The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

SEPTEMBER 25. WHAT IS MINE

121 oncologist tell you to do that? the young person asked. No, I said, my husband did. The diabetic said, When I was diagnosed, the first thing I wanted to know was if I could fast on Yom Kippur. SEPTEMBER 23. FOUR WOMEN, FOUR BREASTS I went to Ann and Peggy’s 30th anniversary picnic today. When they were cutting the cake, I was standing nearby and noticed Nancy (mastectomy ) standing on Ann’s other side. Later I said to Ann (mastectomy ): I don’ t think I’ve been anywhere where there were three onebreasted women. And then she pointed out a fourth. Ann, Nancy, and I don’t wear prostheses. Ann, Nancy, and the fourth woman are all lesbians. Are lesbians less likely to opt for reconstruction? Are they less attached to the symmetry that epitomizes the mainstream male-centered female ideal? Earlier, I was waiting on the corner for Garnett to give me a ride to the picnic. The Cubs game was just letting out. A guy noticed my adorned baldness and exclaimed: Look at you! What would he have said if he’d noticed my one-breastedness? Depends on how drunk he was. SEPTEMBER 25. WHAT IS MINE Marcel Marceau is mine. And that’s not a typo. He is mine because his father, Karl Mangel, was born in a small town in Poland and was a kosher butcher in Strasbourg. I understand kosher butchers. I understand Yiddish-speaking Polish fathers, though mine wasn’t either. After his father was arrested, Marcel and his brother worked in the Resistance. Marcel took a new last name from a Victor Hugo poem. He used his artistic skill to forge documents. He led a group of Jewish children, dressed as Boy Scouts, across the Swiss frontier. He took drama lessons in Paris from a school that had been named, before and after the War, for a famous Jewish actress: Sarah Bernhardt. She is mine, too. So is Simone Weil; and Edith Piaf, but only because I saw the Piaf movie. Simone de Beauvoir isn’t mine, though I know she had an orgasm for the first time when she had sex with Nelson Algren on the beach in Indiana. He isn’t mine, either, though he was Jew- 122 ish, despite the Scandinavianizing of his name. Or maybe it was in his apartment in Chicago. She wrote him love letters. Marceau’s father was murdered in Auschwitz, and so was Karl’s younger brother. Herschel Grynzspan is mine. Anne Frank is mine, though she’s everyone’s and they’ve all trooped through her cramped recreated attic in Amsterdam. Philip Roth is mine, though Cynthia Ozick is not. I. B. Singer is not, Bernard Malamud is not, though he was my teacher’s teacher, and my teacher named his son after him. Delmore Schwartz is mine. St. Augustine is mine, for his agony, though I haven’t read his diary since freshman year of college. So is Thomas Merton. Both had wild early years. Charlotte Salomon is mine, and Lincoln Park (the neighborhood) is mine. Louis Sullivan is mine—the ornamentation, not the shape of the buildings—and Sacagawea and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose former summer place I stayed in for a month on a fellowship. Squirrels are mine, and raccoons, and dachshunds, and beagles . Cicada skins and doodle bugs and grasshoppers, though they struggle against my closed hand (quick as lightning) and spit tobacco juice on my fingers. Lightning bugs aren’t mine. Mark Twain isn’t mine though he looks so familiar in his white mustache and suit. Milk chocolate is mine, but only when it’s sold in bulk, and covers almonds or malt balls. Milk shakes aren’t mine though chocolate chip ice cream is. Tiropita is mine. And kosher gumbo. And espresso. Organic milk is mine, and organic rice milk. Dark wood molding is mine, and green walls against dark wood is mine, and also polished light pine floors. Dark chocolate is never mine. French is mine and Hebrew is mine, and spoken but not written Yiddish. Kafka is mine. The Nora Ephron from the 70s is mine. Mrs. Pigglewiggle is and so is Jeanne-Marie who counts her sheep. Little Brown Bear is mine and Judy Bolton but not Nancy Drew. Emma Goldman is mine and Eugene Debs and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Frida Kahlo and Walter Benjamin are mine but I have to share them with everybody else. New York isn’t...