“But, but,” I stammered, years of psychology at my back, “your mother was unhappy. She lost her family in China. She —”
“No.” She cut me off and shook her head.
In one sense, Yu-kwan was the most mature person I ever met. She didn’t expect her mother to be different, to fulfill an ideal image of mothering. She was able to burn through the pain and desire, and see the truth of her mother before her. Not expecting it to be other than it was. This is the hand you were dealt; now sally forth. Yu-kwan peered directly into the horror, the vulnerability, the luck or jinx of her life.
In the 1960s, at age twenty, living alone in London, she discovered Shakespeare’s plays in the cinema. She thought, Ahh, here’s someone who understands me. She dreamed of someday becoming a Shakespearean scholar.
Instead, living at the YMCA, with no money and no way to make a living, she wept when she was rejected by the secretarial school. “I couldn’t type fast enough.”
In the evenings an older woman resident at the Y taught her to play chess. Pretty soon she was beating her teacher.
“You’re smart,” the woman said. “You should go into programming.”
“What’s that?”
She took a six-month course, eventually taking a test that landed her in New York at Automatic Data Processing, where the boss was a legend on Wall Street. He wore long-sleeved white Oxford shirts to cover the tattooed numbers along his wrist — his identity in Auschwitz.
This New York Jewish company, which employed many Hassids, took Yu-kwan in, guided her through stocks and bonds and computers that occupied entire rooms. She eventually drafted the theoretical programs that other programmers made happen. The company hired John Lennon’s lawyer to get her a green card.
My beloved became an Upper West Side New Yorker.
At age fifty-eight she retired. She did finally study Shakespeare, putting herself through four years of a BA at Sarah Lawrence. All the other students in her classes were nearly forty years her junior.
In the Shakespeare class, when it was her turn to recite a memorized passage, she chose Othello. She told me that, as she spoke the lines, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak of one that lov’d not wisely, but too well, tears rolled down her cheeks. She had a whole lifetime to know the truth of that great playwright’s words. The students, in their twenties in desks around her, mostly theater majors fulfilling a course requirement, stared at her.
One called out, “Wow, you really feel this, don’t you?”
* * *
—
It took me years to coax small details of Yu-kwan’s past out of her. She didn’t want people to feel sorry for her — or even worse, for them to feel sad, listening to her story.
One day she said to me, “I will tell you one thing, but you must never tell anyone.” Then she fell silent.
My imagination went wild in her long moment of hesitation. She killed someone. She has another lover.
“What? What?”
“I had to take a GED exam,” she whispered. “I never graduated high school.”
“That’s the big secret?”
“My stepfather came to visit the boarding school in my senior year. There was a used condom in the parking lot. He freaked when he saw it and pulled me out of school. He was very possessive.”
“Didn’t you protest when he took you out of school?” I asked.
“No use. All my childhood I was dragged one place or another, with no consent.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“Yeah, but you found a power against him when you said no to running. Did you miss it?”
For a second time she shrugged. “It was a terrible choice I had to make, a self-inflicted internal wound. That day I realized I’d lost passion for things, and almost immediately I started losing time running when I went back to school. I no longer broke records. There was a psychological shift.”
* * *
—
Now Yu-kwan had cancer too, her left breast removed. For the first time I saw her worry about blood relatives. In bed at night she divulged her fear. “Who will care for me when I can’t take care of myself, when I really become helpless?” Each day she feverishly washed the dishes in the sink. “We can at least keep the place orderly.”
She looked often in the mirror, anticipating clumps of hair falling out once her chemo treatments began. “I should get ahead of the game and shave my whole head now.”
She called Jean, a longtime Zen priest, who was used to shaving a neophyte’s head. “Would you do it for me, please? I guess I am undergoing some kind of transformation — but not a religious one.”
“I’d be honored to help,” Jean said.
On a Sunday in mid-September, the last of the tomatoes hanging on the vine and the peach tree leaves just beginning to turn, Yu-kwan sat in my back garden as Jean first cut Yu-kwan’s black hair as close as possible with a scissors. Then, with shaving cream and a bowl of warm water nearby, she shaved my sweetheart’s head with a single blade, working slowly and carefully.
“Wow, you have a beautifully shaped skull. You’d make a good priest.”
When they were done, they dropped her long hair and the shavings into the compost bin. “Let the worms at it,” Yu-kwan said.
Friends brought caps they’d knitted in anticipation of her bald head. Red, green, black, yellow, orange. She even wore them to bed.
“I feel like I’m sleeping with a schoolmarm,” I told her.
“You know, it’s cold without your hair.”
She bought a wig but never wore it. One night I asked her to put it on for a few moments. “I want to try to remember what you used to look like.”
She obliged. A black coif appeared on her head. She pranced around the bedroom. “Here I am.” She flung open her arms — and then flung off the wig. “And here I really am.”
DOWN TO THE MARROW
In 1986, the second time I go to Paris, I search out Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. She is buried with her partner of fifty years, Jean-Paul Sartre, at Montparnasse Cemetery.
Graves are lined close to each other; no space for grass — every inch filled in, a whole cement city. When I enter, I approach a small man in a beige overcoat. I half-finish my inquiry in terrible French when his arm juts straight out, pointing in the direction of Division 20.
I want to make sure. “De Beauvoir?”
He nods and walks away before I can call out, “Merci.”
I’ve already gone to Les Deux Magots, where Sartre and de Beauvoir met. There I poured hot chocolate out of a porcelain pitcher, nibbled at a crusty croissant. Here, in the Saint-Germain-de-Prés area of this romantic city, was where the two talked, devised philosophy, and shared the gossip of their liaisons.
The two were always linked, but it is Simone I want to visit in her cramped grave. To thank her for a single line in The Second Sex that I read in my midtwenties. It rang in my head like a bell, tolling the direction to my future. I paraphrase: In order to create, one must be deeply rooted in society. After reading that line I vowed to elbow my way in, to be heard. I knew women had been pushed to the margins.
Here she is below all of this marble, granite, concrete. I stand a long time. There is no loose stone nearby that I could use to mark my visit. I take an American penny out of my wallet and place it below her name.
Our lives pass. A link past death carried in her words.
11.
BY SEPTEMBER I was finished with the eight weekly infusions. Now I had four months of respite ahead with once-a-month infusions. What a relief.
I also had a two-week retreat scheduled in France for the end of September. All summer I had my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t have to cancel that too. The oncologist said I could go. Yes, I was a little weak, but let me out of here.
A longtime student from Mexico flew into
Santa Fe to escort me onto the plane. At each airport exchange a wheelchair took me to the next gate.
We hit the bright morning in Paris and rented a black car, drove down to Ferme de Villefavard, formerly a farm of one of my student’s grandmother’s, now an arts center.
I stayed on the third floor of a grand old dilapidated stone farmhouse, climbing three long flights of stairs. I insisted on this room, where I’d stayed before, with the two large dormer windows opening to the brown Limousin cows grazing in the long green grass.
Two days later I faced thirty-five students from England, Holland, Germany, Australia, and the United States. To my delight, at least ten women of color attended. Thirty years ago I’d had to coax a single Latino or African American or Filipino to join us. Times had changed. Thank God.
After an explanation of procedures and safety by the director, it was my turn to speak. I sat quiet for a long moment. The students might have thought I was searching inside for something profound. The truth was, at that moment I had nothing to teach. My mind was like the inside of a Ping-Pong ball. I’d taught for many years. I was sure I could pull out something — Ah, writing practice! — but no. It was all far away, in another land, before cancer.
Nat, say something, anything. “You have traveled from very far.” Another long wordless moment. “You have pens. That’s good.” I looked around. “Ah, notebooks too.” Remember, Nat, you’re a writer. The pen goes on the page. “You know what to do.”
And out they swam, far into their own minds and notebooks.
For those two weeks, I mostly treaded in thin thoughts, not daring to plunge.
One woman from Germany, who had a PhD from Yale, leaned in with a face of consternation — wrinkled brow, lips pressed together — whenever I spoke.
“Peggy, you make me self-conscious,” I finally said.
“I want to understand.”
“Don’t think too much or the real grain of writing will never come.”
She explained that every sibling in her California family of ten children had made it — lawyers, doctors, teachers. The older ones pushed the younger ones through. “But now,” she told me, “many of them are paying the price. Alcohol, antidepressants, divorce.”
Ah, the American way. “Write about that.” She seemed to relax. She could write the truth.
As I crawled through the first week, I slept well every night, but in the morning I was exhausted, could barely move. Then I noticed my mouth was always dry and no amount of water quenched my thirst. And I was terribly constipated, which I credited to all the baguettes I was eating. I’m usually gluten-free, but in France the wheat is processed differently. I took advantage. Cheese and bread, bread and cheese.
The truth was, I was fading. But I had a retreat to lead — and lead I did. In the evenings I took fifteen students at a time on slow walks down the narrow country roads, listening in silence before the sound that rows of mature corn make in a light breeze, and watching fat lambs munch and jump in fields. We walked under sycamores, seeing pigs near wood shacks, and past rows of flowers along the edges of barns.
* * *
—
While I was in France, Yu-kwan had her first chemo treatment. Her stepdaughter from the previous nine-year relationship with Alice flew in for a week to support her. The first treatment didn’t seem to be too bad, she told me by phone. But she was warned that the effects were cumulative.
How could I leave her to go to France? We had talked about it and came up with the simultaneous conclusion: Go!
“You’re ready to bolt, to feel autonomous again,” she said. “You’d be impossible if you stayed here. No help at all. The hope of France is what kept you going all summer.”
“Are you sure? Am I uncaring?” I asked.
“I need you out of the way. Besides, I’d love to spend time with my stepdaughter. We’d trip over you.” She leaned close. “I’m so glad you’re up for it. Remember our vow: we each have to do what we have to do.”
I called her each day, hearing my voice echo in the empty farmhouse hallway. Several times I couldn’t get through at all, and I’d scream into the receiver, “Fuck you!” I’m sure my students heard me. “Yu-kwan, are you all right?” Only electric noise. It was a graph of the psychic distance we each created to survive.
* * *
—
I made it through the two weeks. But when I came home I couldn’t get out of bed, and I had a constant cough. The kitchen seemed far away from the bedroom. I could not traverse the distance.
During that first week home, I had a blood test. My oncologist called the next day. “I know why you are so tired. Your calcium is very high. You better come in tomorrow.”
Annie came with me. Yu-kwan, slowed down from chemo, sat at home by the phone, waiting for our call.
The oncologist told me, “Your cancer is active.”
“But how? I thought I was okay.”
“That cough. It could have spread to your lungs.”
* * *
—
Yu-kwan watched me drag myself to the bathroom and listened to my panicked phone calls to try to get advice, appointments. Every clinic had a waiting list. I could see someone in a month. “Not fast enough. I’m full of cancer.”
Yu-kwan continued to clean the kitchen frantically, scrubbing the stove top for the third time. I hung up, walked over to her, and took the sponge from her hand. “Enough.” I pointed to the couch.
We didn’t talk very much then. We were in our parallel hells.
Both of us had been on our own from an early age. Yes, I had parents, a sister, people I could call aunts, uncles, cousins — but I always felt desperately alone. I left for college at eighteen and never returned. I saw my parents once a year, but there was little connection or support. People would ask, “What do they think of your books?” They never read them. There were no books in our home.
I was a silent child who received little attention. But the silence I often had with Yu-kwan was different, comforting. I felt free to live in my own thoughts, wander in my imagination, relax deeply in the quiet safety that this other human being provided and accepted. For me it was a living Zen: to just be. Not nagged or criticized or having to constantly protect myself. This silence served us well. It allowed me the full screaming journey inside, the best way I knew to stay close to my own hard experience.
In our bones we both shared the deep loneliness.
* * *
—
I went for a CT scan and then spoke with my oncologist about the results. They weren’t good. “I called Dr. Kind (yes, that was his name), a urologist, who said he’d fit you in for a consultation. You have an enlarged lymph node by your left kidney. I also have a call in to the doctor at MD Anderson. We have to get your calcium down. It’s dangerous.”
The next day I waited in a windowless room to see the urologist. A person in blue scrubs walked in. He looked like a kid in junior high. I wanted to point and say, “The soccer field is that way,” but he sat down opposite me and began explaining that I had to get a stent placed in my urinary tract as soon as possible. He flipped through a chart. “I have a surgery opening for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Why? I thought this was just a consultation.”
He rolled a machine forward that showed me photos and x-rays of the problem. He told me I could lose a kidney if we didn’t do this soon.
“What about another day?” I asked. “I need a little time.”
He adjusted his glasses. “I could also do Friday, but you need to decide soon. The spaces fill fast.”
When I arrived home, there was a message from the oncologist. She’d heard from MD Anderson. An enormous amount of prednisone, administered through my veins two days in a row, should lower my calcium.
I called back and said, “No. That amount would make me psychotic.”
She told me she would come up with a different prescriptio
n — but something had to be done.
Slowly a picture was beginning to emerge: those last four months of dripping Oh Fat Tuna Man into my arm had given the cancer a boost, free time to keep growing. All along it hadn’t been working.
Looking only at the blood results each week hadn’t been enough. The oncologist repeated, “With scores like this, the cancer can’t exist.”
Well, guess again.
The cancer cells this time were not in the blood but parked in my lymph nodes. And those parked cells, undetected, were having a free-for-all, a heyday. The high calcium was from the cancer eating at my bones and dumping the results into my blood.
The CT scan also showed that the enlarged lymph nodes circling my abdominal aorta had not gotten bigger but hadn’t shrunk at all.
The oncologist called a second time. Even though I was coughing, I did not have lung cancer. But what did I have? The original blood tests showed CLL, but maybe I had two kinds of cancer, one of them that didn’t respond to Oh Fat. I needed a biopsy of that lymph node circle. She gave me the number to make an appointment.
I hung up and sat in a chair, staring out the window. The aspens were brilliant yellow up in the ski valley, and from town they showed as patches of mountain gold. We should drive up there.
I convinced Yu-kwan to make the drive. I sat in the passenger seat. A long line of cars also wanting to view the autumn aspens moved slowly, then faster.
As we drove, I stared into my lap. I knew I couldn’t stay with the comfortable, warm Cancer Center in Santa Fe, where over the months I had learned the names of all the nurses. Veronica, a single mom with two children in school, who was able to hit my vein right on the first jab. Kathy, my first attendant nurse, pregnant eight months with her second child, who assured me I didn’t need a port. Lorraine, raised in Santa Fe, who was having her wedding in Hawaii so all of her relatives wouldn’t come. The Cancer Center was near home, three miles away.
Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home Page 7