CNF: Family History
by Nadja Maril
The worst part of sitting in the little cubicle is the waiting afterwards. Partially undressed, you re-tie the closure of the examining gown and feel the dampness inside each arm pit. You smell your nervous body odor. Fear clutches the pit of your stomach. It’s too dark to read a magazine or the book you brought, but in the dim light you can check your phone, look for messages.
You remember the metal of the machine cold against your skin. You remember the places where the technician’s hands pushed and pressed your flesh.
“Hold your breath,” she said. “Do not breath.” Eyes fixed on a small smudge on the wall, you counted slowly to yourself and thought only of the numbers—one, two, three, four— while she took a picture of your breast.
You think of numbers again as you fiddle with the curtain that screens your cubicle from traffic in the corridor. Numbers and statistics. If anything is found, it will be early in the cycle of malevolent growth. Technology has provided the tools to intercede. And if they find cancer, you tell yourself, like a Girl Scout you are prepared.
Cancer, the word your mother hated to say. A word always whispered. A secret your mother hid from you until you found her prothesis bra draped across the towel rack in the bathroom. Examined the compartment with its fabric barrier. A separation between the ribcage and the artificial breast.
You remember those weeks, unable to talk about it with your friends, forced to ask for rides home from school. Skillfully, you avoided the topics of why your mother didn’t pick you up herself and why your parents missed your performance in the spring concert.
You tried to theorize where they did the cutting. A partial or a radical mastectomy? Did they remove all the lymph nodes? At night you lay awake and asked yourself, Will the cancer come back?
Low-cut dresses must be discarded. Bathing suits replaced. You were fifteen years old and frightened. Confused as to what exactly happened to your mother at the hospital, until you found the prothesis.
“I’ve been mutilated,” your mother told you while readjusting a loose poncho.
You clench your teeth. Say nothing. Silence is power. Silence is pain.
“Talk to no one about this,” she said. “No one must know.”
You were sad for your mother who was unable to voice her anger at the doctors’ mistakes. Confused.
The fear your mother instilled in you, the times she’d stop talking to you for hours, for days, for weeks, left scars. Emotional abuse you did not recognize until adulthood when your own children question your reticence.
You brace yourself for what is to come and then tell yourself she didn’t die from cancer and neither will you. Whatever is found in this diagnostic mammogram is treatable. And you will immediately share your knowledge with your family because it is the secrets that are toxic, not the diagnosis.
The technician pulls back the curtain. She smiles. “All Clear,” she says and you want to kiss her. “All clear,” she says and you want to take her in your arms and dance in the hallway.
Pleased with your reprieve from worries for another year, you don’t remember getting re-dressed. You don’t remember pulling on your coat and striding past the receptionist desk until you see them, the others waiting to take their turn at spinning the roulette wheel. Causing you to purse your lips together, hide the smile, and quickly exit remembering to take nothing for granted.
Nadja Maril is a former magazine editor and journalist living in Annapolis, Maryland. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine and her short stories and essays have been published in dozens of publications including: Change Seven, Lunch Ticket, Thin Air, Lumiere Review Defunkt Magazineand Invisible City. Currently completing a novel titled Diogo’s Garden, additional credits include weekly blogposts, two reference books on American Antique Lighting and two children’s books.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Family History”? “Family History” started out as a fictional short story entitled “Secrets” because writing it as memoir felt too painful. But no matter how many times I revised and rewrote, the short story didn’t quite succeed. The approach to diagnosing and treating breast cancer has changed and the short story had too many historical references. So, I decided to take a different approach and begin in my present, because I often take a little journal to write in when I am stuck in a situation where I have to wait and I feel anxious, in this case waiting for the radiologist to give me my diagnostic mammogram results. As I started to write from this perspective, the words easily flowed to reveal my emotions of fear, hurt, anger, joy and empathy in a way that made sense. Even before sending this piece for consideration to the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, I had thought of this nonfiction essay as a compressed story, so I am very pleased to be included in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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