Beastie cats, one of the boys used to call them.
There are a number of fascinating but unnerving things about the tigers: the way they hyperfixate on stroller wheels and errant toddlers; the volume at which they both roar when the male mounts the female (not infrequently); how some suburban Greensboro subdivision practically backs up to their habitat, how the female keeps incessant watch from her rock lookout while the male naps in the shade, how in some spots there is basically just the equivalent of an elementary schoolyard baseball backstop between you and them.
But the most disconcerting thing about the beastie cats is how they pace. It’s that measured, obsessive, nervous stalking you might recognize from your dog during a thunderstorm or a restless night before a set of important scans.
The science center keepers say the reason the tigers pace is because they are craving human contact—they were bottle-fed as babies, and they miss being close to people, which is why they like the perimeter of the enclosure so much. It’s where the people are.
I don’t know. What is this, really? It reads a little more like madness to me. Decades before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the poet Jorie Graham wrote this about the hot, dry scirocco wind in Italy:
Who is
the nervous spirit
of this world
that must go over and over
what it already knows
Maybe it’s not really madness though. Maybe it’s an entirely sane response to being denied human contact. Or to very many things—results and treatment protocols and the future.
So, the beastie cats are pacing the chest wall.
Yesterday morning—after a restorative, humanizing walk in the near-rain among many heart-stoppingly beautiful blooming gardens and yards with a good friend who lost both her parents in a year and whose dog just died—I was remembering the dream. Simultaneously nonplussed and not nonplussed, I was thinking: There are tigers in the woods here and they are a little off their rockers, but that’s the place where we live.
STAGE TWO
1. Something Gray Like Grief
First ultrasound ever: I’m sixteen weeks pregnant. The darkened room, John standing at my side. We’re watching the tech—then a doctor who enters from another room, then another doctor—wade again and again into the ocean of my belly, find our growing boy there—his spine curving like driftwood, his thunderous heart. It’s the strangest thing we’ve ever seen. We can’t stop watching the screen/ocean. Him.
But they’re taking too many pictures. Too many measurements. His feet. His legs. His brain. His heart. His feet again. No one is talking at all, until suddenly someone says, “Well, I guess by now you know something is not quite right.”
*
We don’t exactly, but we were starting to. We’ve never been here before. I find myself remembering the time we took our old dog, Zilch, to the ocean for the first time.
We let him out of the backseat of the car, and he beelined for the beach—racing circles in the dry sand, sniffing the bite of tidal decay, knots of seaweed, rotting crab shells, a dried black purse of skate eggs.
Eventually he nosed his way to low tide’s edge, the gentle lick of the inlet slapping the sand, and then, when the wet of seawater meets the wet of nose, he froze, as though only just then realizing this was not his backyard water bowl.
We watched as he planted his front paws into the uncertain earth, then raised a wary head to scan his surroundings—where the ocean reached in a thousand blue directions, as massive and inscrutable as sleep, as bad news.
He took two steps backward, stopped, and growled. The world was even stranger than before. Something gray like grief passed through his eyes before he turned his glance to a low-flying gull and chased it.
*
Talipes equinovarus, they tell us after the scan—club foot. It sounds like something that has been flung toward us from the dark ages. My brain is groping through Beowulf. Idiopathic, they say. Sounds like Greek for a Shakespearean fool, but it turns out this is good news: not part of a larger, scarier complex of issues. Just the foot. The right foot.
Not the world ending, but the ground shifting. Everything is stranger than before. Will he walk? They are talking about surgeons and casting and braces, about cutting his Achilles tendon just after birth. We have only just learned he is a he. Fixable, they keep saying.
Later at home, John bans me from obsessing on the Internet, but agrees to read me a list of people he finds born with club feet. It turns out it’s not just obscure, misanthropic rulers. There are athletes on the list: Troy Aikman. Kristi Yamaguchi. Mia Hamm. Freddy Sanchez—who won the batting title in 2006 for John’s hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and for whom the shapes in the ultrasound-verse will soon be named. Eight years later—leg casts, orthotic brace, surgery—we watch him round the bases, slide into third.
*
Today at the postchemo scan, I’m back on the table. It’s a lot like my dream, dim and goopy, so I tell the radiologist about the tigers.
“Hmmmm—two tigers, huh?” she says. She’s measuring, she’s taking pictures—click clicking on the keyboard. Measuring again. Too many pictures.
“Well, I can’t say I love what I’m seeing,” she eventually says. Something gray like grief.
The tumor is still there. It is not smaller. In fact, it is bigger than they first thought. It seems to reach in a thousand directions. And, on top of that, there is another tumor a few centimeters away that has surfaced from some depth previously unseeable. A second tiger.
“We will need to do some more tests,” she says.
The ground shifts—it just does. I text John in the waiting room and know his footing is shifting, too. Things are stranger than before.
Zilch never really became an ocean dog. He was short, below wave height—a beagle/corgi mix—and lower in the front than the back. But later that same afternoon, for a moment, he did chase a gull right out into the shallows and hardly even looked down.
2. Occult Tumor
The Duke Aesthetic Center, where my breast surgeon’s office is housed, is brand-spanking new and very lovely—tucked back among perfectly perky B-cup-size rolling hills in a shaded medical park with two long-legged parking lots.
So fresh and Truman Show-ish is the whole complex, in fact, it almost seems fortunate that we arrive a little late to my appointment to give the numerous landscapers time to lay out more pine straw. I’m pretty sure a couple boxwoods are hastily planted as we walk down the pathway toward the office.
The waiting room is silent and comfortable. Two other women sit leafing through magazines, but they don’t speak or look up or have their names called, and they look suspiciously like set extras.