Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  She had such light, nice times with Richard that she even began to feel sorry for her bedraggled husband, who was looking wearier and seedier every month. He could have had a nice easily impressed girl who might have been able to make him feel he was someone special, and instead he had stuck himself with a woman more neurotic than his wife.

  Flap knew vaguely that Emma must have a lover, but he was in no position to inquire. He couldn’t manage Janice, and he began to talk to Emma again, and even to take an interest in his children, as an escape. He had even begun to have the vague suspicion that Janice had a lover, and he didn’t feel up to confronting even one infidelity, much less two.

  Richard was as awed by literature as he was by sex, and discovered a new great writer almost every week. Emma could not resist tutoring him, and with her help his grades improved. As usual, it was her mother who called her attention to the flaw in her arrangements.

  “I’m sure he’s a fine lad,” Aurora said. “My dear, you are so very impractical. This is first love for him, remember? What are you going to do when he wants to carry you off to some very cold town in Wyoming? You’re not happy being the wife of a college professor, what chance do you think you’d have with a high school teacher? These things have to come to some resolution, you know.”

  “I think the pot’s talking to the kettle, on the kettle’s money,” Emma said. “What have you ever resolved?”

  “Don’t be impertinent, Emma,” Aurora said. “Marital arrangements don’t happen to interest me, that’s all.”

  “They interest me less and less,” Emma said.

  “The point is that they interest men,” Aurora said. “My men are too old to make much of a fuss, no matter what I do. Young men are not so easily put off.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Emma said. It was a statement she used more and more often. The illusion that talk was a means to change had left her, and she felt cloudy in her spirit when she found herself talking too much or too hopefully about what was going to happen.

  Luckily, though, she made a friend in Kearney. She had felt so isolated from the college community, partly by Flap’s affair and partly by her own disinclinations, that she had not supposed she would be making any friends. She had Richard and her kids, and she expected to read a lot. But then one day at a P.T.A. meeting she met a big gawky Nebraska girl named Melba, the wife of the high school basketball coach. Melba was all teeth and elbows, but she was irresistibly friendly; the two of them quickly became fascinated with one another. Melba seemed to have vast unused energies, despite having five boys, all under twelve. She had many nervous habits, one of which was stirring coffee constantly while she sat at Emma’s kitchen table. She only stopped stirring long enough to take large gulps. There was something slow and Nordic about her. In her way she was as awed by Emma’s ordinary two-story house as Emma had been by Patsy’s mansion in Beverly Hills. She thought Emma led a romantic existence because her husband taught college; she was fascinated by the fact that Emma’s children read books instead of throwing balls around constantly, as her boys did.

  Emma, in turn, was intrigued to discover that there was someone whose domestic situation was on a lower level than her own. Melba’s husband Dick had no interest in anything but drinking, hunting, and sports—his general disregard of Melba made Flap seem almost oppressively considerate. Emma often felt like telling Melba that it was all relative, only Melba wouldn’t have known what she was talking about. Emma soon found that she couldn’t resist titillating her friend, and she confessed her affair-dangerous as that was.

  “You mean a young guy?” Melba said, crinkling her large forehead as she tried to imagine it. She tried to put herself in Emma’s place, tried to imagine sleeping with someone other than Dick, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t imagine anybody. All she could imagine was Dick killing her when he found out. In a vague way it worried her that Emma would pick a young guy, but it was so different from anything she might do that her imagination never got a good grip on it. All she knew was that if Emma was doing it it must be very romantic. From then on she referred to Richard as “your Dick.”

  “Richard,” Emma said over and over again. “I call him Richard.” But Melba never made the switch. In her world all Richards were Dicks.

  It was a minor flaw, though, for no one was better-hearted than Melba. She would offer to keep the boys at the drop of a hat, if Emma even looked like she might be getting sick. The only problem there was getting the boys to go, for her boys regarded Melba’s boys as uninteresting louts—a judgment with which Emma agreed. With Melanie, Melba was less sure of herself. She seemed to regard Melanie was an exceedingly delicate creature.

  “That kid’s about as delicate as a truck,” Emma said, but it didn’t matter. Melanie found Melba scarcely worth the charming. Melba’s whole life, it seemed to Emma, was spent hoping that the prices of things at the supermarket wouldn’t go any higher. If they went any higher her husband would gripe at her for buying them, and yet they had to eat something. She was like a big walking ticker tape of commodity prices; when she walked into Emma’s kitchen the first thing she said was, “Pork’s gone up twelve cents. Twelve cents!” And yet she seemed to be a happy woman—Emma never heard her complain about anything except prices—and her energy was extraordinary. Emma watched her shovel snow one day, and she cleared a driveway almost as quick as a snowplow would have. “Emma, you don’t exercise,” she scolded. “I don’t think you could shovel out a driveway if you had to.”

  “I believe in professionals,” Emma said. “Fortunately my boys are professionals.”

  ON THE morning of Melanie’s third birthday Emma baked a cake and got everything ready for a little birthday party they were having. It was Melanie’s first party. Unfortunately, Emma had forgotten and scheduled an appointment for both of them to have flu shots and checkups that morning, something that didn’t suit Melanie at all. “No shots, it’s my birthday!” she insisted, but she got a shot anyway.

  “I don’t want you sick,” Emma told her.

  Melanie dried her tears and sat on a little stool eating a lollipop and kicking at a filing cabinet, much to Emma’s annoyance and the doctor’s. Emma was getting her shot.

  “She’s big, two shots!” Melanie said vengefully, removing her lollipop and pointing it at her mother. Her eyes were still dark from her recent anger.

  “She has a keen interest in justice,” Emma said.

  “What’s this?” the doctor said. He was named Budge, a fat sexy-ugly man with enormous patience and a way with women and children. He began to raise one of Emma’s arms up and down while probing her armpit.

  “What?” Emma asked.

  “You have a lump in your armpit,” Dr. Budge said. “How long has that been there?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “Stop it, Melanie. Stop kicking that cabinet.”

  Melanie kicked more lightly, pretending that she was only swinging her legs. When her toes happened to bang into the cabinet again she looked at her mother and tossed her curls innocently. Dr. Budge turned and looked at her sternly.

  “I’m three,” Melanie said cheerfully.

  Dr. Budge sighed. “Well, you have two lumps,” he said. “Not very big ones, but lumps. I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “I didn’t even know they were there,” Emma said.

  “They’re not very big,” he repeated. “They’re coming out, though. The question is when. I have to be out of town for a week and I hate to leave them that long.”

  “Goodness,” Emma said, feeling her armpit gingerly. “Do I have to be scared?”

  Dr. Budge frowned. “Be scared,” he said. “Then you’ll be that much happier when they turn out to be nothing.”

  “What will it turn out to be if it doesn’t turn out to be nothing?”

  Dr. Budge was probing her other armpit. He shook his head and gave her a thorough examination. Melanie watched with mild interest, sucking greedily and audibly on her lollipop. She had
been that way nursing, Emma remembered; she could be heard in the next room.

  By the time he was finished Dr. Budge had regained a cheerful demeanor. “Oh, well, you’re lucky,” he said. “They’re just in your armpits. Some people have lumps in their brains.”

  “I can read,” Melanie said, jumping up and grabbing Dr. Budge by the pants leg. “You want me to read?”

  THE BIRTHDAY party worked fine, where the kids were concerned, but it never quite worked for Emma. She was a veteran of a good score of birthday parties and managed the games and refreshments and even the gaiety with expertise; yet she was partly not there. She kept feeling her armpit. Her mother called, and Melanie had to babble away about her birthday to Aurora, Rosie, and even the General. Vernon was in Scotland, to Melanie’s annoyance. “Where’s Vernon?” she wanted to know. “What’s he doing? Let me speak to him please.” By the time Emma got the phone she had begun to feel very tired.

  “I’m in postparty collapse,” she said. “Have you ever had lumps in your armpit?”

  “No, why should I?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “I do.”

  “Well, I believe there are a lot of glands in that area, if I’m not mistaken. Probably your glands are just stopped up. It’s no wonder, the way you eat.”

  “I eat fine,” Emma said.

  “I know, dear,” Aurora said, “but you’re always so prone to malfunctions.”

  “Mother, don’t generalize about me like that,” Emma said. “I just have my ups and downs.”

  “Emma, what do you think our lifelong argument has been about?” Aurora said.

  “I don’t know!” Emma said, furious at being picked on when she had just given a birthday party.

  “About keeping yourself up, of course,” Aurora said. “Now you’ve let your glands stop up. Are you still seeing that young man?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t mention that quite so casually,” Emma said.

  “Well, I forgot,” Aurora said, in fact, Emma’s news had upset her, and she was casting about for a normal explanation.

  “What kind of hospitals do they have in Nebraska?” she asked.

  “Perfectly good ones,” Emma said. She had grown patriotic and had begun to defend Nebraska against her mother’s constant attacks.

  When Flap was told about the lumps, he winced. “I’m glad we’re insured,” he said. “Remember that tonsillectomy?” Emma remembered. Teddy’s tonsils had kept them poor all one winter in Des Moines.

  It was a very minor operation, taking out the lumps. Dr. Budge seemed embarrassed that he had made her stay in the hospital overnight. “I could have practically done this in my office,” he said when she had been stitched.

  “What were they?” Emma asked.

  “Little tumors. Marble-sized. We’ll do a biopsy and you’ll know soon.”

  Flap had a committee meeting and was late getting to the hospital. He had had a fight with Janice, who thought Emma was only trying to get sympathy. Janice made whatever emotional capital she could out of whatever marital conventions Flap still chose to honor. The fight and the meeting together had left Flap looking more in need of a hospital than Emma.

  “They’re doing a biopsy,” Emma told him. “That’s the modern way of casting bones.”

  Flap had bought her roses, and she was rather touched; she sent him home to make the kids hamburgers, and settled in with the two Graham Greenes she had brought to read. Then her armpit began to ache and she took the pills that had been given her and drowsed off. It was her own remark about casting bones that was in her mind when she awoke. It was four in the morning; there was no wind. She lay awake imagining her little lumps in a test tube and wishing she had someone to talk to.

  The minute she saw Dr. Budge, late that morning, she knew how the bones had fallen. Until then she had somehow pushed away the concept of cancer. “You could have cancer, you mean?” Flap said at one point, and she had nodded, but they took it no further.

  “Old girl, you have a malignancy,” Dr. Budge said very kindly. He had never called her old girl before. Emma felt herself dropping, as if a bad dream had ended, or was starting.

  FROM THAT day, that moment almost, she felt her life pass from her own hands and the erring but personal hands of those who loved her into the hands of strangers—and not even doctors, really, but technicians: nurses, attendants, laboratories, chemicals, machines.

  Her escapes were brief: a week at home before she went to Omaha for serious tests. It was not lost on her, in the six days she spent in Omaha, that her doom was being sealed in the city where poor Sam Burns had hoped to take her in marriage. Dr. Budge had been frank; he feared she was melanomic and she was, but his fears had been understated.

  “I’m riddled,” she told her husband, for that was more or less the case. For a few days she was haunted by the fear of endless operations, but the bones had fallen too definitively even for that. “It must be like measles, only they’re inside,” she told Patsy, trying to put it comically, for the doctors had given her almost that feeling.

  “Don’t say things like that,” Patsy said, appalled. She went to her own doctor the next day.

  Aurora Greenway had listened gravely to the first news. The lumps had not been quite out of her mind since Emma first mentioned them. “Our girl is in trouble,” she said to Rosie when she hung up the phone.

  “You’re not leaving me here,” Rosie said. “Somebody’s got to take care of them kids.”

  That was exactly what Emma wanted of her Houston forces. She had never liked visiting hospitals; the awkwardness of visits had often seemed worse than the disease—any disease. Her mother and Rosie were to stay in Kearney and keep the household functioning. Everyone agreed that Flap would stay at the faculty club for a while—a pure convention, since there was none. He stayed with Janice, who managed to be jealous of Emma’s illness despite its seriousness.

  In the few days that she was home after her first operation, Emma hid her own bewilderment in order better to cope with the bewilderment of her children, her lover, and her husband. Flap at once chose to pretend that she was really not very sick-doctors were often wrong. He was one himself, he knew, he often said. Emma let that ride, because it was what the boys needed to believe. To Melanie it was just a party. Grandma and Rosie were coming. “An’ Vernon,” she insisted. “Vernon’s coming, sometime.”

  Richard was the hardest to deal with—much the hardest. Emma didn’t know then whether she was really dying or not, but some cold instinct told her that Richard must not be allowed to attach himself any tighter. She didn’t want Richard’s life to be haunted by her, whether he lost her to death or life. She didn’t, and yet she had not the strength to coldly banish him. Richard was desperate; he wanted to cure her with love, he made it a test of himself. Emma was touched; she made a show, but she was glad they only had a few chances to meet. She had too much to do and think about. Only, at moments, Richard’s fervor did make it all seem silly, really silly, an illusion of the medical profession. As yet she had felt no serious pain.

  That arrived in Omaha, where it turned out she was going to be hospitalized. Dr. Budge didn’t have sufficient machines; he couldn’t administer radium, which she was told was necessary.

  “All right, but is it going to stop anything?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure, it will arrest it,” her new young doctor said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”

  Her mother had come with her to Omaha. Flap had his duties and Rosie was quite adequate to the children. Vernon was going to come when he could. Neither Emma nor Aurora liked the new young doctor, whose name was Fleming. He was small, neat, and very articulate. He told them both a great deal about the behavior of various cancers; his method was to give his patients more information than they could assimilate. Much of the information was, of course, totally irrelevant to their own illnesses.

  That little person is too self-satisfied,” Aurora said. “Must we stay here and deal with him, dear? Why won’t you come
to Houston?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. At night she often wondered herself, for it might be nice to go back to the softness and sogginess of Houston. Yet she didn’t want to. What was happening might take months; to go to Houston would mean relocating her life, and she didn’t want to. Even though she was riddled, nothing was certain. New chemicals were being tried, and even Dr. Fleming wouldn’t predict the outcome. It was all confusing, but she did understand that the new chemicals were her ultimate hope. On certain metabolisms they had been known to cure rather than merely arrest.

  If they didn’t work, she had it in mind to go home. Even one day in the hospital was enough to make her dream of home, and she wanted to be in her home, not her mother’s. She wanted her own bedroom and the smells of her kitchen.

  That was her dream, though, before she had had any serious pain. After the radium, and the failure of the magic chemicals, her will to go home weakened. She had never been in pain before and hadn’t realized how completely it would come to dominate her. One night not long after she started radium she lost her pills, knocked them off her bed table in the darkness, and found that her bell was out of order. She couldn’t get a nurse—all she could do was lie still. Combined with the terrible ache inside her was a sudden deep conviction of helplessness; no one was going to come and help her. For the first time in her life she felt beyond the efficacy of love; all the loved ones she had couldn’t help her as much as the little pills lying somewhere in the darkness under her bed.