Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  Angela nudges me and leans over to speak into my ear, but she’s drowned out by the klezmer band launching into “Here Comes the Bride,” clarinets wailing like they’re announcing the end of the world.

  After the ceremony Sally asks me and Angela to take her to the floating dock while white-smocked caterers prepare the tent for the reception. “I want to look at the water,” she says. We bump over the uneven ground toward the stone pathway, past the receiving line where Jill, Harris, and my aunt and uncle brush family palms.

  Angela halts the wheelchair at the top of a bluff, before the stone path that leads down to the dock. The wind rifles our hair for a while and nobody says anything.

  Aunt Lydia comes over. She seems to have recovered from her earlier episode; her cheeks are flushed and she holds a lipsticky glass of champagne and a pink-tipped cigarette in the same pink-tipped hand.

  “Well cry me a river, that was a beautiful ceremony. Those two kids, you could just eat them for breakfast.” And she could, too; she has a hungry, wolfish look. She leans on Sally’s wheelchair like it’s the railing of a ship and pats me on the cheek.

  “You girls,” she says. “Which one of you is going to be next?”

  “Next?” says Angela. Lydia tilts her head and gives her an eyebrow wiggle.

  “I heard you have a suitor,” she says. Angela looks shocked, then laughs. I think about a small cottage, wisteria vines. Two cats, named Gertrude and Alice.

  “Oh. Oh yeah, that,” Angela says. “Yeah, we’re off to the chapel any day now.”

  “You won’t forget to invite us, will you?”

  “Never.”

  Lydia catches me in her unfocused gaze. “And you, Stacey?” She leans in and winks.

  I look out at the lake and want so badly to be flying over it, just buzzing over the still water with my arms outstretched, like God, like an airplane.

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of your seks-you-ality,” Lydia says. “Your seks-you-ality is a beautiful thing.”

  “I’m not,” I say. Sally is smiling now too.

  “You know,” says Lydia, “I know the nicest lesbian couple. They live in my co-op. I could introduce you to them sometime.”

  I look at Angela, but she’s barely there, an outline of a girl looking at a lake.

  “That’s okay,” I say.

  “There’s no reason for you to be alone,” Lydia says. “There are plenty of people like you in the world. You just have to be willing to open yourself up!”

  Sally takes my hand and says she’s sure I will make some girl very happy someday. And I think she’s right but it won’t be the one I want.

  Back in the tent, our parents are already at the table. Mom is talking to a broad-shouldered man in a polo shirt; instead of the standard alligator it has a tiny gun embroidered over the heart. His hair is sandy and swept back. He has the look of an aging college athlete, with slightly leathery skin that’s part handsome and part sad.

  “Stacey, this is your second cousin Mitchell. He’s a writer, just like you.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  I’m extended a firm manly-man grasp.

  “Ah, Stacey. Aunt Abby was just telling me you have a piece coming out in Sparkle-Pony. Congratulations. I haven’t heard of it, is it affiliated with a university press?”

  “Uh. No. It’s kind of an independent publication.”

  “Cool, man, cool. Anywhere you can get your start.”

  “Mitchell has a book contract with Knopf,” Lydia says. “And he hasn’t even finished his book!”

  Mitchell smiled and waved one hand dismissively. “It’s nonfiction,” he said, “that’s standard for the industry. Not like what Stacey’s doing. The literary houses want to see product.”

  “Well I just think you kids are great,” Lydia says. “You follow the rainbow.”

  “To find the horn of plenty,” Mitchell says.

  “Exactly,” says Lydia.

  When the food arrives Mom gives it her usual benediction: “It feels good to be eating.” Angela cuts her eyes at me and leaves the table, her purse with the test still in it tucked tightly under one arm.

  The DJ puts on Bryan Adams and a few couples start slow-dancing. Dad’s holding Mom in a close embrace and murmuring into her neck. The gin and tonic she holds in one hand is dribbling onto the back of his suit jacket.

  “Come dance, Stacey,” Mom says. She detaches from Dad and starts toward me, swaying side to side and snapping her fingers like some kind of beatnik chimpanzee. She grabs my forearms and tries to lift me out of the chair. I make myself as heavy as possible without looking like I’m doing anything.

  “Oh come on,” she says, “loosen up.” She jiggles my arms, and I think about passive resistance. Mom sighs. “Kids can be such fascists,” she announces to the tent at large. I slip away as she begins to twirl like a taffeta hurricane.

  There’s a very long line outside the portable toilets. While I wait I overhear a couple of the groomsmen talking about their favourite porn star, whose name is Iona Dildo.

  “She’s off the hook,” one of them says.

  “Off the hizzle.”

  “Off the hizzay.”

  “Fo shizzay.”

  A door swings open, and Angela staggers out of a stall holding her high heels in one hand. She spies me in line, takes my elbow and steers me away from the portable toilets and outside the tent.

  “I have to pee,” I say.

  “Give me a smoke,” she says, ignoring my personal needs for the twenty thousandth time. I dig around in my purse for my pack.

  “Mitchell’s hot,” she says, lips clamped on the filter as she lights.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “He’s like forty. And he’s a pretentious twatbag.”

  “He’s thirty-two. And he is not.”

  “He was making fun of Lydia to her face.”

  “He was teasing her, gently. If she’s too dumb to catch on, that’s not his fault. Anyway he’s an intellectual.”

  “An intellectual twatbag.”

  “I’d still do him,” she says.

  “Do I need to remind you that he’s your cousin?”

  “So? That didn’t stop Bubbe and Zaide.”

  She has a point. Our grandparents were in fact distantly related. Slim pickings on the shtetl.

  “Talk to the hand,” I say.

  “Tell me you didn’t just say that.” She turns and walks toward the path leading down to the floating dock, her heels sinking into the wet grass. The melody of “Hava Nagila” floats over the trees and I can faintly hear Jill shrieking as she and Harris and their chairs are hoisted into the air. I think about a baby that looks half like Henry and half like Angela, and therefore half like me. The idea is both compelling and nauseating.

  Angela stops suddenly and I almost bump into her. “Give me another smoke,” she says.

  “Why, are you smoking for two now?”

  She gives me a condescending smile and holds out her hand. I grab it and we skid down the gravelly path together and walk out onto the dock.

  There is a certain kind of vertigo that comes from looking into deep clear water. Angela sits on the edge of the dock and as I look past her into the copper depths my eyes begin to water. I once climbed a fire escape with Henry and Angela, trying to get to the roof of an abandoned theatre on Parc Avenue. Henry went first, then me, and Angela bringing up the rear. The iron fire escape was bouncing around like something from a 1940s cartoon, jiggling in 4/4 time, and my throat started getting sticky and my eyes watered and about halfway up I just froze solid, with one foot up and my hands in fists around the railings.

  “What’s the matter,” said Henry, “are you afraid of heights?”

  “She’s afraid of gravity,” Angela said. She offered to carry m
e, and I said no, that wouldn’t make a difference, and then she offered to let me carry her, and I said “What if I carry you and you carry me, then we both get a free ride,” and then Henry shouted down from the roof, “Get an effing room already guys.”

  It’s the way a rock sticking out of the water looks like a rock, but when you look down you see you’re clinging to the tip of a mountain. You count to three, and then you let go.

  Now Angela slips off the edge of the dock, into that big empty that somehow holds her and ferries her along, her dress pocketing with air as she breaststrokes through the muscular water. Her back and shoulders glinting.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Go.

  Sweet Affliction

  All the nurses’ names end in nda: Rhonda, Randa, Amanda, Linda, Little Linda, Panda. No, I made that up. No one is named Panda, though one of Rhonda’s tunics is patterned with little pyjama-clad bears. Is tunic the right word? Probably not—it’s too close to panic, which is not encouraged in the ward. People do anyway, but quietly.

  “Look,” says Doc B. “What I’m telling you doesn’t have to be the end of the world. You should think of it rather as an opportunity for personal growth.”

  Well, I think, aha. Now we are getting somewhere.

  “An Opportunity for Growth!” was, funnily, also the title of the informational pamphlet that came through my mail slot just a few days after the BGD chemical plant opened, a few blocks down from my house. It pictured a spry fellow who was either a blob of soft serve ice cream or a frozen waterfall, with bandy legs, white gloves and a top hat. Hi, I’m B.B. Begood, and I’m the Newest Addition to Your Neighbourhood! I am looking forward to moving into the Future with You! These words, speech-bubbled, came out of his mouth. Well, I really believe in the power of coincidences. They are the universe’s way of saying Hey sister, you’re on the right track! Keep on trucking, somebody up there likes you! And so on. So when Doc B gave me the speech about Metastasis and Prognosis Poor and Recovery Unlikely, not to mention the Opportunity For Growth, it seemed like a sign. Not like a traffic sign, not big and sharp-edged and full of neon warnings. More like a subtle gesture, a twitch in an eyelid or at the corner of your friend’s mouth when you ask her how’s she feeling, so subtle you barely notice, so subtle even she barely notices. And it means this: You have no idea, but something important is going on here and you are a small but fundamental part of it. Have faith. Hold on. Or something like that.

  BGDs, I learned from the pamphlet, are manufactured molecules that are used primarily in the making of industrial degreasing fluid. Helping the Wheels of Industry Turn, as the pamphlet says. Think of it: something that never existed before has been created in the interest of progress, in making things go smoothly and without interruption. If they made BGDs for my life, I would be the first in line.

  A documentary filmmaker has been nagging me, emailing and sometimes even showing up at the ward, where Randa or Linda have to shoo her away like a stray dog. She wants to interview me for a “new project” she’s working on; something about the environment and corporate accountability, toxic groundwater, the bloom in my bloodstream—all are related. Which, you know, I wholeheartedly believe. But every time I read one of her cheerfully threatening pleas, I get a case of the squirmies. Maybe it’s her evident distaste for punctuation and capital letters: believe me this is the only way we can raise awareness of what they’re doing to people like you monsters every last one. But it’s more than that. How can I explain to her that the monsters are all in her head?

  Abby, the woman who shares my room, wants me to do it. “Make those bastards pay for what they did to you,” she tells me. Because of her nose tube, make sounds like bake. I understand her bitterness. If only she could know for sure that she was a part of something bigger, the way I do. I keep telling her she’s missing the forest for the trees, and she keeps rolling her eyes and grumbling into the latest issue of Mother Jones. She thinks I’m a wimp, but maybe she’s really jealous of the changes I’m going through. Some people have no concept of the importance of growth.

  Rhonda comes in to change Abby’s tube. “Oh dear, will I be able to play the piano when all this is over?” I say. It’s this little routine we have.

  “You gals,” Rhonda smiles. She calls me pet names that sound violent but are actually full of affection: a cut-up, a caution, the living end. I think Abby finds our relationship alarming.

  The wooded area at the end of the street where I used to live, before I ended up here with Abby, was once a landfill. Landfill is a much better word than junkyard or garbage dump—it sounds so purposeful, like hair gel or cake icing. And the land being filled was the wooded area where I would walk Cocoa Beans. Once enough used diapers and Pop Top Puppies and laptop batteries and torn pantyhose had been recruited, grass was laid over the pile like thick green linoleum, and regularly spaced trees planted on top—Siberian elm, chosen for its ability to grow quickly and in poor soil. And that was my next-door neighbour: the trees, lined up like doormen. Until the plant moved in. Things are always moving in and expanding, the new crowding out the old. Which is pretty much the situation in my uterus at the moment, as Doc B tells me.

  “Well Doc,” I say, “I guess you know what you’re talking about, you are on the right end of the catheter, ha ha!”

  On TV the other day there was a story about a man who had a genetic defect that was slowly turning him into a tree. “We do not know exactly why these things occur,” said the host, a comforting David Attenborough type, “but we can say for certain that each incidence pushes the species toward greater understanding.” Amen, I think.

  Incidentally, I believe that when you die, among other things, you get to see the Log Book. The Log Book keeps track of everything, absolutely everything, in the universe, with strict numerical accuracy. How much money you spent on presents for relatives who didn’t like you. The total volume, in litres, of lime rickeys you drank. How many people thought about you while they yanked off. And so on.

  The documentary filmmaker, a jean-jacketed woman with a silver crescent in her nose, shows me clips from her body of work, to try to convince me to “share my story.” A man, a union organizer for a coal mine, stares past the camera and speaks in a flat voice about The System, which is apparently very hard to beat. There are shots of a wasted moon-like landscape, a crumbling bungalow, a man lifting his shirt to show a scar from a bullet that grazed him on a picket line. At the end, a line of text appears on the screen, severe block letters in cinnabar red: CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY NOW! “Isn’t it a little, you know, grim?” I say. “It could use a bit more pizzazz. How about, like, a dancing cartoon miner’s pick? It could be singing that song, the one that goes ya load sixteen tons, and whaddaya get…” I sing in a gravelly voice and do jazzy hand gestures like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. The filmmaker narrows her eyes at me like she’s checking how I will look in widescreen.

  “Corporate accountability isn’t about pizzazz,” she says. “It’s about—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say. “Growth.”

  When the BGD plant first started posting its Opportunity For Growth! signs in the wooded area at the end of my street, there were all sorts of protests. Women who looked like the filmmaker except with bigger and more colourful patches on their jeans and men with beards that made them look like perverted old codgers way before their time held homemade signs with slogans like BEGOOD? NO GOOD! and NOT IN MY FORMER LANDFILL. One, surely a relic from causes past, read ASBESTOS? ASWORSTOS! I don’t know where they came from—they sure weren’t from around here. At the end of the day, a miniature school bus came and they all piled into it and drove away, leaving their picket signs and stubs of hand-rolled cigarettes scattered on the ground. Later, while I was walking Cocoa Beans around the block, I saw that someone, probably the Johansson kids, had arranged the sign sticks on the ground in such a way that they spelt out
a dirty word. I bent over and moved a couple of the sticks. AUNT. Much better.

  That’s when I noticed another woman in the wooded area. She was muttering to herself and tossing the protestors’ cast-off recycled paper coffee cups into an orange garbage bag. She was about my age, petite, dressed in a puffy insulated coat that made her look like the Michelin Man. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. She looked up at me, startled.

  “If I don’t, who will?”

  “No,” I said, “I meant talk to yourself like that. You could talk to me instead.”

  And she smiled. “You live around here?”

  “Yep. You?”

  “Moving in this July.”

  “Well,” I said, “welcome to the neighbourhood!” Cocoa Beans trotted up and dropped a sandwich wrapper with the words GUTLESS WONDER printed on it in front of her. “What a pain in the keister,” I said.

  “Yeah. But they’re not bad kids. They just don’t understand that there are bigger things than them. God knows I didn’t, at that age.”

  “You are so right,” I said. “About the bigger things, I mean.”

  “I’m glad you understand,” she said. “Like, all this—” she gestured at the wooded area in a non-specific way. “All this once would have been considered unnatural, freakish. But we adapt, we develop a new concept of normal. And we evolve, move forward.”

  “Into the future,” I say.

  “Exactly.”

  Some of the trees were showing signs of disease—pulpy orange thatches on the bark and weird noxious bulges that made me think of acne. “Look,” I said to the woman, pointing. “Get this tree an Oxy Pad.” And she laughed like I hadn’t heard in ages, before or since.

  “You are something else,” she said.

  When the B.B. Begood informational pamphlet came a few months later, I noticed a photo in the bottom right-hand corner. Shyla Cervenka, General Manager and CEO. It was the woman from the woods. The Michelin Lady. Well, I thought, good for her.