LOM Chapter 40. Run-Walk

School even seemed uneventful for a few days, until Strunkel managed to break the silence.

“Before we start with today’s lesson,” she said. “I want to tell you that this month is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. This is something very personal to me – both my mother and my older sister have had breast cancer. My mother passed away from it, and my sister has undergone a double-mastectomy and two courses of radiation in the last five years. So breast cancer awareness is a cause very close to my heart, and I have been active in working to find a cure. Later in the month I will be participating in the Eliza McKutcheon Five-K Run-Walk to Find a Cure for Breast Cancer. I can’t ask you for money, but I will give you the opportunity to sponsor me for the race. You can sign up to pledge per mile, or for a fixed donation. The form is on this clipboard” – she held up a clipboard – “which I will circulate.”

A student raised a hand. “Have you had the test to see if you have the gene?”

“No,” said Strunkel. “But given my family history, I know that I am likely to develop cancer at some point.”

“My aunt had breast cancer,” said another student. “But she only needed surgery to remove the tumor.”

Pete leaned towards me to whisper. “Did she say she’s been working to find a cure?” he asked.

“She does it during her planning period,” I said. Pete laughed.

“Mr. Peary, is there something you wish to share with the rest of the class?”

“No, ma’am.” Never had I spoken a truer word to her.

“Please, do tell,” she said. “I insist.”

“I just said that you do it during your planning period,” I confessed.

“Do what, Mr. Peary?”

“Work to find a cure,” I said. A few of my classmates chortled.

“You doubt my sincerity?”

“No, but I do kinda doubt your ability,” I said. “I mean, if someone finds a cure for breast cancer, it probably won’t be a high-school English teacher. Not that I have anything against English teachers – I just don’t think a cure for breast cancer is likely to be within the scope of your expertise.”

“This is a cause that’s very close to my heart, Mr. Peary,” she said. “I like to think that everything I do to raise money and awareness for breast cancer is my contribution towards the cure.”

“I guess I never realized it was a cause,” I said. “I thought it was a disease.

“That’s very unfeeling of you,” she said. “This disease kills a lot of women.”

When she called me unfeeling, I felt something inside of me give way. Call it judgment, politeness, compassion, whatever – it disappeared. “Lots of people die from lots of other diseases,” I said. “I guess I don’t see what makes breast cancer so special.”

She glared at me. “For a long time, the medical establishment ignored breast cancer, and there was very little progress towards treating and curing the disease. In the meantime, millions of women died quietly and ashamed of their bodies. So yes – raising awareness and increasing funding has indeed become a cause, one that both women and men should embrace and support. This money will go towards research to help find a cure.”

“Isn’t mastectomy a cure?” I asked. “I mean, I’m sure it’s not pleasant, but the breasts aren’t an essential organ like the heart or liver. Especially if you’re already past your child-bearing years, it’s not like a woman needs breasts to survive.” Some of my classmates giggled.

“That’s very chauvinist of you, to reduce breasts to a single purpose, to pretend that a woman could part with such an essential part of her self-image so easily. You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman, and no appreciation of what it’s like to have breasts.”

“I appreciate breasts – really,” I said, to more twittering from the class. “It’s not that I don’t respect your concerns, but it just isn’t fair to ask your students to contribute money to your charity. Clearly, there’s some risk of retribution if we choose not to.”

She put a hand to her chest. “Oh, I do apologize, Mr. Peary. I had not realized there was anything controversial about asking you to have a little sympathy for women facing a serious disease.”

“It’s not my sympathy you’re asking for,” I said, “it’s my money. And even if it was sympathy you wanted, what makes you think you’re first in line?”

“Is your sympathy really so limited, Mr. Peary?”

“I can’t say that I have much of either one to spare right now.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to reconsider,” she said, drawing out her referral pad, “in detention.”

“You’re actually punishing me for not giving you money?”

“No, I’m giving you detention for disrupting my class,” she said. “And insubordination.”

I walked up to her podium to take my referral slip.

“I would expect more sensitivity from you,” she whispered to me, “even if the illness you have isn’t fatal. Whatever inconvenience it may pose, it doesn’t give you the right to disrespect me.”

“No more than the illness you don’t have gives you the right to extort money from me,” I replied.

I took my pink referral to the dean and explained to him my side of the story. He assigned me thirty minutes of after-school detention. When I returned from the office, I learned that Strunkel had chosen the moment of my absence to explain the assignment for our term papers. Everyone was to choose a novel from a list – each person a different novel, and Strunkel chose mine for me: Little Women.

Detention saw me locked up in the cafeteria with the worst of the mouth-breathing imbeciles in my school. Of course, a mandatory toilet visit made me late for detention, which tacked on another thirty minutes automatically. I sat in one corner of the room and tried to read, but could not fix my gaze to the textbook for more than a few lines.

I was still angry when I arrived home, and loathed the thought of talking it out with my mom. I called Travis and asked to come over. He told me that the door would be unlocked, that I should let myself in.

When I got there, I found him sitting in his chair in the living room.

“Tough day at the office?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I sat down on the couch. “My Lit. teacher is all thirty-one flavors of retarded. She passed around a sign-up sheet to sponsor her for a breast cancer walk-a-thon, and I got into an argument with her about it. So now I’m a bad person – I’m a ‘chauvinist’. After all the shit I get for missing her class or being tardy or not finishing homework on time, and she thinks I care about her tits? I told her that I felt like she wasn’t being sensitive to my illness, and she basically told me my illness doesn’t matter because it’s not fatal. She didn’t accuse me of faking it, but I know that’s what she’s thinking.”

“Does she have breast cancer?” Travis asked.

“No, but her mom died from it and her sister got it, so she’s sure she’s gonna get it. Like a fucking walk-a-thon will save her somehow. At this point, honestly, nothing would make me happier than to see her tits fall off in class. Like, if she was writing at the blackboard and turned around and suddenly they were on the floor. That would give me tremendous pleasure. I told her that lots of people die from other things, and she looked at me like I had killed her mom and sister with only my teeth and bare hands. She told me that breasts were important to women’s self-image, so that was why they couldn’t just cut them off.”

“It’s synecdoche.”

“Cynic-ducky?” I repeated.

“Synecdoche,” he said, “it means the use of one part of a thing to represent the whole. In this case, the breast for the woman; breast cancer for all of the ills that beset women. If I remember correctly, breast cancer isn’t even the leading cause of death for women. I’d have to look it up again.”

“I don’t think it matters to Strunkel,” I said. “It killed her mom, so she’s enough afraid of it that she has to shake down her students for this charity. I doubt it will even do her any good.”

“You’re probably right,” he said. “I have this theory about disease charities, how they’re all started by rich people. See, if a rich person gets sick, they get first rate medical care because they can afford it. They don’t spend much time in the emergency room, waiting for some bureaucrat to navigate her insurance paperwork, trying to figure out where else he could send her. A rich person never has to worry about finding a doctor who would take Medicaid, or worry about paying for medicine they can’t afford. Rich people don’t have to deal with that shit, so when they get sick with something like cancer, they see the problem as just the lack of a cure.

“A poor person, on the other hand, maybe doesn’t have regular checkups, or can’t afford the medicine, or ends up in the emergency room for stuff an office visit could prevent. That person’s problem is access to care.

“But all these foundations and charities get started by rich people who have the resources to devote to these things. Poor people don’t start a charities, because they don’t have the education or finances or contacts. So the charities end up focusing on the rich person’s problem – finding research for the cure – instead of the poor person’s problem – getting access to medical care. A rich guy falls off his polo pony and gets a brain injury, and his wife decides that the problem is that we don’t know how to fix brain injuries. So she starts a brain injury charity, in hopes of a brighter tomorrow when polo ponies are safe for everyone who can afford one.

“The extra irony is that the poor person’s problem is more readily solved than the rich person’s, so all this money basically gets thrown down a rabbit hole, when it could be used to help someone who can’t afford care manage their condition better. And even if the charity succeeds, the cure is likely to be too expensive for poor people to afford it – so the poor person is doubly screwed.”

“That’s quite a theory,” I said.

“I wouldn’t share it with your teacher, if I were you.”

“Hells no,” I agreed.

I stayed with Travis until dinner time, and then went home to find my mom in the kitchen.

“Wesley, I just got off the phone with Mrs. Strunkel,” my mom informed me. “She says that you have been ridiculing and mocking her. She says that you are making fun of women with breast cancer.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I was pointing out her hypocrisy.”

“First of all, your job is not to point out your teacher’s hypocrisy,” she said. “It’s to learn. And second, you could find better ways of doing so than mocking breast cancer.”

“She doesn’t have breast cancer,” I said. “She just has family members with breast cancer.”

“Is it true you spent the afternoon in detention?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“For crying out loud, Wesley – Aunt Myrtle died of breast cancer,” she said. She meant one of her aunts by marriage – my great-aunt, whom I had never met. “You need to apologize to Mrs. Strunkel.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“You do – and you need to make a goodwill gesture along with that apology. Pledge a few dollars per mile to her walk-a-thon.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m not going to -”

“I’ll pay for it, Wesley – it won’t be your money.”

“It’s not the money, it’s the principle.”

My mom would not be dissuaded. “She’s in a position to make your life miserable. You need to play nice with her.”

“You mean, ‘more miserable’,” I said.

“Just a few dollars per mile.”

“It’s a five-k; they don’t sell it per mile.” I saw mom tighten her jaw. “Fine, a couple dollars per kilometer.” I traipsed up to my bedroom and shut the door for the night.

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