Milk Cancer a Short Story by Cassandra Felten
Milk Cancer
When Lucille heard, at the age of seventy-whatever, that she had lung cancer, her response to her solemn doctor was, “Ah, yes.”
It was never going to be a shock to her; she had smoked cigarettes daily since she was 15 years old. The shock, as her lifelong friend Barbara said once she heard the news, was that it “had taken your lungs so long to realize! Ha ha ha!”
Barbara’s laugh was strange—throaty, but very high-pitched. She sounded like a little girl choking on a glass of milk she’d downed too quickly. Barbara loved milk, and the other thing she said about Lucille’s diagnosis was, “If I got cancer from consuming too much of anything, it would be milk cancer! Ha ha ha ha ha!”
Lucille, sitting across from Barbara at her friend’s dining room table, did not laugh along at her jokes, but not because she didn’t find them funny; she did see the strange humor in her gloomy situation, and she wished that she could laugh, but laughing had become painful. Instead, she said, “Thanks for being here.” Barbara didn’t seem to hear her over her laugh.
Lucille pulled a cigarette out of her purse. Barbara stopped laughing and glared at her. “Really? Still? At least take it outside, please.”
---
Lucille met Barbara on the first day of first grade. They were sitting next to each other in the classroom, and Lucille whiffed an odor from her classmate that reminded her of that time her dad had taken her camping. The teacher was calling out each student’s name; when she read Barbara’s name, she asked the brown-haired, pig-tailed girl, “Do you go by Barb?”
This was the first time that Lucille had heard Barbara’s laugh: “Ha ha ha ha ha haa!” was her response. Once she caught her breath, she managed to choke out, “No, no!”
Lucille’s name was next—which she had almost missed because she was still staring at Barbara beside her, whose face was sort of red—and the teacher asked the same question of her: “Do you prefer Lucy?”
“No,” Lucille snapped as soon as she heard that shortened name.
As the teacher continued the rollcall, Lucille turned back to Barbara. “Hey, how come you said no?”
Barbara appeared to still be recovering from her fit of milky laughter. “Huh?” she breathed. “Oh, I don’t like ‘Barb.’ I don’t want people calling me that.”
“Neat. Me too.”
“Ha ha! Why would people call you Barb if your name is Lucille? Ha haa!”
“Barbara and Lucille! Be quiet!” the teacher shouted.
Lucille waited a minute before whispering to Barbara, “She’s moldy, isn’t she?” Lucille giggled at herself. Barbara, incapable of any other form of laughter, let out another choking-on-milk sound.
---
Lucille resolved to think about her new diagnosis as little as possible. This was difficult because Barbara had apparently resolved to speak of it as much as possible.
“I do wish you’d have quit after high school, Lucille,” Barbara said at Lucille’s a week after the cancer diagnosis.
“Mhm.”
“You know that I’ve always just cared about you, right?”
“Yes.”
A pause. “I’m really going to miss you, Lucille.”
Lucille could not look directly at Barbara. She stared unfocusedly at her friend’s hands, which cupped a glass full of milk.
“Hey,” Lucille said, still looking at the glass. “That’s got to be your fourth glass of milk since you got here. You better be careful, you chain milk drinker!” Lucille could not stop from laughing at herself this time, which led to a small coughing fit. Painfully, she forced through her coughs, “You’ll get that milk cancer!”
Lucille, keeled over from coughing, looked up at Barbara through tears in her eyes. Her friend was not laughing. She guessed that the worried look Barbara was giving her was because of Lucille’s cough, so she tried to stop. “Look, I’ve got probably a few months left… That’s what that doctor said. Anyway, I don’t know if I’d even trust the prick; he seems like a dumbass. Do you know that when that blonde, skinny whore nurse walked in he kept darting his eyes around like he couldn’t look at her for too long or he’d probably have fucked her right there!”
This, at least, produced a smile from Barbara.
---
One time, in sixth grade, when Lucille and Barbara were eating lunch together in the school cafeteria, Barbara shot milk out of her nose.
Their friend Mary (whose full name was Marianne, but she insisted that everyone shorten it, against the advice of her full-name friends) had told “the funniest joke” that she had heard from her parents about a man who smoked; he had told his friends again and again that he would quit, and when he died, his friends said, “Well, he did it; he finally quit!
Barbara burst into a fit of laughter: “Haaaa ha ha ha haa ha ha!” She had been gulping down her small carton of milk, and when she began laughing, some of it came back out through her mouth, but some exited through her nose. All of their friends at the table laughed harder at this sight than at Mary’s joke, including Barbara.
Lucille did not laugh with the others. “I don’t think that’s a very funny joke,” she said over the sound of the schoolgirls’ incessant, loud giggling.
Barbara managed to say back, “And I think you get what you deserve.”
---
Barbara came over unannounced more often now that she knew her best friend had cancer. How inconsiderate, Lucille thought. She’d said once, “Don’t your daughters want to see you sometime, too? Don’t start giving me all of your attention.” Barbara had replied, “Oh, of course, I see my daughters a lot now... I just thought it would be good of me to come more often, you know, having no daughters of your own!”
Months after the diagnosis and months after Lucille had expected to live, Barbara arrived at Lucille’s very late. Lucille lived alone, so she made sure to check the lock of every window and door twice before bed. She was already under her covers when she heard the knock on the door.
Lucille hurried to the door to peek through the peephole. It was Barbara. Her heart calmed, but she had already lost her breath.
She unlocked and opened the door. “Jesus Christ, Barbara. What?” she managed before a coughing fit.
“I’m so sorry, Lucille! I just couldn’t sleep! I’m so worried about you.” Lucille’s coughing fit worsened. “I just thought that…with everything…you might want some company. Right?”
When Lucille’s coughing did not stop, Barbara helped her to the kitchen table and into a chair. Finally, Lucille spoke: “Barbara, listen, that’s real sweet of you, but it’s the middle of the night.”
“No problem for me! I’m a night owl, anyway.” When Lucille did not respond, she added, less enthusiastically, “I just figured you might want some company. I know I would.”
---
Lucille had tried her first cigarette in high school. At fifteen, she was well-versed in the art of stealing from her mother, a divorced woman who showed her love by handing her daughter a wad of cash every weekend and commanding her to go out and do something.
But Lucille always wanted more. She usually stole more cash to buy herself and her friends more sweets and junk food or to catch a flick. One day, while rummaging through the chaotic insides of her mother’s purse for the wallet, Lucille absently grabbed a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Without giving her next actions a second thought, she shook out one cigarette, ran to the kitchen to find the lighter in a drawer, and lit the cigarette. She did nothing but watch the end burn at first. As she heard the front door opening, she took her first unsteady drag. Her coughs, she thought, sounded a bit like Barbara’s laugh.
Her mother came into the kitchen and said indifferently, “I thought I smelled smoke. What are you doing with that, Lucy?”
“Mom! What the hell! Don’t call me that shit!” Lucille yelled through more coughs.
“Damn, Lucy, why are you so sensitive? You can’t even smoke without crying!” Her mother laughed as tears welled in Lucille’s eyes.
Lucille said, still choked up from the smoke and, now, tears, “And why are you so unlovable, Debby?” She threw the rest of the lit cigarette down on the kitchen tile and stormed out.
After this, her mother would tell her out of parental protocol not to smoke, but when Lucille kept stealing cigarettes, her mother pretended not to notice.
---
When Barbara told Lucille that she had breast cancer, Lucille laughed, even though it hurt to. “Wow, Barbara, you were right about the milk cancer!” Lucille’s laugh was now indistinguishable from her coughs. As she listened to her own laugh, she wished she was hearing Barbara’s. Barbara did not laugh.
The two were sitting side-by-side at Lucille’s kitchen table four months after Lucille’s own diagnosis. Their hands were on the table, and each of them had a Marlboro-logoed shot glass full of milk, because Lucille hadn’t done the dishes yet. Barbara opened her mouth to say something; all she got out was, “Luci-…”
Lucille recoiled. She willed Barbara to finish her name; if she couldn’t even finish her name, it was like she was giving up. On herself? On Lucille? “Barbara?” She wondered suddenly if Barbara had known about her cancer for a while.
Lucille tried another joke, but Barbara burst into tears. She knocked over the glass of milk she’d been holding onto the table.
---
Lucille picked up the habit of smoking a cigarette every day soon after her first. Barbara was unimpressed: “I hate the smell! It’s embarrassing.” She would complain every time Lucille could convince her to join her smoking buddies after school. Ignored by everybody, Barbara would end up plugging her nose in silent defiance, facing away from the mingling cloud of the teenagers’ smoke.
In their senior year of high school, Lucille stood in a circle with her smoking friends in a quiet alleyway. Barbara stood off to the side, leaning against the brick wall and pretending to ignore them back, though she could not stop herself from laughing with them at their stories and jokes.
The youngest boy of the group, a freshman, was telling the “true story” of how he got his Labrador to smoke an entire cigarette. The dog, he claimed, hacked and coughed for a week afterwards, which annoyed the boy’s father so much that he threw the dog across the living room.
Barbara couldn’t hold back her laughter anymore, and her unique sound cut through the rest of the group. She was still ignored by everyone except Lucille, who walked over to her and said, “Hey! Why don’t you just join us? You could tell a story, too.”
Barbara responded, “Well, I don’t have one.” Lucille studied her friend’s face: her slightly-turned-up nose, like she was always looking down on you, even though Lucille was a few inches taller; her pale, thin lips in their natural, resting state: pursed, like she was judging something in her head.
Suddenly, Barbara said, “Oh, your breath stinks!” and pulled away.
“I’m sorry... Do you just want to leave? You don’t have to stick around us.”
Barbara hesitated. Her pursed lips quivered as she thought. “I don’t want to go home. You know I don’t.”
“But I don’t know why. Can’t I just come with you to your place today? Just once?”
“No, Lucille. You still can’t come to my house.”
“I will be nice, I swear! I won’t even call anyone a whore!”
“I call my family whores. You know it’s not that.”
“Well then what is it?”
“Look, I don’t want to go home. But I don’t want to be here either, so...I’ll see you at school tomorrow.” Barbara left Lucille standing with her back to her other friends, who didn’t notice either of them.
---
Lucille went to Barbara’s funeral about a year after learning of her friend’s diagnosis, even though she had been dreading it. She was exhausted after her surgery to remove part of her left lung and did not want to try being civil to people she didn’t know, but she dragged herself out of the house anyway. For Barbara.
She had never met Barbara’s family before. She knew that Barbara had an older sister who should be here. Nobody seemed to notice Lucille’s presence until after the service.
“Hi there, welcome,” said one bubbly older woman. Her demeanor seemed strange. Milk isn’t supposed to be bubbly, and neither is a person at a funeral. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. “I am the deceased’s sister. I don’t think I recognize you. You knew Barb?”
Lucille flinched at the shortened name. Had her friend’s whole family called her that? Had they given up on her from the day she was born? And what else did Lucille never know about her best friend? “No,” she replied. “I didn’t know Barb.” She walked back to her car.
