American Girls(54)

My sister and Dex had retreated into his bedroom. He was a good boyfriend, the kind that came out to get her water and was okay with doing his work in bed next to her. But he didn’t look happy. Once my sister was better, my guess was they were going to have a conversation, and not about her face.

I had watched so much television that I could feel my brain rotting in my skull, so I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I took my shirt off and looked at my fake-flesh-tone bra, sensible but with a pink bow in the middle, and then I took off my glasses, so I could sort of see myself in soft focus. I pretended that the mirror was a camera, and I tried to imagine what it was like to strip for someone, what it would be like for someone to want that from you. I thought about Jeremy, and I felt dumb for thinking about him. My breasts looked more like something from a medical textbook than a porno, and it left me feeling the way I usually felt when I looked in the mirror. Unremarkable. Regular.

Then I started to think about my mom. She was all about the breasts after Birch was born. When he was four weeks old, she opened the door to sign for a package with her shirt completely open. I think the UPS guy was more traumatized than turned on, and Lynette said that she needed to cover up. Even her wife and partner in lady-power knew that she’d gone bananas.

“The breast needs to be desexualized,” my mom ranted, unwashed hair wild around her face, nursing pillow strapped around her middle.

“Then you’re the woman to do it,” I said, and we all laughed.

“Our culture’s obsession with seeing the breast only as a sexual object hurts everyone. Especially babies. Imagine what kind of world we would live in if women thought nothing about breastfeeding in public, not with all these wraps and covers, just breasts and babies. Is that too much to ask?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. I vote no.”

“That’s because you’re thirteen,” she’d said. “You’ll feel different one day.”

If by one day she meant never, then she was right.

I knew what my mom was supposed to be going through right now. Lynette had sent the details of Mom’s surgery in an e-mail to Delia and me. They would take out as much cancer as they found, and so long as everything looked clear, they would remove the right breast and rebuild it with some of her other skin. She wouldn’t be able to raise her arms, or hold Birch, or even hold the phone for a few days, and then it would be weeks before she’d heal and then there was chemo. I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d be through with the chemo by the time I got home, but I hoped so. I touched my right breast and wondered what it would be like to lose something like that, something that was actually a part of you. No matter how terrible my mother could be, I didn’t want her to have to go through that. No matter how much I hated her, I didn’t want her gone, not even one little piece of her.

I wondered if Delia felt the same way, if maybe that’s part of the reason she was acting so crazy, why she wouldn’t touch her phone. Lynette had left a message, saying that Mom was doing well, that Birch was with friends, that we were all missed and that she’d call again tomorrow. By then, hopefully, they’d have the pain managed enough for my mother to talk on the phone. I didn’t like to think of her in pain, laid up in some hospital bed, pushing buttons for drugs and moaning in the night.

Dex tapped on the bathroom door. “You okay?”

“Just a minute,” I said, trying to fix my bra and button up my shirt as quickly as possible.

I went into the hallway, where Dex was looking at me, worried.

“Delia told me what happened.”

“She did?”

He leaned against the wall, ran his fingers over his scalp.

“I never know how to help her,” he said.

I didn’t know what she’d told him about: our mother, Roger, the real reason she was mugged, the stalker she liked to pretend didn’t exist. There were so many things he wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t about to take a guess.

“So how about you?” he said. “Has anyone asked you lately how you’re doing?”

We both knew the answer.

“How are you doing?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Okay, I guess.”

He reached across the hallway and hugged me, not in a pervy way at all, but the kind of long bear hug that my dad gave me when we were kids, before I turned thirteen and it seemed like he was suddenly afraid to touch me. It was probably half my fault that my dad checked out. I wanted to spend time with my friends more than him, he was such a sad sack and wanted to talk about my mom all the time, and his feelings. I didn’t like it when he touched me, not because it was gross or anything, but because he seemed so needy. Not like a dad. And then he found Cindy, and I sort of vanished, became the kind of person he could forget while he went to Mexico for a month and not even feel bad.

Dex was strong and warm and he smelled like the deodorant he wore, clean and minty. I relaxed into his arms, and if I’d been less exhausted I might have started bawling, but I was suddenly so tired that I thought I was going to faint, standing up, right there under his ugly fluorescent hall lights. I had turned into one of those pathetic animals that we read about in science class that practically cracks up when someone treats it like it has warm blood, when its wire-monkey family gets replaced with something real.

“I’m so tired,” I said.