Peggy Duffy

Challenge With a Capital C

My co-worker sits across from my desk in a plain office chair, a woman who over three years has become a good friend. How was your week? I begin, wanting to catch up after my vacation. I have breast cancer, she says, amid tears. She is an emotional person. I am not, but suddenly I am in her arms and crying too. She curbs my rare display of emotion with reassuring words. The doctor says it is cancer with a little ‘c’, she says. The treatment will be a challenge, but I’ll be fine. That little ‘c’ stays with me all day, the weight of an anvil, a Challenge with a Capital C.

A year ago, maybe two, I wrote a short story about a girl in Nazi Germany, saved by the lie of age her mature body allowed her to tell, now a woman fingering a small lump beneath her armpit. The history is real, the girl invented, as are her overly large breasts. The woman is no particular person, rather a creative amalgam facing the dread of discovery all women I know share. I fall into her world and in the dreamlike state of the writer, words appear like fine grains of sand, illuminated by the light of imagination, as I recount this new tale.

Fall back in time many more years, an earlier version of that same writer sits with a notebook and pen scribbling, so as not to forget, the experiences of another good friend with breast cancer. I am relating her story, writing it down to preserve it because she is no longer around to do the telling. I don’t want her to be forgotten. That is what I tell myself as I write this tale, one wrought with unrealized hopes and fruitless dreams. My thoughts wander into uncharted territory, strolling off the narrative path, searching for my place in the story while I walk this dark trail. That story is written and rewritten between long lapses of time, striving for the right tone and voice, seeking purpose and meaning.

Almost a decade later, that story finally emerges, fully shaped and formed, accepted for publication in an anthology of similarly themed stories. The other story, the fictional one, has already appeared in print. They are but small pieces of me, these stories, specks of dust in their initial creation, fashioned by the blow of the writer’s metaphoric hammer, molded from observation and the heat of experience, curved by the design of imagination. The woman I created with the big breasts reaches out for the touch of her adult daughter. I gave her hope, what the woman I once was, a younger version of myself, tried to discover.

Yesterday my co-worker, a friend, a fellow woman, comes into my office, takes a seat in a plain office chair. Fear strides in with her, sits in my lap. I rise to hasten it away, but it cannot escape the windowless room. Shared now, we stand and embrace it, my good friend and I. Together we attempt to keep it at bay, one letter at a time, this cancer with a small ‘c’, this story I tell, a journey wrought with bends and twists, forged for meaning, the weight of the hammer heavy upon the anvil.

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Peggy Duffy's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, Notre Dame Magazine, and Brevity. She has an MFA from George Mason University and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website is here.

My One and Only Grandmother
Peggy Duffy

My grandma was not my grandmother. She was my mother’s aunt, my great-aunt, but in the absence of any living grandparents of our own, she served as a surrogate to my sister and me. She was the real grandmother to my two cousins who lived in New Jersey, about a half hour’s drive across the George Washington Bridge from our New York home.

Home to my grandma was a one-room garden apartment with a couch in the living room that converted into her bed, a small kitchen, and a large closet you passed through to get to the bathroom. Visits were always day trips. We’d park on the street and walk up the cement sidewalk to her front door, the farthest one from the road. After a short while, we’d all pile back in the car and drive over to the adjacent town where my cousins lived.

My cousins and I liked grandma’s apartment, so different from our more traditional style houses. We also liked that she was born in 1900, making it easy to calculate her age. Although she was just in her sixties, she was very gray, very wrinkled, and extremely dowdy in both dress and bodily shape. This is not just in memory. I have the pictures to prove it.

In the pictures, she looks traditionally grandmotherly, but in real life she didn’t fit the mold. She couldn’t cook. Once when I stayed overnight, we made beef stew, a meat and potato concoction boiled in water. Her baking wasn’t any better. She served the same hard, tasteless dough balls she called sugar cookies whenever we saw her.

I saw her every month or two, and sometime during my teens became aware of our family lineage. She was the sister to my mother’s father, the man whose wife was my true grandmother, a set of grandparents whose images were preserved in a few old sepia photographs. But my grandma was the only grandmother who’d ever instructed me in the kitchen, although she hated to cook, or attempted to teach me to crochet, a skill I couldn’t master. Not being authentic did not make her any less real. She had no culinary abilities, but she fed me a lifetime of memories that would last.

The last picture I have of my grandma was taken in early 1981. She is sitting in my mother’s living room chair cradling my newborn daughter in her arms. She looks frailer but otherwise as gray, wrinkled and dowdy as I’ll always remember her. She looks very grandmotherly.

—originally appeared in A Bouquet for Grandmother

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Peggy Duffy's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, Notre Dame Magazine, and Brevity. She has an MFA from George Mason University and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website is here.