__This is how we celebrate our last Valentine’s Day together: I draw a heart in spermicide on my diaphragm. The gel forms a protective seal that keeps him away. Inside my body it joins the conference of chemicals, circulates, makes friends. I’m here to keep her from getting pregnant, it boasts. To which the chemotherapy laughs, I don’t think you need to worry.
__Hers is the same voice that says “your immunoglobulins came back normal,” that says, “your lungs sound healthy,” that asks, “are you taking a multi-vitamin?” that informs me, “you have a nice cervix.” I wonder what it would be like to have a mean cervix.
__Hers is the same voice that says, “At twenty-four, your chances of having breast cancer are very, very slim,” that says, “having lumpy breasts is normal,” that says, “if you were in your forties…in your thirties, even, I’d do a biopsy. But we might just want to sit on this one for awhile. Wait and see.”
__Justin’s stopping-starting keeps me from sleeping. He cranes his neck to see around a semi dribbling fluid. I change the radio station,
“When are the dedications? I thought…are we out of range?”
“You missed them. You were sleeping.”
“I was never sleeping.”
__This is how my father reacts to me introducing them: asking Justin for haggis. “I’ve always wanted to try it. My ex-wife, uh, Leah’s mother, would never…well, you know. She just wasn’t very…”
I interrupt, “I think it looks like something that came out of a seasick cat.”
My father says, “Why would there be a seasick cat?”
This is how they bond. Just them. Old dad, new boyfriend, Scottish cuisine.
__In Invermere, the gas station rejects the credit card for our joint account. “It’s probably just a mix up at the bank,” Justin says, “You should call them.”
I say, “I should call them?”
He uses his private card, from a separate bank, which swipes successfully. He buys the melt-in-your-mouth soft Cheetos, beef jerky, an 8-pack of Kotex, $20.03 worth of gas. “You can just pay me back,” he says.
I say, “I can just pay you back?”
__His is the same voice that says, “I haven’t had a real girlfriend, ever,” that asks, “can I kiss you?” that imitates Oscar the Grouch when he’s pissed me off, that recites quasi-sexual haikus on our eleven-month anniversary. “Tell your friends your boyfriend writes you poetry.”
__His is the same voice that says, “You think you feel what? Come here. They feel fine to me. Perfect. As usual. Maybe even bigger.”
__There is no such thing as not knowing. I knew from the moment I dropped the insert from the box of tampons, before I unfolded it, before I stared at the cartoon women holding their arms above their heads, squeezing their nipples, moving their fingers in larger and larger concentric circles. Looking for what I knew was there.
Cleavage: The Push-Up Version
Theanna Bischoff on writing Cleavage
History
I fold and refold the Okanagan map in my hands, blue river veins. As a child, I would repeat my own name over and over until it sounded foreign on my tongue. Maybe it can work backwards too—if I say ex-boyfriend enough, it will start to sound familiar.
Cleavage emerged originally as a short story which was the final assignment in a creative writing class at the University of Calgary. Originally, it centered primarily around the road trip taken by Leah and Justin, and the awkward drive home after having broken up. While working on Cleavage, I’d just started researching my psychology undergraduate thesis in psycho-oncology – the psychology of having and dealing with cancer. I think the primary goal of a writer is to create and explore complexity, and an illness certainly intensifies emotions, both negative and positive; it also creates a lot of reorganization and renegotiation of one’s life. Combining a cancer diagnosis at a young age with an unstable long-term relationship between two incompatible twenty-somethings gave me lots to work with; so much so that, when the short story version of Cleavage was handed in, the feedback I got said it read more like a novel waiting to happen. The goal of the following year’s class (Novel Length Manuscript) became making it happen.
Fact vs. Fiction
Once, during a particularly angsty bout of teenagehood, Sabine stole all the tampons from my purse. This was the three and a half days after the boy I like performed a song during a school pep rally, the sort of ‘wah-wah’ rock ‘n roll with another girl’s name in it. I went down into the ravine behind our house and sat with my feet in the stream for a long time, twiddling the sludgy leaves with my toes. I remember being totally eight-tenths of the way to killing myself.
I’ve told friends that I’ve met since writing Cleavage that they’re lucky they met me afterwards, because I can guarantee they’re not interwoven into the novel in some way. Much like Cleavage is a patchwork quilt of Leah’s life and thoughts, the novel has served as a hodge-podge of my own experiences. Those who know me very well can find pieces of my life within the novel: I did live in a shady basement suite (nicknamed the Hobbit Hole for its low ceilings); I did once visit a psychic who forgot my name mid-session; my parents are divorced; I do own a cat; I do ride the C-train facing the opposite direction; I do read the Sun as opposed to the Herald. Those who know me will also likely find pieces of themselves and significant moments, albeit disguised, interwoven within the text. I won’t embarrass anyone by saying what parts belong to whom.
At the same time, I made a point to deviate from real-life events in specific ways. While my psycho-oncology research was on ovarian cancer in older adults, I chose breast cancer for Leah and made her young so that her story remained distinct from the narratives in my thesis. Additionally, Leah was a fun character to write in that she and I have a few significant differences, such as her fear of intimacy, and her lack of ambition and motivation toward her job. Furthermore, I’ve never experienced a serious illness. Having cancer gives Leah permission, in a sense, to do and say a lot of things that aren’t typically acceptable. Modern society really emphasizes rationality and keeping one’s emotions in check, but with Leah, I was able to really explore the dark side of a person’s psyche, and the cynical things we all think but don’t say aloud.
Cancer
I am sick of the pink ribbons. Slap a pink ribbon on stationery, stuffed poodles, bracelets, toques, car windshields, lapels. Silly, smiling women walking for a cure, shouting empowerment in the air, clutching their mothers and daughters to their chests. They think the pink ribbons are points – collect enough and breast cancer will disappear. They don’t understand. This game has endless levels. You can play as long as you want.
I’ve referred to Cleavage as my anti-thesis because the research I did that year essentially talked about life lessons learned from cancer, and how one can triumph over and grow from this diagnosis. However, the women I interviewed also expressed the view that talking about their negative feelings and fears was discouraged, and that the “Pink Culture” of women’s cancers focuses more on ribbons and raising money as though this will somehow make all the bad parts of cancer go away. While some individuals may be able to integrate a cancer diagnosis into their lives and make sense of it, having an illness is still a serious, life-changing stressor that, as I’ve said before, severely complicates one’s life. In Leah, I wanted to express the dark side of cancer and the pain it causes (essentially the view that cancer patients often feel they need to hide to protect their family and friends).
Early Drafts / Deleted Scenes
In its short story version, none of the characters had names except for Leah, and characters who had died or were about to die (e.g., Adelaide Kaltenbach, Leah’s cat Eightball, the list of the sick at church, etc.), to emphasize Leah’s self-identification with death. However, this proved problematic as the story got longer. It gets confusing, for example, in cases of dialogue between two individuals of the same gender (at which point one starts to run out of distinguishing pronouns). Cleavage was probably half to three-quarters completed when Leah’s friends and family acquired monikers.
At one point, I also experimented with a scene from Justin’s perspective, which my editor effectively squelched, as it was too discordant with the rest of the text.
More of the Push Up Version can be found at the back of Cleavage