Ten days, I tell Annie, my lover, that night in bed. She’s lightly touching my bare back and reading a book, coincidentally, by Rachel Carson. Carson’s evocations on the poisoned earth are fitting, but they seem too large right now for my little life. I’m trying to be like my cat, purring to Annie’s touch, being here in this bed as though I have, in fact, flown from the exam room and landed in my life’s homemade quilt.

But I can’t sustain a sense of being present. A loop tape of the doctor giving me two different versions of the news plays over and over. My heart beats like an old film reel flapping around and around after the film has ended but no one is there to turn off the projector.

Dr. McFinney has two different looks in each version in my mind’s eye. In the first version, her tall body slopes into the room, with knotted hair and wrinkled white coat. Coffee on her breath and eyes averted, she tells me I have cancer and that furthermore I’m pre-menopausal so I should take every precaution, including a mastectomy, radiation, and chemo and that furthermore with a maternal aunt who died of breast cancer I shouldn’t hold out much hope. I feel this scene in my body—my legs, arms, and head tingle so insistently that something in me separates, as though half of me has walked out into the hallway and left the other half behind.

When the tape loops to the next version, Dr. McFinney is very rested. Her twin two-year-olds slept through the night, so her white coat is crisp and properly buttoned. Her stethoscope hangs authoritatively from her willowy neck, and her brown hair sways at her shoulders, gray threads combed through like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Her gift to me unwraps in her smile and settled eyes: “Just as I thought, a mere premenstrual breast.”

At the amusement park on the beach a few blocks from our house, a saltwater taffy machine’s movements pull a wad of rubbery candy out to its stretching point then back again. Its beginnings and endings intersect, a moebius strip in sticky motion. Like that taffy, I am repeatedly pulled apart and put back together, in the milliseconds it takes the mind to fool the body into believing it has experienced the future over and over again.

A few days into the wait, my heart occasionally races and I’m vaguely nauseous off and on, as though I have a teenage crush. I can’t concentrate for long—can’t write, can’t read much of anything except junk mail fliers. One afternoon I see auras around the juicer, the rose bush, and even my neighbor who, in her raggedy orange bathrobe picks up the newspaper off the walk at 2 p.m.

Annie has great news: our friends can’t go to the Indigo Girls concert and so are giving us their tickets. These are coveted tickets, for the Indigos hold court as an immensely popular duo, who happen to be lesbians, playing in a small, sold-out venue in our very lesbian town. I have a feeling that somehow Annie finagled these tickets to distract and entertain me, but I don’t ask. I know she’s worried and that my nervous energy and talk of seeing auras around the rose bush is driving her nuts.

Dressing for the concert, I quickly put on my bra, avoiding contact with “the spot.” My breasts are rather large, a 38C on my 5’8 frame. Usually they are like breathing: I don’t much notice them unless I’m physically exerting myself. For running I wear two jog bras to avoid what I only half-jokingly call “boob sprain.” Once I ran a couple of blocks with a regular bra on, and my right breast ached for a week. Another candidate to add to the “potential causes” list.