Playing Nurse

MY MOTHER flinches when I pull the tape, not at first, but when I get close to the incision.

“How does it look?” she wants to know, for the twentieth time today.

“It isn’t bad,” I say. I mean it. “Purplish, bruised, smaller than the other, but it isn’t bad.”

She doesn’t believe me. I try again.

“Your left breast is smaller than the right, but it’s still bigger than mine.” I reach for my shirt hem, pause. “Will you be sad if I show you?” She shakes her head and I lift up my shirt. “See? Yours is still bigger than this.”

She shakes her head, then the longstanding competition between mothers and daughters takes hold and she allows herself to be interested. “It is?” she asks hopefully.

I nod. “It is.”

“When I have my reconstruction, I want mine to look like yours,” she says. I smile.

“Tell the surgeon,” I say.

She asks me to describe the scar, and I do—running down the breast from what was the nipple to the underside, then cutting left to her underarm. An upside down, messy T. I trace it lightly along the surgical tape, which I won’t remove as it sits on top of the sutures. I’m washing off Betadyne and adhesive scum with an alcohol pad. I wish I had Dial soap, but this will do. I swab at the surgeon’s initials, RH, still scrawled on her left pectoral. The remains of the breast hang loosely on top, a sack of skin with a divot where the surgeon dug deep into