by Janet Elder
Rich and I had our own Nantucket rituals. Once Michael went to sleep at night, we enjoyed the rare pleasure of sitting in the yard, staring at the night sky, listening to the quiet, and sipping wine.
Nantucket held a trove of potential pets. From the time Michael was four until he was about ten or eleven, every day at the beach, he would capture jellyfish, sand crabs, and sea lice, put them in a bucket, and insist that he wanted to bring them back to the cottage and then back to New York. Initially, Rich and I did not react to Michael’s desires in the same way. I was always trying to figure out how to say no without seeming like the exhausted mother I was. Rich was always trying to figure out how this could be made to work. Rich’s undaunted spirit always prevailed.
Every summer, the backyard was lined with buckets and bottles of all shapes and sizes. Fortunately, the sea creatures never lived long enough to make the trip back to New York, but they did live long enough in their buckets to overpower the sweet scent of honeysuckle that grew wild in the backyard.
The collection, care, and feeding of all these sea creatures made Rich and me realize we were on the road to buying Michael some kind of pet. A dog was still out of the question; that had definitely not changed. But right before Michael started kindergarten, right after Inchie died, once we were back in the city, we bought fish. Goldfish. Three of them: “Beautiful,” “Goldie,” and “Blackie.” Goldie died first. Blackie was soon to follow. I wondered if maybe we could prolong Beautiful’s life by feeding it less. I nearly starved the fish, but, remarkably, it went on to live with us for years.
On Michael’s first day of kindergarten, he drew a family portrait and listed the members of his family: Mom, Dad, Michael, and Beautiful. I noticed the other kids had lists that looked more like, Mom, Dad, Susie, Joey, Sarah, and Fido.
Michael was an only child of older parents, and although that provided him with a kind of closeness to his parents he might otherwise not have had, it also meant he didn’t have siblings to play with, fight with, and make fun of his parents with. He also didn’t have a dog. He had Beautiful.
We bought him more fish. After buying, starving, and burying many more fish, we finally retired the tank. Unable to hold and pet the fish, not to mention their rapid demise, Michael’s interest in the fish had naturally waned, though his interest in pets and animals in general had not. If anything, Rich and I had frustrated him by never allowing him a pet he could really play with.
Every so often, Michael would wear me down with a steady stream of comments like “I just need a dog to love,” or “If I had a dog I’d always have a friend.” I’d start to ruminate again about getting a dog. But I knew that even if I could see my way clear, Rich could not. He was willing to take on the overseeing of goldfish, but I knew he would protest at the expense and responsibility of adding a dog to our already demanding lives.
Rich was running his own consulting business; I was always at the newspaper or on the phone with someone there. There wasn’t time for a dog. On a couple of occasions I started to broach the subject, but Rich never really wanted to get too far into it, ending the conversation with: “Can we talk about this some other time?” Which really meant: “I haven’t changed my mind, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
On occasion, though, Rich would start to grapple with getting Michael a pet that required more of a commitment on our part than fish. When Michael was in fourth grade, Rich and I took him to East Hill Farm, a working farm in Massachusetts. After collecting eggs, riding a horse, and learning how to milk a cow, Michael discovered the baby rabbits. He spent every waking moment attending to them. Rich started musing about owning a rabbit. “At least,” he said, “it is an animal that would not have to be walked.” But if it was unthinkable to own a dog, it was utter insanity to think about bringing a rabbit into a New York City apartment.
Michael continued to long for a dog, and we continued to say no and to surround him with poor substitutes. One year, Santa brought Michael a kit that allowed him to hatch butterflies. We sent away for the cocoons, watched and waited until they magically turned into butterflies, and then struggled with whether or not to let them go.
We hit a real low point when Michael came home from school one day and announced that a neighborhood friend’s rat was about to have babies and his buddy had offered to give Michael one. “He said I could have one of the babies. Isn’t that great?” Michael said to me, smiling ear to ear.
I had to call the boy’s mother and ask her to please not allow her child to give Michael a rat. She didn’t see why I was so distraught. I asked her what she would do if Michael had tempted her son with a new puppy, one of the few pets her son did not own. Six months later, I saw the mother and her son walking their new dog.
It was around that time that one of Michael’s friends and fellow New York Yankees devotees, Jack Schlossberg, a boy with two sisters and no brothers, got a dog: “August Yankee Alfonso Soriano Schlossberg.” Jack was so in love with August that he referred to him as his brother. Jack’s mother had been one of the dog holdouts. She had once gone so far as to caution me that if I ever felt myself weakening, I should call her and she’d set me straight. When she called to say she had weakened, her first words were: “I know you’re going to kill me, but …”
Many of our New York friends had also wrestled with the dog issue and decided against it, saying, too, that the complications of life in the city just made the prospect daunting. There was something ironic about the whole mind-set. Here we were, all making sacrifices so that our children could have every advantage in life. We managed to keep a hundred balls in the air all the time, and yet we just couldn’t see our way to taking care of a dog.
One friend, Susan Finkelstein, the mother of Jesse, another of Michael’s friends, repeatedly quoted to me what a friend of hers had said: “It just may be the one thing all of our kids are going to have to do without.”
But it became harder and harder as Michael got older. Like most kids, he had no idea what taking care of a dog would actually be like—walking, bathing, feeding—and he’d vow in the most earnest and heartbreaking way that he would happily take on all of the responsibilities himself. “I promise I will walk him if you come with me, and I will feed him, and he can sleep in my room, if we can just get a dog for me to play with,” he’d say. The longing was genuine. He was simply desperate.
Nothing would set Michael off like seeing a dog, especially “Rocket,” a shy, auburn-colored toy poodle who was the newest member of the Simon family, neighbors who lived three floors above us in an identical apartment, with an only child, too. Emily was two years younger than Michael. She was the sweet, composed, adored daughter of Jennifer and Paul.
Of all the dogs Michael had ever fallen in love with, none captured his heart the way Rocket did, not even McDuff. After all, Rocket lived in our building, not in the pages of a book. One frigid winter’s day, we saw Rocket dressed in a red sweater and Michael declared him “the cutest, most adorable dog I have ever seen in my entire life.” It was another of those moments when I walked right up to the edge of relenting before backing away.
By the time Michael was eleven, his life was chockablock with school, friends, and baseball. Over spring break, for the first time in his life, we were headed to Europe. Michael had not brought up the dog subject for a while.
I, however, thinking I had an opportunity to add a convincing point to the ongoing debate, did something foolishly daring. I proclaimed, “We wouldn’t be able to take a vacation like this if we had a dog.”
As usual, Michael was prepared. “I’ve already talked to Auntie Babs, and she said anytime we went away, she’d take care of my dog. Please, Mom, please, can we get a dog? I will never ask for anything else. I promise!”
My younger sister, Barbara Clark (Auntie Babs), and her husband, Dave, and their three children live in Ramsey, New Jersey, in a house with a fenced-in yard. The Clarks have owned many dogs. They were in fact what one might call “dog people.” It was too perfect.
I was cooked. Backed into a corner of my own making, I actually found myself desperately declaring, “We can talk about it when you’re older.” I now hated myself.
We had a glorious trip—Rome, Florence, and Venice. Michael was now old enough to read the guidebooks, tote his own suitcase, figure out what he wanted to order in a restaurant, and appreciate the more civilized pace of life in a Mediterranean country.
While climbing the 463 steep, narrow, winding steps in Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence, the family backpack stuffed with water bottles, jackets, books, and souvenirs became too cumbersome for Rich, age fifty-six and the recipient of two artificial hip joints. Michael happily and gallantly offered to carry it on his own back. A line was crossed. Michael was growing up faster than I realized and probably faster than I was ready for. It is a funny thing about parenting: by the time you get used to understanding and dealing with one age, your child has already moved on to the next.
Toward the end of the trip, as we sat at Caffè Quadri, an outdoor café in San Marco Square in Venice, basking in the sun’s warmth, watching Michael tirelessly feeding the pigeons, something happened that made me think more seriously than I ever had about getting Michael a dog.
Michael had spent so much time feeding the pigeons that we had spent $70 on food for them. But it wasn’t the money spent on pigeon feed that made me see the dog situation differently; it was two teenage boys who were making sport of tormenting the birds. The boys had lured the birds with feed, captured them, and started pulling their wings. One of the boys acted as though he was going to twist one of the birds’ heads off. It was a horrible scene. Michael was overwrought. “Dad, make them stop! You have to make them stop!” he cried.
That was the exact moment I secretly started to seriously abandon my long-held position on owning a dog. It was an epiphany. Michael had to have a dog. How could I ignore my son’s love for animals, which had only deepened throughout his childhood? Why wasn’t I listening to him when he said he “needed” a dog? He really was getting older. Maybe he could take on some of the responsibilities. Maybe we could make this work. Why was I so willing to spend money on everything else for him except a dog?
Maybe I wanted to hold on to my son’s childhood, or maybe I had some sixth sense of what I was about to learn was on our family’s road ahead. But I sat there watching Michael with the pigeons and put aside my own limitations to think seriously about Michael’s unquestionable, unabated love of God’s creatures. I vowed to myself I would once again raise the subject with Rich as soon as the time seemed right.
The time came soon.
CHAPTER 2
I ARRIVED AT THE radiologist’s office four days after our return from Italy. There were no other patients in the waiting room. The receptionist called me over and asked a few questions. “No, my address has not changed.” “Yes, my insurance is the same.” “Yes, I understand that I have to pay today for the services rendered today.” “Yes, I have been here before.” “Yes, I do want to actually see the doctor and not have my test results mailed.”
While we were away I had managed to forget about my work, a rarity for me, but I could never manage to fully shake the nagging dread that when we returned home to New York, I had to get a mammogram. I was overdue.
I hated those checkups—the anxiety; the chilly, sterile environment; sitting around braless in a cheap, flimsy gown; the endless, endless waiting. I hated staring at all the other women who were waiting, too—all of them trying to make small talk and avoid it at the same time. I thought if I took the first appointment of the day, there would be less waiting. I was wrong.
I sat there that cold, rainy, Monday morning in March leafing through the well-thumbed magazines. No Times or Newsweeks here; it was either magazines full of recipes or ones with ideas for reigniting a decades-old marriage. If the magazines aren’t interesting enough, there are the pamphlets about breast cancer. My “favorite” had a picture of a breast with a rainbow going through it. The walls are pink. In fact, there is a lot of pink there, the color of little girls. There is something demeaning about all that pink. Cancer is not pink. Cancer is serious business.
No one thought to pipe in music, so every sound—every clearing of the throat, sneeze, page turn, zip of a handbag—was magnified. It was becoming crowded. Ten women, mostly in their fifties and sixties, were all wearing the same expression: worry.
I thought about how earlier that morning I had hugged Michael, sent him off to school, and watched him walk away. That’s the last time I’ll hug him without knowing I have breast cancer, I thought. I instantly scolded myself, You are really, really crazy. Some years ago, when I hit forty, a friend told me that we were now at the age when every headache is a brain tumor. I put my paranoia about breast cancer in the “headache is a brain tumor” category and headed toward the doctor’s office. After all, this was just a routine mammogram.
It was always the same. The technician would squeeze one of my breasts between two steel plates, tell me not to breathe, disappear behind a wall, and take the x-ray. Then she would do the same thing to the other breast. I’d be dismissed and sent to another waiting room. Sometimes I would be called back for reasons no clearer than, “We need another picture.”
I sat there at 9:00 that morning, in my pink gown, growing more and more anxious. The technician said they needed another picture. Back again. Don’t breathe. Have a seat outside. Another waiting room. More magazines. There was no source of natural light in the inner waiting room; I felt the walls closing in. The more I tried to persuade myself that the long wait had nothing to do with the results of my mammogram, the more I thought the long wait meant I was that one in seven women who would be handed a diagnosis of breast cancer.
And then, after the endless wait for the new picture to be developed, the doctor saw me.
Her office was dark, lighted mostly by an illuminated screen that held the x-rays of my breasts. My regular doctor was away, so this much younger woman, with a stern and determined demeanor, was filling in. She was thin and had long blond hair. She did not look friendly or approachable in any way. One might call her “plain.” She was probably ten years my junior. Before she spoke a word, I knew something was wrong.
“There is something suspicious on the x-ray,” she said, as she pointed to a mass that looked indistinguishable to me from the other masses on the film.
I didn’t panic. I had a twisted sense of relief in just being out of the waiting room and finally in front of a doctor, someone who could end the unknowing. I’m also pretty good at steeling myself in a moment of crisis. The journalist often takes over and starts asking a lot of questions, listening for the nuance in the answers, trying to detect information not intended to be divulged. As long as I’m still reporting the story, gathering facts and not writing the story, there is no conclusion, no bad ending. Anything is still possible. It is usually later that I fall apart.
“When was your last mammogram?” she asked. Without waiting for the answer, she said, “You should have a sonogram as soon as possible.”
“Can it be done now?” I asked. Fortunately, “now” was possible. I didn’t have to make another appointment for another day and wait some more. Waiting had already become excruciating.
The medical suite had two floors. The sonogram machine was down a narrow, winding staircase. Another waiting room. More magazines. More waiting. More women sitting around braless in cheap, pink gowns trying not to notice one another. No one was there with a husband or a companion of any kind. Each of the women in the waiting room was alone.
I was called to the examining room. I took my place on the cold metal table. I lay there remembering the only other time in my life I had any kind of sonogram. I was pregnant, my husband was holding my hand, and we were ecstatic to see our son, sucking his thumb and floating around in amniotic fluid.
I started thinking, too, about the day Michael was born. It was also a Monday morning. Michael was born at 9:01 on a crystal-clear, perfect, sparkling spring day
in early May. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I had always been told that first babies arrived late. Michael was two weeks early. I was fully dilated by the time we got to the hospital. There wasn’t time to fill out admissions papers, and I was way past the point of any discussion of epidural drugs.
Before I knew it, I was whisked to a delivery room and Michael came charging into the world. Rich watched as the doctor cut the umbilical cord and placed Michael in my arms. I kissed his small cheeks, and his nose and the top of his head and then his hands and his feet. I stared into his eyes. To me, he was a miracle and I could not take my eyes off him. I had loved him from the second I knew I was pregnant.
It was a day of unbridled joy. My sister Barbara, having ditched work, arrived with a bouquet of yellow tulips and purple irises. She was the first of my siblings to get to the hospital, the first to hold the newborn nephew.
The cold gel on my breast startled me, ending my reverie. “We’ll look at the left breast first.” The technician was as humorless as the doctor had been. Their inability to make even the most superficial human connection with me made me feel even more alone than I was. I thought they wanted no part of me, as though I had some fatal, communicable disease. There were no niceties, no putting the patient at ease. It was all business. No one seemed to have any sense that psychic relief would go a long way to bringing down the emotional temperature of all those women in the waiting room, not to mention me, lying on the steel table with cold gel on my breast looking for clues in their remote expressions.
It was dark in this room, too. The doctor came in and repeated much of what the technician had already done, looking at a screen while she moved a probe across one breast and then the other. The sonogram confirmed what the mammogram had shown: a mass in my left breast with the distinctive shape of a cancerous breast tumor. The doctor said, “Yes, that’s just what I thought.” She seemed almost self-congratulatory, pleased she had gotten it right. She was oblivious to the forty-eight-year-old woman lying on the table, one step closer to a diagnosis of breast cancer.