by Kim Green
Micah pushes Taylor aside and folds his five feet eleven inches into the crook of my arm. I am fairly sure that the last time my offspring hugged me willingly was 2001, when our first family dog, Pickle, was laid to rest in a patch of rosemary. Nearly purring, I inhale my children’s gamey teen scent, stroke their silky skin, lap up their delicious need. It is pure bliss.
And that’s when it comes to me: Maybe, now that I am dying, it is time to live a little.
CHAPTER 2
Waiting to Expire
“Mom!”
The cry cuts through my calm, the cloud of misty heat billowing around me, three handfuls of bath salts and a really good life escape plan featuring me, Viggo Mortensen, and a catastrophic earthquake that wipes out three quarters of the population, forcing all—even the perimenopausal—to wildly attempt procreation for the cause.
Mom.
How such a simple, monosyllabic word can be stretched to three parts, I don’t know; its unique, eardrum-piercing delivery is one of the unexplained gifts of childhood. What I do know: Whatever semblance of peace I manage to achieve through sensory or narcotic means, a good strong “Mom!” is guaranteed to destroy it with the exuberant finality of a SCUD missile. It’s like the pool guy said when I suggested that, in the future, he leave his stash of weed at home instead of enjoying it on my front porch: Dude, don’t harsh my mellow.
Reluctantly, I raise myself out of the tub, one of those boxy numbers from the sixties that lacks both neck rest and overflow drain. I hate it; it’s number 531 on my list of domestic insults. A river of water surges over the side, gathering in the grout-filled moat between bath and floor. I should soak it up immediately, before it turns into green mold. Then again, green mold is number 847, so I wouldn’t classify the issue as pressing.
“I’m coming!” I yell.
“ Mah-ah-ahm!” Taylor bellows as if she did not hear my piteous response.
I grab a bath sheet—fluffy! still sort of white!—off the rack and towel off vigorously. I should probably aim for vigor while I can, before death—preceded by chemo, social isolation, mastectomy bathing suits—claims me.
Robe on, slippers AWOL, I wander in search of the summons. It doesn’t pay to dawdle; they get antsy when you take too long. Once I overheard a woman at the dry cleaner’s liken her family dynamic to sled dogs jostling for raw meat. I can relate.
Micah is in the kitchen. In front of him, on the counter, is a row of whole-wheat tortillas, fanned out neatly, like crop circles. He is busy scooping refried beans out of a can and piling shredded cheese on top. Afterward, he will roll them up with a squirt of habanero. It is his favorite midmorning snack: the fart rocket.
“Have you seen Taylor?” I ask him.
“She went out to the garage.” Micah stops midwrap and turns to me as if just remembering I have an oft-terminal disease. Absorbing the ferocity in his eyes, I think, not for the first time, I can’t believe Philly and I made this.
“Mom, I’m quitting golf,” he adds.
“Why would you do that?” True, it’s not his main sport— that’s soccer—but the dream of Tigerish endorsements and a job that justifies sunscreen dies hard.
Micah grimaces. “So I can take care of you. You’re going to need help after the operation . . . and, you know, the other stuff.”
This is unprecedented. Three days ago Micah agreed to help me wash the garbage cans—after I threw the spaghetti dinner I was making against the wall, cried, and threatened to revoke his driving privileges.
“Mike, that’s sweet of you to offer,” I manage to say, “but you don’t have to start changing your life around for me. I want things to stay the same as before. I’m sure things are going to be just like they were before. I mean, after I get better.”
But what if I don’t?
A finger of unease trails down my neck.
Willing myself not to scream, I shakily fill a mug with coffee and add a dollop of whipped cream and six or seven sugars and carcinogenic sugar substitutes. It occurs to me that I no longer have a need to fear them, so I throw in a couple more.
I set the mug on the counter next to a fart rocket. “I suppose I could use a little help around the house and stuff, but it’s not your job to take care of me anyway, it’s—”
Phil walks in. His tie is broad and rumpled, with a stain in the middle like a third eye. The patch of eczema on his knuckles is raw and red. It gets worse when he’s stressed or annoyed with me. The last time his hands looked normal was August 2004, when he returned from a three-day fishing trip with the neighborhood husband posse. Whatever the skincare benefits, there is nothing sadder than a paunchy middle aged man with a beer cozy and a half-empty cooler of dead spawning salmon.
Panic clutches my throat. With Mr. Primetime in charge of things, we’d better order that tombstone now.
“How are you feeling?” Phil sounds uncharacteristically syrupy, oversolicitous, maybe even guilty. Perhaps it has also crossed his mind that the source of my sickness is his beloved toxic weed killer, though I expect he is too callow to admit it.
He and Micah are both looking at me. There is something almost reverent in their expressions. It’s as if I have, by getting sick, become more important, more commanding, more present, than I was yesterday. I can see that they are really surprised by this development. Like, with another whole person in the room, they are fretting over how they are going to get enough air to breathe, enough space to occupy, enough room to navigate their lives.
“I’m fine,” I snap. Through the laundry room, the door to the garage is ajar. I can hear rummaging that is presumably Taylor making more work for someone—me—to clean up at an unspecified time. After a nice round of radiation, perhaps.
I tug my robe tighter around my waist and storm out of the room before fury executes a bloody coup on my emotional state. Taylor is indeed in the garage. She has managed to unshelve six boxes and rifle through all of them. The floor is littered with old paper, bedraggled Halloween costumes, mismatched gym socks Phil won’t let me throw away, a plaque with the gold leaf flaking off. Last year, when I finally tackled the garage, I’d indulged the bright idea of organizing our lives alphabetically: “H” is for Health Insurance, Holidays, Honors. I was proud of the scheme at the time. It seemed so rational, so clearheaded. That changed. Names of things, I came to realize later, are oblique, subjective, elusive. Who the hell knows if something is called a bank statement (“B”) or a monthly balance (“M”)?
Now nobody can find anything, even me. I see that I should have sorted our mess by emotional state. It’s always easier to remember how something made you feel than the actual fact of it. Thus, I’d have slotted the Lake Tahoe vacation photos into a “Happy” folder, while Phil’s abandoned dissertation would be filed under “Grim” and the 2003 taxes tucked neatly into “Suicidal.”
“Mom, where’d you put my junior high yearbooks?” Taylor’s forehead has a dewy sheen. Even for an athlete, undermining your mother is hard work.
Hmm. Try “I” for “Ingrate.”
“I think they’re over there, in that white bin,” I say instead. “What do you need them for, anyway?”
“Linds and I are trying to figure out if Quinn got a nose job the summer after eighth grade. She says she didn’t, but I remember it being bigger.”
Supposedly, Taylor, Lindsay, and Quinn, along with three or four other girls who attend the H. Arnold Tater Academy, where Phil teaches with skill but without political aptitude, are best friends. The horror of Taylor’s statement tells you something about the state of comradeship in suburban America and why raising a daughter in today’s world is a thankless job.
I nudge the holey socks into a pile. “Well, maybe Quinnie’s self-conscious about it. If you’re going to tease her about it or judge her, why should she tell you? She’s probably afraid you’re going to act like little bitches and sell her out to the whole school for a few laughs.”
Taylor’s eyes widen. Her lips are parted slightly, like a trans
fixed toddler’s. Before I can backpedal—“I don’t know what got into me, honey. I’m sure you’d never act like a little bitch, nor would any of your darling friends. Plus, it’s not really a very nice way to describe someone, is it? Even if she is a little bitch, I mean”—Taylor’s shoulders jerk slightly, and she starts burbling.
“Oh, Mom,” she says. Tears pool, making her look even younger than her fifteen years.
“Oh my God. I can’t believe I was going to do that. I’m a total bee-atch. It’s just—Linds and Quinn were ragging on me about spring break, and I couldn’t stand it anymore”—her eyes dart toward the washer, where a tangle of jockstraps and sports jerseys circles—“I know it sounds bad, but I just wanted them to stop picking on me. They treat me like shit.”
“Don’t say ‘shit.’ ”
Taylor nods. “I can’t believe you’re really sick, Mom. You seem so normal.”
“I am normal, Tay,” I say calmly.
Raquel, don’t be a shit.
“Dad said—”
“What did Dad say?” I suppose the discreet meetings—the ones about how to carry on after I dissolve into a husk of my former strapping self and, eventually, join Pickle under the rosemary— have already begun. I wonder if Phil has surveyed the range of available divorcées and widows and chosen a replacement yet.
Taylor nervously flicks her ponytail. “He said it doesn’t make sense to talk about it until you get a second opinion.”
“You’re getting a second opinion, right?”
“Meissner’s the best, Laurie. It is Stanford, you know.” I say it a little proudly, as if I’d gained admittance to graduate school instead of chemo.
“You said he was young.”
I shrug. “I think he was second in his class at Harvard Medical School.” The diploma hung, crooked and dusty, over the big-ass oak desk, broadcasting that Meissner was too busy fighting the crime of cancer to bother with ambience.
My sister leans forward on her Laura Ashley–style floral lounge, radiating the slightly manic style of caring that has made her a local celebrity. “Rachel,” she says in her classic compassionate purr, “you need to cover all the bases. You need to mount the fight of your life. I think you should see another oncologist, and a naturopath, and an O.M.D.”
“Raquel.” I know it seems petty, but why can’t a family chock-full of brainy lawyers, doctors, and CEOs remember that I changed my name legally back when I still had a waist?
“Quel, I think you should see an oncologist, a naturopath, and an O.M.D.” she repeats, her voice even.
“What’s an O.M.D.?”
“Doctor of Oriental medicine.”
“Oh, like an acupuncturist.”
“Eastern medicine has been healing people for literally thousands of years, when our people were still running around in loincloths and slapping on leeches. When I was studying with Xia Chi-Hong at the Center, I personally witnessed him cure several terminal cases who’d been written off by Western doctors.”
When I was studying at the Center. . .
Spare me.
My sister is one of those insufferable people whose lives sprout magic the way the rest of ours breed boredom and regret. Lingerie model (okay, so it was just catalogs, but still), chief executive officer of her holistic fitness video empire, personal coach, successful guru on local television. . .
The list goes on. If that weren’t enough to screw up the most secure, accomplished sibling—and we all know I’m far from that— it gets worse.
She married my guy.
With the ironic timing of those who deserve to be entitled, the onetime love of my life, Loren “Ren” White, glides into his family room right after I drop the bomb. Polite skeins of gray have just begun gilding his wavy mass of golden hair. Aristocratic bearing. No paunch to speak of. Real life-size muscles.
Warm hazel eyes. Full lips ready with a tension-shattering
quip.
God, how I’d loved him.
“Jesus, Quel,” he says, and then I am folded into my brother-in-law’s embrace. His chest, gift-wrapped in tennis whites, feels like a premium extra-firm mattress, sans pillow-top. After a respectable ten seconds, he releases me and enfolds Laurie, who tilts her highlighted head aside so he won’t muss her hair. I watch them, not twins, exactly, but indisputably complementary, what with their blond manes; lithe, naturally toned physiques; and born-to-the-manor carriage. They even have matching names (Lauren and Loren), which is why we call one Laurie and the other Ren.
I don’t hold this against them. Much.
Laurie frees herself. Ren’s beautiful hazel eyes are gratifyingly damp.
“I’m calling Xia in Beijing,” my sister says, brushing aside my reluctance, as per usual. I can see gears meshing in her head, transforming her from the host of the Bay Area’s leading healthy lifestyle show, Living with Lauren!, into the humble integrative health-care student who mastered Mandarin while becoming Xia’s star pupil, beating out hordes of native Chinese and a handful of hairy-armpitted Europeans in the process.
“Okay.” I have to give in. I have twenty minutes to get to the school to pick up Taylor from cheerleading practice. It’s funny how these types of mundane duties continue in the face of my impending demise.
Ren grasps my hand in both of his. Compared to his lean, smooth, manicured ones, mine looks like a fifteenth-century washerwoman’s, chapped and broad and designed to withstand prolonged contact with lye and the rigors of crude sex acts performed under less than luxurious circumstances.
“You’re going to beat this thing, Quel,” he says.
Not sure if this statement requires a response, I mumble something unintelligible and discreetly check out Laurie’s new red-lacquer Chinese butterfly cabinet, which must have set them back a pretty penny. Ren’s hands are warm. If I concentrate— which I do—I can almost remember the feeling of them cupping my nineteen-year-old ass. As a matter of fact, I recall it better than the feeling of owning a teenage ass, which tells you something about the flame in my torch.. . .
“If there’s anything we can do—taking the kids, driving you to the doctor, hiring someone to make dinner and do the cleaning—just let me know. I’ll take care of it. Christ, I can’t believe this is happening . . .” Ren’s voice trails off, empathy filling the silence.
Ren White is the only man I’ve ever met who can say these types of things without sounding like a secretly gay soap-opera hero. He even makes me want to be a better person.
Laurie smiles at him in sympathetic synchronicity. Better person or not, I want to kill them both.
I swing the Sienna into the parking lot at the north end of Big Basin Redwoods State Park at 5:46 P.M. I’d dropped Taylor off at Lindsay’s, where the girls were ostensibly going to study for their trig exam. Mikey had called after soccer practice to say he’d grab dinner at Ronnie’s. And I’d fulfilled my sole culinary responsibility already—scribbling “fettuccine alfredo, add peas” on a Post-it and slapping it on the fridge so Phil would be sure to open the correct bags of frozen foodstuffs.
I slide out of the car and inhale the brisk damp scent of California redwoods and shaded water. It is the sort of bright, cool light the Bay Area is famous for, igniting everything green and wet into pearly iridescence.
Based on what I’ve read, I should want to be alone right now. Alone with my thoughts. Which are (presumably) deep because I’ve just been leveled by The Diagnosis. Given free tickets to the exclusive yet undesirable cancer club.
The problem is, being alone is making me nervous. No, wait: panicked. Untangled even briefly from the threads of mutual need and ridicule that comprise Rose family relations, I feel ephemeral and temporal, a substance that dissolves quickly under threat of space and quiet. These days, those feelings are too close to nonexistence for comfort. It’s ironic, really, because if someone had told me three days ago that a one-hour solitary walk would provoke anything but the most delicious flush of liberation, I would have called her nuts.
; Swallowing dread, I lock the car and strike out blindly for the trail. My plan is to walk the challenging three-mile loop around the reservoir. The one I’d sworn I’d circle daily the last time I flunked out of Jenny Craig with an extra fifteen pounds buttressing my waist. My current goal is not thinness, exactly, but the glory of a thin epitaph: May God grant you eternal rest, dear (skinny) Raquel.
“Raquel! Raquel, is that you?”
I lift my head and stare into the horizontal sun, tipping my navy old-lady visor to shield my eyes. I am enveloped by a cloud of noxious, lollipop-scented after-bath spray. A millisecond later, a tangerine helmet head and white sweat suit with gold lamé stripes assaults my field of vision.
“How you doing, sweetie?”
Rochelle Schitzfelder grabs my shoulders and pulls me against her ample bosom briefly. Rochelle is sixty if she’s a day, can pass for fifty-nine after dusk in heavy fog, and runs the local JCC board like a cavalry platoon. I know it is infantile, but every time I see her, I issue a quick, silent prayer of thanks that I’m not one of those unfortunate Jews forced to bear a name with “shit,” “fish,” or “wiener” in it.
We deliver the usual platitudes about how great the other looks, how thin the other is, how busy and exhausted we are, how challenging it is to meet the needs of our genius-athlete offspring, and what a pain in the ass our husbands have become.
“Did Micah get his acceptance letters yet?” Rochelle says.
I nod. “A couple of UCs, Michigan”—I tweak an imaginary piece of lint from my jacket in an attempt to play down my (almost tacky) level of satisfaction— “and Princeton.” I happen to know Rochelle’s youngest, Larry, is, at twenty-four, in his (second) final year at a small state school up north known mainly for its alcoholic recidivism rate. Thankfully, Micah has delivered the goods.
Rochelle frowns. “You’re coming to the party on Saturday night, right?” She folds her hand around my arm. Her nails look like calcified slabs of lox.