments and all the alternatives we’d discussed for having children. I simply didn’t have it in me to take on the uncertainty and risk of adoption or surrogacy. And I told myself that it didn’t really matter—that my life was full with other things that were just as validating of my femininity.
In the intervening years, I hadn’t allowed myself to question the decision. I’d focused on my career and told myself that it was fulfilling enough, that kids would only have hampered the aspirations that had brought me such professional joy. But I’d still felt a twinge of uncertainty every time I’d seen Nate playing with our friends’ children. I’d chalked it up to hormones and chosen to focus instead on the stability of the life we’d built together.
With a double mastectomy just thirteen days away, the twinges I’d felt years ago were crawling back to the surface again—the sense that my womanhood, already diminished by my inability to have children, was facing an amputation that would erase it for good.
Our intimacy had subtly changed since my diagnosis. What had become more perfunctory than passionate in the last decade or so had suddenly taken on a sad sort of intensity—the sense that every touch was the acknowledgment of inevitable change, the image-altering lessness that felt as threatening to me as it was life-preserving.
The Weezer vinyl spun on the record player. “I just need to be sure you understand, Nate,” I said.
I’d caught him looking at me a couple times over the past few weeks, as we got ready for bed, his eyes lingering on my breasts, as if he too was wondering who I would be without them. Something similar flickered in his eyes as he considered what I’d asked. It morphed into hesitation. Then resolve.
He turned his attention back to the Crosley and gingerly lowered the needle onto the vinyl.
I stifled sudden anger as the song began with its ridiculous banter. “I’m serious, Nate.”
He held up a hand and watched the record turn, waiting for his cue. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper than they’d been a month ago as he looked up at me again, mouthing the words of Weezer’s song, coaxing me to join in and bopping a little to the rhythm. At any other time, I would have found his awkward moves endearing. “‘If you want to destroy my sweater,’” he crooned, his eyes and smile on me, “‘hold this thread and walk away.’”
“Nate.”
He winked and held a hand out to me. “‘Watch me unravel—’”
“Nate!” My voice was sharp enough to cut through his best intentions.
The needle squeaked as Nate lifted it off the LP. I saw his shoulders sag. His voice was rough with frustration when he said, “I understand, Ceelie.” He looked at the ceiling and let out a loud breath. “I’ve gone to your appointments with you, I’ve watched the videos, I’ve read the articles.” He looked at me, eyebrows drawn. “I know what’s coming. I know it’s going to be hard—really hard. I know it’s going to take a while. I know all that. But we have two weeks, Cee. Two weeks before everything we’ve been planning for happens. Can we not dwell on it every moment of every day until then?”
I wanted to let it go. To drop the topic and find the box of old records I’d stored in the attic and sit on the floor while we played them all. “What if this changes everything?” I asked instead.
A taut silence stretched between us. I stared at his face as if it could reveal our future. He looked down at the still-spinning record.
“I told you it won’t.” There was something steely in the words.
I felt myself frowning as trust wrestled with uncertainty. I wanted to believe that the same forces that had kept us together all these years—through miscarriages and IVF treatments and career upheavals and all the ebbs and flows of marriage between two very different and stubborn people—would serve us again as we faced what lay ahead. In that moment, despite the misgivings that had wreaked havoc on my sleep and sanity since my diagnosis, I chose to believe it. Because I needed to in ways that took my breath away.
“I’m sorry, Nate.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“We’re going to get through this.” I nodded in affirmation of my own words. “We’re going to get through this,” I said again, just to be sure.
Nate placed the needle back on the record and held out a hand. I stepped toward him and he brought my palm to his chest, anchoring it there with warmth and promise. I could feel his heartbeat—steady and slow. He cupped the side of my head with his other hand, and the roughness of his skin tugged on strands of my auburn hair as he caught the tears on my cheek with his thumb.