The Future is Always the Wrong Guess
A medical test, a memory of high school, and a movie
It’s Thursday, and on Tuesday I had my annual mammogram and ultrasound. Today the doctor called to say I was fine. The way I look at it, I have another year to live. Richard finds it odd the way I live in my body.
Today, he went to the dentist and learned he will need surgery on a tooth. I said, “Are you scared?” He said, “I’m never scared of things concerning my body.” His body doesn’t appear to change much, although it does change, of course, because we are plants in pots and new things grow and other things fall off. He has been reading Beckett. All of Beckett’s writing is about being a plant in a pot and adjusting to things growing and falling off you.
It’s not really an adjustment that Beckett’s characters make. They contemplate their inability to adjust. I was going to say failure to adjust. That implies an attempt to adjust. Beckett’s characters don’t try. Richard and I adjust to nothing.
He has recently gathered the data of our separate finances into a Quicken program. Each year, similarly, a bird builds a nest in the wall-mounted air conditioner in our bedroom. I can hear the chicks peeping softly through the wall. I couldn’t at first see the point of the Quicken program. Now, knowing how much we are spending seems to both of us a pleasant way of not caring how much we are spending. I believe I’m not going to live forever, although this isn’t a certainty. It’s more like believing the universe is expanding, whatever that means.
When I was stretched out on the ultrasound table, the technician told me her name. It reminded me of the word sweet.” She was not a smiley girl. The fact she didn’t smile made me think something bad was happening. I thought she spent a very long time moving her wand over my right breast and that she was seeing things on her screen she didn’t like. When she moved to my left breast, it seemed she spent the same amount of time there, and this relieved me a little.
After it was over, she told me straight out she didn’t see any changes in my breasts from the year before. I asked how she could know. She said before I arrived, she’d studied the images and could compare them to what she was seeing now. I said, “I hope I don’t see you again for another year.” She said in the coded way technicians speak, she believed that would be the case.
I wanted to believe the whole thing was over, but until the doctor called today I couldn’t be sure. For weeks, I’d been sucked into a vortex of not knowing what was going to happen that made me a little the way I would be if something was wrong. Now, as I think about the technician, I wonder if she maintained her detached demeanor in order to project professionalism. On the table, I asked what she liked best about her job, and she said, “Helping women.” I wonder if she thought a warmer approach might have colored my view of her as serious and competent, and I wonder if women think this way consciously or unconsciously. Richard doesn’t fear tests and can’t understand why I do. I say, “You don’t think you are going to be sentenced to death for being who you are.” He says, “Yes, and also I got my diagnosis a very long time ago.”
When you’re younger, you look at people our age and imagine we’re thinking about nearing death or we’re thinking about the slowing of our physical and mental faculties. As you get older, you see none of this is true. You live in your secret life, just as you always have. Nothing you think about the future turns out right, and that’s great. You can get back to the eleven-year-old girl like that because she’s still you, not budging an inch toward adult female life. You can get back to all the other people you were because you remain them.
Richard and I are maybe less wary of sharing our secret lives. Maybe because time is limited and what the hell, how can it hurt anything, or maybe because we’ve learned it doesn’t matter that much, embarrassment and shame aren’t as big a deal as they once seemed to be.
The other day, I came across a memory of high school I must have written following a reunion. As reunions approach, I’m excited to see the movie of our lives together, and I come away feeling the way I did in high school, a bit of a spy and a screw left out of a chair you assemble from Ikea.
Two girls from my high school died young. There were only twenty of us in the class, and we circled each other. I looked at each girl as if I could figure out the kind of girl I was. Some girls seemed already to be on their way into life, with focused study habits and a sense of comfort with their friends. They knew the college they were going to go to and maybe even the house where they would live. Looking back, imagining life can be planned seems a head start, even though life can’t be planned.
One girl killed herself in her thirties. The other girl died of cancer in her forties. When I heard about these deaths, I could see the girls, who still looked beautiful, of course.
The girl who killed herself and I had been friends. I had visited her house a few times not far from where I lived, close to the Atlantic Ocean. I could see something was going on with her that made her edgy and jagged, and it attracted me for reasons I don’t know. She was sexy, and dark-haired, and very thin. She had grown thinner each year of high school. Her skin was practically transparent. You could see her blue veins, even on her young cheeks.
We didn’t have the word anorexia then or the understanding of what starving involved. I envied her thinness. She had a high-strung, hectic manner. Something in her was burning. Looking back, I don’t see myself burning to do anything in particular. Maybe the burning was what attracted me. With the girls in my class, I was shopping for things they knew and I didn’t know. For example, many of them knew what to wear as the seasons changed, and, as I mentioned, many of them knew how to study and earn better grades than I earned.
Each girl had a secret life that was really her life and that we didn’t know how to show each other. For example, outwardly I’m a smiley girl. I flash a giant clown smile all the time without thinking. I don’t know why this is a feature of my personality or social presence, but you can see it like a carving in desert rocks in every photo of me, starting at several months old. Maybe even earlier. Maybe at the age of two weeks old. It’s there, the old carved smile. Why? Is it trying to seduce the world to give me what I want? What I want is to live forever.
When I read this piece to Richard, he said, “If the universe is expanding everywhere, that means where we are is expanding, too, so that an inch is just a tiny bit bigger than an inch was when we were born, although it looks the same size to us.” Now, you can understand why we’re together.
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In Other News
We watched the first two episodes of Presumed Innocent (Apple TV), starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Rusty Sabich, the guy having the affair with his fellow prosecutor in the Chicago DA's office. I read the Scott Turow novel (1987) the story is based on, and I remember finding it compelling. I don't remember whether I thought it was toweringly sexist.
Last night, we watched the 1990 movie Presumed Innocent, starring Harrison Ford as Rusty, and it was a case study in how many ways can you find female humans despicable, creepy, manipulative, sneaky, foul, morally empty, depraved, clingy, ruthless, and clearly murder-worthy, because, I mean, really, they will do anything to get what they want. No one in the movie says the word "woman," ever! They say "ladies" or "lady."
Harrison Ford is a comic actor. I know he's not usually cast that way, but he is. He’s not sexy. You can't believe in his erotic obsession with Carolyn. Jake, on the other hand, is all over the part. He flashes to the sex he had while swimming, the way you would doing laps, and the images are hot. More, please. Oh, well.
The reason I'm telling you this is 1990. The movie is a little time capsule. All movies are time capsules of something in the zeitgeist. This movie was made to be consumed and enjoyed by female humans, who, as I said, are all depicted as murder-worthy. A year later, in October 1991, a majority of women polled during the Hill/Thomas hearings believed Anita Hill was lying and Clarence Thomas was telling the truth.
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Beautiful essay in so many ways. I loved every sentence.
"You live in your secret life, just as you always have." oh yes. oddly, no one else can see the eleven-year-old in you (except, in my case, my older sister, 85).