Pauline understood immediately, as she always did. She put down the phone and yelled out to Roger, who was apparently in the next room: “You need to get Suzanne an interview for that job we discussed.”
“What job?” I heard Roger yell back.
“The one doing negotiation with the sanitation workers,” yelled Pauline.
“That wasn’t a job,” yelled Roger. “I just told you that it was hard to work with the sanitation workers.”
“And I told you that you need to hire Suzanne to negotiate with them. She has a real gift. You should have seen how she handled Karen and Iris on the playground.”
They were yelling back and forth from different rooms, and I couldn’t see why one of them couldn’t go to where the other was, especially since I knew that Pauline was on a portable phone, but apparently they liked yelling back and forth. Married people, I’d come to realize, had their own habits, and one shouldn’t interfere.
“Listen,” Pauline said to me, as there was no response to her last bellow. “I’ll have to speak to him about this and get back to you. Don’t worry, though; they have plenty of people in that office who do nothing. Derek, for example—I have no idea what he does, and I’m pretty sure it’s nothing. Another person isn’t going to make a difference. I know it’s at the taxpayers’ expense, but you can’t fix things like this overnight, so you might as well take advantage of them. Besides, you would be a real asset, given your writing and negotiation skills. So let me work on it—he always comes around to my point of view if I nag him enough.”
I believed her. Having Pauline work on something was a guarantee that it would get done. She had enormous energy that, no longer focused on a career, spilled over into all walks of life. Rose got the benefit of some of it, but so did the local Reform Synagogue, the ACLU, and her gourmet cooking group—not to mention book club. In the time left over, she managed Roger’s career. The mayor himself was known to duck out of the building when he heard she was around, knowing that if she asked him to do something he wouldn’t have the nerve to say no.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, I got a call the next day from Roger asking me to drop by the office for an informal interview. “Turns out we do have an opening in the communications area,” he said vaguely, “and Pauline thinks you’d be ideal for it.”
WHEN I ARRIVED at City Hall I was ushered into an anteroom to wait for someone to meet with me. This someone turned out to be Derek.
“I hope you don’t mind if I do the interview,” said Derek. “Roger was going to do it, but then I said I really wanted to have a chance to say a few words, given that I’d led you on like I did, and be sure that there were no hard feelings.”
I told him there were no hard feelings.
“Bathsheba and I broke up again,” said Derek, looking at me plaintively. “You might have noticed that we weren’t getting along too well at book club.”
I would have had to be catatonic not to have noticed they weren’t getting along, but instead I said, “Really? I’m sorry to hear that.”
Derek looked at me doubtfully. He clearly did not believe that I was sorry and, rather, was sure I was dying to take him back but didn’t want to seem too eager. I felt it best, given that he was interviewing me for a job, not to go out of my way to disabuse him of this notion.
“So … the job?” I cued him. “Do you want to hire me? I have excellent communications skills.”
“Yes,” sighed Derek. “I remember how well you handled the boys.”
I was obviously developing something of a reputation in the area of child negotiation, which I assumed translated well into negotiating with recalcitrant labor.
“I’m told there are problems with the sanitation workers,” I said, taking the interview into my own hands, since Derek seemed inclined to stall indefinitely on the subject of my handling of his boys. “I happen to have a special expertise in technical communication that might be useful in this area.” It had occurred to me that sanitation might come under the rubric of being technical since it was the sort of thing that people didn’t want to deal with.
“I see that,” said Derek glancing distractedly at my resume. “You look like just the sort of person we could use. I’ll talk to Roger, who of course will rubber stamp it, given that it was Pauline’s idea to begin with, and then we’ll simply have to send it by the assistant deputy mayor, the deputy mayor, and the mayor; then the personnel people, who shouldn’t object, especially when they see that this is going to help with the sanitation workers; then, the HR people and the PR people. They have to have a say, given we’re talking about something that might make the news—garbage, you know. It’s not that they’ll have a problem, but they don’t like to rush into things. Maybe a month or two, and we should be off and running.”
“That long?” I asked surprised.
“Things happen slowly here. It’s the public sector. You have to be patient.” He gave me the hangdog look that I recalled from our time together. “But it will be great to have you by my side again,” he added.
I figured that by the time I was hired Derek might be back with Bathsheba, so I nodded and let him kiss me on the cheek.
“You’ll hear from us—eventually,” he said.
Pauline called me that night to say that as far as she could see the job was in the bag, but that, as Derek had already explained, the wheels ground exceedingly slow in the public sector. “Chances are that by the time they hire you, the sanitation workers will be on strike, which will be a real challenge, since everyone will really hate each other by then. If I were running the place, it would be different,” she noted, perhaps missing the time when she did high-level moving and shaking instead of distributing juice boxes. It occurred to me that one of the benefits for men like Roger and Derek of having women like Pauline consigned to the playground was that the men could now be left alone to do things the way they wanted—which is to say, slowly and not very well.
I WAS NOW in a holding pattern. Before, I’d felt that working for the air-conditioning engineers was my fate. It was not a good job—boring and poorly remunerated—but I had no expectations of anything better. Now, however, my perspective had changed. I sensed that what I had been doing was of the past, while the future would be different, though it had yet to materialize. What was I waiting for? To be honest, I felt like the character in the Henry James story: something large and important seemed to be looming, but a job in the public sector dealing with garbage somehow didn’t fit the bill.
I have to say that what was waiting in the wings was a real surprise, but not, at least by any obvious measure, a good one. This goes to prove another of Eleanor’s dictums: “At our age, there are more bad surprises than good ones. If you want to be surprised, be prepared not to like it.” Truer words were never spoken.
My surprise came when I got around to having my yearly gyn appointment with Dr. Laurie McCormack-Stern (“call me Laurie”). Laurie, who looked to be around twenty-two despite her very long name and her degrees from Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia (a pedigree trumpeted by the many framed diplomas on her walls), discovered a lump in my left breast.
I suppose right now you’re saying “Whoa—I didn’t sign on for this.” Well, I’m sorry; I’m not going to leave this out just because it makes you feel bad. How do you think it made me feel? Even Dr. Chitturi couldn’t put her usual reverse spin on things, and said only, “Suzanne, this is not good news. But we will deal with it.” That was the best she could do, so you can imagine the amount of rummaging I had to do in Eleanor’s medicine cabinet to try to calm myself down.
Even after a few Xanaxes and a few drinks, not to mention a half-dozen Reese’s Pieces, I was still in a bad state over what the extremely well-trained but disorientingly youthful Laurie had told me: I might have a malignancy (i.e., breast cancer), though then again, I might not. And here I have to tell you something about uncertainty. You haven’t experienced the anxiety bred out of uncertainty until you’ve waited for the re
sults of a biopsy. I thought I had already suffered everything that is possible when it comes to waiting. I had waited for whole weekends at a time, for whole weeks even, for some imagined Mr. Right to call me, only to find out, after I broke down and called him, that he’d gotten back together with his venal ex-girlfriend. I had also had two excruciating weeks when I thought I might be pregnant by Roberto (the then-gig-playing deadbeat, now seven-figure lawyer), imagining a nightmarish scenario in which the baby was raised by my mother and grew up to hate me. But these periods of uncertainty were nothing compared to what I had to face now. I mean, this uncertainty was about whether I was going to die in the near future—and if not in the near future, then in the not-so-near future. If I believed in God—which I don’t except when I’m having an anxiety attack and start promising I’ll believe in him if he’ll just give me a good outcome—I’d say he’s one inconsiderate sort of guy, someone who makes those guys who made me wait by the phone while they were getting back together with their venal ex-girlfriends look like paragons of thoughtfulness by comparison.
So let me take you through this as best I can so you get the full flavor of my ordeal. First, Laurie sent me to the surgeon for the biopsy. This surgeon was possibly not entirely human. He had a smooth lusterless complexion that made him seem to be made of wax. He also spoke in a very calm, almost monotone voice, so that you might think you were being dealt with by a well-dressed robot, were it not for his waxy complexion and the fact that his eyes darted around a lot as though he were itching to get his hands on a knife. For the biopsy, however, he had to make due with a very large needle.
“Just a little pinch,” he said, injecting said needle into my left breast, “and we’ll see what we have going on.” He said this as though there might be some sort of wild partying going on in the area of my left breast, and his eyes darted around as though he were looking for a knife that he could grab and put a stop to that festivity then and there.
After the biopsy, I had to wait for the results, which is when I essentially went nuts. I even contemplated calling my mother, but restrained myself, knowing that then it would become not only my hysteria but hers too that we would need to manage. Instead, I went over to Eleanor’s and rummaged in her medicine chest while moaning that I was going to die.
Eleanor, fortunately for me, is not the hysterical type. It’s probably what drew us together in the fourth grade; we complemented each other. She stayed calm when I went berserk—or, put another way, she made irrational choices sanely, like marrying the sociopathic Ronnie, while I assiduously avoided making choices altogether and then boohooed that my life was going nowhere.
I had stretched out on Eleanor’s sofa to sob, while she fed me Cosmopolitans and potato chips with sour cream and onion dip because when you have cancer you don’t have to think as much about your weight.
She told me that I would be fine; she knew it; she had an instinct for these things.
A few days later, the biopsy returned to confirm Laurie’s suspicion that the lump was malignant.
“You see!” I wailed.
“So you have breast cancer,” said Eleanor, recouping. “Everyone gets breast cancer at some point. If you didn’t get it now, you’d have to get it later, when you might be doing something really important. This is probably the best time to get it, when you’re not involved with anyone and you don’t really like your job. You can afford to have it now.”
“But if I die, I won’t have a chance to meet anyone or get a better job,” I whimpered. “Then, it wouldn’t be a good time.”
But Eleanor insisted that my cancer wasn’t going to be serious, and even if it was—Eleanor always had a fallback plan— it was going to give me a whole new perspective on things.
“But I don’t want a new perspective,” I wailed, sprawled on Eleanor’s sofa, shoveling the potato chips and sour cream and onion dip into my mouth. “I want to live.” I had already begun imagining the slow wasting away—with that window of opportunity when I would be able to wear all those dresses in my closet that pulled around the hips—then the taking to my bed, the parceling out of my few possessions to my few friends, and the final extinction. My only solace was that in the movie, Susan Sarandon managed to look better and better the closer she got to death.
“You can borrow Wordsworth for company,” said Eleanor, proving to me that she was indeed a true friend, since as I have already explained, Wordsworth served her as the canine equivalent of Prozac.
I assured her tearfully that borrowing Wordsworth would not be necessary. I would simply visit—as long as I had the strength. Then she would have to come to me, even though my apartment was much smaller.
“Don’t be silly,” said Eleanor. “You’re going to be fine. You’ll lose a little weight, meet some cute doctors, get a new lease on life—it’s like going to a spa, except with chemo.”
I can’t say Eleanor sold me on the spa idea, but I did calm down considerably when, after going under the knife of the waxen but wild-eyed surgeon, it was discovered that my cancer was contained to the left breast, that none of the dreaded lymph nodes were involved, and that I was “hormone positive” (hormones being in general a real nuisance, but when it comes to breast cancer, apparently, you want them). In other words, the waxen, wild-eyed surgeon, having gotten the chance to wield his knife, had cut out the cancer, and, as a result, my prognosis was pretty good.
That, at least, was the opinion of the oncologist, Dr. Farber, to whom the surgeon referred me. This individual, occupying the last stop on the cancer train, so to speak, had a thick beard, possibly to make him appear more venerable given his relative youth but which, instead, produced a costumed appearance, as though he had dressed up as a doctor for Halloween and was about to go out trick-or-treating. Dr. Farber discussed my cancer with a jaunty air, which I suppose is understandable, since when you deal with malignant tumors all day long, you are bound to get a little heady when you stumble on a case that isn’t a guaranteed death sentence.
“If you’re going to have breast cancer, this is the one to have,” Dr. Farber announced.
“What does that mean?” I asked suspiciously.
“It means you have a good prognosis.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that your cancer tends to respond well to treatment.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means there’s a good chance of preventing it from coming back.”
We went on like this for a while, and when I finally pinned him down, I learned that my particular cancer had about an 80 percent cure rate—in other words, pretty good, which is, when you think about it, the story of my life: blight and misfortune, but of a manageable, relatively harmless sort.
Still, there was an additional issue that had to be addressed with regard to my pretty good cancer before the dancing in the streets could begin.
“There’s a test we need to give you if you’re an Ashkenazi Jew,” Dr. Farber informed me, flipping through my chart. “Are you an Ashkenazi Jew?” He framed this as a question but his tone was more on the order of: “I assume you are an Ashkenazi Jew.” He could obviously discern my Semitic lineage, despite the fact that I had far less of the Kaplan nose than the Davis knees—but then, I could discern his through the disguise of his Halloween beard, so we were even. When I acknowledged that I was an Ashkenazi Jew, he told me I would be obliged to take a “Barack test”—at least, that’s what it sounded like, and for a moment I thought he was telling me that he only treated Jews who supported Obamacare (which might seem bizarre, but in New York you couldn’t rule such things out).
As it happened, however, he’d said “Braca,” not “Barack,” which is how you pronounce the BRCA test used to ascertain whether you have a certain gene, common in Eastern European Jews, that lets you know if you are likely to get more of whatever cancer it is you have (and let’s face it, cancer, even if it’s pretty good cancer, isn’t something you want to have more of). I spent two weeks popping Xana
x (I now had my own stash) before I learned that I did not have said deadly gene, which meant, in a nutshell, that my pretty good cancer was going to stay that way (though of course, as Dr. Farber made sure to tell me, to protect himself from liability, there were no guarantees).
With my BRCA test out of the way, Dr. Farber and I met again to address my treatment regimen. He explained that I would be given twenty weeks of chemotherapy, followed by five weeks of radiation, and, to top things off, five years on the oral medication tamoxifen to prevent recurrence. Wonderful stuff, tamoxifen, with the one drawback that, while taking it, one could not, under any circumstances, get pregnant. Dr. Farber explained this precisely and relentlessly: “There are less good cancers that don’t respond to tamoxifen, which means that some women may have a poorer general prognosis but a better chance to procreate. You have a better general prognosis and a poorer chance to procreate.” In short, even my pretty good cancer wasn’t going to cut me any slack.
YOU’RE PROBABLY ASKING yourself where my mother was in all this—a good question, and one that was on my mind. Part of me had wanted to pick up the phone and wail to her as soon as my gyn had found the lump; but another part of me, the rational part, knew this wasn’t a good idea. To get my mother involved would be to add a whole new layer of drama to my ordeal. She would have promptly usurped my breast cancer and made it our breast cancer, which meant that she would have hauled me to every cancer mecca in the country, consulted every specialist that her friend’s son, some big-cheese urologist, recommended, and looked into every hare-brained protocol that she had read about in those health-food magazines. The very thought of her co-opting my breast cancer and all the exertion that would ensue made me want to take to my bed right then and there.
Fortunately, I was not able to succumb to contacting my mother since she was off on a cruise. It so happens that the over-fifty-five community where my mother lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, goes in for strenuous activities that remind me of an Outward Bound program, and their latest excursion was a monthlong jaunt to Athens, Istanbul, and the Greek Islands. However at odds the Greeks and Turks have historically been, I could at least thank them for, together, diverting my mother from meddling with me. Eventually, I knew, she would return, and I would have to tell her, which would result in tempestuous scenes in which she would berate me for the months in which she could have been worrying about me but wasn’t. But that was in the future. For now, I could concentrate on my pretty good cancer without having to contend with her concentrating on it too.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 11