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Lily-Ray wasn't there the day they ushered the former Miss America into the Chemo Chamber to let us try on her tiara. Glenda, my number one nurse, introduced her, and she stood there in the door all blooming and toothsome. We stared. Someone clapped a couple of times and gave up on it before the motion could dislodge his or her I.V. The former Miss America, we were told, was committed to the battle against cancer. She had targeted breast cancer, and to signify this she was wearing a pink ribbon pin a few discreet inches above and to the right of her right nipple, precisely, I noticed with amusement, where my tumor had been. If I could loop my blurry pink scar in a pretty oval, it, too, could be made into a pin. Not all of us being treated that day in the Chemo Chamber had breasts, however, and those of us who did have breasts did not necessarily have tumor-laden ones like mine. Ovary, uterus, pancreas, testicle, throat, liver, lung, brain, cancer isn't fussy. But it was Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the air glowed pink with a general awareness of breast cancer. Somewhere, someone - breasts intact, doubtless - had decided that pink was the color that one turned, or turned to, or yearned for, when one was aware of breast cancer. And that same someone had decided, before that, that the breast is more attractive than the uterus or the ovary, though those organs may actually be closer to pink in hue.

The former Miss America smiled and called us yawl and invited us to try on her tiara. She told us not to be shah. We held still. Her hair and her eyelashes and her tits asserted themselves in the room as she walked carefully around in her glass slippers and her fine yellow dress, introducing herself. After the initial breathless horror, patients on the other side of the room seemed to be receiving her with great joy and gratitude and a few smarmy tears. What was I going to do when she got to me? I couldn't kick or smack her or otherwise try to injure her physically. I would end up swiping at the air with my unencumbered arm, and she would suppress a smile and call Glenda, who would call the hospital psychologist, with whom she threatened me regularly. I could spit at her, but the spit would probably fail to fly, and would dribble down my chin, and she would loom in, smiling beatifically, and wipe it off on a corner of the blanket, and everyone would murmur appreciatively. And just being surly wasn't enough. She would be expecting surly.

Lily-Ray would have known what to do. I stared at the mauve curtain beside me that usually separated us, me and Lily-Ray.

I had started in on Lily-Ray the day of my first treatment. I was standing with Nurse Glenda at the foot of what was to be my own mauve infusion recliner. Reclining in the recliner next to it was a tall bony guy wearing blue jeans and dirty running shoes and a white tee-shirt and a Red Sox baseball cap, hooked up to an I.V., his head tilted so as to make eye-to-screen contact with the small white television beckoning to him from the ceiling. I watched his face. He had promise. He looked hateful and elemental, not plump with self-affirmations and nutritional supplements.

"What's your name?" I asked him when I was settled in and Glenda had gone to get some blood or poison or acid or something.

He was watching baseball. Winter baseball. He didn't answer. I gave up. I stared at the spot where the I.V. entered my vein until Glenda returned. The first drug in my cocktail was bright red like lipstick on an old whore. Glenda spent the first twenty minutes at my side pumping it slowly into my I.V. If I felt a burning on my skin close to the I.V., she told me brightly, I should let her know, because the medicine burns the skin. Then she hooked me up with the clear medicine that dripped into me on its own.

"Everything okay?" she asked me. Her pink scrubs had hundreds of little pink accented cartoon bears all over them.

"Look at all the bears," I said, pointing at a few. "Yes, I'm all set with this, so you can take it away now and I'll have a look at the dessert menu."

"Another hour," said Glenda, and she was a pink electron, spinning off into other orbits.

"Yeah, fuck you," I said. "Fucking fuck bitch fuck."

The baseball volume went down.

"You want a name?" said the guy. "I'll give you a name."

"I don't really fucking care right now," I said. "Mr. Fucking No-Name."

I laughed. It was a hard laugh to hold onto.

"Lily," I said. "Your name is Lily."

I started laughing again. The baseball volume went up again. I laughed until I could hardly breathe. Glenda threatened to call in the hospital psychologist, and that made me laugh more. I told her I was just laughing and why didn't anyone want me to laugh ever, and she threatened again. She put some Ativan in my I.V. I waited for it to soften things, to sand down the edges, but it just slowly backed me not quite far enough away from the scene.

Lily-Ray disappeared during the fracas, leaving the baseball station on.

"What happened to him," I said gently as Glenda unhooked me and walked beside me past his chair. "Did he die?" I laughed a couple of laughs, soft heavy laughs that stayed where they were dropped.

I drove myself home in the breakdown lane, occasionally pawing at my hair, clawing it back out of my face, feeling the broken ends, how soft it was, yanking at it to feel the pain where it held to my scalp. It would start to fall precisely two weeks after my first treatment, I had been told.

A half a day after two weeks had passed I ran my fingers through my hair and my hand came back with blond strands trapped between the fingers, as though I had tried to climb my own head.

My friend Flo shaved my head for me when bald patches began to appear. We balded me in her kitchen, by candle-light.

"Look," she said after running the shaver from the center of my forehead and turning right, curving down to stop behind my left ear. "I made a road!"

Afterwards we stood together in the unlit bathroom, taking in my new image. I could hear our separate breathing rhythms. Flo petted her own thick curly hair, as though it needed comfort.

I took to wearing a gray scarf with delicate curling designs on it.

"Lily, do you have any hair under that ball cap?" I called during my second treatment, pulling on his curtain.

"Shut up. No, I don't. Shut up. I'm listening to this."

"Baseball," I said. "It's December. There is no baseball in December. You know it, and I know it."

"This is the '51 National League pennant," he said.

"Wow, that's one long pennant," I said.

I touched my right breast with my right hand, touched it right where the tumor had grown and where a scar was healing in the shape of a frown.

The tumor would have killed me. That was the thing.

"Listen, Lily," I called. "You're watching games that were played fifty years ago. The games are dead. The players are dead. The coaches are dead. The fans? Guess what? Dead. Look around you. We're not dead. I'm not dead."

"No, we're just almost dead."

"Hah!" I said. I let my head fall back on the back of the chair. I lifted my head up again.

"Come on, Lily, open your curtain. I'm lonely."

"Shut," he said, "up."

"Open your curtain. Open it."

Glenda appeared at my side.

"Hi," I said.

"Ray doesn't want his curtain open," she said.

I smiled.

"Ray," I said. "Why, Lily-Ray."

Glenda moved on. There was a moment of relative silence - one of the dead players had hit a home run, and the dead fans were cheering, and the dead broadcasters were emoting - and then Lily-Ray spoke.

"Nurse," he called. "Open my curtain please."

Glenda came over and opened the curtain, and there was Lily-Ray. He didn't turn to me, and his mouth was set in a neutral position that looked hard to maintain. I smiled. I closed my eyes.

"Cool," I said.

My third treatment I was bald and cold and weak and scoured out like a squash. The nurses spun around us.

"What are you, on roller skates?" I said to no one, or to everyone, who knew?

Nurse Wanda halted in front of me and said, "It is so great that you have kept your sense of humor."

Then there was the fat warm pink lippy smile, the head tilt. I was somewhere else, laughing darkly, planning, stringing my next words together. Keep your sense of humor, throw away the tumor.

"And do you also think it's great," I said, tilting my own head, enunciating the first and last consonants of great, "that I have decided not to cut off my ears and live alone in my basement?"

Lily-Ray started to cough right then, and the nurse was over by his side.

"You okay?" I heard her asking him. "You sure? Want a drink of water? No? You sure?"

And she was gone, and the curtain was moving gently in the displaced air.

"Want some Tang, Lily-Ray?" I whispered in his direction. "It's what the astronauts drink. No? You sure?"

I thought this was funny but didn't laugh.

Then Lily-Ray spoke, actually strung together sentences in a dreamy voice.

"I was never the type of kid to say 'I want to be an astronaut when I grow up,'" he said. "Now I want to be an astronaut."

In space it would be quieter, it would be black and white, it would be just Lily-Ray and me, floating, regaining our strength, our hair, our flesh, our precious, our previous selves.

When I woke up Lily-Ray was gone.

When I arrived for my fourth and last treatment, Lily-Ray wasn't there. Glenda pumped the red crap into me. I watched the fluid scoot down the tube and into my vein. It shouldn't go in too fast; that was why she had to pump it in like that. My ears began to ring and I was lightheaded and I gripped the recliner's armrests.

"I don't feel," said my voice. "I don't feel so."

Glenda pulled out the I.V. She touched my forehead.

I glanced over at Lily-Ray's recliner.

"I think you're all right. I think you're just," she said. And she inserted the I.V. and began to pump again.

I looked and Glenda looked at the silent television. I closed my eyes. I dozed.

"People just don't want you to say what you want to say," I said, the words heavy and dry in my mouth as my recliner rolled backwards in space. "Unless what you want to say is exactly what they want to say. Then you can say it. What you want. Otherwise you can't say what you want because nobody wants you to."

When I opened my eyes I reached over and took a fistful of Lily-Ray's curtain in my left hand and held onto it until Glenda came back and mentioned the hospital psychologist again.

"I've developed a resistance to psychologists," I answered. "Like when you take too many antibiotics and they don't work any more. It's like that. Or the psychologist could be the bacteria. That's the whole paradox of it. He could be the antibiotic or the bacteria. Get it?"

"Yeah, I get it," said Glenda.

I could tell Glenda didn't care if I agreed to see the psychologist. What she really wanted was for me to leave so that she could ravage someone else's veins. And I could understand that.

Now, I watched as the former Miss America approached me, tentatively holding out the tiara, having probably been warned about me. What would Lily-Ray do? I asked myself. It's down to the wire. What would he do? What would he do? I reached out my left hand and took the tiara without looking at it.

"Well hah thare," she said. "Whut's your name, honey?"

I stared. I looked at the I.V. tube, at the bubbles scooting along.

"Lily," I said. "Lily-Ray."

"Well Lily-Ray, would you like to try on my tiara?"

Hers was a doll's face. Hovering there at the foot of my recliner, that blank, blooming dollface was too much for me, too much for this room, too much for this world. It ought to be cut loose, given an orbit of its own.

"No," I answered her, "but I'd like to see your bikini. Are you wearing your bikini? Or didn't you shave your pubic region for today?"

Her lips, formed carefully into a winning smile, reframed her teeth so that the ends of the smile were slightly downturned, making her look predatory.

"Well that's rude."

"Well that's rude," I repeated.

She switched smiles again, blinking hard. She was going to give it another try. It was this sort of tenacity that had won her the Miss America title. But I am tenacious, too, particularly in the face of someone else's tenacity. I looked at Lily-Ray's empty recliner.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just upset. I'm very emotional right now. You see, my friend is gone."

I looked up at the ceiling, as though to indicate where he was now - secreted in the suspended ceiling, upstairs, waiting at the gates of Heaven, floating in outer space.

Her face relaxed, and she gave a head tilt and a sorry little pout.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. What was your friend's name?"

"Lily-Ray."

She allowed some air to escape.

"Lily-Ray," she said. "That's your name."

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"But Lily-Ray is such a, such an unusual name. In fact I've never heard of it in my life."

"Yes."

"You couldn't both be named Lily-Ray."

"Lily-Ray, Lily-Ray," I said. "Yes we could, yes we could."

"Oh, come on," she said, smiling as though appreciating my mischievousness. "What was your friend's name?"

"Lily-Ray," I said, pointing to myself.

"Lily-Ray," I said again, pointing first at Lily-Ray's empty recliner and then up to the ceiling and beyond.

Then the former Miss America leaned close to me so no one else could hear her.

"You're fuckin' with me," she whispered. "And I don't lahk it one bit."

"I don't lahk it one bit," I repeated, clinching the accent.

"They told me about you, and it's not mah nature to judge a person before I meet them, but they were right. You are truly disturbed."

"You are truly disturbed."

"Stop repeating what I say," she said.

"Stop repeating what I say."

"You are very disrespectful," she said.

"You are very disrespectful."

She had morphed. Eyes bulging, breasts heaving in unison, doll-hands shaking, lips moving around independently of the rest of her face as though looking for an escape route. My face was expressionless, I knew, and gray, and my eyes were lashless and stark like those of a desert or a space creature.

I was her nemesis. I smiled. I had always wanted to be a nemesis.

I was the last person to receive her attentions, so she turned from my recliner and my I.V. and my disrespect and my cancer and my chemo-ravaged self and went over to Wanda and Glenda to thank and be thanked in soft prissy tones. I slipped the tiara under the blanket that was over my legs. When the treatment was over, I dropped it in my handbag and zipped it. I knew just what to do.

Glenda accompanied me to the door, probably to say goodbye and tell me, using frilly euphemisms, that she was glad I wouldn't be dying soon. I waved and hurried out. I couldn't help resenting her, resenting those trained hands, those trained eyes, watching me shrink and stiffen and age and persist.

I found Lily-Ray in the main hospital, in Intensive Care. He was still wearing his Red Sox hat. Otherwise he was all tubed up and his eyes were closed, but the nurse told me he was awake and had been harassing her all day about the cable stations, which didn't include the one that broadcast the old ball games.

"Come on, Lily-Ray," I said. "You know how it ends."

He didn't open his eyes but under his lids I could see his eyeballs whip over in the direction of my voice.

"The '51 pennant," I said. "The '51 pennant, you know how it ends."

"Aaah," he said, waving his non-I.V. hand in my direction. I laughed nervously, emptily.

"Listen Lily-Ray," I said, "Guess what?"

He opened his eyes and aimed them at the ceiling.

"Now you say, 'what?'" I said.

"What?" he said.

"The former Miss America came to Chemo today, and she let people try on her tiara."

He made a disgusted sound from the back of this throat.

"I gave her the treatment," I said. "And look. You have to look, now. This is key."

I drew the tiara out of my bag. He looked. I held it on top of my palm, the front facing him. I smiled.

"It's for you," I said. He smiled for the first time ever, in the life we had led together. He had blue eyes. I wondered what color his hair had been, if he'd gone to a '51 National League Pennant game, whom he loved, how the world had treated him, what he was thinking right now, and right now, and right now.

"Thank you," he said. And I slowly reached over his head to place the tiara on top of the Red Sox cap. I stood back.

"Perfect," I said. I pressed my hand over my mouth, but quickly gave up and stood there by his bed, laughing at the sight of him.

"Get me a mirror," he said, loudly, over my laughter. He touched the tiara and started to laugh a little, himself, just a little, not all-out like me. He had a dry, quiet laugh. Mine is loud, I can't help it, and frequently changes tempo and tone, at times persisting until I get desperate and clutch my stomach.

When a nurse brought a mirror, I held it in front of him and turned my head, hoping that not looking would keep me from laughing any more.

"Now all you have to do is shoot me into space, and all my wishes will be fulfilled," he said.

We laughed until Lily-Ray began to cough. A nurse came in and looked sternly at me.

"What have you got him wearing?" she said.

"A tiara," I said. "He's been crowned."

"Yes," said Lily-Ray. "I've been crowned. This is how it ends."

And we laughed together as I left the room and walked softly down the corridor to the elevator and pressed G and descended to the ground floor. It was effortless. The air shimmered and the hospital staff, ashamed, diminutive, passed by me with downcast eyes, and when I reached the front door, I allowed the building to exhale me, a weak, purified, floating thing, back out into the air that just might continue to hold my life intact.