And still I say, “You have to tell her. You have to at least tell our mother herself that you want her gone.” I think the word “our” can somehow put her in her place, without my actually having to leave.
“That isn’t going to happen,” Isabel tells me. “Close the door on your way out.”
What do you do with someone who is always willing to lose? What do you do with someone who wins by losing?
We drive home, some twenty-four hours after our arrival, Isabel having never once come downstairs or spoken to Mami. We drive home like sole survivors of a lost battle, wordless in our shared disappointment and humiliation. This time I don’t wear lipstick. This time Mami doesn’t cry.
Isabel wants to wait until after the New Year to have her hysterectomy, but neither the doctor nor Eddie will hear of it. Her daughter, Ezme, comes in from Grand Rapids; I would only be redundant. The surgery goes “perfectly,” according to Eddie—“as well as we could have hoped for.” She will be home for Christmas.
Getting information is like playing Clue. Doctors speak in euphemisms unless asked extremely specific and direct questions, and Eddie is clearly not that guy. You’re talking to the wrong guy. Eddie and Isabel are not the people who sit in their doctor’s office with notebooks, writing down CA 125 levels and the names of specific chemo drugs and inquiring about new studies in which they might participate. Isabel being in the hospital is the first time I am able to obtain any concrete information, because I call and ask specifically to speak to her doctor. I say the sentence, “This is her daughter,” for the first time in my life. My heart ricochets around like I’m afraid there will be some approved list of daughters stapled to Isabel’s chart that will include only Ezme, and that security will be called and I will be arrested for fraud.
It turns out, of course, that the doctor thinks I am Ezme, whom he has met. He calls me Ezme throughout the conversation, and I do nothing to correct him. He seems fond of Ezme, although neither of Isabel’s children is as beautiful as she. When I interrogate him, he never says, “We’ve already discussed this, Ezme.” No doubt he thinks she has gotten on the Internet and suddenly realizes how paltry her questions have been up until now. I am worried, for the duration of the call, that the real Ezme will walk right by him, bearing flowers, on her way to her mother’s room.
(Why don’t I correct him? Why don’t I just say, I’m her other daughter, I live in Chicago, and tell him my name? Why do I make everything harder than it needs to be, and insist on behaving as though I am an intruder in my own life? I accuse Miguel of acting that way, but the things we recognize in others, that drive us the craziest, are the ones that cut closest to our own bones.)
Isabel’s CA 125 markers, going into the surgery, were over six thousand. The acceptable level is thirty-five. She is at Stage IIIC of ovarian cancer, the cancer having metastasized to her stomach lining, her colon, and her lymphatic system. Her ovaries are gone now, and they have removed as much of the cancer as they could from her stomach and colon; it’s the lymph nodes that pose the most serious issue and that account for the “C” staging, her situation being as bad as it can get before she would be in the final stage. They’ll be able to tell us the new CA 125 numbers as soon as they come in, the doctor says, but we should expect a significant lowering given the success of the surgery. The objective is to use chemo to put her into remission. “Yes,” he assures me, “that’s attainable. She’s young and healthy, she was asymptomatic, she isn’t coming to us compromised already—chemo is hard on the system and the biggest barrier to remission is patients not being able to withstand aggressive treatment, but your mother is as healthy as it’s possible to be at this stage, at our starting point, and we have every reason to believe she’ll respond well to treatment.”
“But how long does remission last?” I ask. “It’s in her lymph nodes—it’s spread all over the place—she can’t be cured at this stage, I know that. Realistically, what’s the prognosis?”
“You need to stay off the Internet,” he says. “You’re reading studies that say the average survival rate is two years, but you need to understand that if those studies were published even a year ago, then they were following patients for five years prior to that to collect that median survival rate, so you’re talking about people who were diagnosed seven years ago. Seven years ago were the Dark Ages when it comes to cancer treatment. Every single year is bringing radical improvements. Don’t read the studies. Just think positively and help your mother do the same.”
I hang up, shaking. I have not read any studies. Was this some arbitrary example? My brain cycles through its usual overwhelming desire to jump out of my head. Every single fiber of my body wants to escape itself. I’m having a hard time getting my lungs to feel full when I inhale. I’m not thinking that I want to be high so much as I want to just feel different. A drink would do it. A pill would do it. Being tied up would do it. A lit cigarette against my skin would do it. I want to feel like anything other than myself. I’m not sure how long I sit there, wanting to be Not Me, falling into the familiar black hole of time suckage, the energy drain it takes to simply exist in my own skin, unable to rip off my head for relief, deciding (sometimes by inertia, by not moving toward self-destruction) not to detonate, one minute at a time.
The sun patterns are different on the wall by the time I get online. And there they are: the studies. Oceans of studies. Two years. Two years. Two years.
According to the Internet consensus, Isabel will be forty-five when she dies.
I call Eddie’s cell. He answers, which at this point hasn’t stopped surprising me yet. I know that Isabel takes my calls less out of love for me than as a way to hurt Mami—that even if Mami doesn’t know I’ve just called, Isabel still gets a secret burning satisfaction from picking up the phone as though Mami is the invisible camera that follows her everywhere, as though Mami is the eye of God, and Isabel’s main objective, even more so than remission, is to tell God to bend over.
“She’s doing real good today,” Eddie says. “They’ll probably send her home tomorrow.”
“I was thinking I’d come up again,” I say. “Without my mother, I mean. For, you know. For Christmas.”
Why would I say that, you wonder? Getting to Isabel’s island is as complex and exhausting as flying overseas, and I just undertook the endeavor only to be sent away. Clearly, I would be exempt from another visit so soon, so why do I voluntarily enlist, like some desperate patriot in an unwinnable war? But really, how dare you ask me such a question—you, who left your mother behind in Ireland when you were not even eighteen; you who had the luxury of having something to, as in the proper order of things, grow out of and past.
“Oh, yeah, sure! Isabel would like that a lot,” Eddie says, like a man who hasn’t recently watched Mami and me flee his house in shame. “Ezme will be here, too, that’s great.”
I should be clear here that Eddie, to the best of my knowledge, has no idea that Ezme is my sibling.
“Fabulous,” I say. “I’ll make the drive Sunday. I could see if Miguel wants to come, too, if that’s all right with Isabel.”
“Sure, Miguel, yeah, Isabel will love it, that’s great.”
After I hang up, I think about calling Miguel. He hasn’t been to see Isabel yet. I have no comprehension of why I said he’d come, when of course he won’t, and the fact that Eddie didn’t even miss a beat and acted like everything I was saying was perfectly normal just confirms to me that he is so over his head with my family that he’s essentially inconsequential, like Isabel married the village idiot as some kind of grand subterfuge. This is unfair—Eddie isn’t stupid—he’s taken care of her and Ezme and he’s actually less of a religious fanatic than she is. Still, it’s like Isabel has led her entire adult life in disguise, on the lam, in some witness relocation program.
I text you: You don’t want to drive up to Charlevoix, Michigan, for Christmas, do you? It’s not like you have two kids or anything. It’s not like you have to play Santa. It’s no
t like your wife is pregnant. You don’t want to drive seven hours and wait for me in some motel while I go visit my secret mother for a couple of days, and keep me away from sharp objects on the way home? Wtf, it’s not like you’re busy—what kind of friend are you anyway?
You don’t text back right away; you must be with the boys. When you do, it reads, I can be there on the 26th. Wherever “there” is. Whatever you need.
You pick me up the morning after Christmas, to drive me all the way to Charlevoix, even though you are not coming with me to visit Isabel. You have told your wife and presumably your children and anyone else who asked that you are heading up to Minneapolis to check out the other version of your play. The fact that you have agreed to our actual journey makes less sense than anything other than that I would ask it of you.
I’m waiting for you on the corner, half a block from my apartment, in a fur-hooded coat that weighs as much as an infant. I have two takeaway coffees in my hands, and when you stop the car and see my hands full you jump out and run around to the passenger’s side to open the door for me. The chivalrousness of the gesture seems incongruous with everything I know of you—you are sweet but not chivalrous; you don’t seem to understand, most of the time, how manners work precisely. I put both coffees into the tray cups between the two front bucket seats while you’re going back around to your side of the car. You get in, and by then my hands are empty, and I take off my left mitten, red and wooly with a yellow flower on the front, and take your cold hand into mine, still warm from the coffee. The gesture doesn’t seem so inappropriate given that you are taking me to see my cancer-stricken sister.
The first time we let go will be three hours later, when you have to stop for gas.
I painted my nails that morning—my usual color, like blood in a vial—and took them for dry enough to put on mittens. But while you are filling the car, when I look down at my hands, I see your fingerprint stamped into the polish of my thumbnail. You are outside, in your long sheepskin coat that I call Pimp, 1972, and I am inside the car slowly raising my thumb up to my lips, slipping it into my mouth and tracing the intricate design of you with my tongue: our first kiss.
We miss the ferry, of course. This time, I know the ferry schedule. This time, I made sure we would miss it. There’s no other option, you see. On this trip there is no earthly reason for you to be on to begin with, now that we’re here, what else can we do—there’s no ferry, you see? We have to get a hotel.
I don’t need to tell you about that night. I don’t want to write about our first night because of what it means to me, and how schmaltzy, how cliché the narrative of adultery is, and how the act of pinning the words to the page like butterflies no longer in flight will cheapen them, will dissipate the power of what it meant the one moment I thought to roll away from you and instead your body moved fluidly in time with mine like we were liquids bleeding together, like a single energy coil, you winding around me, your every joint bent into my every curve, your head resting on my head. What does that mean, in words instead of motion? It says nothing, so fuck it, I refuse to try.
Rather, as some paltry offering in return for what that night meant to me, I’ll tell you something you don’t already know:
The first night I slept at Bebe’s apartment, I was twenty-five years old. I had been clean and sober less than three months. Though I could only claim some eighteen months or so as a full-on heroin junkie, I’d been more or less fucked up on something since my freshman year in high school. I had never quite learned how to live as an adult, and now the world seemed like I had been in a coma or in prison for a decade, and had been suddenly re-released into a civilization that was vaguely recognizable, but inexorably different than I remembered it. Dazed and blinking like a time-traveler, I was perpetually stumped by minor details, like that everyone seemed to know how to surf the Internet and make dentist appointments and go shopping for clothes one could wear outside a strip club. But in other ways, quitting had made me reckless. Nothing could be harder than those agonizing days of withdrawal. I’d burned through two husbands and fancied myself someone who had nothing left to lose. So although I had a hard time ordering a pizza, I had no problems flagrantly picking up my female professor at a reading, even though I’d never done anything sexual with a woman beyond mild girl-on-girl stage acts just for show. In her car, Bebe called me a “bratty bottom” and I didn’t know what that term meant. But when she closed the door of her apartment behind us and said I had a very spankable ass, I instantly said, “Prove it.”
At first, she did the talking. She told me to strip, which by then I felt nothing much about doing, but when she fastened a collar around my neck, before she even touched me I was wetter than I’d ever been. She ordered me to my hands and knees, and then, wordlessly, cropped me until I could feel hot welts swelling on my ass that stretched the skin tight, like they might explode if I touched them. And it was like some dam had smashed and words bubbled out of me uncontrollably: I asked her to chain the collar to the leg of the sofa and make me sleep on her floor all night. When I said that for the second time, Bebe threw her head back and cackled. She cropped the hard welts again—her aim was so sure she could replicate the exact path of a previous stroke—and told me to beg to be chained up like her little bitch. I begged wantonly—the floodgates of me were so far open I spilled all over her living room. I called myself names I doubt she’d have dared approached on her own, but my doing so made her bolder and she told me to whine and bark for her, and for the first time she put on her strap-on and fucked my ass. I had never done anything like that with Javier, who would have thought it made him gay, or Todd, whom I’d barely noticed despite having somehow ended up married to him, and I grunted and moaned in pain and ecstasy and the wild terror that I would lose control of my body and have some horrific accident on the floor. I was completely out of my head with bliss.
I didn’t know much about how to exist in the world, but I knew this was the best I’d ever felt sober, and therefore understood that I should not let Bebe slip away. I confused an act at which she was exceptionally skilled—a common set of desires—for love, and hitched my wagon to hers so quickly and over such duration that it became love.
Gloriously unrepentant, Bebe left me chained, naked, to her leather sofa (“It cleans up easy after sex,” she said, and that, too, made me fall in love), just as I’d requested. She went into her bedroom and closed the door. I fell into a glorious subspace sleep, my last awareness being the helpless, goofy smile on my face and the way my ass burned while the rest of my naked body felt cool. With the typical impulsivity of an addict, I had not considered what to do when I had to pee during the night, which, as you know, I always do. When I woke in the dark, my bladder was nearly bursting; I’d been slamming club sodas all night to occupy my sober hands. Embarrassed, I called Bebe’s name but she didn’t respond, so I called out again, three times, so loudly that it seemed impossible she could sleep through it. I squirmed a long time in my desperation, waiting for her to come, but she did not. Finally, I pulled one of her potted plants close to me and pissed quietly into the soil, and then put it back where it came from so she would never know. I curled tight in a ball and cold on the floor, unable to reach the throw blanket on the other side of the couch. In the future, whenever I hit subspace with Bebe I would feel emptied out and clean, sometimes for days, but that first night on the floor, having pissed in her plant, I thought how I should have killed myself better the last time I’d tried. How I had just met this amazing woman but she would soon enough realize I was broken and couldn’t be fixed, and I’d have to live alone in my head again. If I had not been chained, there is no question in my mind that I would have gotten blind drunk, though I never told anybody that.
In the morning Bebe came in the room bright from a shower and unlocked the chain and said, “God, last night was hot—you are so fun.” I ate the spicy eggs she cooked and we went to the farmers’ market in Wicker Park to buy vegetables so I could make her dinner. It turne
d out that the proverbial lesbo U-Haul was already metaphorically parked outside her door, and I was overcome with gratitude. I would realize soon enough, of course, that Bebe is the world’s lightest sleeper—that she had to have heard me calling her name and was ignoring me on purpose, to heighten my feelings of helplessness either for her own gratification, mine, or both. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Probably I don’t care anymore. I never asked her about it, whether she was in her room masturbating and silently laughing at me. The incident, in memory, has been robbed of its power, of the desperate humiliation I felt in the actual moment. It’s been softened by retrospective eroticism or the indifference of cohabitation (I would later water those same plants daily, for years—somehow managing not to kill them though I had never tended a plant before) or some combination therein. All I mean to say is that suddenly it was daylight, and there was Bebe, with eggs, offering me a future inconceivable only a few months prior. And in the light of morning she seemed all-powerful: a hand that could push me to the edge and yank me back simultaneously, and there was never any decision to surrender. I was merely, all at once, hers. I don’t remember thinking of suicide again.
The thing about psychotic episodes is that of course I can’t recall them afterward. The last thing I remember from our night at Villa Moderne is my body twitching out of your arms to the edge of the bed—your voice telling me, “I didn’t say anything,” and the cold realization that I have been talking to the air.
Episodes are like a drunken blackout, except the beauty of a blackout is that you have to make the call to drink yourself into one. Addiction may not feel like a choice, but if you’ve ever had your brain chemistry go haywire despite every meticulous effort to keep it level, words like choice start to take on new meaning. My Lamictal is the first thing I pack when I travel. I’d taken it that afternoon, swallowing it down with my cold coffee once you let go of my hand, while you were filling the car with gas, before I noticed my nail. I see my shrink every month. I’m supposed to keep a journal of my sleeping and eating habits, of my moods, though I admit I don’t really do this. Does anyone really do this? The Lamictal is heavy-duty shit, the best mood stabilizer I’ve ever been on. I haven’t had a psychotic episode since my first six months clean—the last was when Bebe and I had only been together a couple of months, and when I woke in the hospital I was certain I would never see her again, but in the morning she arrived with wild, expensive-looking pink peonies like Mrs. Dalloway had decided to visit Septimus Smith.
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