by Amy Boesky
Like Pope Gregory, she was remaking the calendar, lifting out rituals and holidays, laying them over this new dispensation. She talked about chemo as if it would only impact the infusion days themselves—three days, a month apart. Nine days total. Really only half days, when you thought about how long the infusions were supposed to take. Normal life could just go right on.
We took our cues from her, trying to be upbeat. Trying to work on our attitudes. Maybe it was a good thing about the clot, we told one another, because it made the doctors do the second scan sooner and realize she needed something stronger. OK, the Megace hadn’t worked, but the F-U should do it. From the way Dr. Brenner talked about F-U, it sounded like this stuff could kill anything.
“Maybe we should try putting it out on the crabgrass,” my mother said, after she’d read the fine print on the clinic’s consent form.
My mother hated the idea of chemo—more than almost anything else. In her usual way, she dealt with her fear through black humor. That and avoidance—she tried not to talk about it. But it was a hard subject to avoid.
Before my mother started the F-U, people called to tell her how much better chemo was now than it used to be. There were all sorts of wonder drugs these days to combat nausea, a well-meaning neighbor told her. Almost everyone had an inspirational story or a piece of advice. A former colleague thought my mother should consider hypnosis. She sent a big flower arrangement, too—gerber daisies, day lilies. My mother wanted to know how all these well-wishers had found out she was sick in the first place. When more flowers came—pink hydrangeas this time—she complained the house smelled like a funeral home.
Much better than flowers were the thank-you notes she got from her “bubbies” sharing their AP History scores with her—almost all 4s and 5s. She loved hearing from her students. None of them knew she was sick, or that she wasn’t coming back in the fall. “My brother says he can’t wait for the Hittites,” a boy named Samir wrote to her. “He says he’s taking your AP European History class next year even if he has to camp out outside your classroom to get in!” When she read that part, she got a funny catch in her voice.
SARA CAME OUT TO MICHIGAN in mid-June, flying the red-eye from Seattle, getting in at six in the morning on Sunday, in time for the first round of chemo that Monday, June 22. My mother was in good spirits. She brought a tote bag filled with New Yorkers with her to the hospital, ready, she told Sara, to finally get caught up on her reading.
Day One started well. They found the infusion room easily. What Dr. Brenner called “the clinic” was really just a big room off its own corridor on the second floor of the hospital, set up with reclining chairs for patients, little clusters of chairs for visitors, and stations with tea and water. You were supposed to drink lots of water while you were getting F-U, to flush away the toxins.
My mother was getting three different drugs, one right after the other—Five F-U, Adriamycin (which was red, and turned her pee red afterward) and Cytoxan, which burned when it went in and made her sick to her stomach. Sara reported that she was “very plucky.” She read her New Yorkers, mostly, and looked out the window at the parking lot, and when she didn’t feel woozy, she flipped through catalogues, flagging potential baby gifts for Julie. It was all weirdly normal, Sara said, at least if you didn’t look too closely at the bags of fluid going into her arm, which had stickers saying TOXIC across the bottom and were such shocking colors. If you tried not to think that all your life you’d avoided anything that had so much as a drop of poison in it, and that what was in these bags was pure poison, designed to wipe out “rapidly dividing cells”—cancer cells, of course, but also skin, hair, and white cells. Not to mention all the other healthy cells running around her body. If you tried not to think about that, chemo could be like anything else. A root canal. Whatever. A few hours later, after the last bag emptied and the little machine beeped, the nurse slipped the IV out and my mother was free to go.
The strange part, Sara said, was how tired she was when they got home. My mother had been ready for nausea, and there was some in the late afternoon, but not bad. What was bad—baffling, really—was the fatigue. “It’s like—well, it isn’t really like anything else,” Sara reported. The first night my mother was sitting there with Sara and my father at dinner, and one minute they were talking and everything was fine, and the next minute her face just began to descend, lower, lower, lower, until boom, she’d laid it down right in her plate of pasta. It was like something out of Laurel and Hardy—only not funny.
On top of that, she had no appetite. Her mouth tasted like metal.
“The funny taste in my mouth,” my mother told me when I called that evening, asking about the F-U, “isn’t the worst.” Then she was quiet.
“Then what? What’s the worst?” I asked.
She wouldn’t say.
“That isn’t fair,” I complained. “You can’t start to tell me and then stop.”
“I have to go, your father just walked in,” she interrupted. She wasn’t following any of the rules.
Sara suspected the worst part was the flowers.
“The flowers?”
“Everyone just keeps sending more and more flowers. And fruit baskets. It makes her feel like she’s already dead,” Sara said. Literally—they got three arrangements one day. Two the next. Weird combinations, Sara said (she was the gardener among us, so she should know). The house stank of lilies. Apparently word about the cancer had gotten out.
“But maybe,” Sara said, reconsidering, “the worst part is getting the IV in.”
It turns out there are lots of things involved when it comes to getting toxins into the human body, because the body, being how it is, with its intelligence and defense systems, doesn’t actually want Fuck You pumping through its veins; the body says, Whoa, what is this stuff? And in my mother’s case there were protests, cells throwing up their hands, Do Not Pass Here, borders closed. The big issue was her circulation. In the first place there was the clot, caused by a combination of bad veins and Megace. Now the clot was better but the veins in her arms were bad. On Day One, the nurses had argued about the best terms for describing the problem. One said her veins were “small,” another, “dry,” but the consensus by the end of the day was that it was very difficult to get an IV into either arm. Everyone was worried about this.
Day Two, my mother planned to ask for the nurse she’d already decided was the Good Nurse, Gretchen. Not to compare, but some of the others . . . Gretchen was the best. Gretchen knew everything about veins and their stubbornness. Gretchen was willing to go the distance. Warm compresses to soften things up. A massage, especially a hand massage, which my mother—usually no great fan of being touched by strangers—told us felt wonderful. Under Gretchen’s compassionate kneading, my mother’s tiny side-street veins opened into boulevards, and the chemo tunneled through, no problem. But Gretchen was in high demand, and the other nurses—
Sara took Gretchen aside, talked to her, and Gretchen agreed to help my mother through the rest of round one.
In her usual way, my mother developed the relationship into something deeper. Day Two, she and Gretchen talked while the F-U dripped into my mother’s arm. My mother coaxed things out of her, bit by bit. The names of her boys (Eddie and Josh). Who cut her hair like that, on that sharp angle. How long she’d been at Rougemont. What kind of specialization did it take, being an oncology nurse? And true to form, before long they were talking not about my mother’s side effects or symptoms or cancer at all, but about Gretchen’s career dilemmas and her secret love of history. Gretchen—full name, Gretchen Moynihan—had been a Victorian history buff since girlhood. Loved Victoria and Albert trivia, watched the History Channel, read historical romances. She’d actually thought about majoring in history at State, she admitted. But her parents wanted her to become a nurse. They thought it would give her lifelong job security.
Nursing was tough. With the boys at home, and the long hours— and then, Gretchen added, forgetting where she was for
the moment, all the anguish—
My mother nodded, commiserating. She’d forgotten that she was part of the long hours and the anguish.
Had Gretchen ever thought about going back to school? Did she know about the master’s program in history at Oakland Community College?
Sara reported all this back to us. “You wouldn’t believe it. Before you know it, Gretchen has her notebook out and she’s writing down all this information—people to call, courses to take.” My mother had gotten her master’s in history at Oakland. She knew everyone in the department. If Gretchen wanted, she could make some calls—
Only Mom, we agreed, could mentor her chemo nurse right out of nursing.
Sara told us Dr. Brenner stopped by on Day Two to see how things were going. He called my mother a “trooper” and patted her on the leg.
She was more than halfway through the first course. Just let those fuckers get in her and do their work, we thought. Blow those cancer cells to hell and back.
By the end of the second day, my mother was jubilant. She could do this! It wasn’t that bad!
It was almost July. Almost her birthday. She didn’t look that great—her skin was pale, she had shadows under her eyes—but Dr. Brenner said that was a good sign. That meant the F-U was doing its job.
Maybe, my mother theorized, she was already in remission. That was what Dr. Brenner was hoping. Knock those cancer cells out and give her back her life. Maybe not forever, but, my mother said, who needs forever? A while, at least. That was all she wanted.
We inched back into making plans again. The Fourth. Charlevoix. My mother called and booked the condos.
“I’m telling you one thing,” she said. “This year, I’m hosting Thanksgiving. I’m making you guys do the traveling—babies or no babies.”
SHE DID IT. SHE FINISHED round one and she didn’t get mouth sores and she didn’t throw up, so now she could move on and look forward to all of us coming in for her birthday. Dr. Brenner told her he was relieved, because now he admitted that some of his patients couldn’t tolerate F-U, not even one course of it, and he’d been a little worried after her bad response to the Megace. But she’d done well. This was good news. Round one was done, and they’d let the chemo do its work and in a while—after round two or three—they’d take another set of scans and reassess.
EVEN WHILE SHE WAS GETTING chemo, my mother and I talked every day, somewhere between three and four o’clock, as if by unspoken agreement. We both seemed to think of each other around this time every day—whatever else either of us was doing—and sometimes I wondered if that had to do with the old patterns, coming home from school as a girl, opening the front door, calling out to her—“I’m home!”—or when I was younger, waiting for her outside in the snowy gloom, waiting for her headlights to pick me out from the others, sliding across the vinyl seat into the warmth of the car, the smell of Dentyne and her perfume (Charlie), Carly Simon on the radio. Three thirty, four. Do we associate people we love, our people, with certain times of day? Strange, how even the heart has its clockwork. Sometimes I called, sometimes she did. In each case, we’d start up light—“Hi Mellie” (her); “Hey” (me); “So—what’jdya have for lunch?” (her); “Half an organic squash puree” (me); “Tried to eat a Granny Smith and cheese, but it tasted like tin” (her)—back and forth, light, darting, daring each other to see how long we could go before I couldn’t stand it anymore and I caved in and asked her how she was feeling.
“Like the cat’s meow,” she’d say. Or, “Like something the cat dragged in.” A surprising number of cat metaphors proliferated, considering there’d had been no cats in the family since the one that died when it ate Sylvia’s tinsel all those Decembers ago in Chicago.
My mother hadn’t counted on this, but instead of feeling better after the chemo stopped, she felt worse. Dr. Brenner said that could happen sometimes—the chemicals build up, accumulate in the system. She just felt “off,” she said, like she was sitting next to herself, somehow.
One afternoon, while she was napping, Sara called and told me they’d gone out that morning to get a wig. Advance planning: My mother’s hair was already thinning, and she didn’t want to be caught unprepared when it started to fall out for real. “It was horrible,” Sara said. They’d gone to a place out in Pontiac, in a neighborhood neither of them knew. They got lost and it took forever to find the store. My mother’s back was killing her, and every time Sara hit a pothole, she moaned. But at last they got there, and with the help of the store-owner, my mother found something. “It’s made of real hair, not synthetic,” Sara said. “Real hair” sounded creepy to me, but apparently that was what you wanted.
“What does it look like?” I asked, trying to picture this. My mother had worn her hair the same way for twenty years. She got it “done” every Friday at a place in Birmingham she called “the beauty shop.” Washed, set, and dried. It always made her look a little like Nancy Reagan to me, her hair acquiring the luster and texture of steel wool. I couldn’t imagine her any other way.
“It’s kind of a pageboy,” Sara said. “Picture Thoroughly Modern Millie with highlights, and you’ve got it.” She hesitated for a minute. “It’s rakish,” she said at last.
SARA WAS GETTING THE BRUNT of my mother’s pain, being with her for those weeks before, during, and after round one. On the phone with Julie and me, my mother was resolute, even chipper.
Distance helped. The phone helped. We didn’t know she was losing weight, though we could’ve guessed from the way she talked about food. Or didn’t. She did talk about the wig a little, though. Probably preparing us for the Fourth of July. She said it itched.
By the last week of June, her hair was coming out by the handful. Sara told us her scalp looked like an old sponge. “You know when little wads of the sponge come off, and there’s bare patches?” That’s what my mother’s head looked like.
“She looks different,” Sara added, voice low. Trying to prepare us.
I brushed it off. Julie and I had seen her just a few weeks ago! I remembered her Lucite cane. I knew what was what.
A week before her birthday, my mother started feeling better. She had some mouth sores, which made eating harder, but nothing worse. She called Dr. Brenner’s office to schedule the second round of F-U for mid-July. Dr. Brenner was proud of her. She was a “trooper’s trooper,” he told her.
Now that she had a little energy back, she started planning for the Fourth. It fell on a Sunday that year, but the plan was to have our ritual barbecue dinner on Saturday night. We were all coming out on Friday, different times of day, and my mother was command central, setting up meeting points to share cabs at the airport, detailing flight numbers and arrival times.
Next, she had to map out sleeping arrangements. Sara and Geoff liked staying with the girls down in the finished basement, where my mother had set up trundle beds and a sleep sofa. Julie and Jon were getting the Hilton. At this stage, Julie—almost eight months pregnant—needed the best bed.
The Hilton used to be Julie’s room, but my mother had turned it into a guest room, wallpapering and adding plantation shutters, packing all signs of Julie’s girlhood away and heaping so many odd-shaped throw pillows on the bed we all decided it looked like a hotel room. Julie nicknamed it the Hilton, and the name stuck. In fact, not many actual guests had ever stayed there. Despite the pleasure she took in providing plush towels and miniature soaps, my mother was fundamentally guest-averse. She threw a fit once when a colleague of my father’s, passing through to attend a conference in Ann Arbor, stayed overnight with his partner, a dashing lawyer named Allison. They’d been living together for years, and they were both in their fifties, presumably old enough to run their own lives, but my mother was horrified when she found out they weren’t married at breakfast the next morning. “How can they do that?” she kept asking us—much to our conjoined amusement—and after they left, she aired the Hilton out for days. They didn’t get invited back.
With Julie and Jon in the Hi
lton, Jacques, Sacha, and I would be relegated to my old bedroom, now converted, like most rooms in my parents’ house, into an auxiliary study. I tried not to think about four nights on an unyielding sofa bed, wedged between Sacha’s Pack ’n Play and an outsized printer.
Once she’d sorted out sleeping arrangements, my mother threw herself into meal planning. Despite her lack of appetite, she’d spent every minute she felt well enough over the past few weeks baking and freezing: two pies, several batches of brownies, and a raft of appetizers. Not to mention the foundation for her annual Flag Cake, which would require Jenny’s and Rachel’s deft decorations (blueberries, strawberries, and white frosting) on the Fourth itself.
She sounded like her old self.
It was a relief she was cooking. It was a relief she was doling out bedrooms and worrying about towels. It was a relief to have her call me back three times in a row, reminding me incessantly about Julie and Jon’s flight number and arrival time. Telling me again where to find the airport van. I was so glad she was feeling better, I wouldn’t have even cared if she made Jacques and me bring our wedding certificate to prove we should be allowed to share a bedroom.
Maybe this was it. Remission. Number one on the list of things she wanted for her birthday. That, and a new laundry room. She hated having to lug clothes all the way down to the basement, she told me one afternoon on the phone.
Remission came first, though.