I mention this to Catherine.
“If there is a connection here,” says Catherine, smiling, “I don’t think you have to look very far to find it.”
A New Perspective
When Catherine got cancer, I stopped teaching. After her year of treatment I started again. This workshop is for people who have had cancer, and those who are living with cancer. We started small and were supposed to run for five weeks, but our numbers have grown, and the workshop has been going strong now for almost two years.
I run this class differently. We don’t discuss in depth the work of two people a week; we don’t have that kind of time. Roughly half the group have metastatic cancer, and we want to hear from everyone every week, so this class relies on doing exercises. Everyone reads, every week.
This may be a workshop, but I’m the one learning. Part of what I’ve learned is that if it isn’t life and death, it isn’t life and death. I have learned that every moment is precious. I know now that cancer is not an isolated experience; cancer is part of life. I have learned that to be witness to one another’s lives is the greatest of gifts. Thursday afternoons are sacred. Carol Dwyer, one of the writers, puts it perfectly: “Our bonds are quickened by the proximity of death,” she says.
Catherine is part of a larger landscape now, and it comforts me.
More About Naps
I like a cold room at bedtime. If it’s winter. I turn the heat off, open the window, and turn on the fan. My hands are ice-cold when I read, my feet, which I like to stick out of the covers, also ice-cold. I love this. The dogs are comfortably under the covers, so most of the rest of me is warm. I pull in my extremities after I turn off the light.
In the morning my floor is cold, the room is windy, I can’t find shoes or socks, and I have no slippers (Daphne). The urge to lunge back into the warm bed is mighty. But the dogs need to go out. Some days, these short winter days, I am up only a fraction of the day, all the rest of it is spent napping. “Napping” is not the right word for sleep that is interrupted occasionally by an hour of being awake, then back to bed.
Surely there is more to life than all this sleeping. I believe in naps. I believe they clear the mind. But my first nap begins an hour after getting up in the morning. If the dogs wake at five, then going back to bed is not unreasonable. But if you get up at eight, then going back to bed at nine can only be depressing. I am beginning, I think, to turn into a solid.
Here are some of the rules I have made for myself.
Get dressed immediately, that’s key. If you make coffee and let the dogs out and wait for them to come back in while still in your pajamas, you are still technically in bed. Do not wait too long to turn the heat back on, or you will go back to bed just to “get warm.” When you go upstairs to get dressed, do not get into bed “for a minute” even though the dogs are looking at you hopefully. Remember, you are not a dog. Do not even sit on the bed except to pull your pants on (because standing on one leg has become precarious). If you should fall back under the covers, try not to be too upset when the next time you open your eyes it is noon. Get dressed and put on a bra and something too tight that will be uncomfortable to lie down in. Be cheered when you pick up the phone to call your kids and realize it is only 11:55. Listen to your daughter who will remind you that at seventy-one you have earned this. “Give yourself a break,” she will say, and you say you will try. Then hang up and pick up the business section of the newspaper you put on the rug yesterday to sop up the pee. Then remove the sports section you put under the rug so the pee would not discolor the floor. Look around for the bottle of stuff that eliminates odors even though nothing smells yet. Remember that summer brings out every secret. Pick up the towel Daphne has been shredding. Put the dishes away.
Get out of the house.
Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.
March
Here we are at the beginning of spring again, the weather is not cold, but I am. Chuck drops by while I am sitting outside writing in the sun, shivering. “Spring is horrible,” I tell him. “I’m freezing all the time.”
Chuck is too. He turns his heat way up. “Money means nothing to me,” he is fond of saying.
“I saw my neighbor in her garden today.” I point to a house just visible through trees. “She was bending down. I think she was gardening.”
“That’s what gardening consists of,” says Chuck. “A lot of bending down.”
He suggests I write about the positions we are no longer capable of assuming. “Kneeling,” he says. “And putting on socks,” he continues, “the chair can’t be too high.”
“Oh, I have one of those,” I say. “It was my mother’s. It’s the little one with roses on it. Women had them in their bedrooms for getting dressed. Slipper chairs.”
Then I remember an insight I had when I woke up this morning. The words “yo” and “like” (when beginning a sentence) are not parts of speech at all! They are punctuation. “It’s like starting a sentence with a comma,” I tell Chuck, “isn’t that brilliant?”
“With a little refinement,” he answers, “it might achieve the level of a thought.”
We decide to drive to the SPCA in Kingston. Our friend Susan has told Chuck about a basset hound they’ve got. Chuck is willing to go look even though his dog, Pojd, is a handful. “Another dog might make her friskier,” I say. We gaze at her lying flat on the flagstones, asleep in the sun. “I’m not sure I want her friskier,” says Chuck.
The SPCA is closed, but some of the dogs are out in their tiny yards, and one of them is the enormous basset, trumpeting away. Chuck stands in front of him, saying something I can’t hear. I wander down a couple of cages where three small puppies are leaping and barking. I want them. Every one of them! There is a brown one, a white and brown one, and a darker brindle one! Their little ears flop over like wontons! Their curling tails wag crazily! They are leaping and yipping with joy and hope! I want all of them right now this minute! A moment passes. The reality of six dogs sinks in.
Good thing it’s Monday, we agree. Otherwise there might be a basset in the back and three puppies in the front.
As we round a bend on the Sawkill, something is flying across the road, although flight implies speed and grace, and this creature’s motion is more accurately described as lumbering through the air. The road is too curvy to turn around and we are left with the memory of a round yellowish feathery ball flapping small blunt wings and a tail that resembles the spine of a fish, or a snake. A ridiculous, if slightly menacing creature about a foot long. Part bird, part insect, part fish, part reptile.
When we told Catherine, she began googling “strange creatures Ulster County.” She looked up everything she could think of: “birds with tails like snake skeletons,” “birds with blunt wings,” “odd birds of the Northeast.” Nothing turned up. I began to think what we saw was a mythological being, out of his element or out of his time, put together by an angry god or a Senate subcommittee, never to be seen again.
Dumplings in March
We were supposed to get a lot of snow last night. Warnings were up everywhere, instructions on how to survive. Water, flashlights, et cetera, et cetera.
I bought a Campanelli’s chicken from Woodstock Meats and a lot of carrots and celery. I made chicken soup with dumplings but found I had only a tiny bit of flour when the recipe called for two cups. So I improvised. The “dumplings” dissolved into the broth. Chuck came over and we watched three episodes of something. Or rather, I did. Chuck fell asleep on the couch, after making room for Carolina at his feet. As usual. When I finally woke him at midnight, he rose stiffly, asking what he’d missed. “Nothing,” I say. “Everything.”
We have a deal. When he starts driving home from a day of work in the city he calls me as he leaves, and I call him every hour after that to make sure he’s alert. It worries me how tired he is.
The soup was rich
and delicious, but I’ll never be able to make it again.
Trust Binds Us
The other day, apropos of what I can’t remember, Chuck said, “We are bound by trust.” He was speaking philosophically.
But yes, I thought. We are.
Drinking and Thinking
There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning. I’m an alcoholic. I’ve quit before, but always started up again, usually in the kitchen. I’d find myself pouring half a bottle of red wine into tomato sauce, then testing for flavor, using a ladle and scooping up only the wine part, then pouring the rest of the bottle in and testing again. This gave me the tiniest buzz, and of course it wasn’t really drinking.
But brownies were my downfall. You have to put vanilla in brownies or there’s no point, and I’ve always scoffed at recipes that call for a measly teaspoon. A teaspoon? I’d pour half a bottle into the mixture, then taste. Soon I was drinking it straight out of the bottle. Vanilla is delicious, and it’s also 35 percent alcohol.
Good old lowly old vanilla.
I became a vanilla connoisseur. It started with McCormick, which is too sweet, moved on to Durkee, which has a bitter finish, attempted Goya, which was surprisingly bland, then discovered Madagascar Bourbon vanilla. Now here was a really robust vanilla, and it was organic! I began going to different grocery stores, imagining the clerks whispering to each other, “Didn’t she just buy four bottles of vanilla yesterday?” I alternated between the West Side Market, the University Market, and whatever is now a Gristedes. I discovered the Eighty-Sixth Street Williams-Sonoma and traveled crosstown to buy a dozen bottles at a time, twelve-ouncers, murmuring something about getting my Christmas shopping done early, then slinking out the door, hailing a taxi, sliding down in the seat, unscrewing the cap off a bottle, and glugging it all the way home. Vanilla isn’t drinking, I told myself; if you can’t order it at a bar, it isn’t drinking. The fact that you can get hammered on a big bottle of vanilla meant nothing.
I love to drink. I love the taste. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve found the place that makes the best Manhattans. Up here, it’s Cucina. I love the dappled place I find myself after one drink, and even two, but after three I’m getting lost in the woods, after four, I’m climbing back onto the barstool I’ve just fallen off of. After that, I stagger to the car to be driven home by Chuck. The point is that after one drink, there’s no stopping.
Six months after Ralph talked sense to me, I decided one beer a day would be okay, as long as I could keep it to one beer a day. I went to the Cub every afternoon, bought my one bottle of Rochefort 10 and a pack of Camels. All was going smoothly until the week I was invited out for dinner four nights in a row. Out for dinner was always a different story, like being on a plane, where calories don’t count. (Not that there’s anything to eat on a plane anymore, but you know what I mean.) So there I was at Cucina ordering a Manhattan, then another, and often another, then three glasses of wine with dinner, and for dessert an Irish coffee (Irish on the side, please, wink wink) and I was plastered. Four nights in a row.
On the fifth morning I woke not so much with a hangover, as with appalling feelings of guilt and shame and fear. For no reason! I didn’t attack anyone, I didn’t take my clothes off or hurl abuse, I behaved very nicely except for a little spilling, and possibly leaning too close to Chuck, but he knows me drunk and finds a way to tolerate it. I was beside myself. “I’m seventy-one,” I stormed around the house shouting, “why can’t I drink?” So I sent an urgent email to my friend Kitty asking her please to call me. And within five minutes she was on the phone. I love Kitty.
“I am so angry,” I said. “I’m seventy-one years old, why can’t I have a few drinks? Why do I feel so guilty and afraid and full of dread in the morning? I behaved myself! Why do I feel this horrible guilt?”
I was furious, but it was Kitty I called, Kitty, who has been sober for eleven years and counting. Kitty, who has a sense of humor, whose advice might go my way. “Go ahead,” she might have said, or so I thought, but she didn’t. “I feel so guilty in the morning,” I whined.
“Well,” she said slowly, “maybe you ought to take a look at that.”
And so, at long last, I did. The other times I’d quit had been different. I remember standing on the island at 112th Street and Broadway thirty years ago, a bag of groceries in my arms, waiting for the light to change. It was the day after a Twelfth Night office party where I had hit my head against a hanging plant and pinned someone to the wall explaining rather aggressively how to cook rice, then later leaned against the front door making out with the host while his wife and everyone else looked on. Gee, I’d thought, I don’t really want to do that again, and quit before the light turned green. But now, at seventy-one, I finally had to think about it. I do not want to feel this way, especially from something I’m doing to myself. So I have stopped, thoughtfully this time, weighing the morning against the dubious pleasure of the night before, and so far the morning is winning.
Landfill
The backyard now belongs to dogs. Huge holes dug everywhere, bits of yogurt cups obtained from counters and chewed into little bits, god knows what else. “Park-like grounds,” offered the sales sheet when I bought the house. Not anymore. Now it’s landfill. But the newly replanted forsythia is drooping. You know you’re in trouble when even that unkillable, unstoppable bush looks languid, so I go out every morning and water. I don’t want anything to die.
Here is some of what I’ve found in the yard. Not my cell phone, alas, Daphne has probably chewed what she wanted and left it somewhere, but I’ve searched both yard and house with no luck. What I did find was a small porcelain shoe that belonged to my grandmother. It was on one of the shelves of my bookcase along with other odds and ends that struck my fancy—old photographs, bits of scrap iron, pebbles, and a shell—and I guess Daphne found it irresistible, although it wasn’t chewed, just deposited on the lawn near my weather vane. I don’t know how I wound up with it, but the belongings of the dead are parceled out one way or another until finally you’re just tossing things into boxes willy-nilly. I pick it up and look at it carefully and notice for the first time that it was mended once—glue holds the high heel on. My grandmother must have loved this little object of gilt and roses. It lives on the mantel now, far from Daphne’s reach. I want to keep safe something my grandmother loved.
I have one pair of shoes left, my good shoes. Daphne has taken the others, distributed them around the yard in disrepair, even my Crocs, which she can’t bite through, are gone. Well, one of them is gone. Now when I traipse through the wet to my studio, it is in my good shoes. When I take them off, I put them on the mantel with my TV remotes (both of which have bite marks), and my cigarette lighter, and whatever I’m reading. Daphne can’t reach the mantel. At least not yet. Last week a friend loaned me her special copy of Wolf Hall. It is a first edition, first English printing. I tried not to take it, but she pressed me. It seemed churlish to refuse. So I borrowed it, read about twenty pages, and foolishly left it on the coffee table while I made a cup of coffee. The next thing I knew, Daphne had chewed at the binding of this precious (I didn’t yet know how precious) book. I couldn’t give it back in this condition and set about trying to find another. The only place I found a first edition first printing was on Amazon UK, and it cost $467. I bought it, and hope it will arrive soon, and I’ve got my eye out for its delivery. Sometimes UPS leaves things on the side porch, where they are usually found by Daphne, who is turning out to be the most expensive dog I’ve ever had.
Lesion
A new MRI for Chuck. He avoids my questions. Catherine tells me she had to ask four different ways before she got an answer. There appears to be a lesion on his liver. “It’s not a bad thing or a good thing,” he said, “but
they want to schedule another MRI in three months instead of six.”
“I hate the word ‘lesion,’ ” I say to her.
“So do I,” she answers.
That night Chuck and I go out for supper at Cucina. We go so often that they automatically give us a dessert if we haven’t ordered one, and it’s always butterscotch budino, which is our favorite. “It’s on the house,” the waitress says, and we dig in.
Chuck is more serious than usual. “I should be experiencing things,” he says. “I should travel.” I know he is thinking of the lesion. “Want to go somewhere?”
“Sure,” I say. “How about Istanbul?” He mentioned Turkey one day last week. “The Greek islands? Oslo?” I have been reading a Danish detective novel. “They have fjords there.”
Chuck points out that Oslo is in Norway. I’m reminded that Catherine once said to a Dutch guy, “Do you speak Hollish?”
“Anyway, not abroad. Somewhere here,” he says. We eat the dessert. I order my espresso.
“How about the Grand Canyon?” I ask, but he shakes his head. “Too crowded.” He wants to drive up the coast of California.
“Big Sur,” I say now, and he looks up, interested. I natter on about its beauty, although I’ve never even seen a picture of Big Sur. I rarely see Chuck as vulnerable as he seems tonight. When I get home, I look up Big Sur. I find places to stay. But by morning the mood has vanished, and Chuck doesn’t want to go anywhere.
What Comes Next and How to Like It Page 11