CNF: Accompaniment
by Lauren Fath
As you filled out your medical history on the form on the clipboard in the waiting room with the green chairs (by which I was not soothed, even though someone at the hospital must have been told that green is soothing, but had not been warned against hanging block letters on the wall, reminding us we were in the cancer unit), I tried not to look at what you wrote, what boxes you checked, as if knowing your body’s back-story somehow took me deeper into your past than I would need or you would want. The day was already laden with the possibility of knowing too much about you. But you pointed toward a box that you’d ticked off and said to me, “Everyone smoked pot in college, right?” Before I could answer, the nurse called your name and we stood up together and allowed ourselves to be led through a door to a long and daunting hallway that began with a scale you had to remove your shoes and step onto. I looked away, not wanting to know your weight because all I need is the substance of your presence in my life, which can’t be quantified. And when the surgeon spoke to us in a small, warm room, there would be more about weight: the fifty-seven grams she would remove from your right breast. The radiation that would weigh on your energy five days a week for maybe two, maybe three weeks. The surgeon’s thick pen strokes as she drew breasts on a sheet of paper, an outline of the cuts she would make into a bean-shaped anomaly, dots showing calcification spots, then more cuts if the margins weren’t clear. The heaviness of the sigh you couldn’t let out, building up inside of you, but that I could hear the same way I could see your hands tremble as you took notes on a small tablet, the way you dropped your pen cap and I bent to pick it up because, if you had, the gown would have fallen open. Even watching your cancer drawn on a blank white page felt like an invasion, and I could only imagine what it felt like to know that those pen lines would become incisions and scars, someone cutting openings into your body only to sew them closed again, weeks of healing, the many green chairs you’d sit in. When the surgeon asked you to get on the exam table, then pull back your gown, then lie down, I saw again the bruise I’d already seen, from the biopsy (the first invasion), a harvest of cells that left you purple and yellow in the spot where the healthy tissue ended, where the needle had been. It looked like the mountain ranges we’d driven through together, purple all around and lit only at the edges by the sun, the yellow sun, tugging at the dark center. Three weeks earlier, we’d soaked carefree in the hot springs of northern New Mexico on a Saturday, at dusk, beneath a hillside of pines lambent in the dying daylight. You cupped the water in your hands and let it fall back to the surface. But a biopsy has a singular and determined way of upending what we thought life was. All I could think about, as you asked questions and scrawled answers, was how long it would be before we returned to the steaming springs. How long it would be before you held in your hands the same water that covered your healing body, so many times exposed.
Lauren Fath is the author of My Hands, Remembering: A Memoir (Passengers Press, 2022) and the lyric essay chapbook A Landlocked State (Quarterly West, 2020). Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Gertrude, High Desert Journal, and Post Road, among others, and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she is an associate professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Accompaniment”? This essay emerged from a mixed-genre workshop I co-taught with a colleague—a poet—last spring. We always ended the class with a generative exercise. That evening’s prompt was “a time you crossed a boundary.” I had just the day before taken my friend to her appointment, and I was trying to make sense of how I felt. In learning so much of her body’s past and present, I had become an interloper, someone who knew more than I ought to. The compressed, single-paragraph structure was innate to the content: a medical history condensed to one page; the distillation of a life to a column of check-boxes; the small, stuffy exam room where we hung on the surgeon’s every word, holding our breath.
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