“Jolie’s Disclosure of Preventive Mastectomy Highlights Dilemma”
—The New York Times, May 14, 2013
Dear Angelina,
First, thank you. If it hadn’t been for you, my sister would’ve
never called me, gutted, to say I’m BRCA positive. And you might be
too! I rolled the dice: landed the wrong side of 50/50. Now, I hold a sturdy
future in my hands, alchemized by clean scalpels & warm casseroles &
a spidery, noisy mutation muted under scars and flannel. You were still
with Brad then. And your kids so little: Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh. Their
tiny hands so tight in yours as you navigated airports & sunny hospital
corridors in Beverly Hills. It’s so gray
here. You cannot imagine. The sky like dishwater, skim milk,
smoke. My son was just heading off to college when my results confirmed
what I already knew. We couldn’t tell him, though; we couldn’t send him
off to college with such news: how could we? So we tiptoed through
the wrenching drop off, our station wagon flashing in the street until it
was time to go. You might be surprised
how often I think of you, sitting at my desk as snow pelts down
outside the window. I admire your big, smart run forward against cancer.
You lost your mother so young. I looked her up: Marcheline Bertrand.
Who everyone thought was French: her name! But no. She’d grown up
in a bowling alley. In Illinois! You look just like her; it’s startling. But you
have your father’s lips. Your mother’s dimples. Her tender urge to feed
the world. Hold the door open for the lost and lonelies. I lost
my mother, too. A house cleaner of prodigious talents. Stitched quilts, knit
boodle slippers, wallpapered every room in her house with tiny flowers, pastel
polka dots, clusters of apples in the kitchen. Midwestern as sweet corn, there was no
mistaking her for French. Still. Losing a mother doesn’t make it easy, right?
To amputate your breasts in the name of life? Trust me: I will not call you lucky. I
wonder if you miss them. Their soft natural sway, their glorious warmth, their wink
of cream and pink? Do you? For months I’ve tried to find
the right word for the simple curse of our spoiled genetics. Maybe
you already have. Maybe it’s deleterious. Or delirious. Maybe it’s pie in the face. Or
maybe it’s nothing we can say.
Love and gratitude,
Anne Panning
Brockport, NY
ANNE PANNING recently published her first memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss. She has also published a novel, Butter, as well as a short story collection, The Price of Eggs, and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has also published short work in places such as Brevity (5x), Prairie Schooner, The Florida Review, Quarterly West, Kenyon Review, and River Teeth. Her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport and is working on her next memoir, Bootleg Barber: A Daughter’s Memoir.
Midwest Review 