“Healthy living, Sophie,” Dr. L told me. “Eat well, get plenty of sleep, and allow your body lots of rest. It’s one big battle in there.”
I knock back another gulp of rum. Ha. After four months of obedience, the mint and cane sugar taste better than good. The alcohol slides down my throat without a hint of guilt. Tonight it’s food for the soul.
We quickly lose one another when we hit the dance floor. I scan the room and my eyes settle on a swinging tie. I throw my scarlet locks into battle. Sophie would hesitate, but Sue doesn’t care. And tonight I’m Sue. I dance along to the rhythm of the music as Sue tickles the nape of my neck.
A few hours later I’m half asleep in a taxi and Tie Boy lies purring with his head on my lap. I’m pleasantly drunk from the mojitos, but also from my night of anonymity. The boy next to me thinks he’s met Sue, a trendy girl with a cool haircut. Our conversation hasn’t gone beyond house music and sneakers.
“So, what is it you do, actually?” he asks.
“I’m on a gap year.”
“Oh. Cool.”
He sees nothing of the loneliness I feel because I’ve turned my story into a secret. He doesn’t know how happy he makes me by running his hands through my hair when we are kissing, not realizing the significance of that movement. How can he know that not only has he won Sue’s heart, but also that of Daisy, Stella, Uma, Platina, and Blondie, too?
I watch the city pass by the taxi window. My thoughts are still on the dance floor. Sue who tickled my neck. Tie Boy who was dancing away to the music and told me he liked my style. Jan and Jochem who gave me a wink and told me to go for it.
The taxi pulls up to my house. With a long, passionate kiss I say good-bye to Tie Boy. I get out of the taxi and step back into my own world. The day after tomorrow I’m expected back at the hospital. I tell Tie Boy that I’m going on holiday for a week—heading off to the airport with just a backpack and booking a last-minute flight to Marrakech.
He’ll never know that I will visit Marrakech only in my dreams and that I’ll be stuck in bed only three streets away. Three streets and a whole world, which, dancing with him, I was able to forget.
At home I take a long look in the mirror. I take off my wig. Put it on again. Off. On. Off. On. I fall asleep, clutching my wig close to me with a smile on my face. Just before I fall asleep I receive a text. It’s Jan: “Wigs … A necessity or an opportunity? You naughty girl! Tell me everything tomorrow. Sweet dreams. XJ.”
SUNDAY, JUNE 5
I BETTER SAY IT OUT loud. I’ve been dreaming of Jur ever since we met. How great a boyfriend he must be! I wish for someone like him in my life, or even someone who is still fighting, like me. Someone who will shuffle in and out of hospitals with me, hold my hand while we do our chemo together, annoy doctors with endless questions, and put his arm around me at night when I wake up crying.
Jur asked me when we first met whether I had a boyfriend.
“No, but lots of great friends,” I told him. Now I understand his question. Those friends are there to drink coffee with me, and they loyally visit me in hospital, but then they go back home. To their own beds.
Thanks to Jur, I’m beginning to see my fear of dying from another perspective. Like it’s an opportunity, rather than a punishment. He’s talking to me about how I can manage my fear. He helps me recognize and name it, cut it up in pieces, and then confront it. He takes my loneliness away, makes me believe I can take on all the cancer in the world. Well … as long as he sits next to me. The moment he gets up, my newborn spirituality takes off with him. I can’t explain what happens inside me when he’s with me. I guess I better just call the magic by its name: Jurriaan.
Today, when I arrive at Café Winkel, he’s already waiting on the terrace with apple pie and whipped cream. He’s wearing a bright green T-shirt that complements his strong tanned arms. Nice. His dark hair flops over his forehead carelessly. Even nicer.
“Hey, new hair color?”
Not only is Jur gorgeous and understanding, he’s funny, too. Uma is perched atop my head. These days I prefer Sue’s and Uma’s bangs to my other wigs because I don’t have to bother drawing in eyebrows every other hour or putting on fake eyelashes. Vive les bangs. We greet with three kisses on the cheek and dive into speaking our shared language of dactinomycin, dexamethasone, metastases, and other yucky cancer-speak. At one point Jur pauses to look at me. Then he says, “I think I like her best.”
The other reason I opted for Uma today: I was hoping my Miss Mia Wallace hairstyle would inject some of her sex appeal.
I feel so clumsy, out of touch, self-conscious. Like a bull in a china shop. I want to give him a self-confident, seductive look and put my lips on his. Even better, I want him to give me that look, that look that makes all the rest disappear, and take me with him into his arms, his life. Why can’t I just tell him how I long for him at night? All I do is keep quiet and worry if my wig doesn’t live a life on its own. I’m just too afraid that he’ll run off if I burden him with the true extent of my feelings.
Cancer-talk it is.
I’ve brought my file with me, and Jur immediately starts to leaf through it. I’m not sure whether I trust him because he is a survivor or because he is studying medicine, but I do. He thoroughly analyzes all my doctors’ decisions. It’s nice to hear someone more optimistic than Dr. L, even though Jurriaan doesn’t hide from me how lucky I’ve been.
“Tell me about the port-a-cath” I ask. “My doctor suggested it because I have such trouble getting needled.”
“Are you going to get one?” asks Jur.
“Tuesday. Injections are getting harder and harder.”
“I had one as well. Look, mine was here.” Jur pulls up his T-shirt. A scar from left to right covering the whole width of his hairy chest. I like hairy chests but this freaks me out.
Jur starts laughing. “Not that one, silly. That one was from surgery when they tried to get my tumor out.” I sigh, relieved. “It’s this one.” I can barely see it through his chest hair, but then I see a horizontal scar about eight centimeters long on the left side of his chest.
Great.
I shake my head. “I don’t want one.”
“You hardly notice it.”
“Not if you don’t wear tank tops, no.”
Jur reassures me, telling me that no one will even notice the difference.
Sure, but I don’t have chest hair.
MONDAY, JUNE 6
IT’S TIME FOR THE RESULTS of my latest scan. Another moment of truth. Sis and I are waiting for Dr. L to call my name. When he appears, I search his greeting for a hint of the results. In his office he looks at me a little longer than usual. His demeanor is getting warmer by the day. I’m even starting to like the guy, who would’ve thought?
“Well, it’s worked. The tumors have decreased yet again. Not quite gone, but…”
“Did you expect them to be gone this time? Was that the goal?”
“They should be next time. Then we’ll have given it all we’ve got as far as chemo goes. After that it’s just maintenance chemo, maybe radiation.”
“So the results are good, then?”
“Yes, Sophie, they’re good.”
I let out the breath I had been holding in. Sis and I softly squeeze each other’s hands. Wearing a big smile, I leave the room that once scared the living daylights out of me and I fall into my sister’s hug.
Often when I spoke about my falling-out with my sister, friends would say: That’s just sisters. Not a very satisfying answer for someone who misses her big sister but doesn’t have the words to say so or the courage to let go of her arms. I never understood how we could have started off so close and ended up avoiding each other. Where things went wrong. I just know we tried to live our own lives as far away as possible from each other. If she would start working in a certain café, I would start working in the equivalent of the opposite of that café and vice versa. It’s such a gift to drink our tea in the same café again. And the strangest
thing is neither of us ever had to apologize. After the news, we just looked at each other and held each other close, never wanting to let go again.
TUESDAY, JUNE 7
I WAKE UP AND IT takes me a while to realize where I am. I see a lot of white beds and people either sleeping or looking dazed. Then it’s all coming back to me: the operating room, the strong arms of the nurse, the deep sleep. But also the mojitos and the dark nightclub and Tie Boy and Jur’s chest. I move my right arm and carefully feel my new third breast. I feel a bump with a big bandage around it, just under my collarbone.
Gross.
Unfamiliar nurses rush around. My vision is still fuzzy. Suddenly my grandmother is at my bedside. She must have come in while I dozed off. Oma is very fragile and shy, with big blue eyes. When we’re together I always forget that for fifty-six years she led a life without me in it. She has ten of us—grandchildren. Everybody in the family says we look and talk so much like each other. We love spending time together and telling each other stories and jokes.
Oma would never talk pain and misery—I think she thinks it’s inappropriate. She lived her worst experiences but best stories in a Japanese camp in Bandung, Indonesia. It’s where she was born and brought up, into a Dutch family. When she was fourteen, World War II broke out and they all became prisoners of war. Her father, Louis, was sent to Burma to work on the Burma bridge. She and her mother and sister were sent to war camp. Because there was so little food, the children were always on the lookout for some more. Once she saw a papaya hanging in a tree. It was just hanging there, waiting to be eaten maybe. So she climbed onto the back of her friend, made herself big enough to grasp the papaya, tugged it loose, and then turned around and looked straight into the eyes of a Jap. Eating papayas was a luxury the prisoners of camp were not entitled to. People in camp would call the Japanese “Japs” or “Jappies.” She felt her neck hair stand straight up and her muscles stiffen. The man didn’t say anything, just looked at her like a statue. She slowly climbed down the back of her friend, put the papaya on the ground in front of the Jap’s feet, bowed, and ran off. She never told me what happened the next day when she was called upon for stealing the papaya. I think she chose to have a selective memory.
She told me this story—and the one of her saving her two white poodles from the Japs—at least a hundred times, and as vividly as Roald Dahl wrote his. She turned them into exciting, naughty, and funny bed tales. When she spoke, her big blue eyes were so alive.
When I was still a child, together we did a heck of a lot of retail damage in the city’s department store. We would go out grocery shopping, and I always found an excuse to pass by the department store. I found it mesmerizing, this building full of everything. We would re-dress the mannequins, taking their heads off and putting on scarves. It was silly but sweet. And other times we would stay in and bake a cake. We could never get the recipe right. It always came out as a sticky toffee. It turned out that we always put the double amount of butter inside. My granny craves it. Mornings for her are toast with two layers of butter.
The times I ask her a real question, she always takes some time to answer. Once I asked if her years in the war camp were really bad. She was quiet for a while, took another spoon of her soup (she always made soup), and then answered: “Yes, I think they were.” I didn’t ask further. But now seeing her big blue eyes, I can’t help but asking:
“Oma, are you very sad about me?”
She stays quiet for a minute. Her large, piercing eyes tell me she’s thinking this over. “Yes,” she says.
“Often?”
“Well, the thing is, nothing is any fun anymore.”
Silence. I don’t know what to say. Not even a joke to pull out of my sleeve. For what feels like minutes we share the silence together, and for as long as those minutes last she seems all I need to be happy. It stings, knowing that she’s sad because of me, but it also gives me a warm feeling that we’re so closely connected. I get to see her even more often now, and she always brings me something yummy from the organic food store. Today it’s nuts, raisins, and plums.
“They’re good for you,” she says. Carefully, she looks around and asks if my parents or sister have been to visit yet.
“No,” I say, suddenly growing restless. All these new faces bustling around are getting to me. I want to go back to my own ward, my own room, and to close my eyes and sleep. “Is it big?” I ask Oma, who has bent over me to inspect the doctor’s handiwork. She shakes her head, but her big blue eyes, which have seen so much, can’t hide her sadness.
* * *
Later, back in my own ward, Pauke takes off the bandage. The port-a-cath is lodged right below my collarbone. I can’t see it and don’t dare touch it.
“They’ve done a very neat job on you,” she says while inspecting my bump up close. I smile and wait until everyone has left my room before I take a mirror and look at the horrible bump myself. Two thick pink lines about four inches long run across my collarbone, right over a strange-looking bump. Two? Why two? There’s nothing neat about them. It’s just ugly.
I take out the pictures that Jan took of me flipping off the camera. I always bring them with me to the hospital, for when life’s a bitch. This coming Monday I will cross off the twentieth week in my agenda. Then only one more hospital week to go, at the end of July. It doesn’t feel like it, but time does go on.
* * *
“Hi, gorgeous, did you sleep well?” My sister’s radiant smile flashes as she walks in carrying a basket full of delicious food and birthday banners because it’s Mom’s birthday today and mine on Saturday. My lethargic neighbors look up.
“Kiss!” I call, sticking out my arms for a hug. I’m always a drama queen when she comes to visit. Sis can never hug me enough and today is no different as she clambers into bed with me. She feeds me pasta—the hospital food is so disgusting you lose just as much weight avoiding it as you do with taking chemo—and takes out some red nail polish to paint my toes.
I tell Sis about my latest fantasy with Dr. K. Sis tells me about her future as an expat wife and her plans to be much more than that. Her darling boyfriend, Kieran, is an English expat—almost as chic as a diplomat, in my book—whose job sends him off to a new location every two years. That’s how he and my sister met here, and it’s also the reason that Sis and I will be torn apart in six months. He’s being posted in Hong Kong, and she’s following him in December.
“Two years in a lifetime is nothing,” she says.
Two years? Nothing? I love hearing her voice, but not when we’re talking years that are like nothing. Or moving across the world. But so much of our lives are lived in the future. All our conversations are built around plans and dreams, and that makes this disease so fucking hard, as I’m not entitled to that vocabulary anymore. I’m an outsider stuck in the present. I don’t understand why people say that living in the present brings happiness when it’s really the opposite. It sucks. I’m jealous of her life, her future, her beautiful hair, her glowing skin. Her choices. Her freedom. Her health.
We pull the curtain all the way around the bed and talk very softly so as not to disturb the others, but more to not be disturbed. She carefully strokes my bump. I cry. “War wounds,” she calls my scars. You can leave symbolism to Sis. While I say “Fuck this fucking cancer,” Sis talks about gray skies clearing. We both have our own ways of dealing with it, I guess.
It’s comforting to know that she’s my guardian angel whenever gray skies are overhead. With her I can let go. There is no such thing as modesty or manners between sisters. When I’m sick and vulnerable, she takes care of me, and when I’m a pain in the ass, she just lets me be a pain in the ass. We’re back to being sisters.
Sis selflessly offers up her time to make me vegetable soup and other super-healthy concoctions. When she walks into my room with her homemade pies and pastas, I like to think that I would have done the same for her. But she’s always been the caring one. She wanders through the organic food store looking
for treats to bring me. Kieran tells me how she struggles with her guilt each time she leaves my bedside and sees my time standing still while her life carries on. It guess it’s not less harder to be the person around the sickbed rather than to be the person in it. She has to deal with my illness and with the guilt of being the lucky one.
It’s another reason why I feel the need to write everything down, if only to fill the gap between us. I don’t like gaps or islands. I hate them. I want to be close to Sis, my parents, Oma, my friends, the whole time. I don’t want to be separated from them. I don’t want to live on an island. I just can’t. I really can’t.
Dying is not an option.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8
IT’S FUNNY HOW PEOPLE assume that, given the choice, I would rather not wear a wig. That when I stick my keys in the front door and hear it fall closed behind me, I’d immediately want to rid my head of all that fakeness, toss my wig on the floor, and sigh with relief.
It’s not like that at all. Oftentimes I forget I have anything on my head that shouldn’t be there. I’ve gotten so used to my wigs that they are set up on my dresser as if they have always been there. They’re just a part of me now.
Underneath my clothes and wigs I’m starting to look more and more like a cancer patient. Not only do I have the bald scalp, but now I have the scarred body to match. I’m fascinated by this thing sticking out above my breast, connecting me to my IV pole. I can’t stop touching it. It moves around awkwardly, like a Ping-Pong ball under my skin.
I always associated cancer with old people and unhealthy lifestyles, but the past few years have shown me that nothing could be further from the truth. Even my beautiful mom and Angelina Jolie got to deal with it.
People assume that cancer comes with spirituality. I’m not afraid of a little spirituality. But it’s quite another thing to go and sit on a cushion and hide myself behind a wall of Buddhism. To say whatever happens is fine because I live in the present. Blagh. Although I’ve always felt attracted to Buddhism, I can’t see what to make of it now. It’s all about acceptance and letting go. But to me, accepting being a cancer patient is like giving up my defenses. I have not accepted being one and something tells me I shouldn’t. That the day I do accept being bedridden 24/7, walking around bald and ugly or becoming a person who doesn’t care about her fantastic pair of new shoes anymore, is like closing a pact with death.
The Girl With Nine Wigs Page 9