by Dani Shapiro
“God,” mutters Ruth. She buries her head in her hands. “I can’t even…what the fuck is my—”
“I have an idea.” Kubovy sweeps over, holding a paper towel with which he quickly wipes up the offending pee. “Clara, I’m going to take you for a very special treat. Let’s leave your mother here for a few minutes”—he motions to Rico and Brian to open the rest of the crates—“and you and I will go get some ice cream.”
Clara stops crying.
“Have you ever had this very special Italian ice cream? It’s called gelato,” says Kubovy. He reaches a hand down and hoists her to her feet.
“But my dress,” says Clara.
“It will dry in the sun as we walk,” says Kubovy. He makes it all seem like a grand idea.
“Mommy?” Clara says. “Is that okay? Can I have gelato?”
Ruth turns to her. Her eyes are dim. She seems very far away.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” Clara says.
“Oh, honey.” Ruth scoops her up and hugs her. She presses her lips hard against Clara’s cheek. “You’re the one who should be mad at me.”
THE STREETS of the Upper West Side are not made for wheelchairs. The sidewalks are uneven, an obstacle course. A cracked bit of pavement or a pothole can stop a wheelchair abruptly, tossing its inhabitant forward. The curbs, a series of little cliffs, sharp angles at every intersection. The only way to traverse them is to tilt the wheelchair back and carefully, with all one’s strength, inch the back wheels forward, little by little, until they gently bump the street below.
Add to this, late-winter slush, icy patches, frozen gutters backed up with sooty snow. Clara isn’t wearing gloves. She left hers at home in Maine, and she keeps forgetting to borrow a pair from Robin. In Clara’s memory, New York is not a freezing-cold place. Not compared to what she’s grown accustomed to, the endless string of twenty-below days, the thermometer outside the kitchen window permanently stopped, frozen somewhere well south of zero. Her hands—the knuckles red, the skin chapped—curl around the plastic handles of her mother’s wheelchair as they wait for the light to change from red to green.
Thank goodness for Robin’s clothes: a heavy oversized cashmere sweater, a pair of post-pregnancy jeans from before her sister snapped her body back to her usual size two. These, along with a few turtlenecks and some warm socks purchased at the Gap, have kept Clara going for exactly eight days. She cannot possibly lose count of how many days she’s been here. Each morning, Sammy reminds her.
You’ve been gone for five days, Mom. That’s a long time.
Now it’s six. Six whole days.
It’s been a week now. Why are you away? Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?
Clara has tried to reassure Sammy, but she knows that everything she says rings hollow. She can’t give Sam an answer as to precisely when she’s returning to Maine—though at least Clara has promised her that (my God!) she isn’t getting a divorce. All these years—staying at home with Sam—they’ve been such a tight little threesome. It has to add up to something, doesn’t it? To some sense of peace and security? Clara and Jonathan have never taken so much as a weekend away without Sammy. Surely, Sam will weather this absence. It will close up around her as soon as Clara gets home.
An older woman, bundled from head to toe in a black coat, moves expertly past Ruth’s wheelchair, one hand holding a cane, the other a blue-and-orange Fairway shopping bag.
“Look at her,” says Ruth, from the depths of the wheelchair. “She must be eighty.”
Ruth’s breath makes a vaporous cloud, disappearing as it wafts up toward Clara’s face. Ruth is well insulated; she’s wearing an ankle-length shearling coat, and Peony has tucked a soft blanket around her. A fur hat covers her head.
“I want to be just like that when I’m eighty,” says Ruth.
The WALK sign lights up, and Clara eases the wheels down to the street.
“What do you think?” Ruth asks. She’s a little breathless. Actually, they’re both a little breathless. Clara’s out of shape, hasn’t been hiking in Acadia National Park lately. Who is she kidding? She hasn’t been on a hike in more than a year. Her arms are shaking from the effort.
“Did you hear what I said?” Ruth asks.
“What?” Clara steers around a pothole the size and depth of a bowling ball.
“Eighty,” says Ruth.
“Yeah, amazing. She looks great.”
“You’re not listening to me!”
They’re on the corner of West End and 77th. Their destination, a holistic oncologist, just two blocks farther downtown. They should have taken a cab, but somehow that had seemed more daunting: folding the wheelchair into a cab’s trunk, holding on to Ruth to make sure she didn’t slip on the ice, sliding Ruth into the narrow confines of a backseat. That is, if a cab would even have stopped for them. Strollers, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, pets, suitcases—all these might make a driver speed on by, hoping to pick up a simpler, less demanding fare.
“I’m sorry,” says Clara.
“I’m trying to give myself some hope here. Can’t you understand that?”
“Hope,” Clara repeats. This is today’s news, a curveball. Ruth, it seems, is ricocheting around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. At the moment, she has made a flying leap from acceptance to denial.
Or who knows. Maybe she knows something. Maybe, despite all the stark evidence on the Internet—eighty percent dead within eighteen months—Ruth has peered inside herself, inside the black caves of her own lungs, and seen herself rising above the statistics, climbing to the top of the highest curve of the most infinitesimal number and holding on, as if to a sturdy branch in a hurricane, waiting for the wind to die down all around her.
Who the hell knows. Clara rings a bell next to a brass plaque: ABRAHAM ZAMITSKY, M.D. A buzzer sounds, and she pushes Ruth’s wheelchair through the door, only to be faced with two steep steps down to the office door below. How can an oncologist not have a ramp? How many patients are trotting in here on their own two feet? A holistic oncologist, in particular, might well be the last stop—after the chemo, the radiation, the trials and pills and potions of regular doctors have failed. Clara summons her strength, then tilts the wheelchair back and eases it down the first step. The wheels teeter precariously for a moment on the stair, threatening to slip too quickly down.
“Good job,” says Ruth. As if this—the successful maneuvering of a metal contraption—is worthy of praise.
“Where did you find this guy, anyway?” Clara asks.
Their voices are deadened in the tiny vestibule. As soon as the words emerge, they are snuffed out. No echo, no reverberation. No sound at all.
“The Today show,” says Ruth.
“The Today show! Since when do you—”
“I’ve had a lot of time to lie in bed.”
A second buzzer sounds, and Clara pushes open the office door. The doctor’s waiting room is furnished in a soothing blend of earth tones. An enormous fish tank is built into the far wall. The artificial aqua-blue water appears to be a distant ocean, and all these people—sick people, waiting—are stranded on the sandy shore of some interior decorator’s idea of peace. Plants are everywhere, hanging from baskets by the windows, in terra-cotta pots in the corners. Low-maintenance plants. No African violets for this holistic oncologist. No ferns. Nothing that will die easily. A huge, hardy rubber plant spills out from behind a bald girl in her twenties.
“Can I help you?”
“Ruth Dunne, to see Dr. Zamitsky,” Clara says quietly. They’re on the Upper West Side, after all. Someone here will know the name, though it’s possible, in this environment, that no one will care.
Pages and pages of forms to fill out. Paperwork. Clara wheels Ruth to an unoccupied corner of the office and brings her a months old copy of Vogue on which to balance the forms as she checks off various boxes.
“Crazy,” says Ruth, as she quickly runs down the list. “Diabetes, heart attack, str
oke, high blood pressure…no, no, no.” She jabs her pen against the box next to cancer. “Such a stupid thing,” she says. “Nothing’s ever been wrong with me. I’ve never even been in the hospital, except to have you two girls—and now this.”
Ruth’s eyes are watery from the cold. The tip of her nose is bright pink. She pulls off her fur hat, and beneath it is a silk scarf wrapped elegantly around her head. She wears no makeup, her bare face still surprisingly youthful. Ruth has always looked a decade younger than she is, and even now, even with no hair and pale, almost transparent skin, she is like a china doll. Soft and lovely and breakable.
“At least it got you here.” She turns to Clara. She reaches over and takes Clara’s hand. Her own hands are warm and dry. “Nothing short of this would have gotten you home, would it?”
Clara doesn’t answer. Her mother’s touch—the very fact of her hand encased in Ruth’s—is almost more than she can bear. Ruth has been inching toward this—pushing Clara toward a greater intimacy—for the last few days. So, darling, tell me about your life. Not just the broad outline; tell me what it’s really like. Your days—what do you do? How do you feel? Ruth wants to know everything about the last fourteen years, it seems. And your daughter? I would give anything—here she held Clara’s gaze until Clara finally looked away—I would give anything to meet her.
Clara’s mere presence, unlikely to begin with, is no longer enough. Her mother wants more of her. And now the hand. Foreign. The skin thin and dusty. Clara closes her eyes for a moment, tries to pretend that the hand is Jonathan’s. Or Sam’s. But it isn’t working. She pulls away.
“Oh, Clara. Please don’t,” Ruth says.
“I can’t—I can’t help it.”
Clara starts to cry. Despite everything, despite every cell in her body struggling mightily to keep it together, she’s losing it. Her eyes are flooded—the tears are almost horizontal. She swipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater. She had sworn to herself that she wasn’t going to let her mother see a single feeling. Not rage, not grief, not loss, not a fleeting moment of tenderness. Fourteen years. It’s just goddamned unacceptable.
In the upholstered chair across from them, a middle-aged woman in a velour sweat suit is thumbing through a copy of People magazine. She resolutely keeps her gaze on the magazine, but her brow creases in sympathy. She thinks Clara’s crying because her mother is ill. Because they’re at the last stop on the cancer train, the office of the Today show doctor.
“You hate me,” says Ruth.
“It’s not that,” Clara says, her breath ragged. And it’s true. She doesn’t hate her mother. Not exactly. There may have been a time, a stretch of months or even years—but even then, inside the hate there was something else. Something she didn’t want to look at or think about. A bright glowing thing—a core of softness. Clara never allowed herself near it. She had worked so hard to disconnect. To release herself from the bondage of Ruth. But now it isn’t so easy. Ruth is in front of her: her mother—always her mother, forever her mother. Incandescent, beautiful, fragile, gravely ill. Ruth’s smell hasn’t changed in fourteen years, as if the mingled scents of the darkroom—the developer, stop bath, and fixer—have become a part of her.
Clara breathes her in. Tries to exhale her out. Tries to hold on to herself. Without even realizing it, she is gripping the sides of her chair.
“Mrs. Dunne?” A nurse looks around the waiting room. “Ruth Dunne?”
A few startled looks. An older man in a dark overcoat. The bald girl in her twenties. Ruth’s name may be known, but physically she is anonymous. She is rare among photographers for never—not ever, not even once—having taken a self-portrait. It is Clara whose face is known. As she pushes Ruth’s wheelchair through the waiting room, she keeps her head down. No one would think it, anyway. She has lost her girlhood face, along with its Ruth-like softness. No one will ever again look twice at her in confused recognition. Samantha is the one. The uncanny likeness passed down from one generation to the next. My dear, you’re the spitting image of that girl in Ruth Dunne’s early photographs. The daughter. What was her name? Not Sammy. She can’t think about Sammy now.
The nurse leaves them in an examining room. What is there to examine? The X-rays Ruth has brought with her, large manila envelopes tucked into an aqua blue Metropolitan Museum shopping bag, should tell the whole story. Clara looks around the small, brightly lit space. She’s never been good at small talk, but all she wants to do right now is keep the conversation with Ruth skimming along the surface of things. She searches for a subject. The weather—Cold out there, isn’t it?—the news—Did you read about those two guys who were arrested at JFK? Anything to keep Ruth from pushing harder, probing deeper.
But there’s nothing much to see, nothing to distract. No piles of well-worn magazines in here, no hardy plants, no striped neon fish swimming madly around faux-coral reefs. Only a life-sized diagram, tacked to the wall, of the human body. An acupuncture chart. In the sinew, the muscle, the nerve endings from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes, hundreds of small red dots are shown, each one illustrating a particular pressure point. Crisscrossed lines run throughout the diagram, linking one pressure point to the next and the next—patterns of energy. The arm bone is connected to the leg bone after all.
“So tell me about seeing this guy on TV,” Clara finally says, filling the silence. The low buzzing of the fluorescent light overhead could drive a person crazy.
Ruth wraps the blanket around her shoulders, even though the room is already warm, the clanging radiator emitting a dry oppressive heat.
“It wasn’t so much Dr. Zamitsky as some of his patients,” she says. “He cured one woman of pancreatic cancer, using green tea colonics. And another woman, with the same kind of lung cancer as me—she’s been in remission for six years now—he sent her to Mexico, where they use a special mud—”
“Special mud?” Clara repeats.
“They heat it up, like a compress,” says Ruth.
Clara tries to keep her face expressionless. What does she know? Green tea. Special mud. Anything is possible. Particularly when it comes to Ruth, who has spent her whole life defying the odds.
A knock on the door, and then immediately the door opens, and Abraham Zamitsky, M.D., walks into the examining room. He’s holding Ruth’s paperwork in his left hand, his right hand outstretched.
“Mrs. Dunne,” he says.
“Ms.,” Ruth says faintly.
Clara can’t tell: Is Ruth insulted that the doctor clearly has no idea who she is? To him, she’s just another Upper West Side lady with cancer, or perhaps a housewife from Larchmont who has driven into the city after seeing him on TV. He’s the famous one in this room. Illness, the great leveler.
“This is my daughter Clara,” says Ruth. As if Clara is not thirty-two years old. As if she weren’t about to introduce herself.
Zamitsky shakes Clara’s hand. She’s not sure what she had been expecting. She’s surprised by how young he is. In her mind, a holistic oncologist would look something like Abbie Hoffman, with a curly mane of hair, a bushy beard, maybe an amulet strung on a leather cord around his neck. But Zamitsky is maybe thirtyish, wearing a good suit. He’s bald—his head shaved in sympathy for his patients. His brown eyes are clear and limpid, radiating good healthy habits. He probably cleanses himself with green tea and takes Mexican mud compresses preventatively.
He gives Ruth’s chart a quick read.
“I see you’ve been to Dr. Abelow,” he says. “Ah, and Dr. Krellenstein.” He reads farther. “And Dr. Chang.”
Ruth watches him carefully. Clara remembers this look. Her mother’s eyes—large, unblinking, as dark and impenetrable as a telephoto lens—taking everything in, processing it with her quick, visual intelligence.
“I brought my X-rays,” Ruth says.
“Let’s have a look,” says Zamitsky.
He pulls the X-rays from their manila sleeves and attaches them with clips to an illuminated board. Six
films in all—two of each lung, and two of another part of the body—liver? Spleen? Clara isn’t sure.
Zamitksy stops in front of each image and examines it closely, as if it were hanging on the wall of a gallery. Clara can’t possibly tell, looking at the X-rays, where the malignancies are located. That shadow on the far left? The white swirly material in the center? They look like the night sky, seen through a telescope. Bits of cosmic matter. The images are nothing more than abstract harmless shapes, if one hasn’t been taught how to read them.
“Ah,” Zamitsky says, tapping the last of the six films with the eraser end of his pencil. “And has Dr. Chang discussed these with you, Mrs. Dunne?”
“No,” says Ruth. “Dr. Chang’s office just received them from radiology yesterday, and I asked for them to be messengered directly to me.”
“Why is that?” Zamitsky raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t feel comfortable with Dr. Chang,” says Ruth. “His receptionist was rude to me, and I…”
She falters. And in the space left where her words trail off, Clara knows that the reason Ruth has left Dr. Chang—as she has left the doctors before him—is that he’s not telling her any news she wants to hear.
Zamitsky continues to tap the X-ray on the far right with his pencil.
“Here’s our problem, Ms. Dunne.” He waves the pencil around a wide area on the film, which looks grainy to Clara, full of hundreds of tiny specks. An aberration. An image left too long in the developer, breaking apart.
“What are we looking at?” Ruth asks.
“Your brain,” says Zamitsky.
Ruth sits up straighter in her wheelchair.
“Can you see all these pinpoints in this area here?”
Ruth stares at the X-ray, uncomprehending.
“I don’t see—”
Zamitsky points with his pencil. “They’re hard to see, if you’re not used to it; they’re very small, like grains of sand.”