Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  I AM MOTHER. I will keep everyone safe. I will keep everything the same. Same is safe. I get to the grocery store at seven in the morning, thanking God for twenty-four-hour grocery stores, and charge through the aisles until I fill three carts—we will be at the hospital and away from home a great deal, and I must make sure everyone will be okay. I wave the shopping list as I go, the one Leibl and Avrami made last night. We will make it through this together. The bill is over $400. “Next time,” the manager says, “just call and we’ll deliver. No charge.”

  I rush home and Avrami meets me outside, unloads, and starts putting things away. If I wind up and whirl fast enough, the pain will fly away. Sarah is ready for school, but the two younger ones are dawdling, no shoes, no food, so I get them moving, make lunches, set out breakfast, but we get three different calls from doctors’ offices. Levi leaves for the hospital without me. I have to run carpool, and Itzik still won’t get his shoes on, and I’m late for Levi’s catheterization at the hospital and a class about catheter care that I’m obligated to take twice if I’m to care for him. I care for him.

  I arrive at the hospital to find a technician struggling to thread a line below Levi’s clavicle into a vein that makes a straight, short path to his heart. Wondrous, I think, to find that path. The man has to bypass an artery without puncturing it, no leaking or kinking. He’s calm and confident and well scrubbed, but he’s having trouble. He wiggles and pulls. Levi goes white.

  Afterward, Levi heads off to another clinic in the hospital and I settle into a big, soft chair in the lounge. I put my head back against the cushion. Shoulders fall. I let out the breath I’ve held since early morning. Then I check my phone. Janice has called, but I blink away her truthful face, our coffee conversation, my new conviction. There’s room only for Levi. I don’t call her back.

  Instead I lift my tote bag and pull out a play that just won a Pulitzer, W;t, about an English professor dying of cancer. She spent her life building a wall of complex ideas around her, engaged in analyses of John Donne’s convoluted sonnet musings about death and an afterlife. But her cancer makes the physical, the now, overwhelmingly real, and only now does she realize how the mundane simplicity she has always disdained—and is about to lose—is real life. Only now does she realize that she never lived.

  My throat tightens. What would life have been without all my escaping into philosophy and prayer? It seems the words I wove for years in my head, and those religious ideas to which I still cling, have been barriers to living.

  I put the play down, but its sadness stays in my throat. I launch myself out of the chair and head off to the infusion lab to pick up Levi’s chest X-rays before I meet him at our appointment with the doctor. At the reception desk, an older man steps right in front of me, but he just wants to say hello to the clerk. She’s a tall black woman with a Louisiana accent and a motherly bust. She sees him, jumps up, comes out from behind the desk, and wraps her arms around him, her eyes shut, forehead creased. I can’t bear this. Then she takes her leave, sits back down, and looks at me with an expression that says, Next? I almost can’t choke out my request. Quivering lips, eyes filling, fighting it, I say, “Levi Lax’s X-rays, please?”

  She takes his patient number, scrolls down a screen.

  “That man,” I add. “He … must’ve survived something big.”

  She looks up. “The doctors gave him a coupla weeks, and it’s been nine years,” she says, and that finishes me. I have to turn my face away, and then she is up and I’m gathered into that same embrace. “God is good,” she says. “God is sooo good. All love. You’ll see.”

  But I don’t believe that anymore. Her words hit a wall and don’t go in. But somehow, standing there smothered in the motherly arms of a stranger, I have never loved Levi more.

  Daily home care for a subclavicle catheter: Remove the dressing and wipe with alcohol, then betadine. Discard the gloves and put on a clean pair. Apply new gauze and tape. Flush the line with saline. Clear air bubbles from the tubing. Flush again with heparin to dissolve blood clots that can stop the line. Don’t forget to swab the cap! And don’t touch the open catheter—a single germ or single air bubble in the line will go straight into his heart—a painful way to die. Connect the chemo pump. Don’t forget to unclamp. And stay attentive! If you stayed up until four in the morning pouring your gibberish into the keyboard, you can make mistakes. Crucial mistakes.

  There will be weekly blood tests through nine months of chemo. Responsibilities related to general vigilance: Hover together over results. Watch his white cell count shrink until he is like a bubble boy left outside his tent, until you think the world will kill him before cancer does. Don’t even blink at the impassive doctor who casually states that this is no typical lymphoma. Just wonder why it isn’t going away as more and more poison flows into him. And why does the catheter itch? Better get it checked for infection. When he runs a fever, go straight to spend a day in the emergency room. And another. Watch that chemo pump, make sure the orange liquid keeps moving, make sure he keeps a spare battery with him. Why isn’t the cancer responding? Live, dammit!

  Food he can handle: Oatmeal. Protein powder. Smoothies. Eggs! Eggs taste almost normal to him. Nothing with tomato paste, or he’ll taste bitter metal for days.

  Watch his skin go yellow as dead blood cells pile up. There’s an open line to his heart hanging in the air, and behind it thinned blood with defenses down. I dream of that single rogue microbe that can kill him.

  The weight drops fast. Twenty pounds already gone. But he is a cancer patient; they shrink before they fade. The last step is transparency. I grab at Levi’s image in the air, and my hand passes through it. Try two hands. “Eat!” I say. To keep you opaque.

  And what to do about well-wishers? Friends at the synagogue who hand him death with their unwashed hands while they hug him, touch him, bless him with long life. Follow him to the synagogue, scowl at people who offer their hands. Why does he shake them? Stay away! Dishes sent to our home from dozens of different hands. Levi eats and gets sick. Fever, and back to the hospital. And the kids: No, if someone is sick in your friend’s house, you can’t go over there. You can hug your father if you wash your hands first, but no kissing.

  Keep that bucket nearby for vomit. Demand wellness. Demand he lives. Keep him vertical, moving, out there. At night, listen to his breathing.

  Is anyone the same person after cancer? A new hope wells up, that he will change. Oh, I hope this will change him, soften him, bring him to me, so that maybe I can stay. He has to change, because I can’t be any more of what I’m not, can’t play along or shape myself to him. My poor children; once he’s well, it will take his changing to keep me.

  But if he dies, will I?

  Even while I work to keep him safe, a tiny, budding part of me whispers, He can die, you must know this, he can die, you may want this, he can die, and then, and then … You can do this.

  Then I know. I can. I can manage. When it’s all done, when he’s well again, I can find my own real life. I will live.

  MY MOTHER CALLS. By now, her paintings have been seen in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Washington. “Lisa!” she says.

  “Mom!”

  “I called to tell you to stay in school.”

  I’ve thrown everything into the ring to fight Levi’s cancer, and she says stay in school. Still with her impractical demands. “I can’t stay in school,” I say.

  “Just one course,” she says. “Hold on to something.”

  And I do. It helps that the hospital is near the university, so I can go straight to the infusion clinic from class. I enroll in one more fiction seminar with Daniel Stern and write fast, raw, angry stories late at night. One is about a woman stuck for years with an inaccessible yet loyal husband. When she gets cancer, it is like a revelation and she leaves him. Cancer frees her. She even leaves her son, who comes to find her when he is nearly grown. The story ends with her holding her big son in her arms as if he’s a child.

  As usual
, we are to write up formal critiques of one another’s work. One day Keith hands my story back across the conference table with his typed comments and says, “Leah, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but keep it up.”

  Janice leaves a message. She has found someone to model and wants to start taking photographs. Can she start in our mikvah? Have I spoken with Rabbi Frumen?

  A MONTH INTO THE CHEMO, three days after the second infusion, Levi steps out of the shower one morning with a naked face, a dead clump of black wiry hair left behind over the drain. “Leah,” he calls from the bathroom, still nude. I come in, stop short, and stare. He’s become curiously immodest. And there’s a dimple in his chin, like Itzik’s. “Well,” I say, “we knew this was coming….”

  But this is his beard. His uniform. For God. “You okay?” I say.

  Levi shrugs.

  “But what about all those months you searched for a job years ago?” I say. Levi is our soldier. “What about the interviews that ended over the beard, and the proud way you still tell those stories?”

  “It’s only hair,” Levi says.

  “And my wig is only hair,” I tell him.

  And his black and white clothes, my modest swaths, his yarmulka and tzitzis strings are only cloth. Our kosher food—its preparation governed by huge volumes of rules aimed at higher and higher levels of “holiness”—is only food. “Cancer changes everything,” I say.

  Symbols become just things. The beard is no longer something to sacrifice for. When life is at stake, it’s only hair.

  “A small price to pay,” Levi says, and smiles. “Look!” he says later to the children. “Tatti really does have a chin!”

  But what if, I think, as the children gape, what if even when our lives are not cancer lives, what if then hair and clothes and food were only hair and clothes and food, and not binding symbols of connection to God, and not the outlines of boxes we put ourselves in?

  CYCLOPHOSPHAMIDE, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone. The chemicals burn Levi’s intestines and line his mouth, esophagus, and stomach with bleeding sores. They thin his skin, make him depressed, kill blood cells, strain kidneys and liver. He prays. But as he turns into a bald, gaunt alien, Levi also goes back to being a stranger in our home. The spate of warmth is gone. He withdraws, ever more driven to keep up at work in spite of the leave they have offered. Sometimes he is a wild man who cries, who yells and blames the children for his cancer or blows up over nothing. Then he prays, turning back to God but never to my offers of comfort.

  Itzik hates him for this. I tell him and all the children that anyone filled with poison and fighting for his life has the right to yell or cry or be completely illogical, but Itzik is angry. I watch Itzik’s undiluted response, my own efforts to care for Levi now more often than not rebuffed, and more and more the teary cancer-driven nostalgia fades.

  One day at the hospital between appointments, Levi and I are eating our sack lunches in the “park,” a huge lower-lobby food court stretched around tall trees planted in an indoor plot under a skylight. Except that Levi doesn’t want to eat. He reads psalms while I nibble a sandwich. But through all the cancer rush, something has stayed on my mind.

  “Levi,” I say, “I gave you one of my stories, but you never read it.” I gave it to him shyly, after his diagnosis, as if to say, This is me. Hello. If I’m to care for you through this, I want you to know who I am.

  “I didn’t have time,” he says.

  “Time?” I say. “That was important to me.”

  He looks up then and does that wave of the hand. “I made a commitment not to read secular literature a long time ago,” he says.

  And finally, I get it. I get it that Levi long ago put himself behind an unmoving wall so huge and ancient and deeply rooted that I will never move it. I get it that his connection to God and religion will always take precedence. I get it that anyone who cares about him has to face that wave of his hand. And I finally stop. I stop hoping he’ll change.

  “I see,” I say.

  AVRAMI, BACK AT YESHIVA NOW, is called into his principal’s office. “Close the door,” the rabbi says. Avrami does so and sits down, a little nervous. “What’s going on with you?” the rabbi says. “You’ve been late to class a lot. You missed a test.”

  Avrami makes his face a hard mask. He looks down at his shoes.

  “And what is this?” the rabbi says. He holds up a written test with the number 38 scrawled in red across the top.

  Avrami studies his shoe. He drags the toe in a small arc on the floor.

  “I know your father’s sick,” the rabbi says.

  And Avrami breaks down. Great gulps of tears. When I hear about this from the rabbi later, I will think about when Avrami was last home, now three months ago, at the outset of Levi’s illness, how he emptied groceries, got his brothers ready for school, finding something valuable and tangible he could do in the face of cancer. Then Levi told him to go back to yeshiva and learn Torah to gain God’s grace for his father. Levi told him to pray. But at yeshiva, Avrami’s hands are empty. He looks at them, through his tears. He’s fifteen. He doesn’t know how to rescue his father with prayer and study. He knows only how to unload groceries and help with dinner. I imagine him embarrassed at his crying, feeling exposed before his rabbi. Afterward, he doesn’t want his friends to know.

  We put this burden of holiness and thus helplessness on his shoulders. I call Avrami and we talk a long time. But I wonder, what good is a telephone call when I can’t touch his sweet face just sprouting the beginnings of his first, soft beard?

  MARCH. Old, sick Pope John Paul II is wheeled into St. Peter’s, where he struggles out of his wheelchair and kneels down in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà—the beautiful son of God, stricken down in his prime and laid lifeless across his gentle, ageless mother’s tender arms in her grief. Later, from the altar, the pope begs God’s forgiveness in a trembling voice for sins the church has committed over centuries, against women, against native peoples, against Jews.

  The news filters through our community, where people still blame the Catholic church for the Crusaders pillaging Jewish villages, for blood libels, for centuries of pogroms on Jewish towns, locking Jews into ghettos, for rapes, murders, extortions, communities banished overnight, centuries of poverty and anti-Semitic policies, and Nazi collaboration. People laugh. “Oops,” Levi says, pretending to be the pope. “We made a little mistake.”

  WE HAVE A NEW KIND of Sabbath in our house, a cancer Sabbath. On a normal Sabbath, the Law doesn’t allow us to use hot water and soap, so we bathe Friday just before the Sabbath begins. But now, before the kids help to cut up salad, set the table, carry in platters of food, I line them up in the kitchen and direct them to scrub to the elbows with hot water and plenty of suds in spite of the Sabbath Law, to protect their father. But really, the Law requires these concessions when health is at stake.

  Levi and I also wash our hands. I wash out of medical necessity, free for now of at least one of the strictures. Levi washes his hands with the same religious zeal with which he prays. He washes his hands not out of medical necessity, but because the Law in its wisdom requires him to do so under these circumstances. If the Law didn’t state that he has to follow doctor’s orders above religious rules, Levi would not be scrubbing his hands on the Sabbath, no matter what his white blood cell count is, and he would be certain that God would protect him because he would be honoring the Sabbath with his unwashed hands. I understand that. We all do. I wash my hands for germs. Levi washes his for God.

  I DECIDE I HAVE TO go visit my mother. I don’t know why, don’t understand that cancer makes me somehow need to go back and finally look unflinching into her mother mirror, just as I don’t know why, in the midst of our nightmare, memories of Lisa and her hopes and dreams are plaguing me. I just know I’m going and that it seems necessary. The visit will be of little consequence, other than to make it clear that she is aging and so I’ll never really find the mother of my childhood fantasies. The
kids are spending the night with friends. Levi has been getting himself to the hospital and has taken over his own catheter care, handles his own meds and the chemo pump that hangs like a pocketbook from his shoulder. I can go.

  As I head north toward Dallas on I-45, the sky is a vast blueness, the wide-open highway a ribbon cutting across the enormous flat middle of this state. I sail past fields of oats, sorghum, corn, herds of cattle that slowly pick up their heads to watch with liquid brown eyes, past widely separated exits for towns with names like Flatonia and Waxahachie. It is December, and that means warm sunshine with cool wind, the sky and again the sky, so inland blue it is almost painful to look at.

  As I drive, topping eighty, the scarf starts to slip off my head. I let it go like a discarded fig leaf. No one will see. Only God.

  Then I’m mad. I think, My God doesn’t chastise. My God’s silence is a tacit embrace.

  But really, the fallen scarf is my gauntlet—with it, I’m challenging the God of the Law, insisting He change. It’s a kind of take me as I am, but not one of submission.

  An hour into the drive, I need a cold drink and a bathroom. There’s a filling station up ahead set up in an old house with a convenience store in it, so I exit and pull in, observing its peeling paint, its cracked, oil-stained concrete. I stop beside a beat-up, mud-spattered old pickup with a man beside it. He’s leaning back against the truck with one foot anchored behind him on the running board, in worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and old boots with mud on them, his face leathery and lined. He’s smoking a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, squinting his eyes at that sky.

  I sit there bareheaded in my parked car next to the pickup. As I touch the door handle to get out, a moment of programmed Hasidic panic hits hard because of the man and my uncovered head, my nakedness before a man. I pause, breathe, grit my teeth, and tell myself, Yes, I am really going to do this. Then I open the door, stand up in the Texas sun, and step out in front of an actual man with my head uncovered. I stand and turn, resolute, take another breath, a step, another. Then I stop short because I have a sudden enormous urge to stride over, reach up, grab that tall old cowboy by his frayed flannel collar, and say, Do you know you’re the first man besides my husband to see my hair in twenty-five years? Instead, I take in his sun-browned face and burst out laughing.