by Pamela Ribon
“Okay, park here,” she said, just past a hotel.
It was a parking lot near what appeared to be a furniture store. “Are we doing something for Henry?” I asked.
Smidge laughed, pointing at something on the other side of the windshield. “You still haven’t seen it! Look up.”
I craned my neck to look out the window. Towering above us was a giant office chair. It was bigger than the building, probably thirty feet high.
“Smidge, what is this?”
“Duh! It’s a gi-normous chair!”
“I can see that.”
Smidge was already out the door and on her feet. “Come on! Grab your camera!”
I did what I was told, but I felt a growing knot of anger in my stomach. I’d been looking forward to this vacation. I’d even figured out how I would enjoy the cruise ship, if that was where she was forcing me to go. I was going to pretend we were an old lesbian couple on our first trip away after the kids were grown. It wasn’t ideal, but I could have worked with that, had a little fun with it, maybe made Smidge rub my feet by the pool, just so we seemed more legitimately like lady lovers.
I’d been busy and I’d been sad. I needed our vacation, our escape from our lives. I wanted to be far, far away. But there we were, staring at a giant chair, still in the South. You can’t vacation in the South when you’re from there. And listen: I’d rather walk from here to Los Angeles than step one damn foot into Florida.
Smidge looked elated standing underneath that gigantic chair, like she’d reached an important milestone, as if we’d walked the entire Great Wall.
It might have been just another prank. Maybe she was about to tell me there were plane tickets taped to the bottom of that chair.
“Can you take a cell phone picture for Henry?” she asked. “You probably have to go way back to get everything in the frame.”
“Smidge.” My voice warbled as I tried to hide my impatience.
“I’m gonna tell Henry I bought this chair, too.” She posed, one hand behind her head, leaning sassily against a thick leg beam. “That’s why we’re here! Because this is the funniest thing I’ve ever thought of.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it! Well, and you’re looking at the World’s Largest Chair, so you can cross that off your to-do list.”
“We’re not going anywhere else? I packed half my life into a plane so that I could drive to a giant chair and take a picture of you?”
“Yes! I mean, fine, we can drive to Atlanta if you want and get a drink.”
My jaw clenched tight as I hissed through my teeth, “Smidge.”
I wonder how many people have forgotten that her real name’s Farrah. She never seemed like a Farrah. Nobody called her that, not in as long as I’d known her. Not even her father called her that, and he named her after his sister.
Your mom had what she referred to as a “sad puberty.” She was a big girl, too big for her small size. I’ve seen the pictures she threw away before you were born. She had a stomach that would sit high up over her shorts, like she was playing make-believe pregnant lady with a basketball stuffed under her shirt.
Her mother named her Smidge. It originated with “Just a smidge more,” as in, that’s what she would always eat. “Just a smidge more than a normal girl should.” Than a thin girl would. Your grandmother’s relationship with your mother was a complicated thing.
Smidge’s mother once said to one of her friends, “I don’t know how that pudgy thing shares my genes.” She didn’t care that Smidge was standing right there. “But that’s my daughter. Squat and stunted. The Smidget.”
Smidge dumped all that weight once she turned twelve and discovered the glamour and camaraderie that came with preteen eating disorders. After Smidge got tiny she embraced the nickname and grew a personality to match it. By the time I met her she was small, sassy, and proud. I think she liked how the name made her seem like she was already everybody’s best friend.
Sometimes when we got drunk I called her Smidget Jones. Occasionally I got away with calling her Midge. Smidgeriffic. Smiddy. Or simply Smeh, which is what I used when I ran tired of words and just needed her to give me a beer or a hug. I said it like a sigh. “Smeh.”
“Smeh, I need you.”
“Smeh, I love you.”
To which she would reply, “Danny. You know I love you, too. I love you the mostest.”
But the woman standing underneath the World’s Largest Chair, I was not calling her Smeh. That woman was Smidge, and about thirteen seconds from being Farrah.
“Do it, Danny. Go take a picture!” she shouted.
“No!” I threw my cell phone to the ground like a petulant child. I was done with feeling like I was the only one not in on the joke. I didn’t want to be the last to learn the truth again. “This can’t be about the chair, I know it. What is going on? Why aren’t we on a plane? Why aren’t we having fun somewhere with drinks that have umbrellas or taking pictures of churches and real monuments? What are we doing in Alabama, Smidge? Can you at least tell me that?”
“Fine!” Smidge clenched her fists and practically doubled over. “I have taken you to the middle of nowhere so I can tell you that the cancer is back!”
I felt it first in my knees. They went numb, liquefied, stopped working entirely. My lungs paused, leaving me frozen in time.
Her cancer was back. Her cancer was back, as if it was something she used to own, something she had sent off to boarding school. But it wasn’t supposed to be here ever again. Not after she beat it. Not once we called her a survivor. We had a party. We wore T-shirts. There was a cake. Once you’ve eaten your survivor cake, that’s supposed to signify an ending. That time was supposed to be over.
So how was it here again? Why would cancer rear up like a phoenix? This should be the twisted joke. I wanted her to bust into a grin, shocked that I once again fell for something that couldn’t possibly be true. You can’t get cancer twice, silly! That would be so unfair!
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that your mother didn’t start crying. Even in that moment she wouldn’t let her face get wet. Rather, she was slapping a pillar of the gigantic chair’s leg, batting at it like a vending machine that stole her money. A tiny little lady battling an enormous piece of furniture as she invented curse words for this situation, barking in furious gasps.
“I just wanted to see this . . . suck-crap chair because . . . I’m trying to get some . . . goddamn things done before I’m . . . shitballs dead!”
“Smeh,” I said, but I could hardly hear myself. “Smeh,” I tried again, but I knew if I kept talking, I’d cry.
Smidge threw herself back against the chair leg. She swallowed and punched her thighs before staring me down. “My stupid cancer is back,” she said. “And now I’m going to be dead just like my daddy. I can’t believe it. Fucking cancer. Fucking cancer, Danielle! Again!”
Cainsir. That’s how she said it. Hospitals and needles and vomiting and tests and no, please, not this again.
I forced a question past my lips. “What can I do?”
All the little muscles in her face relaxed as she resumed control. “I’m glad you asked,” she said, as she folded her arms across her chest. I was right; they were thinner. “I have a job for you,” she said, all business.
“Anything.”
“Can I get that word in writing?”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Get me to a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
I stumbled over to my small friend and pulled her in tight. I hugged her as hard as I could, until I worried I was pressing tiny tumors into her heart.
“I still need you to take a picture of this chair. I mean, we drove all this way.”
EIGHT
I’d known Smidge longer than I’d known how to use a curling iron. I know that’s a fact, because Smidge is the one who taught me.
I was fourteen when my dad moved us from Brooklyn to Ogden. I remember being so pissed off my first day
at Neville High. All my preconceived notions of what living in the South was going to be like were bouncing around in my head, notions that were mostly acquired from television shows. I assumed everyone would own a horse; they’d all get into their cars by jumping through the windows. I figured everyone I’d meet would have a lump of tobacco jammed in his cheek.
My mother takes some of the blame for this. Right around the last time I ever saw her, she told me she was leaving and had absolutely no desire to haul her ass down to a “po-dunk, racist-ass, shit-kicking, cousin-fucker town just because your father thinks he owns me.”
You never met my mom. I don’t really talk to her all that much. Never to her face, anyway. I sometimes talk to the idea of her, when I get really frustrated. I talk to the memory of her, ask why she didn’t care to find out what happened to me once I left Brooklyn. I ask her if she started doing drugs and that’s why she forgot about me, or if she reinvented herself and became a happy homemaker with three kids and another on the way. That last one I could almost understand. Maybe for her it’s just too painful that even though she eventually got it right, there’s a little girl in her past for whom she got it spectacularly wrong.
My parents were very young when they had me, as it wasn’t something they were planning on doing. They got married because that’s what you did, that’s how a man was a good man to a girl who was suddenly going to be a mother. They got married and tried to pretend they were in love with each other. It never caught on between them, never tricked their emotions into believing it. Therefore, I was pretty much a sentence they were serving. My mom got out early for terrible behavior.
She defected from the family, declared herself a “roving artist,” a woman who only wanted to be married to “Our Lady America.” I’m going to go ahead and guess that’s an area that never went past the five boroughs.
Because of her reasons for not wanting to live even in the same state of the union that I was going to be in, she had me concerned that the citizens of Louisiana were restricted to ultrasnobby ladies with abusive husbands, men unironically named Bubba, and people who still owned slaves.
The first time I did meet an actual man named Bubba, I was heartbroken my mother had been at least slightly correct.
I was all alone, thrust into this small Southern town, attending a school filled with people who talked like words were made out of taffy. They pulled and squished their sentences into any old form they wanted. These people said “might could.” As in, “You might could find a more podunk town than this one. But I sure do doubt it.”
I was so far out of my element, I was positive I’d never meet anyone who could understand me, who would want to be my friend.
That’s when I plopped down into the desk next to Smidge’s on my first day of biology.
I remember her eyes as she gave me the once-over, how big and wide her pupils looked. She was wearing blue mascara, which I’d never seen anyone actually use before. She looked famous, important. Smidge had a way about her that could make you feel extremely self-conscious. When she’s in front of you, you don’t see her; you see her looking at you. People are always tugging at their hair when they’re under her gaze, fixing themselves, straightening their shirts, surreptitiously wiping their noses, adjusting their necklaces. You don’t know what she’s thinking, but you have a feeling it can’t be good. Her stare bores right into your secret shame and gets your brain screaming, “She knows! She sees my lies! I knew I shouldn’t have worn this padded bra!”
Smidge was barely fourteen the day I met her. She always looked younger than everybody else. Did you know she had a fake ID before she was sixteen?
She was chewing gum with her front teeth. The pink wad crackled briefly before disappearing somewhere into her surprisingly large mouth so she could ask, “What’s your name, new girl?”
“Danielle.” I remember the word barely made a sound, I was so nervous. “I’m Danielle Meyers.”
“Well, Danielle Meyers, if you are going to be my friend, we have got to do something about this hair.”
Coming out of her mouth, the word hair had two syllables. Hay-ir. She grinned, leaned over, and held my sad strands in her left fist as she shook her head in pity. “Poor hayir.”
She was always bold when talking to a stranger. It never occurred to her to have a boundary, or attempt something that resembled a tactful approach.
“If you had toilet paper stuck to your shoe, you’d want me to tell you, right?” she once asked me. “Even if I didn’t know you, you’d want me to say something. Well, imagine your hair was that toilet paper. Because it was.”
Not much changed about our relationship after that first exchange. Smidge fixed my hair that afternoon and became my self-declared guardian forevermore.
I was smart enough to know not to contradict her about that. It’s a lot like having a lion for a best friend—everything is really fun and exciting until the lion is unhappy.
Did you know your mother once stopped a woman in a mall and told her she should get a mole on her face checked? “That thing is ugly,” she said. “And God wouldn’t have made it so hideous if he didn’t want people to come up to you and tell you to do something about it.” I was there that day, hiding behind a sunglasses kiosk, mortified down to my very last blood cell.
And do you know, one year later that woman with the mole showed up on your doorstep with a homemade sheet cake and a dozen roses, thanking your mother for saving her life?
Nobody ever stopped Smidge from talking, because she somehow had the ability to always end up being some kind of right. It was maddening.
I was sliding a dark walnut bar stool out from under the bar for Smidge when she gently pushed me aside.
“I’m not dying today, Danielle. You can cool it on the coddling.”
I tried to cover. “I just assumed you were too short to reach the bar without some help.”
“I’m not buying that,” she said. “But I will buy your first drink.”
In the hours after Smidge dropped the bomb on me, we had silently driven to Atlanta, quietly checked into a hotel, robotically changed outfits, and then practically sprinted to a rather swanky, dark bar in midtown. We didn’t have to say why; I knew neither of us could handle whatever we were about to discuss without a drink. I’m glad we found a quieter spot in a corner, pressed up against the bar near a mirrored wall, watching the place grow crowded.
The regular patrons were standing together in easy-to-recognize groups. There were the overly boisterous office workers who’d been here since happy hour, ties loosened and pumps off. The young married women early into a girls’ night that would end badly, their shot glasses aloft as they focused on temporarily forgetting all the young children they’d left at home in the shaky care of their husbands. Awkward body language gave away the couples on first dates, unsure how close they could sit despite—or because of—the noise level.
The walls around the bar were glassy and black, twinkling with ever-rotating dots of lights, making everyone look just a little more glamorous. For a second I was homesick. The upscale atmosphere reminded me of a place James and I would have gone to in Los Angeles after a movie or for celebratory drinks with friends.
I studied Smidge’s face, thinking maybe I could find a sign, some hint as to how advanced her cancer was. What would I do if I were faced with the knowledge that my time was quickly coming up? Would I want to sit here with my friend at this trendy bar in Atlanta, ordering a martini? Wouldn’t I want to be home with my family?
It might seem wrong that I could think of my own life, my own decisions, as I was waiting to find out the details of Smidge’s illness. But everyone sees this disease through their own mortality, looking back over their shoulders, wondering, Would I be ready for this?
Cancer is selfish. It rips through its victim’s body without the slightest hint of remorse. Then it spreads, jumping to anyone who hears the victim’s story, infecting those people with fear, guilt. Cancer is at its most selfish when it com
es to the spouses, the families, the friends. Because that’s when it mutates again. For them, it’s not their cells it destroys. It’s their dreams.
“Okay, so I’m just going to start talking,” Smidge said, smacking the bar with an open palm like a contestant on a game show. “I can’t take it anymore, Danny. You have got to get that look off your face. I am not a pound puppy.”
I tried, turning my eyes turn downward, forcing my focus onto the bowl of wonton crispies left for us by the bartender. I picked at one, wondering how long I could waste time pretending I was deciding whether or not to eat it.
There was another pause as Smidge took a healthy gulp of her drink. She leaned back, eyes closed in boozy bliss. Finally, she said, “These taste much better when you’re dying.”
I tried to laugh but my breath caught in my throat. “Are you sure you’re supposed to be drinking?”
“Lord,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Here we go. I’ll tell you something funny. They say alcohol reduces the risk of some cancers.” She shook her head and rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand.
“If that’s true, I don’t understand how the cancer could come back. With the amount of preventive drinking you do, a relapse should be scientifically impossible.”
“That’s my girl,” Smidge said, giving my elbow a gentle squeeze between her thumb and forefinger. “That’s better. Thank you. Now drink a lot of that.” She wiggled her fingers toward my drink. “I’ve got a proposition that’ll sound better if you are nowhere near sober.”
“A proposition? I don’t recall you ever having a proposition. You mean I’m about to get some orders.”
Smidge had all the information and I was trying to get a foothold on the situation. Just how she liked it.