The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  I reached up and pressed my hands to my eye sockets to stop the tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, gulping air.

  “There’s no need to be sorry,” she said. “But I need you to be able to hold your breath to get a good picture. Shall I give you a little time?”

  “That’s OK,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll be fine.” I took a deep breath and willed myself to calm down. I forced the air out of my lungs, stood up and walked over to the X-ray machine. I dropped the robe from one shoulder and moved in close to the glass plates. The technician grabbed my left breast, the real one. Her hands were freezing. She asked me to scoot closer, and I leaned toward the machine as if it were a dance partner who would support my weight and whisk me around the room. I leaned toward the machine like I loved it, like it had saved my life.

  “Don’t move,” the technician ordered, as she cranked the plates together, but I tightly curled my toes in a tiny act of defiance.

  When she was done taking pictures, the technician asked me to wait in the room while the slides were developed. “At five years, you’re still diagnostic,” she explained, from the doorway. “The radiologist reads it while you’re still in the building. Next year, you’ll be screening and you’ll have to wait for the mail like everyone else.”

  As I sat there waiting, I forgot all about the steamy reading material in the pocket of my robe. I imagined what would happen if the technician came back and said she needed to take a few more slides. My heart would start pounding; I’d feel it in my throat. Adrenaline would pump through my body, sending me into a state somewhere oddly close to giddy. She’d take one picture, then two, three and then four. She’d leave for an ominous length of time, then come back and try to tell me the X-rays were fuzzy. Off-kilter. She’d need to do a few more. I’d nod, bare my breast again, hold my breath, knowing without anyone needing to say anything that the cancer was back.

  And then what? I’d call Rick. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. Sorry that he’d have to go through it again. Sorry that he’d had to go through it before. Sorry that we weren’t any better for our brush with mortality—and closer, any happier. Sorry that I’d lost a breast and lost any desire to turn to him in the middle of the night, in the middle of a bed, in an apartment we were renting while we built a house that was supposed to be the place where we’d live for the rest of our lives.

  The technician breezed back in and told me everything looked fine. She held my chart in her hands and paused before she slipped out the door again. “Five years,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and even though she had disappeared from view, I added, “Happy Holidays.”

  I have a friend who has leukemia who has never once been to any cancer-related event in which you have to wear a hat or T-shirt that identifies you as a survivor. She refuses. “You can’t be a survivor if you’ve still got it,” she explains. “And I’ll always have it.” It, of course, being the insidious cells that move and morph within her blood. It, being a thing that saps energy and demands constant vigilance. She pisses me off. Go to the damn walk, I want to yell, wear the damn T-shirt. This woman who takes chemo the way most of us take multivitamins, throws up with shocking regularity, and has, of late, started to fall because her feet are numb from pain relievers, also volunteers at her nephew’s elementary school, coaches a swim team which demands that she stand on a freezing cold pool deck five out of seven nights every week, and, for a regular job, is in charge of our city’s youth sports leagues, which means that she is in constant and intimate contact with the most demanding, irrational, frightened and misguided parents in America. And she’s not a survivor?

  I have another friend who had ovarian cancer when she was just twenty years old. Her father was a surgeon and he stood over her in the operating room when they cut her open and removed her uterus and ovaries. He stood there, inspecting every bit of tissue, making the doctors take their time, making them take out each cell. She’s nearing sixty years old, and when people who know anything about ovarian cancer hear that she has lived as long as she has and as well as she has, they practically fall to their knees in awe. But there are no special hats for her to wear, no special pins or special slogans. There are no T-shirts and marches, no lunches in hotel ballrooms with gift bags and speeches. She shrugs when I ask her if she resents it. “I’m alive,” she says. “I have no reason to resent anything.”

  I got in my car and made myself sit there and look at the sunlight and the red Volvo next to me and the old couple making their way across the parking lot— he with a walker, she with a cane. I took a deep breath and thought about giving thanks, but it was exactly like trying to remember a word you’re sure you know but can’t bring to mind. I just couldn’t do it. God didn’t make sense anymore. There were people in the Middle East who were blowing themselves up in the name of one God, whom they claimed to be almighty. We had a president who was retaliating in the name of another God, whom he claimed to be almighty, too. In my own church—the church of my childhood, of Sunday mornings and patent leather shoes—people were locking each other out of sanctuaries over an argument about how much God loved or didn’t love gay people, because, I presumed, they wanted God to be almighty for just them alone. The selfish drama of the deity even played itself out in our apartment complex. Most of the residents were homeowners in the middle of remodels, corporate executives in the middle of relocations or first wives in the middle of divorces, but on the floor below ours, a Christian rock musician spent his days in a studio singing praises to God. At night he would sometimes shout at his wife with such violence that someone would invariably call the police, and when the police came, the Christian rock band singer would yell for the fucking nigger to mind his own business. I believed there was an unseen force of goodness in the world, something at the center that held it all together and made it all come into being in the first place, but claiming a proprietary personal relationship with God—even one in which I could simply give thanks—had come to seem like an act of folly.

  I called Rick on my cell phone. He answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, his voice as tight as a coiled spring.

  “It was all clear,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s great, April,” he said. “That’s really great.”

  There was an awkward split second of silence. I leaped into it. “It’s been five years this week,” I said, as if the thought had only just occurred to me as I sat there in the December sun.

  “Has it?” Rick asked. “I guess I’ve always counted from the day of the surgery, not the day of diagnosis.”

  This made perfect sense—and if my husband is known for anything, it’s for making perfect sense. You count five years from the day when you could reasonably say the cancer was gone from your body, which in my case was December 10, 1999. But how can you ever really be sure? None of us can ever really be sure. In my mind, there was a day when cancer was just a word—a word I could write about in a magazine, or talk about at dinner—and the next day, the day of diagnosis, it was a reality that had the potential of defining my entire life because it had the potential of ending it. That was the day that mattered to me. And now that I had reached five years, maybe I couldn’t say that I had survived, exactly, but maybe I could say that cancer could now be nothing again. Just a word, something that had happened to me once upon a time, a story in the past.

  “I was thinking maybe we could have lunch,” I said.

  “I’m over at the house with Ruben,” he said. “We’re still wrestling with the backsplash tile. I think we’re going to go ahead and build out the wall behind the stove. It’s a hassle, but it’s the only way to make it plumb. You want to come see if you like the height of the hood?”

  The hood that was going over the range in our new house was Italian. It was an arc of glass and steel, a piece of sculpture, really, that would draw the eye from the family room. We had pendant lights to hang over the central island that mimicked the arch of the range hood. The lights would be reflected in
the granite of the island, a spectacular slab of terra-cotta red. Finding these things—the hood, the lights, the stone, the tile, the flooring, the molding and the perfect shade of white paint—had consumed our limited leisure time for the past two years. Instead of lunch, we looked at tile. Instead of sex, we searched together for a range hood.

  “Sure,” I said, “I could stop and get Subway.”

  “Great,” he said. “See you in a few.”

  There was no one in line at Subway, though the restaurant was full. A young girl with her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail asked me what I’d like. I scanned the menu, and my eye caught on the descriptions of the platters they offered for holiday catering. You could get a selection of small sandwiches that could feed twenty, plus chips and soda. The signs suggested that this would be an easy way to host an office party, or to entertain guests during New Year’s football games. I could have a party to celebrate the fact that I had reached my five-year cancer-free anniversary. I could serve all my friends roast beef and turkey to thank them for how much they’d helped me, for how they’d brought lasagna to our house, picked up Jackie to take her to volleyball practice and sent flowers, cards and soft slippers for me to wear in the hospital.

  “Ma’am?” the girl behind the counter asked. There were now three people in line behind me, looking at their watches, glaring at me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take three turkey and cheese on sourdough.”

  “Mustard and mayo?” she asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” I said.

  “Would you like drinks and chips with those?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, and as she told me the total, my eyes started to tear up again. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand to my lips to keep from weeping out loud. I would get a turkey on sourdough, a Diet Coke and some Lays potato chips to eat on the gleaming granite counter in the middle of my new kitchen. That’s how I would celebrate this milestone—with a fast-food meal in a house that my husband had designed and built after my diagnosis because he thought it was what I wanted.

  “Ma’am?” the girl asked. I was now crying. I was standing in line at Subway at lunchtime, and I was crying.

  “Are you OK?” the woman in line behind me asked. She was wearing black pumps. That’s all I could see of her as she grabbed a napkin off the counter and handed it to me. The shoes had pointy toes and a white strap that curved over the top of the foot and ended at a button on the other side. The stitching was black on white and white on black. They were like saddle shoes all grown up and gone to town.

  “Why don’t you go ahead,” I said, and stepped aside. I turned to sit down on a red plastic chair by the door. I was like a child who couldn’t get control of her own body. A minute went by, maybe two. The woman in pumps came over and squatted in front of me. She was wearing a black suit with a pencil skirt that had a rim of knife pleats at the hem and a jacket that nipped in at her waist—not the easiest outfit to squat in. She put her hand on my knee, which I thought was incredibly presumptuous and incredibly kind at the same time.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.

  “Those are great shoes,” I said.

  She looked completely unfazed. “They’re Kate Spade,” she said.

  I nodded. I’d written a piece for Inc. about Kate Spade many years ago, before I had a child and before Kate got into shoes and dinnerware. I’d sat down to lunch with her at Shutters in Santa Monica and we’d had a great conversation about women’s entrepreneurial spirit. We joked about the hippie purse of the woman at the table next to us. I was young, and I was certain that we had bonded in some profound way—that Kate Spade was going to be my friend. I sent her a thank-you note that referenced the joke we’d shared, included my phone number and never heard from her again.

  I lifted my eyes to look at the woman in the black suit. She looked smart; Armenian, possibly. She was probably a lawyer who came home at the end of the day and threw together fabulous dinners with lamb and mint. “Have you ever left a pair of shoes behind in a store,” I asked, “because you didn’t think you needed them or you thought they were too expensive and then one day, years later, they pop into your head—the exact color and shape and even their price—and you think, why didn’t I buy those shoes? Why didn’t I bring them home?”

  The black-suited woman nodded. “It happened to me with a pair of Frye boots in college. Remember Frye boots?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what happened to me today, only it wasn’t shoes I left behind.” She didn’t say anything, just squatted there waiting for me to explain. “What I forgot was how to celebrate that I’m alive.”

  I drove with my sandwiches along the beach, dipped down into the grove of eucalyptus that lined the creek near Malaga Cove, and then climbed up into the hills. The whole of the Los Angeles basin opened up in my rearview mirror. From here, on a clear day, you could see each building of downtown and Century City, the Getty Museum on the very far side of the valley and even the Hollywood sign, if you knew where to look. Our house—which was one of only five houses on the cul-de-sac on the ridge—had a view that looked out the opposite direction, south toward Catalina Island. We could stand in our master bedroom and watch the giant car carriers steaming toward Long Beach Harbor. We could see the sailboats as they made their way up and down the channel. And with a telescope, in winter, we could spot gray whales migrating south to the warm waters of Mexico. It was all water all the time from almost every room of the house. It astonished me every time I saw it.

  I pulled into the driveway, got out of the car, walked past the Porta Potti, up the front path—and suddenly felt as if I’d run into a wall of ice. I could hear hammering inside, could see a guy on a ladder fiddling with the outdoor lights, but I couldn’t move. Someone yelled something in Spanish, and Rick came to the front door.

  “Hey!” he said. He leaped down the front steps and kissed me on the cheek. “Are you OK?” he asked, stepping back from me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  The ghost of the woman I wanted to be was just inside that door. Her spirit was there, enjoying the view. Her husband’s spirit was there, too—the spirit of the man who’d designed and built this house for a wife he hoped wouldn’t die. I’d always believed that houses could be haunted. I swore to my mother when I was four years old that there was a ghost who lived in my closet—a friendly ghost who kept the monsters away— but she told me to stop making things up and just go to sleep. Every time I tried to tell her about this wonderful thing, this thing that kept me safe and made me happy, that’s what she said: stop making things up and just go to sleep. We only lived in that house a couple of years, but I never forgot the feeling of that ghost.

  After my grandmother died, I looked forward to returning to her lakeside cottage in New Hampshire to see if she’d haunt it in the same way. She’d been such a comfort in real life, a woman who taught me to play the piano, who introduced me to Willa Cather and who seemed to understand my mother’s sadness in a way I never could. I expected her to be a comfort in death, too. While the adults scurried through her house in a frenzy of sorting and packing, I sat in front of the old stone fireplace, squeezed my eyes shut and convinced myself I could feel my grandmother’s presence.

  “I feel her here,” I said to my mom, but all she said in return was that I should stop daydreaming and help pack up the books.

  With so much experience feeling the presence of ghosts who made me comfortable, I didn’t think much about the other kind until I got to college. There was an old house next to the church where we used to perform choral concerts—a shingled house with gables and a weather vane. All the kids insisted it was haunted by an old president of the college who had been poisoned by his wife. I used to look at the dark windows of that dark house and think—yes, some evil spirit surely resides there. There was something about the house, even from the outside, that gave me the creeps. I never asserted my conviction about the house being haunted, however, for fear t
hat someone would tell me to stop making things up.

  I handed Rick the Subway bag. “What would you say if I said I had seen a ghost?” I asked.

  “Well, that you’re nuts,” Rick said.

  That night, in the apartment, I lay wide awake as Rick snored beside me. I watched the minutes tick by on the clock and listened to the noises of the night. It was 2:00 A.M., but somewhere in the building someone was taking a shower, someone slammed a door, a car started in the parking lot. It was too late to take Ambien or even Benadryl. I would wake up in the morning as groggy as if I’d been drunk, and I needed to hit the ground running first thing. I had to pick paint colors for the master bath. I had to research an article on lingerie. At three o’clock Jackie had a volleyball game. It would be better not to sleep than to slog through the day on drugs.

  “Rick?” I said. He kept snoring. It sounded exactly like a lawnmower. It was amazing that he didn’t wake himself up. Had he stopped snoring and replied, I was going to mention the bottle of champagne that we had on top of the refrigerator. One of his clients had given it to him upon completion of their house six months ago. We both knew better than to store a nice bottle of champagne on top of the refrigerator where it was hot, but there was no room in the small refrigerator and nowhere else to put it in the tiny apartment kitchen. There were baking pans stored in the oven and cereal lined up on top of the microwave. I had measuring cups in a cardboard box in the bottom of the broom closet, and every time I needed to measure something, I had to waltz with the broom and wrestle with the vacuum cleaner.