Metastasize, it stings.
3.1 Just Me and My Anger, Strolling down the Avenue
A. Hate everyone. Everyone is evil. Even babies, babies are evil because they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. Stupid babies don’t even know what they’ve got.
Except for your baby. Your baby makes your father laugh. Your baby can stay.
On the M14, make an argument for extinguishing nearly every life on the bus: Mean to Kids, Stares at Women’s Breasts, Old and Smells Bad, Doesn’t Give up Seat to Pregnant Lady, Addict, Homeless, Wouldn’t Be Missed by a Soul, Tax Cheat, Likes Little Boys, Gets off on Making People Cry, Ugly Sweater, Dumb Mustache…until there’s just you and the guy you need to drive the bus.
B. Be short with your friends when they kindly inquire about how you are feeling. Say, “Fine.” Think, Nobody wants to hear a sad story. Alone, gorge on self-pity like it’s ice cream. You make yourself nauseous.
When your best friend asks why you seem so hostile these days, say, “Oh, I don’t know, I guess because my father is dying of cancer.” Relish the look of horror wilting her features.
C. Be cruel to your husband because he can’t do anything right—i.e., save your father. Feel justified and comforted when your sister says her boyfriend is an asshole too.
D. Hate everyone some more. Wonder if you can get addicted to hate. How would you come off that high, what would the cold turkey be like? Would you be forced to watch slides of Mother Teresa feeding the poor, your eyelids held open with toothpicks? Would you be considered healed, clean, if all you felt was apathy?
At night, crying in your bathtub, decide that the only people who should be allowed to live are you and your sister and your mother and father, and maybe your husband, and your sister’s boyfriend, but even they have to build their own life raft.
E. Wonder how anyone in the world can stand you, forget about like you.
F. Wonder why it is that you have two healthy grandfathers, both in their eighties, and your fifty-five-year-old father is toast. Are you a bad person for not even thinking twice about offering their lives to God in exchange for ten more years with your father? You’re not greedy, you’re not asking for twenty, just ten. Do I hear five?
Wonder how you will explain to the grandfathers that your father is dead, since neither has been told he has cancer again. How many business trips can a guy take?
Think, There’s some kind of dark comedy to be formed out of all of this, but that’s another story.
4. Embrace Treatment
A. “Basically they kill you and bring you back to life,” your father says.
“Oh, is that all,” you say.
B. Feel grateful when the doctor, who likes your father, respects him, gets him into a program that he really isn’t eligible for because he isn’t sick enough. Wonder at that. Not sick enough? That sounds good. Still, we start. Chemotherapy. Therapy—therapy—that sounds good. You are in therapy. It’s a science, they say, but they’re really just high-end bartenders expertly mixing chemicals, layering poisons like a pousse-café. Chemotherapy, the word sends shivers. It’s what the outside world knows of cancer, the hero of cancer stories: Caped Crusader Chemotherapy and his sidekick Radiation Boy. Think of all the chemotherapy clichés. Hair loss. Vomiting. Yellow skin. Numbness. Imagine Deadly Disease Roulette: Okay, Alex, I’ll take Bloody Stools for a side effect, and spin again. Come on, Remission! Daddy loves Christmas!
C. Offer to shave your father’s head before he loses even one hair. Contemplate who you are really doing this for. Your father says, “I always did like the way I looked in a drug helmet,” folding and unfolding a dark blue bandanna.
Pledge that if you do shave his head you will not cry. Pledge that you will save his hair, but not let him know. He wouldn’t understand.
D. Go to the hospital and sit with your mother and father while he has a series of bags filled with various chemo concoctions, liquid hell, dripped into his veins. Say, “That’s not chemo, that’s antifreeze!” Don’t stare at his arms, or the tubes, or all the tape they use to keep the tubes in place for eighteen hours. He looks like a bungled arts-and-crafts project from the children’s wing. Don’t get hurt when your father ignores you. When the nurse comes in, clipboard in hand, looking tired and bored by all this dying, say, “Oh goody, another Intoxicating Drink of Love.” Your father says, “That’s my daughter.” Think you will never get tired of hearing your father say that. That’s my daughter. Roll up your sleeve, slap the inside of your arm, and say, “I’ll have the Zombie, no chaser, and hold the umbrella.” Try to make the nurses laugh. Be nice to them, apologize for ringing the bell when they don’t materialize as soon as one bag has been drained and it’s time for the next. Be nice to the nurses in the hope that they will be nice to your father. Give him confidence in his treatment. Make him unafraid. Like they can save him, these white-frocked witches in their silent white rubber-soled shoes. When your father has to urinate, excuse yourself to go get a snack. Say, “Man, have I got a hankering for a microwavable cheese product hotter than the core of the earth.” See the silhouette of your father behind the curtain peeing into a plastic bottle. Later, see the bottle sitting on the windowsill in the sunshine. It’s chartreuse.
Try to distract your father from the cramps that keep shooting up his legs, the lava flows of nausea bubbling up his throat; try to make him laugh, but keep staring at the plastic trash receptacle for needles and other sharp objects. When he falls asleep, leave the room, it looks too much like he is dead. Make your mother come with you to the lounge to watch a soap opera. Recognize the evil temptress by her expressive eyebrows.
Wonder why the television is always on so loud in the lounge of the cancer ward.
Smile at families who look just like people you see in the supermarket, people buying cheap ground chuck and boxes of ice-cream cones in the wintertime. Everybody seems to be either in fancy sweat suits or rugby shirts. You are wearing all black, like a crow.
E. Scour New York City for a roll of an obscure English brand of large, extra-chalky, extra-strong peppermints—the only thing your father can stomach after chemotherapy. It’s what keeps him from vomiting in the car. It allows him time to get upstairs and vomit in his own toilet. Consider this a triumph.
Remember:
Just last summer your father was mistaken for a movie star in a third-world country. The proprietor of a Thai restaurant took a Polaroid and insisted on an autograph. Your father protested, then went along with the ruse. He purposefully misspelled the star’s name, Warren Batty. He rolls his eyes when he tells you this. Your father pretends to be no one but who he is. Wonder, if he was that movie star, would the doctors be breaking their humps to save him?
Remember:
The doctor has said that right now your father’s cancer is sluggish. You never know with cancer, the doctor says. Think of lazy, recalcitrant Boy Scouts ambling in the wilderness of your father’s body, up the path of his spine, poking his organs with sticks as though they were torturing frogs, carelessly spilling cancer seeds everywhere.
Remember:
Your father has beaten cancer before. He’s been in remission on and off for fourteen years. He is unstoppable. Superman. Everyone should just remember that.
F. Your father can’t sit down to eat his birthday dinner, his back is in too much pain. He stands, palms pressed to his lower back, and stares down at the table frowning, not touching his plate of duck a` l’orange and steamed asparagus. Nothing tastes good. He picks up his wine, sucks at the glass. His skin is as yellow as old newspaper; he is going deaf from the drugs. Still, he is hopeful. At your father’s insistence, your mother has bought napkins and balloons that have the number 77 on them. Your father insists that you are all celebrating his seventy-seventh birthday, not his fifty-fifth. This is supposed to make life make sense.
Your father has beaten cancer before. Everyone should just remember that.
Your sister looks at you across the table, spits a mouthful of food in
to her napkin, and asks to be excused. Her skin is gray. Even her eyes look gray. Wonder if she even swallows her food anymore, how big the masticated food ball in her hand has to get for her to start a new napkin.
“It’s strange,” your father says, “but I’m not angry. I guess I should be, but I’m not.”
Pat his arm and say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got enough anger for the two of us.”
In truth, your father has rages too painful to recall, spitting out hurtful things in a voice that isn’t his own. He makes jokes about the men he imagines your mother having sex with after he’s dead. The doctors tell my mother it could be the cancer attacking his brain, or all the steroids he’s on. Sometimes your father looks like he could rip a phone book in half. When he is angry, try to make yourself small, try to speak slowly and softly like you’re trying to charm a grizzly bear or an angry weight lifter.
Your father has beaten cancer before. Everyone should just remember that.
5. The Holidays
A. Get Through Them
Buy ridiculously lavish gifts for family members
Drink: Aperitifs, after-dinner drinks, beer, Bloody Marys, champagne, egg nog out of a carton, glog, red wine, shots of Aquavit, shots of tequila, a shot every so often.
Hang on to your father like he’s a fancy purse you’re afraid of leaving somewhere, something that could be stolen.
6. When Treatment Number One Fails
A. Wonder who in the hell it saves. Have you seen these wonder patients or their families in the hospital? Do they have kids? Do their kids even like them?
B. Try not to grimace when your father says (a little too loudly, for he’s quite deaf now), I WANT TO KEEP TRYING. Your father clings to science like religion.
C. Try to stay positive. Be encouraged when you hear from a woman in the waiting room that her husband, who is ten years older than your father, has been taking a drug made from the sap of some rain-forest tree and it’s cleared up his brain cancer, as though it were just a bad strain of acne.
Try to remember at what rate the rain forest is being depleted. Should you send Sting a check?
D. Contemplate Eastern remedies, even though you feel like you are settling for the first runner-up, the hunchbacked bridesmaid.
Acupuncture, attacking cancer with long, blade-sharp pins, like cancer cells are fat caterpillars you could stab to a card, and bleed.
Think that all of those Buddhas your parents have collected over the years can’t hurt.
Wonder if sacrifices really work. What does God like? Do I know any virgins?
E. When people say, “You should be thankful that you’ve had this much time together,” wish a pox on their house. Tell them your father has beaten cancer before. Everyone should just remember that.
F. Wonder why your own back hurts, why your arm is numb, why your entire body aches as though you’ve been beaten up and down with baseball bats. Monkey see monkey do. What did you say? If your father jumped off a cliff, would you? Come again?
What are you missing?
G. Fantasize about your father dying. Never at home or in a hospital. It is always quick, painless, and exotic, quite possibly on vacation. Your father deserves a remarkable death. No bedsores. No bedpans. No bed at all. A wild passing. Every time your parents take a trip you pray:
Your father is eaten by a lion while on safari in Africa.
Your father is eaten by a shark while diving in Indonesia.
Your father is eaten by an unnamed beast that will prowl/swim/thunder around with him in it’s belly, so he will live eternally.
H. What can you do about this eternity thing?
I. Remember being sixteen and wanting to kill your father for not letting you borrow the car one Saturday night. You imagined incredible violence. A gun, an ax, a rope, a club, a hacksaw, a table saw, a vat of acid. You didn’t have enough hands for all the ways you wanted to kill him.
J. Fantasize about your father dying again. This time he is bedridden, blind, drooling, and wasted on morphine. He can hardly speak, but he touches your hand and his lips mouth, I, love, you. You are selfish enough to choose this.
K. Fantasize about your father growing old. That is the most impossible thing you could pray for.
7. The Second Go-Round
A. Suspect that the doctor who likes your father is only continuing to treat him because he’s known him for fourteen years; your father was his success story. Maybe he just wants him to have hope. Perhaps it’s a favor. When your father complains, “This new treatment is shit. It isn’t making me sick enough to possibly be doing any good,” be afraid.
B. Your father calls to you from the back porch, where he is sitting in a kitchen chair clipping the branches of a bonsai tree and wrapping the amputated limbs with copper wire, bending them into the position of branches being blown in a gale-force wind. This is his new hobby.
“Come talk to me,” he says, gesturing at the porch steps. He is wearing moccasins without socks; his ankles are knobs; his skin looks shiny and white, like bark on a birch sapling.
“People expect that I’m gaining some kind of wisdom or insight through dying, but jeez I’m not,” he says, pruning the new growth of a blue spruce. He has told me all this before. “I don’t have the answers.” He laughs and uses his sleeve to mop the sweat that drips from his brow. “Right now, at this point in your life you know as much as I do, sweetheart.” Is he trying to tell you that you can live without him? He has no idea what he is talking about. Wonder why you have to psychoanalyze everything your father says. It’s exhausting.
Your father has beaten cancer before. Everyone should just remember that.
8. Father in the City
A. For the first time your father comes to a gallery show. A rinky-dink group show in the Village. You are nervous. You’ve done very delicate, very small pencil drawings of animals and women, intentionally childlike and sexually fraught. You feel self-conscious. He peers at a dark scribble of pubic hair. You want him to be proud of you. He looks at you, and he smiles, sweat rolling down his face, dampening his collar. You told him he didn’t need to come to this one, that there would be other shows, shows when he didn’t feel so bad, but he insisted.
Afterward, he is weak with hunger. He can’t eat the five-dollar chocolate bar you bought him at Dean & DeLuca; it makes his gums bleed. You climb into a cab; he closes his eyes and lays his head back against the seat. You wonder if you could chew the chocolate up like a mother bird and feed it to him. He’s your father. He would do that for you.
You go out to dinner, he just drinks wine, he takes your hand. “I’m proud of you,” he says. You cry, big hiccuping baby tears.
Finally, the two of you are getting somewhere.
B. At home he can’t get out of his jeans fast enough and he shits on the floor of your bathroom. You don’t see this happen, you smell it. A smell worse than shit, like death. Behind your bedroom door you laugh and laugh, then feel as though you will vomit. Your father doesn’t seem embarrassed, but he doesn’t want you to know, your mother tells you this as she carries his clothes downstairs to the washing machine. You can’t forget that smell.
C. Your father is in sky-blue pajamas, in bed on your pullout couch. On his chest is a paperback book; he’s recently become interested in maritime novels. Your mother is reading a fashion magazine beside him. When you bend down to kiss him good night, he holds your face between his hands and kisses you on the mouth. He tells you, “Sleep well.”
You say, “I will. I love you.”
“Good girl,” he says, and goes back to reading his book.
You say, “Wake me in the morning before you leave.”
Your mother says, “You need your sleep, sweetie.”
Your father says nothing. In the morning, you hear the rustling of your parents in the other room. You think, Get up. Your body says, You said your good-byes. Then you hear the door gently close. They don’t want to wake you.
9. Come to Me Now
A. The
Phone Call
Your mother says, “Your father is in the hospital, he dropped a glass this morning, and—”
You interrupt her. “Boy, you sure know how to punish a guy.”
Your mother laughs a little. “He didn’t feel well—it’s probably coming off all those steroids—so I drove him up here. Why not.”
You say, “I’m coming down.”
Your mother says, “No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Wait. You know, sometime in the future I’m going to need you to come down and help, but I think we’re okay. I want to save my favors, okay?”
You are not convinced everything is all right. Why didn’t your father call?
Your mother calls back half an hour later, frantic. “Your father is deteriorating,” she says. “The doctors say come now.” You don’t believe there is reason to be panicked. It’s just the first of many frightening and sick-making steps we will take down the steep slope of sickness, until we’re forced to walk into the sea of it.
B. The Car Ride
You put your suitcase in the car. You didn’t know what to pack. You packed shorts and T-shirts, a silk nightgown, lots of underwear, and no socks. You packed a pair of high heels, and some sneakers. You’ve packed for the beach, or a honeymoon. Your husband drives. The baby sleeps in her car seat. Sitting in traffic, the cords in his neck pop out and vibrate with his swearing. “Shit. God damn it, people. Come on. Come on. Let’s get a move on here.”
You don’t know why he is so testy. He drives up on the shoulder. People stare. Children strain against seat belts to catch a glimpse of you.
“Settle down,” you say. “Everything is going to be all right. Daddy’s just dehydrated from treatment. For Christ’s sake, who wouldn’t be?”
Look at all the cars driving over the George Washington Bridge, look at how the sunlight bounces off the silver girders, look at all the people, if your father was dead none of this could be happening. The sun would be blotted out, the world tipping on its axis.
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