“Millions of dollars,” he would say, and shake his head. “Can you believe it? Ugly as sin. The joker that designed that sucker ought to throw himself off a bridge.”
Then he’d say, “Drive. Just drive.”
My father didn’t know that kids made out here. Or that my friend Michelle and I came here to hang out and smoke, and maybe pass a Michelob if the workmen left any behind. Sometimes we’d just sit in the windows and peel the sunburned skin off each other’s back and watch the lights of our neighborhood come on. We were going to different colleges in the fall. We didn’t like to talk about it, or how we knew everything was changing. I hadn’t told Michelle about my new roommate Mary Beth from New York City—how she’d called me at ten o’clock at night and joked that she’d been mugged twice but that they’d never gotten her jewelry, how her laugh sounded like the tinkling of a giant chandelier. Mary Beth didn’t sound like a teenager at all, she sounded like a grownup—like twenty-five or something. She’d even called me darling. It was sort of exciting. I couldn’t tell Michelle that. What was the point? It was like cheating on her to even think about another friend right now. It was like putting it in her face. Neither one of us wanted to think about the future right now, we wanted everything to stay just the same.
Scott had chosen a two-story with an atrium, and I’d followed him in. There was a sink in the foyer. A bathtub sat in the middle of the living-room floor. We got as far as the half-built kitchen, right where the island and stools should go, and then boom. The first kiss was one of those kisses where you don’t pull apart even when you’re moving to lie down, like your breathing depends on it. Through the roof beams the moon looked like a cat’s claw snagged on black cloth, the stars like nail heads pounded into tar paper. I shrugged off my bra—a very frustrating front clasp—before he took his teeth to the snap like a pothead with a potato-chip bag. I could feel the rough grain of the wood against my bare back. He pulled his yellow Izod shirt over his head. One snap, one shrug, and we were skin to skin. I gasped. He was smiling too much. He wanted me. When he went for my Bermudas I sat up.
“You’ve got to take me home,” I said, fishing around in the dark for my bra and shirt. “My dad is going to kill me.”
“Now?” he asked in that half-plaintive-half-shocked-how-can-you-do-this-to-me voice only a boy with a boner can muster.
“Now.”
“You’re joking,” he said, and laughed, like he really believed I was going to say, Gotcha, why don’t you just whip it out.
“No,” I said. “Please, now.” He got up, shaking his head like he’d made a mistake bringing me here. He slipped his shirt back on as though it pained him. He didn’t say much. I guess he knew about my father.
He didn’t look at me once as I guided him through my neighborhood. North Star was built in the late fifties and early sixties during the country’s big love affair with the space program, so all the streets were named for planets and constellations. We lived on Pluto Drive. Nobody on Pluto had ever died. Yet.
Lots of other people in our neighborhood had. I thought it was the radon. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware made up the “radon panhandle.” Others thought it had to do with the chemical companies, Dupont and Hercules. My father worked for Hercules, at one time as a chemist, but we didn’t talk about that possibility much. He was in marketing now, so what was he going to do, quit his job?
The youngest person in North Star to get cancer was five-year-old Toby Kittredge. I imagined the leukemia exploding in his body like poisoned corn kernels. Pushing his Tonka dump truck up the aisle of the Red Clay Presbyterian Church, he resembled, with his baby-powder-white skin and bald head, a beatific grinning lightbulb. Twenty-two-year-old Shelby Reid had thought the dull pain in his back was from water polo. He’d never heard of Hodgkin’s disease. Two years after his death, his car, a bright blue ’79 Corvette Stingray, still sat in his parents’ garage gathering dust. Mr. McArthur was the first man I knew to grow alfalfa sprouts in a jar, and his cancer pinballed from his prostate to his liver to his brain until, in the end, he no longer recognized his family. Miss Spruance was famous for her awesome backhand and her petunias, great purple and pink trombone-shaped blossoms. The doctors removed her ovaries. Then her uterus. Then her right breast. Then she told them to stop.
I wondered if God was punishing me for secretly feeling relieved every time somebody else got sick—you know, thinking that their tragedy just improved my family’s odds of staying well. There but for the grace of God, and the law of averages, go I. Now, of course, we were like everyone else in the neighborhood. Well, not really, but sort of.
Scott slid his red Firebird into my driveway. It was 2:00 A.M. I leaned over to kiss him good night, and then it started again. It was my fault, he’d have just let me out, I didn’t mean for it to happen. I was out of that car, I was, in my mind, but then my body crawled into the backseat. My body lay down and pulled him on top of me. Thinking, Maybe this is it. Maybe this is really a good thing. Maybe it’s love. Sometimes, good things come out of nowhere. Maybe he’d be the one. I didn’t want him to stop touching me. I just wanted to live in that backseat, with his skin on my skin. I didn’t want to think. My body wasn’t responding, though; I tried to pinch my nipples to get them hard; I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t turned on.
At first, the porch light flicked on and off, a lighthouse signal flashing across my bare stomach. Then the house lights went on. Still I didn’t move.
I didn’t hear the family-room door open or see my father coming. Scott had his tongue in my ear, my eyes were closed, I was disappearing in the kiss. Then I heard my mother yelling, “Chas, get back here. She’s right there, you can see the car, she’s fine. Now come back!”
Neither Scott nor I had time to move before the car door flew open, night air rushing in as if a seawall had been breached. I screamed and covered myself, like I was being defiled. Dad stood there barefoot in the driveway, in his sky-blue pajamas, glaring into the car. Scott pushed himself up off of me, craning his head up, posed like a seal with a ball on its nose.
“Oh, shit,” Scott said. He sounded scared.
“You can’t do this to me!” I objected lamely. What could Dad see? Nothing. I was in my bra, that was like a bathing-suit top. God, I’d worn less in public.
“Inside, now,” my father thundered at me, slamming the car door. The windows rattled. I swear it. How could he do that with that awful incision under his arm? It was as if he didn’t even see Scott. I sat up, pulled my shirt on. For a minute Dad stood still in the driveway, and I thought maybe he was about to come yank me out of the car by the hair and drag me inside. That would be okay. Instead my mother came out, her red kimono flapping behind her like a Chinese dragon, and pulled my father back into the house. “Get inside,” she said. “Inside.”
“Oh, man,” Scott said, rubbing his eyes, as if maybe this had all been a hallucination. “Fuck.”
I sat up and kissed him on the mouth, one last time.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. “Really sorry,” and got out of the car. I tried not to smile.
Inside I could hear my mother saying, “Now, why did you have to do that?”
I was dumbfounded. My mother, who never ever crossed or even really disagreed with him, even she had had it with my father.
I didn’t want to go in. Ever since my mother took this dopey Parent Effectiveness Training Course, to learn “how to talk so your kids will listen,” she wanted to discuss things. Feelings. She’d say things like, “I hear you’re angry about not being allowed to wear purple lip gloss,” and “How does my saying no to letting you stay out past eleven make you feel?”
Our mom wanted to be the perfect parent.
Our dad just figured he was.
I didn’t want to go in. They made me insane. Of course I had to—what, I was going to live in the garage?
I sat there for a second and played the whole thing out again in my head. The day he came back fr
om the hospital I had started trying to memorize my father. His forward-leaning walk, the way he stood on one leg when he brushed his teeth, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet to “Brown Sugar,” the way he would hold my face in his hands and kiss me. I wanted to build him inside of me, so I could never forget him.
They were both sitting on the edge of the brown nubby couch, not speaking.
“I think you know we’re disappointed. Our trust in you has been shaken,” my father said. His brown eyes looked black to me, two angry little coals, boring into my head.
“We were worried, it’s not like you not to call,” my mother said.
“Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I should have called. I am really really sorry.”
“You know we’ll have to discuss this,” she said, then, “I don’t think Dee needs to know about this.” Now I felt dirty.
Dee didn’t even know she was pretty yet.
“I lost track of time,” I said. “I was with Michelle and then Scott offered to give me a ride home. It was late, I figured you’d be asleep, I didn’t want to wake you with a call. There wasn’t really a phone, and looking for—”
“Your shirt is inside out,” my mother said, getting up from the sofa.
My father got up, and frowned at me. Then, without saying a word, he pulled me roughly toward him, kissed the top of my head, and left me there in the family room. Just me alone.
On the glass coffee table with the National Geographics and the Whole Earth Catalog were the books about cancer Mom had taken out of the library, which nobody read, because nobody needed to.
Just that morning I asked my mother if her books explained why it was that cancers always came in the shape of fruits and vegetables. Peas and raisins if you’re lucky, grapefruits if you’re not.
She said, “I would guess it’s a little less scary to tell someone they have a green-bean-sized…”
I waited for her to say the word, but she didn’t. She said, “Spot.”
Spot seemed much more polite than lump or tumor.
Alone on the sofa, I thought about my father, the way he ripped open the Firebird’s door, the way he pounded on the glass, the whole car shaking like it was made of tin, like he could pick it right up and tip me out into his arms. He could catch me in one hand, like King Kong, and carry me away.
My daddy was going to be just fine.
I started smoking in the woods behind our house, in our old broken-down tree house. I sat staring at our house waiting for something to happen, but of course nothing did. Mom had been talking about how we should all have a family meeting to “rap about our feelings.” But that never happened either. Sitting there smoking, I imagined generations of my father’s family, all smoking, each one of us a smoke ring, a magic trick. We were descended from French horse thieves; we were too mean to die.
I forced myself to really inhale, even though the smoke scorched my throat and pricked my lungs, making me cough until I thought I’d bleed. The coughing hurt, but it was a good hurt, proof that I was doing something—actually taking some action. I smoked, chain-smoked, lighting the next cigarette off the last, sucking on them until they burned down to the filter, until the ash began to singe my fingers.
I knew how angry it would make my father. I knew that if he found out he’d shake me until I couldn’t stand, but I didn’t care.
A few weeks after his “procedure,” there was a follow-up appointment, and the whole family went. The doctors were going to shoot blue dye into my dad’s feet so they could see if there might be a papaya pressing on his kidneys, a green bean in the old spleen.
My parents got all dressed up in their conservative clothes, a dark suit and red tie for Dad, a knee-length jean skirt and blazer for Mom, both of them in loafers. Like it mattered how they looked. Like it was a beauty contest or a job interview: Hey, nice suit, snazzy but respectable, good shoeshine, we’re going to let that guy off with lymphoma. But, oh dear, that one there in the pilling sweatsuit and rundown bobos, buddy, prepare yourself for bone-marrow cancer.
“This is the worst part,” my mother whispered to me as we entered the waiting room, trying to find a seat as far away from the others as possible. “The not knowing. We can deal with anything but this not knowing. Shit,” she said.
My mother had only recently taken to swearing, and every time a curse came from her lips she still seemed a little surprised, a little repulsed, like she’d spit up a frog.
After Dad was called in, the three of us sat there in the waiting room, sort of holding hands, but it felt queer, and their palms were sweaty and I couldn’t sit still, so I walked around. Everywhere you look in those cancer wards it’s all painted pale blue or pale coral, and some genius has hung all these impressionist paintings in every crappy hallway, waiting room, and bathroom, you know—in case you get the bright idea of slitting your wrists. It’s like oh, don’t get depressed, oh look at the smiling ladies in the big flowery hats and all that pretty yellow—see, see, purple, ooh, happy haystacks, ooh happy sailboats, happy damn monkeys on the Grande Jatte. How many times did I have to see that painting? I don’t care! And for your information, the light on the cathedral at Notre Dame is not lavender, not peach or violet. I have been there. The cathedral at Notre Dame is covered in pigeon crap.
In the waiting area people were talking, but we didn’t share our story. What was there to say? We had a little spot, the doctor dug it out, and now we’re fine. No loss of life, some loss of sleep, but that’s it. It sure paled in comparison to the young mother jiggling her leg as she read her Bible, her hand on the head of a boy who couldn’t have been older than five, and who was wearing a tiny chestnut-colored chemo wig. Or the high-school football coach’s tale of an egg-sized tumor that pressed his eyeball right out of his head. “Holy Toledo, I just thought I had the mother of all migraines!” he said to my mother.
“Mmm,” she said. “I can imagine.”
But, of course, we couldn’t really.
We had nothing to compare to the grapefruit-sized tumor scooped from the balls of a silver-haired electrician who told the group he was now learning to dance all those dances he once thought were too ritzy for him. He already had the foxtrot and the cha-cha under his belt.
“So what if no one does them anymore? I want to know them.” Then he got up and got a little Dixie cup of coffee from the “courtesy” table. He had an elegant limp.
You just about wanted to scream your head off.
When my father came out, he looked almost surprised to see us sitting there. “Hey sweet babies, why does everybody look so blue?” He kissed my mom. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”
“So, are you okay?” I asked. Why didn’t anybody else ask these questions?
“Of course, baby girl,” he said. Dee threw her arms around him.
Of course.
My mother squeezed my hand.
We went to a little restaurant around the corner from the hospital. Even though it was still officially morning—eleven o’clock—Mom ordered a kir, and Dad had two beers. Dee and I both got Fresca and chocolate mousse. The scan had showed nothing at all, not one little chickpea, not a grain of rice, not even one mustard seed, and so we toasted our good fortune.
Back home I went to my room, grabbed my smokes, and crawled out onto the roof. I needed a cigarette. Just one.
With the exception of his two weeks of not being able to do yard work, which simply made the yard look as if we were on vacation—the grass lush, and a little long—our household manifested none of the telltale signs of illness. No dandelions, no peeling shutters, no drawn blinds or stink of sickness. Everything was going to be fine.
From the roof I could see my dad in the garden. He was supposed to be resting. He was out in the flower bed, surveying what last night’s summer wind had wrought. All the plants looked mussed up, the peonies splaying out in all directions, the lilies slightly dynamited. In my father’s back jeans pocket were his gardening shears, their blades so sharp they could snip the ears off a dog;
in his hand a knife. He leaned against the split-rail fence and watched a Carolina wren light on a pine. Standing there in silvery-green sheep’s ear and budding purple irises, he looked content. For one moment. Then, in haste, he began to work, lashing the white trumpet lilies to stakes like Christian martyrs, binding pink heavy-headed peonies resembling drunk girls on the nod to skinny bamboo poles. I watched him work. I should have been helping him, but he didn’t need me.
I watched him go in the house. After two more cigarettes, I heard him calling my name.
“Hey, Evie, come here a second—I want to show you something. Something that will make you laugh.”
How funny can it be, I thought. I crawled in the window, changed my shirt, quickly pulled out the jar of Skippy I kept hidden in my underwear drawer, and stuck a fingerful in my mouth. (Peanut butter is better at disguising the smell of cigarettes or booze than gum or mints, which are like taking out an advertisement of guilt.)
Downstairs, I felt so confident I kissed my father’s cheek.
“Hey, what’s all the hubbub, bub?” I said.
“Did you happen to see Superman using the john?” he asked.
“Superman?” This better be good.
“Yeah, Superman, you know, the man of steel, able to leap—hey, Dee, come here for a second, sweetie,” he calls, hearing my sister and Mom returning from Dee’s riding lesson. Dee comes clomping out into the hall in her riding gear, crisp white shirt, jodhpurs, black velvet hat, her leather crop in hand. Dee wouldn’t give him any lip.
“I hit all my jumps,” she said. “I didn’t miss one, I didn’t fly off, nothing.”
“I’m so proud,” my mother said, putting her hands on Dee’s shoulders. “I had to cover my eyes half the time, of course, but she was perfect,” my mother said, then noticed we were all standing in the bathroom. “This is no place for a family meeting,” she said.
“Look,” my father said, lifting the toilet lid.
My mother peered into the bowl, blinked several times, then turned white.
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