What We Have
Page 27
Still. I wanted—needed—for her to be ahead of herself. She was going to be an older sister in March. She needed to grow quickly! Besides, if she did things ahead of schedule—if she talked early—my mother would know, and it would count. It would be real.
My mother was the historian. She was the one who remembered things, who made sense of things—the keeper of records, maker of plans.
I didn’t particularly care when Sacha walked, but when it came to words . . . I wanted her to learn to say “Bomma.” I desperately wanted my mother to hear her say her name.
We were all flying out to Michigan for Thanksgiving. Maybe Sacha could say her name by then.
I understood at almost every level that what I wanted was impossible. Sacha wasn’t old enough yet to speak. “What Your Baby May Even Be Able to Do This Month” didn’t suggest this would happen until close to a year. If then.
But I could still try.
I tested Sacha, surreptitiously. When Jacques was downstairs, I sneaked out her book of alphabet photos and quizzed her in the bath. “Who’s this?” I asked, all smiles, pointing to my sister. Sacha, solemn as usual, pronounced something unintelligible. Ba-ba-ba-ba. When I turned the page, she squinted a bit at my mother’s picture, bubbles forming on her lips.
“Bom-ma,” I said, unrelenting, “that’s who this is, darling,” and I guided my finger deliberately to my mother’s face.
She grabbed wetly at the book, not at the page with my mother’s photo, but at the next one, where my father—in happier times, relaxing—was beaming out at us from his position, seated near a desk full of books and papers. His was the image she seemed to reach for, as if a more solid planet had slipped between my mother and herself, rendering my mother’s face shadowy, imprecise.
Finally, I put the alphabet photos away.
Some nights I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the bath with her and the upcoming move and the new house and work and everything else seemed to slip away, like so many shells pulled back by a warm engulfing tide, and she wriggled on top of me like a fish—slippery, perfect, her skin glossy with soap, her hair sticking up in little tufts.
Deep inside of me, the new baby circled and dove.
Through the skylight over us I could see the bright, hard eye of the moon. The nights were drawing in earlier, cold as stone, but in our borrowed bath Sacha and I slipped and glided, wordless, fearless, as if winter would never come.
Words for Things (II)
IN THE CONFESSIONS, AUGUSTINE WRITES that memory is like a house. You move from one room to another, and each memory fills a space, informing it, ineluctably giving it shape. “The huge repository of the memory,” he writes, “with its secret and unimaginable caverns, welcomes and keeps all these things, to be recalled and brought out for use when needed; and as all of them have their particular ways into it, so all are put back again in their proper places.” The way Augustine describes it, memory is like a vast storehouse. I imagined crawling back through dim corridors that opened into room after room: pantries, with their bright boxes, canisters of grains. Bags of papery onions. Herbs rustling in the eaves: rosemary, anise. Wheels of bright cheeses; the soft, fermenting aroma of apple and chicory. The secret and unimaginable caverns of what we keep.
OCTOBER. IN NEW ENGLAND, A month of change. From octo, “eight,” for eighth month. In the Middle Ages people thought that on Saint Francis Day, swallows flew to the bottoms of ponds to hibernate through the winter. Walking back and forth from the university to our new house and back to the green shag again as the month drew to a close, I thought about hibernation. Bears knitting themselves a skein of warmth deep within a cave. The frowsy scent of shared breathing. Being pregnant this time felt to me like that: burrowing inward. Keeping this new life warm.
The last weekend of the month, we turned the clocks back. We went from room to carpeted room, Jacques and I, looking for clocks to change, propelling the hands with our fingers, resetting dials, tapping new numbers into the microwave, the travel alarms.
“I love this,” I heard Jacques say to himself, operating on the shower radio. “We could really use this extra hour.”
I imagined where that hour would go, in Augustine’s storeroom. A small, low-ceilinged room of extra hours, the color of slumber.
NOVEMBER 15, WE CLOSED ON the house—a small, cramped office downtown, thick piles of forms that needed signing, Sandi and the other agent shaking hands, the lawyers shaking hands, the former owner shaking hands with Jacques, with me, with Jacques again, and now we had four tarnished keys, an unfathomable amount of debt, and the house was ours.
We weren’t officially moving until just after Thanksgiving. For now we were trying to get things ready at the new house, setting up appointments with contractors and electricians, choosing paint colors. What this meant, of course, was that we were perpetually in between, running back and forth, thinking that while we were heading over we should just take a few boxes of books, a plant, a radio, some flashlights—the former owner, it turned out, hated overhead lighting, and had taken her lamps away with her.
Without any furniture in it, the house looked different. There were lighter rectangles on the sallow walls where paintings used to hang. Bits of wire, the odd picture hook, wires erupting in odd places from the floor, cracks in the plaster. The walls of the room that would be Sacha’s were being sanded, and there were piles of plaster on the floor; an old sticker from the aquarium, half picked off, stuck like a tattoo to a windowpane. When I came with Jacques, we were in planning mode. Usually someone came with us, one of the painters or our electrician, and we talked about fixing things, installing recessed lights, sanding and polishing the floors, but when I came by myself I didn’t plan much at all. The house was on my way home from work, and often I just stopped in now, getting used to the feel of opening the door with my key, listening to the noises the house made, its stirrings and creaking.
A few days after the closing, I came alone. I was meeting the painters, who had finished the walls in Sacha’s room—robin’s egg blue—and wanted to get started on the dining room. I had a fan of paint colors with me. They were painting everything white, but the dining room had complicated woodwork, and we were supposed to have made six or seven different choices I could barely remember now. Which white went where. Which finish. I had a list of shades for the painters to try: Atrium White. White Dove. Navajo White. It was almost four o’clock, the house was already getting dim, the painters were late, and I remembered Jacques had told me the phone service might have been turned on that afternoon.
I tried out the cordless phone Jacques had gotten from Radio Shack. I was standing at the kitchen counter, looking outside, and I saw it was beginning to snow, one of those bizarre squalls that come out of nowhere sometimes in New England in the late fall, millions of tiny flakes of white that whorl around, not sticking, like the inside of a snow globe, and in the dwindling light everything was white and gray. Shades of white. The first snow, early. I dialed my mother, and—amazingly, this almost never happened anymore—she picked up right away.
This was the first time I’d been able to call her from our new house. No owner there anymore but me. I caught her awake and unusually lucid—lately the morphine had been making her groggy and looped out, but this afternoon, she sounded almost like her old self.
Four o’clock, the end of a teaching day, and I was calling her, and she was there, answering. Just like always.
“Hey,” I said, walking into the dining room. “You’re not going to believe where I am.”
I heard rustling, a bit of heavier breathing. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’m getting into position here.”
I closed my eyes, picturing her in the Hilton. Her stuff around her. Her owl-eye glasses, the ubiquitous pack of Dentyne. The most recent New Yorker. The oncology textbook on the nightstand next to her. “Want me to tell you what it says may come next?” she asked me one night, her voice bitter. Not like her. No, I had said. I didn’t want to hear.
“And talking to you guys,” she’d added.
Lately, Julie told me, she’d admitted baths had become torture. The nurses had to help her in and out, stay with her the whole time. And her body . . . “I can’t look at myself,” she said. “It’s horrible. I’m nothing but bones.”
But she still had reading. That, she told Julie, would be the last to go. Like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. This week, there was a story in the New Yorker she was reading. It was good, she reported, but not the author’s best.
Words, words, words.
“I want to know everything,” she told me now. “Blow by blow. Room by room.” I could hear her breathing hard. It cost her now even to speak.
I tried my best. I made it through the first floor with what I thought was the right mix of jocularity and satire. I described the brown walls in the dining room (soon to become some shade of white). I mocked the linoleum floor in the so-called powder room. I described the burnt orange sixty-year-old wool carpet in the former owner’s study. Kelly green wallpaper in the kitchen. I kept it light, I was on to the patois of the real estate world, I had the buzzwords, the descriptions, and then I moved upstairs, the cordless still cradled under one ear, but when I reached the guest room I stopped short.
“In here—” I said. My voice broke.
There was nothing in here. It was four walls, dingy white, but as I looked around, I imagined how we would change it: We would paint the walls ivory, put up plantation shutters, cover the bed with white cotton sheets, refinish the heart pine floors, hang photos on the wall. The guest room. As I looked into the soft-hued future I was imagining, it was only a room at best, a room that would hold guests and none of them her.
“What,” Lucas Hammill had goaded me, back in sixth grade, “would make you pray? If you were being burned alive? What would it take?”
This, I thought now, holding the door jamb with one hand and holding the receiver away with the other. The words formed inside me almost on their own. Half prayer, half wish. Let her make it here. Let her make it. Let her see the new baby (Elisabeth; Eloise). Let her live.
I started crying and couldn’t stop. I knew she would never set foot in this house. The house, through no fault of its own, was a storehouse not for the past but for the future, for the life we were trying to build for ourselves and the family we were making. And it wasn’t the house or the room that mattered but everything else she wanted so badly to witness and wouldn’t: Sacha’s first words. Maddy sitting up. Our new baby. Just when we needed her most (as if we hadn’t always needed her most, through every minute of the lives we’d lived right up to that moment), we were losing her.
I wanted desperately for her to hang on. But to hold on to her—to want her to keep going—was to condemn her to suffering.
I didn’t say any of this. Instead I sobbed, holding the phone away from me so she couldn’t hear, but of course she heard and she started sobbing, too, and she was saying, “I want to know what it’s like, tell me, I want to picture it, even if I can’t be there too—” and in the middle of this the doorbell rang and it was the painters and she and I, both still crying, had to muddle through an ordinary good-bye in the middle of the larger good-bye that housed us.
A FEW DAYS AFTER THANKSGIVING Sacha stood alone for the first time.
As usual, I was on the phone with my mother. Thanksgiving had wiped her out—it had been too much for her, we admitted now, all of us going in at once. She was paying for it now. Most of the time when I called she was asleep now, and some days I had to call back four or five times to get her when she was awake. But then there’d be an afternoon like today (funny, how it was always three or four o’clock, the good times) when there’d be a minute or two of pure lucidity.
Jacques was playing with Sacha on the green shag, building blocks, and she pulled up on him and let go and didn’t fall. Eleven months and three weeks. The look on her face of amazement was partly comical, partly moving—this sense of her own autonomy, her capacity to do this miraculous thing without our help. And then, a few days later—as if language really is nourished by autonomy, or created by it—Sacha said her first recognizable word.
That word—my legate, my skeptic—was no. Only she said it, inimically, ponderingly—backward. “Ohnnnn.” Shaking her head, as if there could be any question what she meant, whether it was prompted by the proffered organic squash or the toy that just the week before she had reached for. “Ohn.” At bath time. At bedtime. Firm, unequivocal, and I thought I knew what she meant, as I traced my path back and forth from the House with the Green Shag to my office to my classroom to the new house and back home again, going to the ob-gyn, calling my mother, learning she was asleep and couldn’t talk, or in pain and couldn’t talk, or in the bath and couldn’t talk, or talking with her and realizing she wasn’t herself anymore, or that we weren’t really talking, that somehow Sacha was learning, growing, pulling up, standing, shaping words, and my mother was slipping away. That this could be happening was unbearable, untenable, I thought of that famous line from King Lear, the line of pure negation: “Never never never never never,” and all I could do was hold Sacha and brush my cheek against hers and agree that this could not and should not be. Ohn.
Then—I had only words to play with—I turned Sacha’s word around and around like a Petoskey stone in a tumbler, polishing it, lacquering it. Ohn of my ohn. She was my own, my only, this gray-eyed child. My mother-in-law worried I’d let all my sadness seep into her, that she would carry the weight of this first year inside her and be changed by it.
I couldn’t say this wasn’t (maybe) true.
There had been hard days. There had been ghosts. I remembered it all: the sad smudge of Emily’s tiny heel. My mother playing the Comparison Game. A River Runs Through It. Charlevoix. The Green Shag. We’d said good-bye to parts of ourselves and other parts had taken their place. I remembered Sacha’s small arms stretching down like a diver’s for Bomma in Rougemont Hospital, and I thought—no. (Ohn.) If sadness had seeped in, and I was sure it had, hadn’t love also seeped in, hadn’t she also learned what it means to feel?
Did I wish Sacha’s first word had been something else, or that it had been forward instead of backward?
No. I didn’t. She was so adept by now at turning things over, herself included, this girl of ours. Our hourglass.
I liked her word ohn. It was like she had faced the vertiginous dome of the universe and met it with the only possible word that could match it. Isn’t that all any of us can do—face what we face, accept the fact that time is finite, that we get only so much—it’s never enough, but still—and just keep trying? Isn’t this what my mother would teach her if she could, what history will keep teaching her, to say, facing what we face (each in our own particular way, with our own inflection, backward or forward)—“no”?
What We Know (Now)
EARLY IN DECEMBER, JACQUES AND I met with my new doctor, Dr. Muto, at the Farber. We were there just to talk, not for any kind of exam.
It was an unusual meeting. Here I was, six months pregnant, Jacques with me, holding my hand, and I was asking Dr. Muto to take my ovaries out right after the baby was born.
“Not right after, of course,” Dr. Muto said, looking at me with concern.
“As soon as it makes sense,” I countered. I reminded him I’d be thirty-four in May. We could wait until summer, even late summer. But I wanted to have the surgery before I started teaching again. While I was still thirty-four.
“Remember,” he said, “thirty-five is just a target. There’s nothing magical about that number.”
He brought some charts out to explain to us how doctors had arrived at thirty-five as a recommended age for my siste
rs and me to have surgery. “It’s not an exact science,” he said. He explained that since genetic cancers often occur younger with each successive generation, doctors liked to subtract ten years from the age of the closest affected relative when she got sick. Sylvia had been forty-three; Pody, forty-five, Gail, forty-seven. After considering the average age of onset in our family (Sylvia, Pody, Gail), they’d decided thirty-five was a safe target for our family.
“But remember,” Dr. Muto said, “thirty-five has always been just a target. Suppose you waited until thirty-seven, for instance.” He drew a graph for us. “Your lifetime risk may be high—forty, fifty percent. But for each individual year, that risk remains relatively low. Let’s say, one or two percent for each year between thirty-five and forty. Then it might go up a bit after forty.” He looked at me, as if he were worried that I couldn’t quite picture this. “For every hundred women in your exact situation who did not have the surgery this year, that means only one or two of them would get cancer. The rest wouldn’t.”
Jacques, who does this kind of analysis all the time at work, found this fascinating. He loves graphs, models, statistics. But I couldn’t focus on the numbers. I’m a story person. I was still turning over what Dr. Muto had said about subtracting ten years from Sylvia’s age when she’d gotten sick. Forty-three. I was already thirty-three-and-a-half. That meant I was past the deadline, if you were a stickler. I didn’t find the idea of 1 percent or 2 percent at all reassuring. One or two women! That could be Julie and me. (Sara, long past surgery, was already on the safe side.)