by Laura Zigman
“Oh my God,” she rasps. “The glare off that forehead!”
I laugh slyly and sip my double decaf latte with whole milk slowly, trying to make it last. I have absolutely no business ordering a $5.25 drink with so little income, let alone the full-fat version, but I would rather die than drink coffee with skim or low-fat milk, and I can’t order nothing. Ordering nothing makes people uncomfortable. Why should Glenn have to breathe in the fumes of my failure when all she wants to do is distract herself with some cheap laughs about someone’s too-big forehead?
“Seriously! Look at it!” Glenn pokes the phone screen with her finger. “I need sunglasses!”
I bite my lip with fake guilt. “We’re terrible.”
“No! She’s terrible! For inflicting that giant over-Botoxed moon face on everyone.”
She takes a tiny sip from her wineglass—Glenn always orders prosecco, even in the early afternoon, which it is, and even though she isn’t supposed to drink now, which she does anyway. How am I supposed to get through this without alcohol? she always says. But now I think that Glenn just pretends to drink to create a sense of normalcy or for the taste of alcohol on her lips: the level of her glass today, I realize, hasn’t gone down. In all the months we’ve come, I wonder suddenly if it’s ever gone down. Not knowing the answer to that question, not noticing something so obvious, is part of my denial. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see. I have been here before and I don’t want to be here now. I especially don’t want to be here with Glenn. She not only published Bird at Black Bear Books but, after that encounter with that boss, it was also her idea all those years ago—a short, illustrated, kids-oriented story about being yourself, a modern version of Free to Be . . . You and Me. At first I’d ignored her—children’s books were just what I did for work, fiction was what I wanted to write—but eventually, after playing around with some very simple pen-and-ink drawings, the story rushed out of me in rhymed verse. I’d tried and failed for years to write a novel, but Bird came together instantly and painlessly, as if it had been inside of me my whole life, just waiting for a way out.
“You don’t wear your hair parted in the middle when you have a giant forehead like that!” Glenn goes on. She grabs my phone again, then creeps on the face, pinching with her thumb and forefinger, to make it larger. “You get some bangs like a normal person, or you part your hair on the side, and you cover that shit up. And you don’t talk about adult coloring books like they’re going to change the world and solve everyone’s problems. I mean, seriously, coloring books? To solve writer’s block? What are we, children?”
I love Glenn. “You could have your own show.”
“What kind of show? A yelling-about-annoying-people show?”
The group at the next table—tweedy ancient Harvard-types—stare at her, then turn back to their conversation. Or try to.
“Oh look,” she says, loudly enough for them to hear, which is her intention. “I’ve offended them with my honesty and my brutal truth-telling.” They try even harder to ignore her, but once activated, Glenn will not be ignored. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says, directly to them now, with a pitch-perfect Boston accent. “Who am I to make fun of someone’s giant forehead and how they do or do not wear their hair, when I myself have no hayyy-ah.” She pulls the hand-knit cap off her head in one quick tug to reveal her bald chemo-head, a sight I’m not used to, no matter how many times I’ve seen it over the years during her illness.
The group is in motion now, trying desperately to gather their things—their books and papers and briefcases, their cardigan sweaters and light jackets—it is October and chilly, of course, in New England, which can’t make anything easy for anyone, ever—so they can make their escape. “Oh no. I’ve scared them!” Glenn rolls her eyes at me, full of disgust. But as the people flee and the space between Glenn and me is suddenly empty and quiet, her eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m such an asshole.” She turns quickly to look at the group she scared away, visible now through the glass windows at the front of the shop, whispering and walking close together on the sidewalk. “They didn’t do anything to deserve that.” She puts her hat back on and blows her nose into a napkin. “I just get so angry sometimes. I can’t control it.” She turns around again, trying to gauge if she can possibly catch up to them, to apologize, or maybe to just explain the reason for her rudeness, but even if she were healthy and quick the way she used to be, it would be too late. They are already gone.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, but Glenn is slumped in her seat. She makes circles around the top of her glass with her finger.
“Tell me something right now, right this second, that will take my mind off the fact that I’m dying and that I scared off some incredibly uptight but completely innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I still can’t believe that Glenn’s breast cancer—which was diagnosed right after my third book, and second dud, Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore? came out—returned a year and a half ago with such a vengeance, to her bones and her liver, the way she always feared it would. Before that, her nonstop cancer-talk annoyed me, as if illness was her identity and she couldn’t let it go; she’d been healthy for over five years, and it seemed ridiculous to keep worrying about recurrence. She. Was. Fine. She should get over it already. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually thought that. Then came the news that changed everything: it was back, and it was bad. I’d just lost both my parents and Teddy both his grandparents: How would we all survive this now?
Glenn was told she might have three years, or ten years. But only a year of chemo and radiation and two clinical trials later her cells are dividing and redividing faster than ever. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, which I hate to be—I much prefer the fog of dissociation and denial—she looks worse today than she did two weeks ago. I’m worried that she’s on a downward trajectory that can’t be stopped.
“Shit. Now I’ve traumatized you, too,” she says. “I shouldn’t have used the d-word, but everyone’s dying. We’re all dying. All the time. You know that more than almost anyone else.”
I nod, and suddenly we’re both crying—then laughing, then wiping our noses and eyes and sipping from our drinks, which don’t even taste good anymore.
“Please,” Glenn whispers, trying to sit up straight and wincing, though to anyone watching it would have looked like she was just recovering from the kind of breathlessness that comes from laughing too hard at some great girl talk. “Distract me. I don’t want to think.”
I tell her about Mr. Noah and his new man bun and his bib; about how tall Teddy is getting and how every day I miss him even though he’s still right here, sort of; about Gary and I leaving our most recent couples therapy appointment early; about being behind in tuition and about wondering what will become of us if I can’t find a better paying job than Well/er or if I can’t ever write another book. And then I tell her about my disastrous school presentation, how it was interrupted before it even began, and how the school is bringing in People Puppets from Vermont for Inhabitancy this year.
“People Puppets?” Suddenly she’s paying attention.
I describe the photo Mr. Noah showed of adults wearing animal costumes, taken outside, on a farm, near bales of hay. “The school is looking for host families,” I explain. “They’ll even give you a credit toward tuition if you host them.”
She is sitting up now. “Host them.”
“Are you kidding? You know that Gary is phobic about anything in costume, and Teddy would die: at his age, all he wants to be is invisible. The last thing he’d want is a bunch of weird people living in our house.” I can’t help remembering the younger version of Teddy, who would have begged me to let them come and stay, how he loved anything and everything that involved filling our house with friends, with voices and energy, with life.
Glenn lifts her glass to sip from it but puts it
back down without drinking from it. “You’re at a moment when everything has stopped, right before it starts again. Like T. S. Eliot’s poem: At the still point of the turning world. / Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards. This will be like pushing the reset button. Gary will deal. He’s a brave bear.”
She is the only person who knows him well enough to say that, and for me to believe it—how sometimes if you push back against his anxiety and challenge it, he can rise to the occasion. Like the time at work all those years ago when we only had two hours to put up our booth at a major trade show because all the boxes had been shipped to the wrong place and how Gary, sputtering comically on the verge of panic, was somehow calmed and spurred on by Glenn’s pushy encouragement. Deep breaths, Gary. You can do it. You’re a brave bear. A mantra he repeated constantly as he worked tirelessly to get the job done.
Or when we dragged him with us and Teddy to Story Land in New Hampshire—a small adventure park for toddlers where he had initially refused to go because it was full of people in costume, but he didn’t want to miss out on it for Teddy’s sake. While I went on the tiny rides with Teddy—sitting in the rotating teacups and in the flying Dutch shoes and on the little pirate sailboat—Glenn took Gary by the hand to each area that had storybook characters physically built into them, her own version of tough-love exposure therapy. They sat on either side of a creepy clown on a white wooden bench and next to a giant Humpty Dumpty on a fake stone wall, even pressing the button to make it talk, though apparently Gary drew the line at allowing a traveling pack of Barney characters to hug him. I’d had to drive home that night—Gary was too drowsy from all the extra Klonopin he’d taken—but every time Glenn smacked him affectionately on the head from the backseat and called him a “brave bear” for what he had accomplished that day, he’d beamed. I’m a brave bear, he’d whispered. I’m a very brave bear.
Glenn reaches over and sticks her hand inside the sling to pet the dog. “Now, take me home.” Her face is pale, but there’s a spark in her eyes that wasn’t there a minute ago: the promise of future entertainment that she knows will come in the form of texted photos with descriptive captions of a farce about to unfold, fun—possibly disastrous—at our expense. “I’m exhausted and nauseated and I miss my Lucy.”
* * *
Later that night, much later, my phone will ring. It will be Glenn, and at first I’ll assume she’s checking in about my visit tomorrow—I always do a weekly grocery shop and Gary always helps with the heavy things—the water and ginger ale and dog food—but instead she’ll ask me if I ever think about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the way those Harvard types had been that afternoon at Shepherd when she’d chased them away.
“Because that’s all I think about,” she’ll say. “My body. All my cells. Everything in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is that what life comes down to? Luck?”
I won’t know what to say, so I won’t say anything.
“If I had kids I would just die,” she’ll whisper. “I know you don’t want to hear that because you have one, but if I had one and if I knew I was dying like this, I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I couldn’t take the heartbreak.” She’ll sigh, but now that she’s started she won’t be able to stop talking. “Parents get sick and die all the time. How do they stand it? Knowing they’re leaving too soon and not being able to fix it?” There’ll be a long pause and then the words that come next will be thin and full of air. “As it is, I can hardly bear the idea of leaving Lucy.” Her little corgi, her constant companion.
“Lucy will be fine.”
“But what will happen when I’m gone? Who will take her when I’m gone?” She’ll cry then, and the sound of it will be so crushing that I’ll wish I could throw the phone across the room to make it stop. It’s excruciating to watch someone disappear, slowly at first, and then quickly. Having done it twice, I can’t fathom having to do it again.
“I will,” I’ll say. “I’ll take her.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Of course I will.”
“But how could you handle another dog? You can’t wear two slings.”
“Maybe by then I’ll be better,” I say, thinking of a day in the future that neither of us believes will actually come, “and I won’t be wearing any slings.”
Part Two
Cabin Fever
Host Family
In the kitchen, with the autumn sun going down fast and a sharp chill in the air, since like all self-respecting long-suffering New Englanders we refuse to turn the heat on until well into October, Gary and I make dinner. I’ve been tempted over the years to try one of those meal-box delivery services, to spare us the hassle of figuring out what to cook and then doing all the shopping and chopping—and mostly to collect those colorful laminated recipe cards that, according to all the social media ads and posts, you get to keep—but Gary won’t do it. He feels sorry for people who get those boxes, like the young couple next door, a doctor and a professor, who, in my opinion, are legitimately too busy to shop and chop. He’s embarrassed for them and their infantilized style of noncooking, and he hates that he knows something so intimate about them—that every week they open a big box with wonder and excitement and play at cooking like oversize children. He wishes he could unsee it on their stoop every week, full of tiny wasteful little plastic baggies of ingredients they should already have—one garlic clove, a teaspoon of cumin, two wedges of lemon—that they will use to re-create the meal pictured on the laminated card.
More than anything, he’s annoyed by the box itself, which often sits for days after they’ve emptied its contents, waiting, with all its recyclable packing innards, for a return pickup by the company. It makes him anxious seeing it day after day, waiting in the rain or chilly wind to be rescued. Once, on a particularly cold and snowy February day, he put a small fleece doggie blanket over the box, hoping they’d get the message that we all see the poor eyesore of a box, freezing its ass off on the bench in front of their house, but instead they were moved by what they interpreted as compassion. With the returned blanket came a bottle of wine and a thank-you note—which included the news that they’d signed us up for a free-trial box from the meal-box company, too. Thanks for being such a thoughtful neighbor! If they only knew. When our box came, Gary opened it in the kitchen but as expected was too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of items in the box and too annoyed by all the wasteful packaging to actually consider using it to cook the meals. Instead, he dropped it off at Morningside Montessori’s after-school program so they could use it as a teaching tool: this is how to cook using premeasured ingredients, and this is what stupid wasteful packaging looks like.
Tonight Gary has already started the salad when I take out salmon and broccoli from the refrigerator, which, when finished, will look nothing like the perfectly plated dishes on the meal-box-delivery cards that I’ve seen on Instagram. “So remember when I did that Bring-Your-Parent-or-Grandparent-or-Beloved-Guardian-to-School Day recently?” I wait for him to nod before I tell him the rest. “Well, Mr. Noah announced that they’ve invited some People Puppets from Vermont for this year’s Autumn Inhabitancy who are going to need housing.”
Gary stares at the cucumber in his hand and his face goes slack. “I don’t even know where to start with that sentence.”
“I know, but the important part is that host families will get a tuition credit, which we could really use,” I say, without getting too specific—I keep most of the details of our financial distress from Gary, since they only make him more anxious, which makes me more anxious. Then I close the refrigerator door slowly so I don’t accidentally whack the dog sling with it, and move over to the cutting board with my onion, garlic, and lemon.
“Um, what exactly are People Puppets?”
“What I got from the photo that Mr. Noah held up,” I say, pointing with my knife, “is that they’re some kind of life-size costumed characters.”
“Like Disney World and Chuck E. Cheese?”
/>
“More handmade, and crafty. With bedsheets for bodies and papier-mâché heads.” I wipe my onion tears on my sleeve. “I think.”
Having to comprehend and categorize a new life-size puppet hybrid is clearly making him anxious: he puts the knife down and reaches into his front pocket for a Klonopin, then bites off half. “So they’re not hand puppets.”
“No, they are most definitely not hand puppets.”
“And they’re not large marionette-type puppets with strings?”
“No. They did not appear to have strings. Nor did they appear to be sock puppets. Or Muppets. I think I saw a cow and a horse and maybe a moose, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so who knows what was actually in the picture.”
Gary paces with the still-unpeeled cucumber in his hand, waiting for his pill to take effect. “I can’t believe we’re talking about puppets.”
“Yeah, well, this is what we signed on for when we left public school: puppets, and ‘Inhabitancies’”—I hand him the peeler—“which in regular school are just called special ‘units.’”
He stares absently at the cucumber and then at the peeler. “Maybe we should pull him out of there.”
I ignore him. Knowing that we’re behind in tuition—“really really behind,” to quote Grace—and realizing that leaving early might actually be forced on us, and on Teddy, makes me not even want to joke about it. Leaving early is only fun when it’s a choice. And when it doesn’t involve the school that your child likes, even though he won’t admit to liking anything anymore.
“Not to mention an aggressive fluidity with normative surnames,” I add, then explain that when Mr. Noah introduced me to talk about writing, he referred to Teddy as “Teddy Vogel.”