“Oh shit,” she said, her hand flying to her mouth in horror.
A bright blue ebullient turd bobs in the water.
“Superman stopped by and he laid cable right here, in our very own bathroom,” my father said. We all laughed.
“Ewww,” Dee said, and whacked the toilet with her crop. “Get out of here, gross blue poop,” she commanded. The crop made a great thwapping sound.
“Jeez Louise, Daddy, I’d hate to see what the Green Lantern would do,” I said, and elbowed my father. My mother wrinkled her nose. “You guys.”
“That’s my girl,” my father said, and messed up my hair. I let him.
I looked at him. Shiny black hair, strong chin, his fingernails so clean they seemed white. A little mole on his cheek. Big smile, big smile.
Everything was going to be just fine.
Freshman year my roommate, Mary Beth, tried to teach me how to blow concentric smoke rings. She could blow a link of rings like a silver necklace. It was just one of her many talents, but one of the few that wasn’t appreciated solely behind closed doors and in the company of men.
For my birthday she bought an elegant silver cigarette case with another woman’s name engraved on the back. It seemed extravagant, and romantic, and I loved it. I smoked clove cigarettes and cowboy killers and Lucky Strikes. Hey, I had a sense of humor. I soon adopted Mary Beth’s brand, a tony English smoke that came in a gold box and were Easter-egg colors. We swapped colors—the lavender and robin’s-egg blue looked good with Mary Beth’s long dark brown hair and olive skin, the pink and mint green complemented my pale skin and blondish brown hair. When people wanted to bum one they got yellow. Regardless of the cigarette, I took each one into my mouth like a talisman. At college I made new friends and didn’t tell them about my father’s brush with sickness. I met strangers in bars and bus stations and told them everything about the cancer. Painfully, as though I were slowly pulling off a Band-Aid. Occasionally I’d tell a new friend when I was drunk or high, or needed connection, some delicate sympathy. Afterward, I always felt cheap, like I’d failed my father. Like I’d used him to get something I hadn’t earned.
I never, ever smoked in front of my parents. They’d have killed me. It was blasphemy.
After a while I forgot. I did. I forgot. It was like people who become religious during finals week, or when there’s a car accident. When the trauma passes, you forget. I became a hobby smoker. I was the annoying person who cadged cigarettes at parties, but never bought them. When I remembered Dad’s cancer, it was just one of the things that proved my father was stronger and luckier than any mortal man, and certainly stronger and luckier than I’d ever be, convinced as I was that I’d never hit thirty. After two years of living with other people, Mary Beth and I decided to be roommates again senior year. We moved into an off-campus house with four other girls. The spring before my senior year my parents had taken a trip down the Amazon. In addition to the orchid cuttings my father smuggled back in his jeans pockets, he’d brought back a trophy for being the only man on their trip courageous—or stupid—enough to brave the piranhas and swim in the river. It was a fungus on the X ray. An almond-shaped fungus.
Or, it was supposed to be a fungus.
But biopsies don’t lie.
“An almond?” I say when my father tells me. My mother is on the extension, I can hear the glug-glug of her pouring wine into a glass.
Mary Beth mouths, “What’s up?” I turn around to face the wall.
She tramps into the kitchen and comes back with an Amstel, then packs her little ceramic pot pipe and puts them both at my elbow. She has no idea.
“Is it a smokehouse almond? Jeez, I thought only doctors and dentists got those, and then only at Christmastime. Or is this almond one of those crummy foil-pouch almonds you get on domestic flights?”
“Honey.” My mother sounds appalled.
My father laughs. “Good girl,” he says. “Well, you know. I’m not sure. But they seem to think they can get it pretty easily. They think they can do something called a surgical cure,” he says.
“Cure, yes, cure,” I say. “That’s what I want to hear, Daddy.”
“Well, we’ll see,” he says. It sounds as though he is chewing pretzels, or ice cubes.
My mother chimes in, “They’re very optimistic. It’s localized, and there’s no reason to think they can’t get it all.”
“Think of it as pruning,” my father says. Then he gets serious. “There’s no need to miss school, because I’m going to be fine. Really. Don’t do that.”
“Listen. I’m coming home,” I say, and instinctively reach for the new pack of cigarettes Mary Beth just bought. I tear the filmy cellophane off the package, the slippery plastic clinging to my fingers like a moth.
“You don’t need to. We’re fine. I mean it, honey. Dr. Butler pulled some strings to get your father into surgery right away. It’s just two nights in the hospital. We can handle it.”
“Shit, Mother. I’m coming down. Thanksgiving break starts in a week anyway. My tests won’t be a problem. I’ve been studying.”
Mary Beth laughs. Mary Beth is also an art history major, and in truth neither she nor I have cracked open a book. We had, however, set up a slide projector in our bedroom that we left on all the time; Michelangelo’s David loomed up on our wall. One night we got stoned and drew flowers and pirate tattoos on his body as well as the words I love cheese. It was funny at the time.
“Okay, then. Take your tests or what have you…” my father says. I can tell he’s pleased that I’m coming.
“Wasn’t one cancer enough, Daddy? Is this about keeping up with the Joneses, or what? You trying to set a record? You want a plaque or something?” I say. My voice is steady, but I can’t light my cigarette.
“What can I say? I’ve always been an overachiever.”
“So I’ll see you Friday night,” I say. I really want to take a drag, but I wait. I wait.
“Great,” he says, and hangs up the phone before I can even tell him I love him.
I hang up and instantly call Dee at her dorm. It rings and rings. A girl with a lisping southern accent answers the phone. I can’t talk to a stranger. I hang up.
Mary Beth sits down next to me on the sofa.
“Oh darling. Fuck, and more fuck,” she says, and wraps her arms around me. “I am so so sorry.”
Even though Mary Beth is my best friend, and even though I trust her, I cannot talk to her. I can’t talk to anybody. I even think about calling Michelle. She knew my dad, but I can’t. If I say it, it makes it true, and I don’t want to say it. I want Dee, and just like that, the phone rings again. Dee’s voice is scratchy and hoarse as if she has been screaming. “I can’t believe it,” she weeps. “This isn’t fair. What are we going to do?”
“It’ll be all right,” I say, like I’ve practiced it a hundred times.
“We need a plan,” she says. “What if he dies?” Her voice is small and desperate. She just can’t let it go. “It’s almost Thanksgiving,” she says. “God, it’s so unfair.”
“For Christ’s sake, he’s not going to die,” I say, making it sound like a joke. I roll my eyes, as though she could see me. “Dee, do you really think Daddy would die without seeing us get married? Come on—think about it. Use your head. Just the sheer curiosity of it will keep him alive for decades,” I say, twisting the phone cord around my finger until my fingertip is purple and numb. “The what-if-the-guy-isn’t-good-enough-for-my-princess thing. You know Dad.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“He couldn’t stand it.”
I can just see Dee in her freshman dorm room, her single bed scattered with stuffed animals, an “autograph hound” covered in the autographs of friends from high school. She is probably wearing torn blue jeans and one of my father’s old pullover sweaters that we inherit from him when they get holes in the elbows. He always seems a little surprised at how much we covet this clothing. I pick at what was once just a loose thread, but wh
ich is now a hole in a forest green hand-me-down, and worry it like a sore.
“You don’t know he’s not going to die,” she cries softly into the phone. “I’m going home. I don’t care about my finals.”
“You should care, Dee, you’re going to fail out if you don’t…He’s going to be fine. For Christ’s sake—this is our father you’re talking about here. Tell me, how’s school?” I say, trying to distract her. “Are you still trying to decide between the nice guy from Virginia and that rogue from Tennessee?”
When I hang up, Mary Beth is good about not making me talk about it. She lights my cigarette, then makes me a bed on the sofa.
“I should study,” I say, but we both know it’s hopeless.
“Oh please,” she says, flipping through the channels until she finds a 1930s black-and-white movie, Topper. We watch for a few minutes and I can feel her staring at me, gauging my reaction to see if a dashing couple who die in a car crash and come back as ghosts is benign enough. She flips to a rerun of The Muppet Show.
“You’re in Kermit’s hands,” she says. “That’s almost as good as God’s.”
Later she brings me poor-boy soup—chicken bouillon with carrot wheels and egg noodles. For dessert there’s a bowl of fudge ripple ice cream with a pale blue tranquilizer perched on top like a cherry.
“I thought about hiding it inside like the baby Jesus in an Epiphany cake, but it seemed a waste. They are so pretty.”
Mary Beth is always generous with her drugs, but the big blue Xanaxes are her favorites, she treasures them. I feel honored.
“Isn’t that how you get dogs to take their medicine, stick it in their food?” I say.
She pets my head. “Swallow.”
As I lie in bed that night my lungs ache, but I light another cigarette. I notice how the slender tube juts from my fingers like a mutated digit. I inhale deeply, feel my lungs seize. I wonder if this is what my father feels? Or if he really feels nothing at all. Maybe it’s just too frightening to feel. I imagine the cancer amassing in my father’s lungs like a clump of purple grapes, becoming so heavy it pulls the lung down, and I can’t breathe.
That night when the phone rings at midnight, I pick it up and carry it back to my bed. When I lift the receiver and don’t hear anything I know for sure it is Dee. I cradle the phone to my cheek, and we both lie there in silence until we fall asleep.
When I wake up the next morning I call home, just to check in. My father answers the phone, something he very rarely does. He hates wasting time on the phone.
“Hey, Puss,” he says, sounding chipper.
“Hey, Dad,” I say. “How is it going there?”
“Fine, fine. Mom and I were just talking, planning a trip. Your mother has this idea about Borneo,” he says, like nothing has happened. “It’s the orangutans,” he says.
“No way. It’s the hair,” I say. “She’s got that wildwoman of Borneo look going on.”
“Hey, did I ever tell you about all those car accidents your mom and I saw driving in the Indonesian countryside? It was something to see. Everywhere, up and down the highways—if you could call them that—you’d see crashes, fender benders, what have you, and the people involved, the driver, the passengers, all of them would be lying there together beside the road taking a nap.”
“You mean it looked like they were napping, like when we were driving through Ireland and Dee and I would spot a sheep lying, sort of pushed off to the side of the road, and you’d tell us it was just napping?”
It’s so easy to forget that anything is wrong.
“No, these folks were sleeping. You see, the Indonesians hate confrontation, so in times of stress they just tune out, fall asleep. It’s easier.”
“Makes sense,” I say, wondering if Mary Beth could set me up with mondo mood stabilizers before I left for home. “Like fainting goats,” I say. “Look dead and no one will eat you. I lobby for changing the family crest so it features a fainting goat.”
“Did you know in Japan people die every day without ever knowing they were sick because their doctors couldn’t bring themselves to tell their patients they were dying?” my father says.
“That’s cheery.”
“Just thought you’d be interested to know that.”
They have to saw through my father’s ribs to get at the tumor. Once they open him up, they lop off the bottom of his pale pink lung, which I now imagine being like a soft starfish struggling to regenerate itself in the cave of his ribs. Which, of course, isn’t possible. When I see him I’m going to say, “So, one lung is shorter than the other—it won’t affect your dancing.” Ha ha.
On the train the smoking car is blue with smoke. Even the goddamn people look blue. I almost don’t sit in it because it seems sad and pitiful, but who am I kidding? I draw the smoke into my mouth, down into my lungs, which seem to inflate as though they were elastic, swelling to meet the heat of my breath. For the last fifteen minutes I ride between the cars. It’s freezing cold but I have to clear my head and air my sorry self out.
My mother waves to me as I walk toward her on the train platform. She’s got her hair down, and she’s wearing a green-and-gold batik dress, some funky wrap number from the seventies, and an armful of gold bangles. That dress, I now remember, is one of my father’s favorites. She doesn’t want me to be afraid.
I wish I’d dressed up, but I, of course, look like a college student. Khakis, pink button-down Tretorns, jeans jacket. A sweatshirt tied around my waist to hide my butt.
“How was the ride?” my mother asks, running her hand along my cheek. I’m startled to see my father’s gold wedding band on her thumb.
“I’m great,” I say, and grab her hand between mine, holding it still for a minute. The ring looks huge to me, like hardware, like the anklets people on bail are forced to wear so the state can monitor their movements. It’s like he’s gone already.
“Oh, that. He couldn’t wear it during surgery,” my mother explains. “Goodness, you smell like smoke,” she says, touching my chin-length hair, which I’ve been streaking with peroxide whenever I get depressed.
“Pretty,” she says absently. It isn’t.
“You know that smell makes me sick, now?” she says. “I can’t help it. I can’t even stand to ride in Judy’s and Betty’s cars. I can’t help it. It makes me so angry. Chas doesn’t even smoke. He has probably, in his whole life, smoked, in total, one pack of cigarettes.”
“It makes no sense,” I say, thinking how strange it sounds when my mother refers to my father by his first name when talking to me. I like it better when she calls him “your father.”
“I can’t stand anyone these days,” my mother says, opening her car door with such ferocity it dings the door of the BMW next to us, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “I’m so angry I hate it.”
“I think it’s appropriate,” I say.
“Well, I don’t like it,” she says softly, staring into space for a moment before she starts the car.
“Would yoga help, or something like that?”
She sort of laughs. “It’s been years. I’d break in two,” she says, then turns to me. “Weren’t there any nonsmoking seats on the train?”
“No,” I lie. “I promise I’ll boil myself when we get home.” I feel like I’ve injured her.
“Good,” she says. “I don’t think your father should have to breathe that in. He’s got to be careful, you know.”
Before we go into the hospital we sit in the car and put on lipstick; I borrow some of Mom’s Chanel No. 5 and put it on my wrists, behind my ears. It’s not like I expected to see my father sitting outside the hospital on a suitcase, checking his watch, like where are my womenfolk? But I didn’t expect to see him still in bed, in one of those awful hospital robes that force you to look at skin you never wanted to see. I didn’t expect him to look so sullen, to barely smile when I kiss him and say, “So we’re here to spring you, Big Daddy.”
My mother kisses him too. “Here,” she says, and sl
ides his wedding ring off her finger. He shakes it in his hand, then slips it on without a word.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get you home.”
The whole ride home he swears and clutches at the door handle like he’s in agony.
“Are you trying to hurt me?” he says, holding on to his side as she takes a turn, not too fast—maybe she’s a little keyed up, but it’s not so bad.
He stomps on the floorboard again.
“You can stop doing that. I had that brake taken out,” she says in a snippy voice I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. When we pull into the driveway, he shakes off her attempt to help him into the house. He moves slowly, staggering into the house like a cowboy in a bad western who’s just gotten shot full of lead.
“Oh Jesus,” my mother says, her voice catching. She believes he’s hamming it up.
My mother has rearranged the living room for convalescence. My father won’t be able to take the stairs, so she has rented a hospital bed, one with all the levers and cranks. The mattress looks like a huge white life raft. She has turned the velvet-covered love seat around so that it is facing the hospital bed, and made it up for herself to sleep on.
When he stands by the big bed, trying to get up onto it without killing himself, I have to look away. My mother offers to help, but he just waves her away. I don’t know why he’s so pissed off.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I think about calling Mary Beth, or Dee, but I’m too tired to make words. Mom will call Dee. Mary Beth is probably out, or asleep. I wonder where my mother has stashed the tranquilizers her friends have been dropping by wrapped in tinfoil, along with casseroles and potted plants.
We are home only a half hour before my father begins clawing at his chest. “I can’t breathe,” he gasps. “Oh Christ, I can’t catch my breath.” I’m sure he’s dying. He should never have left the hospital. His face turns a sickly gray, his eyes widen with fear.
“Call them,” he wheezes. “Call the hospital.” My mother, trying to appear calm, she doesn’t start to run until she leaves the living room.
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