She lays out the possibilities, and the options, and all of the details about the surgery, 99% of which goes over my head.
"So what are the chances of this being successful?” I ask.
"It's about fifty-fifty. We don't have a good number of cases and subjects who have gone through it. And as you know, medicine is an art as well as a science. People come with their own histories and different speeds at which their cells mutate. You're doing a good job of following the right diet, but it all has to do with how your body reacts and that we don’t know for sure."
"So what is the process for the surgery?” I ask, my hands trembling. I stick them deep into my pockets to keep them out of view.
"Well, after this you’ll go and get all your blood drawn, and tomorrow morning you need to be there at eight o'clock for prep. Surgery's probably going to start around 10:30, 11:00, and we'll go from there."
We both nod, both probably feeling tense and anxious, but relieved at the same time.
In situations like these it's important to have something to do.
You got this diagnosis but what do you do now?
How do you try to deal with it?
This procedure has given my mom and me a lot of hope, and it's not for naught. I’m thankful that even if things don't work out well, I have this good feeling of hope to hold on to at this moment.
While my mom is getting her blood drawn and I sit in the waiting room, Dante calls me.
"How's it going?" I fill him in on everything that has happened and then realize that maybe this is just too much information.
"Maybe I shouldn't be telling you all this."
"Why not?” he asks.
"I don't know…but we haven't even been on our first date yet, and it feels like I'm talking to you like we've been dating for three months."
"What if we just fast-forward?” Dante asks.
That catches me by surprise. I shuffle my feet along the linoleum floor and run my finger over the same piece of dry paint on the wall.
“Look, I like you a lot,” Dante continues. “This is happening in your life, and I want to know what's going on. It's up to you to tell me or not, but I'm here to listen."
The words hit just the right spot. I suddenly get completely overwhelmed and tears start to stream down my cheeks.
"Are you okay? What's going on?"
"No, I'm just ... I'm just …” I choke up. “That was just such a nice thing to say. I had ... I don't know. That was just a really good thing to say."
I find myself repeating my words over and over. When Mom comes out from the back office I tell him that I have to go.
"How did everything go?” I ask.
"Fine. All done for today. Now, I just have to wait for tomorrow. What should we do tonight?"
"Anything you want," I say.
“Okay.” Mom smiles mischievously. “Then tell me about this guy you've been talking to."
26
Jacqueline
Mom wants to know about Dante. It's hard for me to figure out what I should and shouldn't say. I gloss over some details.
At first, I pretend like what we have is no big deal, but she doesn't buy it. She knows that I'm acting differently. She knows that I'm waiting around for a call and I'm texting a lot.
We order pizza and sit in the makeshift temporary living room. It feels a lot like a long-term stay hotel. I tell Mom that I met Dante at a club, not mentioning any specifics.
She knows that I've been going out a lot ever since we lost Michael, meeting lots of strangers, assuming that he's just one of many. But she suspects that something is different about him.
"Tell me what he's like," she asks.
"Mysterious," is the only thing I can say.
It feels so cliche and yet that's really the only word for it. I tell her what he does for a living.
"Well, I'm glad that you have something interesting happening," Mom says. "It's important. You haven't dated anyone in a while."
"Yeah. I know.” I wave my hand.
"Listen, I worry about that kind of thing. You know, you're my child and I want you to be happy."
"Please, the next thing that you're going to say is that I'm getting up there in age.”
"No, not at all, but having a long-term committed relationship can be very fulfilling. You’ll have someone to support and love you. I want that for you.”
Before Dad became a gambler and an addict, he was a journalist. I followed in his footsteps and sometimes I hate that. My resentments toward him are innumerable, but he’s still my father and I still miss him.
My mom met my dad on campus at the University of Florida. She went there to get away from the cold winters. My father drove down from Michigan to meet some girls and occasionally go to class. He was always really into the partying and not so much into the studying.
He got a scholarship and he met the most unlikely woman to steal his heart, my mom, who would usually spend the weekends at the library. The fact that she turned him away multiple times made him flock to her like a moth to a flame. He liked the challenge. He liked that she said no. He told me this many times.
Eventually he brought her out of her shell. She was shy and awkward, a little scrawny with thick bottle cap glasses and frizzy hair that the humidity did no favors for.
He invited her to his parties. He introduced her to his friends and she changed, but in a good way. She didn't change who she was, but she found that she could be someone who was fun and outgoing and the life of the party if she wanted to. That's what she always told me she loved most about Dad at that time. He made it okay for her to take chances. He made it a safe place for her to fall.
He worked as a promoter at clubs, trying to bring in the local crowds. They started out as friends, but after a while, they became closer than that. He took her to see Bob Dylan.
They first hooked up during spring break when Dad was booking a bunch of local clubs. He was working around the clock as the kids partied and Mom helped him put out the pamphlets. There was a time before the internet where you had to hand deliver fliers and actually entice people to come in by standing out front.
As it turned out, Mom was able to become somewhat of an extrovert at this time. She told me about how she got her hair done and would have a few shots to “take off the edge." And after that, she would loosen up.
“She just needed a little liquid courage,” Dad said.
For someone like my mom, who's naturally shy, alcohol allowed her to open up and realize that people weren't at all that scary.
Back then Dad's drinking was just social. He knew how to have a good time, but he never blacked out like a lot of his other friends did. He'd have a few beers and he'd nurse one the rest of the night just to keep the party going.
Mom always talked about those days very fondly.
I guess, many people feel that way about college, but for her, college was where she met the love of her life.
We talk about Dad again. Not the dad from the later years, but the dad that I knew a little bit as a kid and the dad that Michael loved.
This was the dad who taught us how to ride a bike and the importance of always wearing a helmet.
This was the dad who took us hiking and taught us how to ski.
This was the dad that I want back in my life. This was the dad and the husband that I wish my mom had now.
Even now, despite everything that happened, I know that what they had was real.
I know that what they had was real love. It just got all fucked up, the way that love sometimes gets when it's thrown into the real world with all of its problems and addictions and lies.
27
Dante
I arrive on Cape Cod on a particularly gloomy, overcast day. The weather continues to threaten to break into rolling thunderstorms, but nothing happens except for low-hanging clouds and a bunch of drizzle.
Some of my fondest memories of growing up are at this estate. There's a main four-bedroom home that Mom occupies as well a
s two guest cottages for overnight guests whenever she has family or friends over.
Every time I come back here, I feel like it becomes a time warp. This is the house where I spent the first seven years of my life.
This is home.
We traveled to and from and had an apartment in New York and a house in the South of France, but this is what I always thought of when I thought of home.
My mom grew up here. While her parents were away having fun in the big city, this is the place where she lived with her nanny, the woman she always thought of as her real mother.
Mom employed some help, a housekeeper and a few others, a gardener, of course, someone to take care of the pool and the grounds, and we had babysitters when she needed to leave us, but we never had an official nanny. She was the one that was there until she wasn't.
I was seven when she announced that she was sending me away to boarding school.
As I walk through the rose garden leading up to the green door with the giant antique gold knocker, I have a flashback of standing right here and crying, begging her to let me stay.
I thought she was sending me away because I was bad. I thought that she no longer wanted to be my mom.
I was scared, terrified of going to this place with strangers taking care of me.
The first year was pretty rough, I'm not going to lie. But I got used to it and after a while I even enjoyed it and I didn't want to come home, and that made Mom mad.
“Hey, you’re here!” Mom runs in, draping her arms around my neck, dressed in a Chanel suit with her hair recently styled.
She looks at least twenty years younger than she actually is.
"Your brother isn't here yet, so we'll have some time to gossip and catch up."
She leads me to the recently remodeled farmhouse-style kitchen with blue cabinets on the bottom and white ones on top, with thick, antique style pulls in matte black.
"This place looks nice,” I say, walking around and feeling the quartz underneath my fingertips.
"Well, you know. I get sick of having the exact same thing all the time."
"Are you redoing everything?" I ask.
"No, not at all. Just the kitchen and one of the guest houses. I don't think I want to do anything with the upstairs quite yet.”
The house itself is a quintessential Cape Cod home. It has a broad frame with a moderately steep-pitched gable roof, a large central chimney, and very low on ornate extravagances.
I walk over to the sliding glass door in the living room and look out at the meadow out front. The Olympic-sized swimming pool is over to one side, covered up and winterized until Memorial Day. The meadow and the trees are out in the distance along with the cliffs and the roaring ocean reminding me of the life that I used to have here and all the games that my brother and I played.
"So, what's going on? What's new?” Mom asks, rubbing my hand.
"Nothing.” I shrug. "I mean, we just talked. How about you?"
"I'm working on a bag line: totes, purses.”
"Really?" I act like I'm surprised, but I'm not.
My mom has always had a number of entrepreneurial projects in the works at the same time. A lot of them have been quite successful.
Back in the nineties, she started a jeans line. Her fellow socialites were appalled and there was a lot of gossip, but when she made close to a hundred million dollars and promoted it on The Today Show and Good Morning America, they all jumped in on the idea and started their own clothing brands.
"So bags? Purses?” I ask.
"Yeah. Well, you know how much I love purses, and I still have all my contacts with the jean manufacturers since I still have a twenty percent stake in the business. I figured why not try to do something in textiles? Just a little bit different, since I can't compete with my own property, as you know."
I nod approvingly.
On the outside, my mom seems flighty and the type of person that goes wherever the wind takes her, but in reality, she's very focused, very serious, and if she has gone so far as to tell me about it, it's probably been in the works for months.
"Well, let me know, because anything I can do to help. I’d love to see some of your designs."
“I thought you’d never ask.” Her eyes light up.
Following her upstairs, I step on the riser, and I remember that this is the exact spot where Lincoln pushed me when we were kids.
We fought a lot, arguing about anything and everything but mostly competing for attention from our mom.
Of course, I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that he was in my life too much and she wasn't there at all.
I don't know exactly what precipitated that particular push, but I remember finding myself at the bottom of the stairs, a big gash in my forehead and right above my eye, followed by a trip to the emergency room for seven stitches.
Lincoln was grounded for a couple of weeks, but that hardly bothered him since he stayed in his room, watched television, and played hours and hours of video games anyway.
My mom's office is upstairs overlooking a beautiful sycamore tree with a bench curving around the trunk. Our old Golden retriever, Molly, is buried under that bench and we put it up in her memory. I still can't look at it without my heart closing up tightly.
The office has built-in bookshelves on both sides, filled with mementos and books, as well as boxes of craft projects and art supplies. Ten years ago, Mom started painting and has actually moved her studio to the other guest bedroom down the hall because the paintings were big and took up so much space.
I've always admired her ability to stay busy in one place. She will just toil around this house doing kitchen remodels, working on her paintings, designing clothes, gardening, swimming, throwing a few parties, but all in all, she's a huge homebody, at least at this point in her life.
I, on the other hand, have to be constantly on the move. I get on flights, I live in hotel rooms, I work too many hours all in an effort to stay busy, or maybe just occupied.
I exist on a treadmill, not going anywhere in particular but I press on because it’s really just the physical act of changing locations that’s important.
Mom has a large collection of sample bags ranging from simple tote bags with minimalist, elegant designs to high-end purses for a more elegant and dressed up feel.
"The only thing I would say besides the fact that they're all really well-made and have excellent craftsmanship is that they don't fit with each other."
"What do you mean?" She tilts her head to one side.
"They just sort of feel like they belong to two different brands.”
"Yeah, I had the same feeling. One feels like it's Saks Fifth Avenue, and the other is a little bit more casual, a cross between Free People and Target.”
“Exactly.” I nod. "I mean, both are great but you should figure out where you stand. Do you have a concept for the company as a whole?"
"No, that's what I'm working on. I wanted to make all the samples first, see how I felt about them and then decide which route to go."
"I'd really just pick one at first and stick to it. Build a good audience, a good mailing list, successful Facebook advertising campaign, Instagram, that whole thing prior to expanding. And if you want to go high-end, I mean, you definitely can charge more, but it's a different market, as you know. And then of course there's the sort of Nordstrom prices, high-end but not ridiculous."
She nods. "Yeah. Pricing and positioning the company will be the key thing here."
"Couldn't agree more," I say. "Once you have more ideas or maybe a layout for your website, I could take a look. I know that you don't necessarily need investment, but I've had my investors put money into Meg and we've been quite successful."
"Meg? You invested in Meg?" She gasps.
"Yeah. You know it?” I ask, genuinely surprised.
"Of course I know it! I’m in the fashion industry. They're top of the line. They have none of that fast fashion crap that just pollutes all of the landfills in the w
orld. They're actually able to give people a good price and make a hefty profit."
“That's what I thought, too.” I smile. “That’s why we invested. I mean, who doesn't want Target or TJ Maxx prices with designer quality?"
28
Dante
After my conversation with Mom, she's on cloud nine: excited, jubilant, confident in her designs. Obviously, decisions have to be made about the direction of this fledgling company, but she appreciates my approval, not just because I'm her son, but because I'm a man.
Despite all of her experiences and confidence as a woman, I know that she's seeking out, and perhaps will always be seeking out the approval of men that have no business approving anything that she does or doesn't do with her life.
Lincoln and Marguerite have arrived while we were upstairs, and Mom made no rush to greet them.
"Lina will show them in," Mom says when I mention this fact.
At first I’m concerned but, after talking to her about her purses, I'm glad that I could lift her spirits up a little bit prior to seeing Lincoln and Marguerite.
When we get downstairs, Lincoln is getting a beer out of the fridge. Mom immediately makes a face when she sees Marguerite. It’s rather subtle, but I notice it. The thing about her is that once she writes you off as someone who is a less than an acceptable choice for one of her sons, there's little that anyone can do.
Marguerite had the unfortunate experience of meeting Mom in college, dressed in sweats. Mom had dropped by and Marguerite just happened to be there studying in his room, hair unwashed, face without makeup. It was just a typical Tuesday night study session at Yale. And yet, for some reason, Mom couldn't grasp that concept.
I give them both hugs. Marguerite holds a glass of water, takes a sip, and cuts herself a lemon wedge.
"How are you feeling?” I ask and her eyes immediately flash up to me.
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