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MORE FEBRUARY 3. TEAPOT/SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME
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8 FEBRUARY 3. WHODUNIT: TWO HOUSEHOLD MYSTERIES 1. The plumber came to figure out why water leaked downstairs when I took a long shower. After running the water and going downstairs and back, he couldn’t figure it out, because of course it didn’t leak when he was here. It could be that the water had splashed on the tile and there was a hole in the grout. 2. I have breast cancer and no one knows where it came from. Pollution and pesticides? What about all the other people who didn’t get it and live in the same environment? Additives in cosmetics and creams? See previous. Genes? No first degree relatives—mother, grandmothers , sister—have had it. What is the history of breast cancer? The first patient described (as a young woman) in Freud and Breuer’s CaseStudiesonHysteria lived into her seventies and died of breast cancer, in 1936. That’s as far as my knowledge of the history of breast cancer goes. There must be histories of it in ancient Egypt, Rome, etc. Nothing in the Bible as far as I know. (Pause for Google search.) I find a recent book, Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History, by James S. Olson. From the book description: A horror known to every culture in every age, breast cancer has been responsible for the deaths of 25 million women throughout history. An Egyptian physician writing 3,500 years ago concluded that there was no treatment for the disease. MORE FEBRUARY 3. TEAPOT/SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME Our third free meal was with our good friends Posey and Marv. They have Italian ceramic dinnerware, as we do, but in a different pattern. They have mostly Raffaellesco, with a yellow dragon in the middle, and we have a mix of Veccio Deruta and Arabesco. Last year my friend Garnett gave me a Raffaellesco teapot. At dinner when Posey and Marv were in the other room, I whispered to Linc that when I’m gone he should give them my teapot. Gone, as in dead. Do I really think I will die soon, before Linc, before Posey and Marv (who are about 15 years older than I am), meaning, that I will die from this? No one dies from breast cancer, as long as it stays in the breast; you die from the spread of the breast cancer cells to other parts of your body. There’s no sign—yet—that it’s spread. I’ve 9 thought about death a lot, from early on. I’ve had asthma since babyhood ; if you have trouble breathing, you’re bound to imagine what it would be like to stop breathing for good. I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was eight, and I would picture the Nazis coming to get us. My sister and I would pretend that we were teachers and secretaries, like our other friends did, but we also would sit hunched and whispering in our pink walk-in closets in Texas and pretend we were in hiding from the Nazis. In my mind I would put the inner and outer threats together and know that I would go like that (snap o’ fingers) if I were taken to a concentration camp, because I wouldn’t be able to breathe without my medicines. For some American Jews, the Holocaust is our holy of holies. Auschwitz is our version of the crucifixion, and we approach it, the idea of it, with horrified awe. We imagine what would have happened to us if our grandparents or great-grandparents hadn’t immigrated to America in the early part of the century. A friend of mine, a journalist who is hard bitten (and Jewish), said to me once, Don’t you wish you were alive in Europe during the war, so that you could test yourself ? No, I said. Still, the Holocaust is my automatic reference point to many things—if it’s really cold outside I think about morning roll calls in dark dead winter in Poland in the death camps. I can’t imagine how cold that must have felt. If I’m doing squats in yoga I wonder how many I could have done if I had a gun or whip at my back and I were emaciated. These are very short, quick thoughts that I can’t help. I don’t verbalize them for the most part. I wrote a book called Holocaust Girls, about people (like myself...