by Lesley Kagen
She mutters to herself, “I don’t know what she’s so damn happy about. She’s a freaking shish kebob.”
I laugh. “True, but she’s also the patron saint of all those fighting against impossible odds.” I hope she makes the connection. “Joan is smiling because she did herself proud and is looking forward to her reward. Her return to the kingdom of all that is and will ever be.”
Tess has given up on traditional religion, which is fine, because all of ’em are just different means to the same end—think of spokes on a wagon wheel leading to the center that holds them altogether—but try as she might, she can’t deny that edging her toes into the forever the way she had during her surgery had given her a completely different spiritual take on things.
Less ticked, she says, “When I do…ya know…do you think I’ll go back to the place I visited when I was under the anesthesia?”
“Doubtful,” I say woefully as I ease back in the pew. “Wish that for you with all my heart baby, but….” I shake my head low and slow. “If only you didn’t have that Mike Nelson wiener sin hangin’ over your head.”
Her laugh echoes through the church.
I don’t have time for anymore tomfoolery. We need to get to work. I put on my reading glasses—don’t need ’em, of course—but they’ll add weight to what I’m about to teach her. I speak to her in a calm, slow voice to let her know how serious I am. “May I see your list?”
She removes it from the zipped side compartment of her lucky purse and hands it over.
TO-DO LIST
Buy broccoli.
Make sure that Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
Set up vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
Convince Will to love me again.
Get Birdie to talk to me.
Bury Louise once and for all.
Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
Die.
Wanting to praise and reassure before I get down to brass tacks, I point to numbers one, three, and five. “You’re excellent at picking out broccoli, and I’m proud, and you should be too, of the mothering job you’re doing with Henry.” I place my hand atop one of hers. “Don’t worry about him so much.” I’m not supposed to tell her this, but what the hell. “That boy is gonna rock the world someday.” I go back to the list. “And with regards to Birdie, the perseverance you’ve shown in rekindling your relationship is nothin’ short of remarkable. And since it’s not on your list, I’m not even gonna mention what a fantastic job you did coping with all those surgeries.” I give her this special love look I have that is enormously penetrating. “But…I’m a little concerned about number two.”
She grasps onto her lucky purse. “You don’t think Dr. Chandler is helping Haddie?”
“I didn’t say that, did I? The doc is doing an outstanding job treating her disorder, what I meant when I said I was concerned is…well, the time is drawing nigh for you to tell her about the cancer.”
Tess doesn’t realize it, but she’s just made the sign of the cross. Old habits die hard.
“She’ll be scared when you tell her, but when it hits her that you kept it from her, you gotta prepare yourself for all sorts of mad.”
Tess whines, “How was I supposed to know I was going to live?”
“Keeping it a secret from Haddie when you weren’t sure of your prognosis and she was struggling with the worst of her problem was a good idea, but now that you’re not gonna die, and she appears to be making progress, you gotta step up.”
“But what if I still—”
“No buts or what ifs about it.” I cross out number eight again. Die. This time in pen. “You’re gonna live.” Much, much longer.
Tess takes a moment to reflect. There are so many repercussions if she accepts once and for all that the cancer isn’t going to kill her. One of them being that she summoned me and framed our time together on the premise that she was about to kick the bucket and needed someone by her side.
Before she can strengthen her argument by bringing up a recurrence, I say, “How ’bout we discuss number seven for a minute?” I take in a deep breath; I’ll need it. “It and number eight are not dependent upon one another. In other words, you don’t have to be drugged up, die, or come close to it, to recapture some of the profound feelings you experienced during your brief visit to the sweet bye and bye, the afterworld, Heaven, the happy hunting ground, or whatever you want to call it.”
My friend can’t help herself, she’s intrigued. No one could resist reexperiencing those divine feelings, least of all her. “How?”
“Well, that brings me to…,” I place my finger next to number six: Bury Louise once and for all.
“You gotta let go of her in more ways than just scattering her ashes. You need to say goodbye to what remains of her here.” I tap her forehead. “And here.” I tap her heart.
She kitten mewls.
“I know you don’t think you are, but you’re well on your way. Haven’t you noticed that she hasn’t been bugging you as much lately?”
She gives me a begrudging nod.
“Well, then, the next step is,” she’s not going to like what I’m about to tell her, but it’s gotta be said, “forgiving her.”
Tess goes as hard as the church pew beneath my behind. “That’s not gonna happen.”
I take on my sermon voice. “In the words of Buddha, ‘Holding onto anger is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die.’”
“I don’t care.”
“Forgiving someone doesn’t mean that you absolve them of the harm they’ve inflicted.” If I’m not careful, she’ll start singing the Brownie Smile Song to drown me out. “All you gotta do is acknowledge that Louise did what she did and you feel about it the way you do, and go on with your life the best your can.”
An harrumph.
I point down to the list again: number four.
The resounding church bells make further conversation impossible, which is how I planned it. I don’t want her posing any more belligerent questions that I’m not allowed to answer. She has to figure out how to do the last item on her list on her own—convince Will to love her again—and deep down she knows that, or she wouldn’t be unconsciously releasing me from my duties.
When only the echo remains of the final bell, the twelfth, I ask her, “You know what that means?”
“That you’re about to tell me some dumb-ass parable about the Disciples?”
Lord, this girl can get attitudinal.
“Actually,” I say as I pass the list back, “I was gonna tell you that the time has come to say our goodbyes.”
“Nooo!” She whips my way. “I’m sorry for being snotty…I’m not ready! You can’t leave me. Please!”
I set my hand on her shoulder and say with powerful conviction, “Trust me, you know all you need to know for now, but there are a couple of things I want you to focus on.” I’m going to frame the advice as a list because I know that’ll appeal to her. “Number one, just like Dr. Drake told you, humor is the best tool you got to get you through tough times. Number two, you are an eternal soul who is loved now and forever. Number three, remember that surrendering is not the same as giving up. And, last but not least….” I reach under the pew, remove a pink orchid lei, and place it around her neck. She understands the implications. She’s a little expert on Hawaii. “If you could show yourself an ounce of the compassion that you show others that’d be a good start.”
“Grace…don’t go…PLEASE!”
Too late. I’ve already deactualized, but just because I can’t resist having the last word, I whisper in her ear with breath that is redolent of an eternity of hellos and goodbyes, “Aloha, Tess Blessing.”
What If I Start Yodeling?
Over the past weeks, Tess has reflected often on our heart-to-heart chat in the church. She hasn’t radically changed—these things don’t happen overnight—but she has noticed that she’s become a tad untethered to the person prev
iously known as Theresa Marie Blessing. Her PTSD symptoms haven’t disappeared, there is no known cure, but they’re becoming more manageable. When she gets depressed, color her gray instead of black, the panics are not as frantic or frequent, and the flashbacks seem fuzzier. Her dead mother is still harping, but every so often she’s being replaced in Tess’s brain by the kinder, drawling voice of you know who.
Big picture? She’s experiencing warm feelings that you’d think she’d welcome, but instead of reveling in the benefits of our hard work, she’s questioning her essence—God almighty, who the hell am I? What’s happening to me? Am I becoming chipper? What if I start yodeling?
She tells Will through the bathroom door, “Time to abdicate the throne.”
As promised by Dr. Sherman, the radiation treatments have taken their toll. Tessie is so damn exhausted that she drops into their bed each night thinking that she’s finally found the cure for her insomnia. Radiation poisoning. She doesn’t trust herself to drive to herself to the treatment this morning, so Will will be sliding behind the wheel of the Volvo.
He’s been sweeter, more sensitive to her needs since she’s started the treatment. Tess wants to believe those are signs that he’s gotten a handle on his midlife crisis, but that’s a stretch for one as pessimistic as she. (She received his permission to talk to their family doctor and Scottie confirmed the diagnosis.) Especially since her husband still hasn’t shown any interest in making love to her. She overheard one woman telling another woman in the cancer center’s waiting area that her husband walked out after she got sick because he no longer found her sexy. Could that be the problem? Or is he just saving himself for Connie?
The receptionist at the cancer center looks up from her computer to say, “How are you today, Tess?”
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve got cancer and I’m undergoing radiation treatments, so I am not doing all that well.”
Miniature Marty rewards her with a sunny smile that has done Tess’s heart good over the past few weeks. “Irwin’s on his way out.”
She drags back to the waiting area and says to Will, “I just remembered that I have an appointment with Cappy after the treatment, so instead of sitting around here and absorbing the fantastic ambience, do you want to head over to Starbucks?”
He folds up his newspaper, hops out of the plastic chair, and tells her, “Call me when you’re finished.” She hasn’t seen him move this fast in years. “I’ll bring you back a hot cocoa and a scone.” As she watches him hightail it through the center’s doors, she doesn’t want to, but all she can think about is how much she loves him. Squeamishness and all.
Irwin gently calls to her from across the waiting room, “You’re up.”
As he helps her onto the table the same way he has the previous seventeen times, she asks him how he’d spent his weekend because she’s grown very fond of him.
“I cleaned the house, baked three cherry pies for the church bake sale on Saturday, and after Mass on Sunday, I dug around in my garden.” Irwin positions her arms in the holders above her head. “The Farmer’s Almanac predicted we’d have a warm spring and how right it was.” He slaps the plate into the radiation machine. “My daffodils are already up.”
“Yeah, mine too.” She’d gasped when she spotted their unfurling yellow heads out of the sunroom window this morning. They reminded her that Haddie would return home in a few days to start her spring break.
Irwin is puttering with her breast. Pushing it this way and that, until it lines up perfectly with the radiation machine. On his way out, he reminds her, the same way he always does, that there’s a microphone in the room. “If you need me, just yell.”
After the initial round of whirring and click-click noise, he comes back, makes some adjustments, minces out, and the machine gets busy again.
Bzzz. “Okay,” his tinny voice announces a few minutes later through the nearby speaker. “You can rest your arms now, Tess.” Bzzz.
Upon his return to her side, he helps her into an upright position and asks, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“That was perfect,” she tells him, like always. “So, what are you planting this year?”
“Flowers that bring joy to the parishioners.” He lives on the grounds of St. Boniface, a Catholic Church in Richfield, a town west of Ruby Falls. Tess pictures a cottage with a thatched-roof and talking bluebirds flapping about the dormer windows. “Daisies, sunflowers, and I absolutely adore pink peonies, don’t you?”
Resisting a double entendre that might offend pious Irwin, she says, “I certainly do.” She thinks of Will’s Monsieur Pierre, and how in the language of flowers, peonies stand for bashfulness. She hopes that’s the case.
Irwin, already busy changing the paper sheet on the radiation bed with a whistle, tosses out his parting line as Tess opens the door to the room. “See you tomorrow, hon. Same time, same setting!”
She takes a deep breath, thinks of me, says, “Fuck it,” and steps into the elevator to travel three floors up to the office of the medical oncologist on her team—the one who’d come up with her treatment regime—Dr. Cappy Anderson.
She had liked the mid-fifties man right off. There was gentleness inside his big bear of a body that made her feel safe, and a cut-to-the-chase sensibility that Tess appreciated. When she’s led back to his office by Jennifer, his receptionist, the doctor greets her with, “Morning.”
“Brilliant observation, Cappy,” she says with a smile.
That’s the worst comb-over I’ve ever seen. If the man can make a serious grooming mistake like that, how dependable could he be?
Tess disagrees with her mother. The part that Cappy makes an inch above his left ear is so touching that nothing he did could make her trust him more.
“How’s the Badger State been treating you?” she asks as she settles in on the other side of his desk. He’d relocated from Upstate New York shortly before she’d begun seeing him.
“The food’s hearty, the people are helpful, and there’s so little traffic, but…I miss waterfalls. I’m a watcher from way back.” Tess has never heard of that hobby before, but if she was a doctor who dealt with death all day long watching cascading water might make her feel brand new again too. “Would you like to do the exam in here today? Patients tell me it’s more comfortable.”
It’s a typical doctor’s office, nothin’ special, but anything’s better than the sterile room around the corner, so she opens her gown to give him easy access and tells him, “Have at it.” (To any woman cancer patient who is shy about displaying her breasts, Tess would say, “Get over it, sister.”)
“Well,” Cappy says as he’s staring at her chest. “The right one is still quite a bit smaller.” She knows that and doesn’t care. She’s begun to find it as endearing as the runt of the litter or the scraggliest Christmas tree on the lot. She’s about to close up the gown when the doctor surprises her with a new move. He leans in, closes his eyes, and places his hands lightly on her breasts. “But they feel similar, so that’s good.”
Tess hadn’t even considered how they might feel to Will.
Cappy has sworn to first do no harm, so even though she’s made her wishes abundantly clear, he asks yet again, “You sure I can’t interest you in a round of chemo?” like it’s an after-dinner cocktail.
She knows he has her best interests at heart and is not offended. “No, thank you.”
The oncologist smiles and says, “Enjoy the holiday.”
“Thanks, you too. See you in a few weeks.”
Tessie sounded chipper enough during the visit, but as she walks down the hallway outside Cappy’s office, she’s not imagining the family Easter egg hunt, dark chocolate bunnies, or even Will’s scrumptious maple ham and sweet potato casserole. She’s thinking about how much she’s dreading telling Haddie about the cancer.
She slows, then stops in front of the elevator, takes a deep breath, and asks another patient waiting to go down, “Excuse me. Do you know where the stairs are?
”
Bad Timing
TO-DO LIST
Buy broccoli.
Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
Convince Will to love me again. (What about Connie?)
Get Birdie to talk to me.
Bury Louise once and for all. (With Birdie.)
Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
Die.
Tell Haddie about the cancer.
Prepare the guest room for Birdie.
Tess is feeling somewhat disheartened. She’d had to make additions to numbers four and six on her list, and now there’s a nine and ten.
She’s working on number ten on Good Friday morning, and not doing a great job. She’s phobic about cleaning products and doesn’t even know what the heck half of them are used for. That was her sister’s area of expertise. Now there’s a gal who knows her Lysol from her Clorox. Birdie would be here soon and Tess could barely contain herself.
Four days after she’d sent the package off, she received this message:
Birdistheword: Thanks for the lips. I’m coming.
Tessie: Hurray!!!! When?!
Birdistheword: May 13-20.
Tessie: xoxoxoxoxxoxxoxoxoxoxo!
Birdistheword: First thing, straight from the airport, I want to visit the old houses. Go to the cemetery to see daddy. Get candy from Ma’s. Have the funeral for Louise. It’s got to be in that order.