If i am missing or dead, p.18
If I Am Missing or Dead, page 18
I want to lay my head on the table and close my eyes. Instead I cajole the kids into cheerfulness. We tell jokes, we laugh, we look happy. I ask them, What was the best part of your day? I do not ask them about the worst, even though that is our tradition, because I don’t think we need to be reminded. If they had a worse moment than the ones at the table, I don’t want to know.
My husband joins in the façade, but I can feel him seething, feel the anger underneath. When our eyes meet I can tell that he is furious.
The waitress comes to clear our dishes, and Kurt gives her some kind of signal. The children wriggle expectantly. She walks away and returns moments later with a lighted birthday cake. The children and Kurt begin to sing, “Happy Birthday to You…”
I look at Kurt, tears in my eyes. He had baked the cake at a friend’s house and then spirited it here, getting the manager to let him hide it in the walk-in. He had given up his day to make my evening special, and I had ruined it.
Three days later we leave for Australia, where Sarah spends the nights wide awake, bouncing and laughing, wanting to play, and the days draped in our arms, heavy and sweaty, as we negotiate the holiday mobs. We are itchy and irritable, thrown off our own sleep patterns and bickering about who should have to stay awake and play with her.
By the time we get to Fiji she has adjusted, and she is her usual happy self. During meals the islanders take her out of her high chair. They tuck hibiscus blossoms behind her ears and dance with her to the ukulele quartets.
Days after we get home I am still on Fiji time, slogging through my Christmas preparations and napping randomly, trying to reacclimate.
What do you think this is?
Amy tips her head to the side and taps a lump on her neck. I put my fingers on it. It is the size of a Ping-Pong ball.
It is Christmas, and most of the family has come to Missouri to celebrate.
I don’t know, I say. Do you have a cold?
She shakes her head.
Kurt wears his doctor face as he presses the lump.
I’d get this checked out, he says. It’s probably nothing, but it’s worth having it looked at.
During poker games I see her pressing it, a distracted look on her face, although she laughs triumphantly and throws down her cards when she wins. She and Sarah build towers out of stacking cups, then laugh together as they knock them down. She whispers and giggles with Claire and Jenelle, her teenage nieces. She sings lustily to Christmas carols, and commandeers Kurt’s recliner, where she sits, smiling and fingering the lump on her neck.
It is the first time all of Mom’s children have been together for Christmas in twenty-three years, in part because Jane lives in Montana and rarely makes it back, and then only in the summer. This year, though, she has come, and she has brought her two children. Our gift to our mom is going to be a family portrait, so the two youngest are assigned to draw a stick figure picture of the family: five adult children, four spouses, and six grandchildren. They glue beads on for eyes, mount the picture in a frame and wrap it up.
It is a family tradition to make symbols of gifts that can’t be wrapped, a tradition heightened between Kurt and me. One year I wrapped an ornament of a skiing Santa to symbolize a ski trip. Another year he made a hand-sized cheval mirror out of popsicle sticks and aluminum foil, letting me pick the real one out for myself.
Mom cries when she opens the picture, and we laugh. Mom always cries. At Christmas. At weddings and graduations. At parades.
What we don’t realize at the time is that this will be our last family portrait.
One night I interrupt the poker game to propose a new family tradition.
Let’s all write out predictions for the upcoming year. Then next year we can open them and see which ones we got right.
I bring out a pad of paper and a handful of pens.
“Mom and Amy will both find romance this year,” Amy writes. “Claire and Jenelle will remain close friends and share secrets!”
At the end of Amy’s visit I hug her.
Let me know what you find out about the lump, I say.
Of course, she says. She smiles. It’s probably nothing.
Within a few weeks she has the biopsy results. It is not nothing. It is cancer.
What? I say into the phone.
Cancer, she says again.
What kind of cancer?
Hodgkin’s disease, she says. It’s a cancer of the lymph system.
Wow.
It’s the best kind, she says. There’s an 80 percent cure rate.
I try to think what to say. In the spring Amy got her associate’s degree, summa cum laude. Everything about her life is on an upward trajectory. Now this.
That’s good. I guess.
It’s better than most, she says. Her voice doesn’t even shake.
You don’t have to be so brave.
She laughs.
I’m not, she says. I’m faking it.
A few days later she meets with the oncologist, who tells her she must immediately begin chemotherapy. We’ll do two rounds, she says, then use radiation if necessary.
Aren’t there any other options? Amy asks.
No, the doctor says. You’ll start in three days, and you’ll follow this regimen.
I’m not ready, Amy says. I want a second opinion.
The doctor gets huffy.
She treated me like I was an idiot, Amy tells me over the phone. But it’s my body.
She finds a new doctor, who recommends a different course of treatment: Radiation five days a week for six weeks.
Amy signs on.
Within a week she has slim blue x’s tattooed onto her neck and shoulder, the treasure chest X for the beam of cell-killing and life-saving radiation. Dig here, the tattoos say, but tiny. Subtle. Like concentration camp tattoos, something that will mark her always as a survivor.
I love you, she says.
She calls each of us and tells us again.
I know, I say. I know. I love you, too.
I am crying when I get off the phone, even though I know it’s Hodgkin’s and she’ll probably survive. Still, she is my baby sister, and she has cancer.
She calls Dad, too, after a seven-year silence.
Hi, she says. It’s Amy. I have cancer.
They meet at a campground, she and Dad and his wife. One weekend to catch up, just in case.
It was good, she tells me. I wouldn’t want to do it often, but I’m glad I let go of all of that.
I know what “all of that” means.
At least, I think I do.
The rest of us rotate in, Mom driving again and again from her home five hours away, staying overnight on a mattress on the floor as her daughter moans and fades, getting weaker, her thick curls clogging the bathtub drain. Her siblings, too, take turns.
When it is mine I fly down and sit reading stale magazines as they shoot beams into her neck. Then I take her home and settle her on the couch while I bake bread in the machine I plan to leave behind.
The bread’s yeasty smell masks the stink of the carpet, which smells like old dog and long-spilled milk.
I try to cook foods enticing enough to get past the grated rawness of Amy’s mouth and throat.
This is one way to lose weight, she tells me.
I kind of liked it better when you were on Weight Watchers, I say. She laughs.
No shit, she says.
She pulls a handful of hair from the back of her head.
You need to get the landlords to change the carpet and paint this place, I tell her.
I know, she says, but they might charge me.
Get serious, I say. You’ve lived here four years. If you’d moved, they’d have changed it three times by now. Call them.
I will, she says, I will. Except Pete’s not doing so well, and I don’t want him peeing on new carpet.
I drop it. Bake my bread. Make spaghetti and meatballs. She manages to swallow a few as we sit in the dark watching Love, Valor, Compassion! a movie about eight gay men gathered together for a week on an estate. Two of the men are twins, one of whom is being cared for ever-so-gently by his lover as he dies of AIDS.
God, I love this movie! she says.
It’s like a gay Big Chill, I say. I love it how they use that one actor to portray both twins.
I wonder how they did that, she says.
Weren’t they both in a couple of scenes together?
She picks up the remote and rewinds through scene after scene. They’re together a few times, but we only see the back of one of the actor’s heads.
Clever, I say.
I love how much he’s loved, she says.
I reach for her hand.
After three days I fly home, grateful for my husband and kids. I could not bear to be alone.
After a week I send Amy a card.
Congratulations to the graduate! it reads. Inside I write, Here’s to the end of round one. The cancer doesn’t have a chance.
Later that week I am at the gym, spent, sore, invigorated. In the locker room I chat with another woman.
I’m going to the one place in the world where I can be myself, I say, smiling fully, unself-conscious.
Oh, home? she asks.
Her answer surprises me. She is blond and gorgeous, her breasts unnaturally large, her husband a plastic surgeon twenty years her senior.
No, my writers’ group, I say.
It is her turn to look surprised.
I should feel that way at home, I know, but at home I am cautious. Anything I say can invoke seething anger, or worse, rage. Certainly defensiveness. In my writers’ group, though, I don’t have to be careful. I am not competing. I read my work aloud and listen to my friends’ reactions. They laugh or they tell me a piece didn’t quite work, but they don’t attack me. I am never on trial.
At home I am. I know that. I know because my husband and I criticize others. We talk about other people’s weight, the bulge over a belt, the pooched belly. They are not us. They are not superior. They do not have our money or our education or our style. Others do, of course, they have it all and more, but they’re no good either, because they’re too persnickety or their marriage is boring or they don’t have any juice. We have juice. We fall into bed. We grope each other in restaurants. We make out in parking lots. When we ride up escalators he is behind me. Right behind me, so that his front runs up my backside as we get to the upper floor. We think maybe no one sees us, the move or the contact or the glazed look in our eyes.
Even more often, we scream. We fight, we yell, we accuse. I hit him. I slam doors. He clenches his hands and tries not to hit me.
You think you’ve got it so bad? he says, his jaw clenched and his face inches from mine. Then leave. You’ll get nothing.
He has been making the same threat for years. We have sat in marriage counselors’ offices and thrashed it out, him cooly polite, me frenzied. He looks rational, I look crazed, what Kurt calls “desperate.” One therapist says I should embrace my desperation. Acknowledge it, accept it, consider it part of who I am. She is the one I call Dr. Weaver. My husband calls her Lisa.
She thinks I should accept that I do not feel safe, that I have come from a place of skewed perceptions, that I do not trust anyone, myself included. My husband is pleased. If I would calm down, accept that I am desperate, give myself over to trusting him, to becoming what he would like me to become, we would have a happy marriage.
Every time we walk into her office I grab the box of Kleenex. The smooth way she talks, the tall blondness of her, the piling on of her and my husband, both clean and handsome, both calm and authoritative, makes me cry.
My husband sits next to me and puts his arm around me, even though we have been fighting for days.
You want to fuck Tim, he says.
Tim is a friend who comes to our home for companionship as his own marriage dissolves. He doesn’t confide so much as simply takes solace. He stands in the kitchen as I cook, listens to stories about the kids, about my writing. We debate politics, olive oils, the merits of crushing versus mincing garlic. Tim cooks. A man cooking is as exotic to me as a llama. Sometimes we meet for racquetball, leaning against the gym walls between games, sweating, getting our breath.
He does not talk with me about why his marriage is falling apart. He talks to himself, he says, and that’s enough. I suggest perhaps he should seek a second opinion, which makes him laugh.
His reticence keeps me from saying much about my own life, although I occasionally spew over a spat or squabble, or beat the racquetball with unusual violence. He is our friend collectively, though, and I don’t want to put him in the middle. He has no desire to take sides. We are both good people, he says. He does not want to choose.
I do not want to have sex with Tim. I have, however, thought about what it would be like to be married to him. What it would be like to be treated gently, with respect, to cook side by side, to have friends over and relax into their warmth.
In that I have been unfaithful.
I do not know if I would be happier, though, with Tim. I think I might be bored with someone who is just nice. I like edge. I like lots of edge, and I don’t know if Tim has any. I watch with fondness as he reads to my child, and then feel guilty for even feeling fond.
He is one of the few people who come to our home. Kurt does not like guests. If we invite someone he worries about it all day, dreading it, even if the guests are family.
What made you think you could schedule my time? he asks.
It’s just family, I say. It will be fun.
But he hates it. Hates having people over, hates anticipating it, hates the very idea of making small talk or being casual or picking up the house before and after.
The therapist has us take the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory that psychologists use to define patients’ personalities. I am an extrovert, which means I get energized by people. He is an introvert. He is energized by solitude and quiet. People drain him.
So we rarely socialize, and when we do I spend the day reassuring. It’ll be fine, I say. It’ll be fun.
It has taken me a decade of marriage to realize that he is afraid of messing up, afraid of not knowing what to say, of not getting the jokes, of embarrassing himself. He is that way when I introduce him to skiing, that way when I suggest scuba diving. He doesn’t know how to do either, and he’s afraid of looking dumb.
The therapist makes me say I understand, but I don’t. I understand rationally, of course. But isn’t it better to look dumb than to not try anything new?
After fights—daily fights—I go to my office, fuming, wanting to cry. I can’t work. I can’t read. I can only obsess. What did he say, what did I say, does he still love me, can he still love me, can anyone love me, really love me, if they know me?
I will not go to him. I will not call him. I will not send him an email. He can just sit down in his office and worry. Worry that I don’t love him. Worry that we will end it. Worry that he will lose me.
I look at the clock. I will not go to him, will not contact him. I pace around my office, a huge room with windows overlooking the backyard, the pond. I look at the clock. I will not contact him. I lie on the floor, do sit-ups. Look at the phone. Look at my email. The icon is not bouncing. The icon is not bouncing, the instant message icon is not bouncing, no one is writing to me, getting in touch.
I want to punch something. I want to scream. I want to run down the stairs and down the hall and scream at him. Scream at him and call him a fucking rat bastard. Get it out, get it over with, tell him to leave, leave myself, get into my car and drive, go to a friend’s, go to the gym.
Instead I stare at my computer monitor. I should work. I have a deadline coming up, I have interviews to do. I look at my motto, taped to my monitor: All you have to do is something.
All I do is nothing. I sit and stare at the screen or out the window and I seethe.
I make it an hour. Then I go downstairs to the kitchen. I look in the pantry. He did his biannual spring cleaning a week ago, stripping every room of everything, then cleaning from the ceiling down, chasing crumbs from drawer tracks with compressed air, getting on his hands and knees and using a toothbrush on the juncture between the floor and the baseboard. For years I worked by his side, but this year I refused on the grounds that I keep the house clean the other fifty weeks of the year.
The canned goods are still alphabetized, still in straight rows, small cans in front, big ones in back, pasta and rice tucked into a new shoe box that does not yet contain crumbs or end pieces or torn-off labels. I want to rearrange it the way it belongs—the waffle mix next to the syrup, the tomatoes with the mushrooms, the canned pears next to the macaroni and cheese. I am the one who cooks, I used to argue; shouldn’t the pantry be arranged the way I want it? Your way makes no sense, he’d say. It’s messy. It’s not organized. My way is better.
I got laid, Amy says.
I laugh. It has been years, in part because she has been so obese and in part because she keeps going after men who are married or too young or too something that makes them unattainable.
Who was the lucky man?
My roommate’s little brother. He’s visiting.
Little brother? How little?
Not little at all, she says, with a deep, guttural laugh.
Good for you, I say, laughing with her. But I meant how old.
Old enough, she says. I’ll send you a picture.
She emails a photo of him in a climbing harness. He is shirtless. The harness frames his crotch. He is in his early twenties at most. I call her back.
Okay, give, I say. I want to hear the story.
There’s no story, she says. We were having a few beers, we got messing around, and today I’m one happy woman.
I wince, both because it sounds like she took advantage of a young guy and because I’m pretty sure she’s going to be hurt.
Congratulations, I say. Do you think you’ll see him again?
I hope so, since he’s staying here for a couple of weeks.
To save money Amy has taken in roommates—a couple in their late twenties who are saving up for their wedding. She likes both of them, although she complains sometimes about the thud thud thud of their headboard against the adjoining wall. The brother apparently is sleeping on the couch, which is where Amy found him after everyone else had gone to bed.
