A third of the time asleep. So what I’m losing is only two-thirds.
* * *
We decided to move to Georgia last March, before I found out that my melanoma had recurred. By June—when I found out—the house in Phoenix had sold and the car was packed. The contractor had installed French doors in the new house; Myra had picked petal pink for her walls.
I had surgery the day after the diagnosis. What I was hoping to hear, what I’d heard the first time, was in situ. This time, Dr. Planer didn’t say in situ. She said stage four. It was Neil’s last day at work, and the day before the first leg of our drive, and the last day on our current insurance. How could I help thinking the timing was perfect?
While the surgeon scooped out tissue in my lower arm, he talked about increased family risk. “You need to contact your siblings. Do you have siblings?” Right, siblings. There are four of us. Of whom I am the eldest. The one who is supposed to take care of the elderly parents—when they become elderly. My parents are in their late fifties.
“And we’re not just talking sunscreen with the kids,” the surgeon said. “We’re talking indoors.”
I said, “We’re moving to a mountain near Chattanooga. It’s shady there.”
“You’re lucky,” the nurse said. “I’d give anything to get my boys out of this sun.”
I closed my eyes against the smoke from the cauterizer. “I know,” I said. “The whole thing is really providential.”
Acknowledging you are dying is the first step toward living the rest of your life.
I have not acknowledged anything to anyone but Neil. Moving was hard enough. I wear long sleeves, and I’ve been lucky with the hair. Hyperthermic isolated limb perfusion—where they cut off the circulation in my arm with a tourniquet and inject the warmed chemo—does not involve hair loss.
But at the clinic today, they implied it might be time to start acknowledging. There are, they said, satellite tumors.
And they gave us—Neil and me—the helpful booklet. Even before you show signs of serious illness, people may have a different look in their eyes when they talk to you. And, Don’t be afraid to ask to be alone.
We pick up the kids from school on our way home. Grady throws his backpack into the car before he climbs in. “TGIThur,” he says. Tuesdays he says TGIT. This is what happens when you teach a four-year-old his days of the week and his consonants at the same time.
Myra keeps her backpack on. “How come you’re driving us?”
“Hey, you two,” Neil says. “I forget. What’s the guy’s name with no arms and no legs, hanging on the wall?”
“Art!” Grady yells.
“No arms, no legs, swimming in a lake?”
“Bob!” he yells again.
“Don’t you have classes?” Myra asks.
“Canceled,” Neil says. “On account of ice cream.”
Our realtor did not tell us about the leash laws. The Tennessee side has a leash law; the first walk I took on the Georgia side, three dogs followed me home. The Georgia dogs have stamina.
Every time I hear that another dog has been hit by a car, I know which side it lived on.
Last week, a big mixed breed scratched at my back door. His tag said Bo, 5874 Cinderella Circle, a cul-de-sac twelve blocks from our street. Twelve blocks used to be a warm-up. I looked for my car keys.
Bo’s tail slapped the insides of my thighs when I rang the doorbell. A lady I recognized from church opened the door. I said, “Your dog came to my house and I thought I’d bring him home.”
“Oh, he runs everywhere,” she said. “But thanks for bringing him. Call next time—I’ll come to you!”
Dogs are the kind of worry I can manage.
My kids worry about a tiny white terrier who crosses the street to meet us on the walk home from school. Yesterday, Myra screamed when a passing truck brushed the dog’s tail. His fur is matted and he has a shrill, rapid-fire bark. He won’t let me pick him up. The kids want to adopt him, but I tell them he already has a home. “Yah! Go home!” we shout, and stamp our feet at him, but this doesn’t work. We decide our best bet is to ignore him. “Don’t pet him, Grady,” Myra says. “If you do, he’ll follow us.”
Yesterday, with the terrier barking at their shins, Myra took Grady’s hand. “I bet you can’t walk as fast as me. Come on, try to walk fast.” She pulled him along and his mitten came off in her hand. Grady took off the other mitten and pitched it back across the street into the dog’s front yard. “Get it, doggy!”
“Go pick up your mitten,” Myra said. “Your fingers will freeze.”
But I said to leave it. I said, “Grady, that was brilliant. Trying to save the doggy like that. You are a brilliant little boy.”
When we get home, Neil runs the helpful booklet through the shredder and goes online. The NCI website keeps an updated list of clinical trials by state and region. There’s a new study in Birmingham the oncologist thinks I’ll qualify for. The drug is Interferon Alpha. Primary interference? Is this what I want to do, interfere primarily? It’s something I’d say to a teenaged daughter: I have a right to interfere! I don’t like the sound of it. Interfering is only rifling around in someone else’s business. Interfering is not ending.
“We’d have to drive down three times a week,” Neil says. “We could ask Sandra to walk the kids home from school.” Be grateful, and accept help, from whatever source, graciously. But would Sandra let Grady pet the terrier? Would she make him go back for his mitten?
In bed, Neil wants to stroke my skin. He tells me it’s soft as butter. Like feathers. Like fluffy clouds.
And I say things I never used to say. Why don’t I dance naked for you. Why don’t I lick you, suck you, sit on you. Why don’t we do it on the dresser. In the rocking chair. Why don’t you have your way with me.
You won’t hurt me, I say.
Our next-door neighbor is a widow from Savannah. Her name is Anita, and she calls me darlin’. From my bedroom window, I always see her putting out leftovers on aluminum pie plates for the squirrels. Sometimes I go out back and we chat over the cedar fence that separates our side yards while she walks back and forth with her metal detector. She puts the things she finds in a cake pan on her deck, then sells them to the Point Park Museum. Since I’ve known her, she’s found half a rusted canteen and three broken Confederate belt buckles.
Point Park is on the Tennessee side, where the east and west brows of the mountain come together. Billboards along 58 South have photographs of actors dressed in Civil War uniform: come visit point park, where the battle begins every 30 minutes! This is false advertising. You think you’re going to watch a live reenactment, but it turns out to be an electronic battle map presentation.
We took Myra and Grady to see the battle map our second week here. We sat in theater chairs in front of a room-sized model of Chattanooga, with lines of toy blue and gray soldiers in formations around the city. I thought the soldiers would move, but once the presentation started a series of tiny lights underneath them—red for Confederate, blue for Union—blinked on and off in synch with the narration. We watched the rows of lights ascend and descend Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Grady fell asleep until the Rebel yell woke him up and made him cry.
After the presentation, you have to exit through the gift shop, which is divided the same way the mountain is: Tennessee souvenirs, Georgia souvenirs. We bought strictly Tennessee, since that was the state we were visiting. Grady picked a bag of cast-iron soldiers; Myra chose a mug that said American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. Neil bought a tall shot glass with three fill-lines. Fill it to the top, you’re a Rebel; fill to the middle, you’re a Southern Belle; fill only to the bottom line, you’re a Yellow-Bellied Yank.
The Georgia side of the gift shop was all garden gnomes, birdhouses, snow globes with forest animals posed in front of cottage
s, handmade quilts, and fudge. Walker County has chosen to highlight the natural beauty of the mountain. The only tourist attraction on the Georgia side is a fairy tale–themed park called Rock City Gardens. Our subdivision is called Fairyland Farms; Myra and Grady go to Fairyland School. They pronounce it “feh-re-lind.” Even the streets have fairy tale names: Robin Hood Trail, Tinkerbell Lane, Mother Goose Avenue. My favorite is a nod to Shakespeare—Puck Circle. You can imagine the graffiti.
On the Tennessee side, the streets are named after Confederate generals.
Friday morning, Grady wants to take his plastic infield rifle for show-and-tell. I am certain I read No toy weapons in the pre-K handbook.
“Ned brought in a broken gun from the war,” Myra says. “His dad dug it up in his backyard.”
“I don’t think you’ll have show-and-tell,” I say. “Today’s the Valentine’s party.”
On the way to school, Grady picks up a cone-shaped magnolia seedpod and shoves it into his backpack. “Grenade,” he says.
In the ’70s, back in Phoenix, our parents put zinc oxide on our noses so we wouldn’t freckle. In the ’80s, when people started worrying about ozone, we were teenagers. Our mothers said skin cancer; we turned up the radio.
When my parents call to ask how the treatment is going, I want to tell them it’s not their fault: You tried to make me wear sunscreen and I refused. But the type of melanoma I’ve developed is genetic, with no proven link to sun exposure. So the truth is, it’s my parents’ fault after all.
What I do blame my parents for? Burying my cat before I came home from school so I never saw the body. Lying about the boy down the street who put a desk chair through his bedroom window and opened his wrists on the broken pane. Presenting me with a world devoid of suffering and calling the cover-up love. How am I supposed to talk about loss with Myra and Grady, when my own childhood experience is only half the story?
My first boss out of college, a woman twice-divorced and living with a younger man, once told me You lead a charmed life. I thought: But where can I go from here?
Tonight Neil is taking me out to dinner for Valentine’s Day. He always has students lined up to babysit; some of these girls are graduate students, only a few years younger than I am. Watching them lean their elbows on our kitchen counter to read the instructions I’ve written, or coming home to find them asleep on our couch, I analyze their hips, the skin on the backs of their arms, the angles of their shoulder blades. I am sizing them up for Neil. Which one could have children that would look the most like Myra and Grady?
My favorite, the one who’s coming tonight, is a senior named Meg. She has a wide-open face, large breasts, and thighs that are too big for her calves and ankles. I am small-chested and have great legs. Meg is desirable in a way that won’t remind Neil of me.
The doorbell rings and the kids fight over who gets to open the door. “I’ll get it,” I say.
Meg is standing on the front porch, holding up her left hand. “Ta da,” she says.
“Congratulations,” I say. “Neil didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.” I examine the ring, a single emerald-cut diamond set in platinum. I notice a pale freckle just above the ring. I notice Meg’s French manicure, her long nail beds, the dozen or so silver bangles on her wrist.
“Yeah, he’s in school back home.” She pulls a thick bride magazine out of her backpack. “Can Myra stay up to help me look at dresses?”
“How come Myra gets to stay up?” Grady says.
Myra says, “I get to wear my mom’s dress when I get married.”
My wedding dress is dated: the sleeves puff and the train gathers underneath an enormous blush-pink bow. Myra loves it now. But I know the only way she’d come to wear it would be as a tribute.
Neil takes me to Tony’s. They serve garlic bread with whole cloves baked in, and pastas like pumpkin Gorgonzola ravioli.
“You need to eat,” Neil says. “Force yourself.”
But I’m thinking about Myra at the end of some flowered aisle, holding Neil’s arm, wearing my wedding dress. “Make sure Myra knows she doesn’t have to wear that dress,” I say.
“You make sure,” Neil says. “You’re going to be there.”
“She’s been coming in to sleep with me during the night,” I say. “This morning I woke up and found one of her hairs in my mouth.”
Neil pulls his chair around to sit next to me. It’s an awkward arrangement. The waiter stumbles on Neil’s chair leg when he brings us the dessert menus. Neil pulls me to him, cups his hand around my upper arm, a single parenthesis. “Tell me what to do,” he says. “How to act.” Against my back, his arm is shaking.
“I don’t know. Take it seriously. Help me tell the kids.”
He puts his lips to my ear. “What’s thin, brown, and sticky?” he whispers. The sensuality of his lips and breath is startling, incongruous. I don’t answer. “A stick,” he says. He takes off his glasses. Then, sliding his wine out of the way, he leans over and rests his forehead on the tablecloth. He reaches for my hand. I can tell he’s crying by the way his shoulder blades keep contracting beneath his shirt.
I lean into him, press my breasts into his back. Before, I would not have believed that it’s possible to feel arousal and despair at the same time. That you could want to straddle your husband across a restaurant chair, open your blouse, rock in his lap and cry with pleasure, cry because now you know, you know how much you love your body and his. Only they’re less and less yours every day. You cry because this last raw thing—fucking—has become a consolation. You cry because when your husband first makes love to another woman, it will be a consolation. And then, later, it won’t.
On Sunday morning I wake up early—there’s a chocolate Lab barking at a squirrel in the crab apple. I go out front and check its tag. Missy, 406 Peter Pan Rd.
Anita, still in her nightgown, is sitting on her front porch. She waves and pats the chair next to her. “Wouldn’t you like to come sit?”
It’s warm out for February; Anita’s barefoot. We talk about the Georgia dogs. Her husband used to be mayor on the Tennessee side, and were he still alive he’d push for a leash law in Georgia. “The way they get things done in Tennessee,” she says. “Tennessee’s a man’s state, Georgia a woman’s. Well, just look at the names.”
I mention all the monuments in Tennessee, the obelisks engraved with Ohio, New York, and Illinois. I ask, “Why do they hold on to the whole Confederate thing? When it’s all defeat?”
“Well now,” she says. “But isn’t that just like a man, to ignore his own surrender?” Her feet are smooth and white against the porch’s brick floor.
“I’m dying,” I say to her feet. “I have skin cancer and it’s spreading. Neil wants me to do a clinical trial in Birmingham.”
“Oh darlin’,” Anita says. I feel her hand on my back. “Your husband told me you had cancer when you all moved in. I was wondering if you might not mention it sometime.”
Beneath the crab apple tree, Missy has not stopped barking. She circles the trunk until the squirrel leaps onto the limb of an oak and climbs out of sight.
When you’re young, no one ever tells you that underneath everything you’ll ever do—school, job, parenting—is appetite. That someday you will look at a seventy-two-year-old widow in her nightgown and think, She is the winner; I am the loser. And you would come out of your skin, you would crawl up into the sweaty warmth of her armpit just to be inside all that pulsing life.
What would you think of me if I told you that I’m jealous of my own daughter—the ropy muscles in her legs, her thickening hair, her becoming? What if you knew that if you and I met somewhere—in the produce aisle, at the ATM—I would imagine cutting your insides out and sticking them into my own body? Would you think differently about me if you knew I would do this in order to breathe the scent of Grady’s skin for another mornin
g?
When the pastor announces a death in our congregation, he uses Saint Paul’s metaphor: “Tom Huskins finished his race last Wednesday.” As a runner, I have always liked the image. That would be the thing to think, on your deathbed—that at the end of yourself, you still had control. But now I see the metaphor only works for people who live to old age. They get to run the whole course.
I have started writing out my prayers, word for word, in a journal. Yesterday I copied down a psalm because it was easier than coming up with my own words. “Unite my heart, that I may fear your name” is what the psalm said. But when I opened my journal this morning, I saw that I’d written “Untie.” So what does that mean? Am I coming together, or splitting apart?
Sunday evening we tell the kids.
From small children, the question “Where do dead people go?” may not be a question about the afterlife, but about the physical body. First, try to answer with “They go into the ground at the cemetery.”
We take Myra and Grady to the downtown aquarium. A shipment of penguins arrived two weeks ago, and we stand in front of the new Plexiglas, shivering. The penguins jostle each other. Some shimmy through the water like silk. The children laugh at the way the penguins walk. They pull their arms inside their sweatshirts and waddle, shouldering one another into the rail.
When we come out, the sun over the Tennessee River is lowering behind a haze of shifting clouds. Filtered this way, it looks like the moon. “Bright for nighttime,” Grady says. We don’t correct him. We walk down to the riverfront and sit on a flat rock next to the water taxi. Rides, $3.00.
“Can we ride it?” Grady asks.
“Okay,” Neil says. “But first Mommy and I want to talk with you guys about something.”
“It says No Fishing.” Myra is pointing to a shirtless man fishing halfway down the bank. Three poles are wedged between rocks, lines cast out and dragged sideways in the current. The man casts and reels a fourth line. “Here, kitty kitty,” we hear him say. He looks up. “Goin’ to catch me a big cat,” he calls up to us.
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