Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? by Erica Orloff Page B

cheaply or wore their makeup wrong. Their eyeliner wasn’t drawn on quite right. Or they threw themselves at men and made fools of themselves. Whatever their faults, I spotted them. Whatever mine were, I obsessed over them. I was the center of my own universe. I saw all of us women in some sort of competition for men. If I walked into a room dressed sexy and felt all eyes upon me, I won. If I walked in overdressed or underdressed, or with my perm frizzed out, I lost. Maybe I am too young. I missed the bra-burning women’s rights era. Other women weren’t my sisters. They were the enemy.
    Now I go to parties and feel the irony. The perm is gone. So is my hair. I’m bald. Even my eyebrows are gone. So there’s no comparing me to them anymore. If the other women in the room have hair, they’re beating me. But, still, now I look around, now that I have breast cancer, and I silently count to eight. I look around the room, thinking one, two, three, four…seven, eight…is she the one? A statistic of one in eight women getting breast cancer? Is she my sister? Is she going to find out that she has a lump one day and the lump is cancer and watch her world turn upside down because of this disease?
    Even more ironic is that I share my life, as my readers know, with my best friend, who is a gorgeous man—but gay. Besides the fact that his culinary skills save my children from starvation, he is whom I choose to walk through this journey with. All that competition to end up sitting on the bench.
    I have also chosen to walk through this journey with my readers, and so this is one of the more difficult columns I have ever had to write. For you see, the roulette wheel has spun, and number eight has come up for me. I have breast cancer.
    My readers have been there for me through bad dates, and even a stalker, through bad hair days, and a husband caught cheating. And this time I expect it to be no different. But this time I am more aware that I may not survive, and that even if I do, some of my sisters will not. I do not want these sisters. I want to, in some strange way, go back in time to frizzy perms and flirtations across the room, not this. Not one in eight contracting breast cancer. Not time running out.
    For every reader who wants to send me a getwell card and flowers and scarves and books, I ask that instead you donate one dollar to research. One dollar to make sure this sisterhood is ended…and I can go back to hating my competition.

16
    Lily
    C hemotherapy is chemical warfare. You hope the chemicals, the same poisons that make your hair fall out and make you vomit and feel so tired even your eyelashes hurt, win. You hope your body loses.
    In the beginning, Michael came with me to each session and held my hand as they started my I.V., and we watched the steady drip snake its way into my arm. However, after a couple of sessions, I decided I was a big enough girl to be dropped off.
    “I’ll call you on your cell when you can pick me up.”
    “You sure you’re okay alone?”
    “Yeah.”
    The cancer center where I get my treatment lines up lounge chairs in rooms. They want you to be comfortable for your chemical warfare. Our doctors tell us to bring personal CD players and music to relax to or music that will help us fight. They are into imagery. They tell us to picture Pac-Man gangs eating the bad cells, or little soldiers going to war. I found the whole idea preposterous, as if having a video game in my body would help me beat cancer. But I tell myself I will do whatever they tell me. If a fucking Pac-Man improves my odds, then bring on the little disembodied eating head that makes that weird noise as he munches away the cancer.
    Usually, at the treatment place, I got my own cubicle-type room, with my very own lounge chair. Nurses brought Michael sodas and typical hospital snacks—crackers. It’s a regular party. But when I went for my third chemo treatment, the reception area was wall-to-wall bald people, and they asked