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58 surprised I was that he didn’t know the word angoisse, anguish. That was a daily necessity for me. Then a couple of years ago Linc and I were on our way back from Springfield and stopped at a vegetarian café in Normal, Illinois—the only vegetarian café in Normal. I asked another customer where the restroom was and he said, The men’s room is there. It confounded me more than bothered me. Maybe the guy was stoned. I mean, I was a married woman. So I had to be a girl! Am I afraid that when I’m bald—whether I have a swirly tattoo or not—I’ll look male? I don’t think so. I’ll be wearing a pair of earrings to clue in the general public. I’ve noticed that scarves and hats and turbans for chemo-heads bill themselves as feminine. The flowers and pastels remind me of unfashionable Easter hats. The bright prints and stripes seem doggedly determined to convince the buyer and the world that there’s a girl underneath the fabric. A smiling girl, if you look at the pictures in the catalogues. But the world is going to look at you and figure out that you’re undergoing chemo, because no one else wears those turbans, no matter what the ad copy says. The caps and scarves are supposed to cover up our loss, hide the evidence of our treatment. Give us privacy, perhaps. The bald head publicly declares: I had cancer and I’m not pretending that I’m not getting chemo. In other words, Death has brushed me. MARCH 25. WHY I HATE ELIZABETH EDWARDS Because she might die. Because she didn’t find her lump in 2004 until it was the size of a half dollar. Because she smiles. She smiles and she is dying, the cancer is in her bones, it is eating in her bones, and though there are drugs that may stop it, that might stop it, the drugs might not work. I hate Elizabeth Edwards because her husband is not quitting to take care of her, she doesn’t want him to quit, she is in the race for him, for both of them. The campaign is a mom-and-pop affair, according to her. She is not working as a lawyer. She wants to work to 59 help her husband get the presidency. She wanted many things. She wanted children in her 50s and got them. She got a husband who became a senator. Did she want that? I don’t know. She can have quality of life. She can have a good life, she can take a pill, and another pill, and a treatment, and she could be in the five percent. Or ten percent. She could live more than ten years. She wants a legacy of helping her husband into the White House, not of keeping him from it. I do not like her husband. I heard him speak the first time he ran, and he was vague and said he understood the poor and the workers because his parents had been poor and workers. He wanted us to vote for him because of that. Because of who he had been. Of what he had been born with. Nothing. Now everyone says he is seasoned, he knows he was wrong about the war. He is for universal health care. See, his wife is so sick and he wants everyone to have the health care she can have. This is his bully pulpit. She says, he says, they want to perform service, that’s the reason for the campaign. He is not blindly ambitious, he wants to help, and he can help the best by becoming the most powerful person in the world. On earth. They do not talk about the possible causes of breast cancer. About pesticides and pollution and that the company that brought us tamoxifen, AstraZeneca, was part of Imperial Chemical, which produces carcinogens that have been linked to cancer. AstraZeneca sponsors Breast Cancer Awareness Month and supervises and must approve all its brochures and public relations because who knows what might come out otherwise. Elizabeth Edwards does not use words like the ones Rachel Carson might, for example, when she warned us in the 1960s about the environment failing us and moreover us failing the environment; she was scorned then and is now a secular saint. I hate Elizabeth Edwards because she didn’t...

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