by Amy Boesky
I keep the textbook in the Hilton, on the table next to the bed, I read when I can focus. Not much. I have the other book too, the one from the Hemlock Society, but the girls don’t know about that. Don’t know about either, actually. Don’t know that I sleep in the Hilton now, I can’t stand bothering Dale, can’t stand either to be alone down the hall or with him, sick, disrupting him; he needs sleep so he can work. When we get back home we’re thinking of hiring someone to help at night, so I don’t have to wake him.
After my father left, Jennie moved into my room with me, but I never played The Worst with her. I don’t know why.
I want to see this baby. OK, put the mask back on—I promised him I’d wear it. But I know better than to look at myself once it’s on.
Maybe in the end you keep The Worst to yourself. Like people do with prayer.
PICTURE A WOMAN IN THE bathroom at the Portland airport, looking at herself in the mirror. Adjusting her wig. She’s flown in to meet her new granddaughter, born three days ago. Madeline Joelle. There is nothing she wants more than to hold this baby.
Picture her. She looks like a scratch, not a person.
A wire woman, a curio. A shadow where a woman used to be.
JULIE KEPT HOPING SHE’D CHANGE her mind, or Dr. Brenner would change his mind, or my father would prevail on her to stay home.
“Can’t you convince her?” she begged me.
Julie and I were on the phone. It had been hard to talk to my mother lately. She seemed like she was in a different place. “Some of the pain meds—” my father said.
“I’ll try,” I said uncertainly.
But there was no stopping her. Dr. Brenner said she should wear a mask to protect herself from germs on the plane. But if she felt up to going, she could go.
Julie, two centimeters dilated and ready to go to the hospital any minute, was beside herself. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “How on earth does she think she’s going to get on a plane and fly out here?”
There was a round-robin of calls. My father fixated on equipment—the right kind of car to get them to the airport, medical-grade masks, travel versions of all her medicine. Who could tell what he thought? Maybe he’d just given up trying to argue with her. Besides, what didn’t seem insane now, when you stopped to think about it? Why was this trip different from any other ludicrous aspect of what they were enduring?
“This is a horrible thing to say,” Julie told me. “I want her to come, I really do. But—” She took a deep breath. “I also want to focus on having the baby, you know? I’m worried about having to worry about her.”
I knew what she meant. Ironically, the one person who would have understood even better than me was my mother—back before all of this happened. She would’ve hated the thought of being a burden. What she wanted was to help—like she had when Jenny and Rachel were born. Like she’d helped with Sacha. She must have known she couldn’t help much this time. But she couldn’t stop herself from trying.
Deep in the middle of all of these negotiations, Julie went into labor and gave birth to Madeline Joelle before any of us could get there. A beautiful, healthy, eight-pound baby girl, born in the first hours of August.
The next day, my parents flew to Maine. My father sprung for business class so there’d be fewer people around her (and fewer germs), and Jon arranged for them to be met at the airport with a car and a driver who could help them with their bags. They were like a visiting royal convoy. She had to use her cane again, not because of the clot this time but because she was having so much trouble walking.
She looked, Julie said, kind of like a folding chair. All bent in on herself.
They stayed two days. My mother was wiped out, but they made it back without mishap.
“What’s Maddy like?” I asked my mother, but she didn’t want to talk about the trip. Instead, she made an excuse to get off the phone.
We drove up that weekend to meet Maddy for ourselves, and I asked Julie about the visit. I hesitated. “Was it at all good to see her?” I asked.
Julie couldn’t answer. I don’t think I’d ever seen her at a loss for words before. This time, she couldn’t get past the knot of tears.
Drawbridge
WE’VE NEVER BEEN RELIGIOUS AS a family. None of us believes in God. When I was growing up, this used to mystify my classmates, who thought they could bully me into an admission of faith. What if you were being burned alive at the stake? (Mr. Lunn, my seventh-grade social studies teacher, had been giving us detailed descriptions of the deaths of Reformation martyrs.) Wouldn’t you pray then? We had six different options for churches within as many miles: Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and even the Mormon Tabernacle right up the road from us. There was also a synagogue in the vicinity, though in my elementary school, there were only a couple of Jewish families. After a brief bout with Sunday school at Temple Beth El, we retired religion the way some families give up membership in a country club or stop watching TV. We had a family meeting, weighed in, and gave it up.
Everyone else I knew belonged to a church, the same way they all belonged to Blizzard, the ski club my parents wouldn’t let us join because they were sure we’d kill ourselves. In fact, since most kids spent weekends up at Boyne Mountain, not many of them actually went to any of these churches. But they knew which one was theirs. They would know, for instance, what to fill out on the hospital form that asked—with a faintly worried air—for the patient’s chosen religion. Then, as now, we drew a blank.
It didn’t help that when it was time to say what our fathers did (this was back in the day when nobody asked about your mother) every kid in my grade said something related—directly or indirectly—to one of the Big Four car companies. Either their fathers worked for GM or Pontiac or one of the others, or they worked for companies that made little parts that went into things like seat belts or steering wheels. When it was my turn, I tried out different terms for what my father did. “Doctor” went over better than “psychoanalyst.” But everyone knew anyway. “He’s a shrink,” Lucas Hammill would say, groaning and holding his sides, as if this were the final ignominious blot on our family’s good name. In Newton, where the House with the Green Shag was, every other house seemed to be owned by a therapist. But in suburban Detroit in the 1960s, it was better to work for Ford.
Back then, in the days when emergency drills served to prepare for Cold War bombs as well as tornadoes, not having a religion was seen as distinctly un-American, and it didn’t help, in addition to my father’s job, that I had other anomalies. I was bad at sports. I was nearsighted, dreamy. My mother didn’t play tennis or ski or fund-raise for local charities, preferring to spend her free time alone, reading history books out on our back deck. She didn’t like inviting kids over or driving us to lessons. I didn’t mind. I had Sara and Julie, and I loved reading, especially antiwar novels. For the first half of seventh grade I spent afternoons mailing angry invectives to President Nixon about our country’s actions in Vietnam. My father worried about these letters, afraid I might end up on some kind of CIA list. He also worried (as my mother did not) that we were being raised without a moral center. Instead of religious services, we had family dinners—this was before food became chic in America, so we ate a lot of multicolored and finely ground things, casseroles and something called Chicken Surprise, stuffed with butter, breaded, and fried. During dinner, along with thousands of calories of high-cholesterol food, we had passionate debates about abortion, Nixon, impeachment, women’s rights, and the importance of poetry. We were an unfolding experiment: thought instead of faith.
In high school I fell in with a fringe crowd. I still read F. Scott Fitzgerald and memorized sonnets, but at school, I hung out with a group of boys who planned to join the army instead of going to college. They all wrestled and got Cs and lived in one of the neighborhoods—literally across a set of train tracks—where the houses were tiny and people drove pickup trucks instead of new cars from GM. My boyfriend, Ray—a stocky wre
stler with an air about him of testosterone and doom—took me with him one Christmas Eve to Catholic Mass in Hamtramck, but the Mass was in Latin and I couldn’t make out a single word. Catholicism was just another thing about Ray that made him different from my family, from everything I was trying to escape: I saw the gilt crucifix in his bedroom more or less the way I saw his wrestling trophies, and all those Cs. But it didn’t last: It was like Just Visiting jail in Monopoly. Afterward, I went back to agnosticism and villanelles.
Still, I wanted to belong. At college, I was invited to join a sorority filled with Midwestern debutantes. Once a week we ate dinner in the sorority house, a white colonial that looked like a northern version of Tara. At dinner we were served by scholarship boys dressed as waiters, and before we ate, the housemother folded her hands piously and everyone said grace. I didn’t know the words, but I mumbled along, eyes decorously lowered.
One night, the entrée was ham, slightly shiny, the color of a sunburn. On the side, mashed potatoes and peas. I hated meat—I was on one of my intricate diets, living primarily on Tab, string cheese, and Doublemint gum. I hadn’t eaten meat in months. Or potatoes. I busied myself pushing the peas around with my fork.
“Ham,” a senior at the head of the table said, in the tone of voice that suggested she was introducing a profligate relative. She studied her plate. “What would happen if we had Jewish girls in this sorority? What would they eat tonight?”
This was not a topic I was glad to hear introduced. I didn’t exactly advertise the fact that I was Jewish. My goal was to be as much like everybody else as possible.
This particular senior—her name was Mandy—was more feared than loved. She was from a wealthy Chicago suburb, and dated a guy from the naval academy who was always sending her bouquets from FTD. She wore rosy mohair sweaters and seemed to drift around in a haze of L’Air du Temps and static electricity. (Once I brushed against her when we were lining up for a meeting and got a shock.)
As luck would have it, that night I happened to be sitting across from the one person in the university who’d known me since elementary school. Her name was Ellie Whitmore, and we’d never liked each other. She was a watery-eyed blonde studying chemical engineering, and we’d kept our distance, even after we found out we’d picked the same college, and (by sheer bad luck) the same sorority. It figured I’d get seated near her tonight.
“I don’t get it,” another girl said, sipping her water.
“Jewish people don’t eat ham. Nothing from pigs,” Mandy told her.
“They don’t even eat lobster,” another girl piped up.
Everyone thought about this.
I knew this was my chance to speak up. There were a hundred and four girls in the sorority and only two of them besides me were Jewish. The night I pledged, I’d been taken aside by a stunning senior named Dani—one of the other two—who broke that news to me. The other girl, Lane, was a sophomore. “Nobody knows we’re Jewish,” Dani had whispered, “except some alum who keeps track for the national board. And us.”
Sometimes the three of us stood together during Greek swearing-in ceremonies. But usually we fanned out, went our own ways. Tonight, Dani and Lane were seated far away from me, each at different tables. As far as I knew, neither of them kept kosher.
I was the one avoiding meat, though the irony was, that had nothing to do with religion. My mother used to put bacon in those Morning Cookies on Christmas! More to the point, we actually celebrated Christmas, even down to singing carols. I just happened to be going through a no-meat phase. College meat looked unappetizing, and I suspected it was full of toxins.
I pushed the peas back and forth on my plate, head lowered.
Ellie fixed her eyes on me. “Amy is Jewish,” she said, after a long pause.
Everyone turned. These were very polite girls, raised in the best neighborhoods, the best schools. Nobody said anything. They were all afraid of being rude, which in our sorority was considered worse than flunking. And flunking was a big deal. Once a month, we all assembled and they read our grades out loud. Anything less than a B plus and you risked getting “library hours.”
“Really?” Mandy said, putting down her fork. She looked at me with interest. Not unkindly. “What’s that like?” She seemed genuinely curious. I guessed she’d never made it as far as Skokie.
I don’t remember what I said, but I know it was something cowardly. I didn’t want to be a native informant. I’d worked too hard to look like everyone else—I blew my hair dry so it was straight and shiny, even if it always smelled slightly burnt. I was wearing what all the other girls wore: a kilt, a sweater with my monogram on it. I didn’t want them all thinking I was different. I probably mumbled something along the lines of: “Oh, my family is barely even Jewish. We don’t even go to temple or anything.” I didn’t look at Ellie, but I could feel her cool, reflective eyes on me. Just for good measure, I took a delicate bite of ham. It tasted a little salty, but it wasn’t bad.
All I wanted then was to be like everybody else. Having just left home, I wanted to distance myself from my family, to forget about our photographs and our troubled medical history and our anxieties and our endless attempts to thwart the future. Part of what I loved about college was the chance to leave all that behind.
I didn’t get it. Not yet, anyway.
Did I think I got to choose? That believing I was one thing or another made it true? As if, even as I spoke, my genes weren’t spelling out the real story. Deep inside my cells, despite my kilt and monogrammed sweater and my flat-ironed hair, Sylvia and Pody and Gail and my mother were weaving themselves back and forth in me, warp and woof. Bone of my bone.
My history had its finger on me, whatever it was I thought I wanted.
WHAT I WANTED THEN WAS not what I’d been given. I wanted a different set of stories. I liked the Christian ones more than Jewish ones, which were filled with begetting and smiting and names I couldn’t keep straight: Nimrods and Davids and Shems and Noahs. I liked the Christian story better: one big tragedy with a transcendent ending. Easter Wings. I wanted to be a poet, and there was such a great tradition of American poets converting to Anglicanism abroad.
When I started graduate school at Oxford, I decided to give the Church of England a try. Under the thrall of Donne’s ornate sermons, stone cathedrals, and sweet-faced choirboys at evensong, I tried to prompt myself into a conversion experience. My old life was so un-decorated, so unlofty. I went faithfully to evensong all that first year, and in the cramped, cold pews, tested myself for inner stirrings. All winter I held out hope. I felt something, I was sure I did! I’d stare with experimental reverence at the choirboys, their gray eyes lifting as they sang. Was that devotion I was feeling? I tried, driven by my passion for everything British and elite and saturated with tradition, but as the days grew longer my enthusiasm dimmed, and I began to suspect what I’d been feeling was closer to loneliness than religious fervor. By spring I gave it up, keeping only the religious poets as souvenirs. I got religion secondhand through them: Donne and Herbert and Milton, reading their poetry out loud to my students with so much emotion my voice would hang in the linoleum gloom for a minute or two after I finished. No God, only poetry about God. Maybe for me, that was enough.
I was thinking about all of this now because when people found out my mother had metastatic cancer, a lot of them said things about prayer. Sometimes this was direct: “I’ll pray for her,” someone would say, and you just had to say thank you. Sometimes you couldn’t help thinking to yourself, OK! Now we’re getting somewhere, someone’s rooting for us. It was like a fresh band of cheerleaders fanning out across the field even though the score wasn’t looking great for the home team.
My mother, I happened to know, didn’t believe in God. History, yes. Family. Stories. Sheer good luck. But not God. And so, I guess, not prayers.
I liked it when people prayed for her, since I couldn’t do it myself without feeling like a fraud. I was happy for any kind of help these days, whethe
r it had scientific backing or not. Who were we to be choosy? Anyway, I much preferred people who prayed to the ones who talked about friends of theirs who were pulling through and beating this thing because they had such a positive outlook. I know this may sound like sour grapes on my part, because so far my mother was proving to be a nonresponder, but the positive-thinking school of cancer cure really bothered me. Even Annie fell prey to it. Each time Annie called me now, she kept coming back to the story of her mother’s friend and her remission until finally I begged her to stop. It’s not that I don’t like miracle tales. I’ve always liked the idea of the exception, light cutting through a dark curtain. My problem is that if you claim positive attitude really makes all the difference, what does that say about people who aren’t doing well—and at this point, my mother appeared to be one of them? Doesn’t that mean by definition their attitudes are bad?
Of course, the whole argument is circular. It’s much easier to have a positive attitude when the treatment works, even for a while, and you seem to be getting the upper hand. When your doctor explains to you—patiently, patiently—that your cancer cell type is very rare and very aggressive and doesn’t seem to want to respond to any of the initial kinds of treatment—no to the Megace, no to the Fuck You—none of this necessarily inspires positive thought.
The second week of August, I flew back to Michigan with Sacha and kept my mother company through round two of F-U at Rougemont. My father joined us, and he and I took turns sitting with my mother and taking Sacha for walks down in the lobby.
THE TREATMENT SEEMED TO BE going OK, but my mother looked terrible. Smaller, much more frail. I brought her glass after glass of water, trying not to look at the places where her bones were sticking out like pins. In the evenings my mother napped upstairs in the Hilton and my father and I pushed Sacha in her stroller around the darkening streets and tried to talk about other things. Teaching. Annabel. Charlevoix.