by Kim Green
“Hi, all. Hungry?” I say.
Micah and Taylor nod, suspicious. I crack the oven; eau de pot roast wafts out. My kids look at each other, then at Phil, who still has a sheaf of exam papers clutched to his chest.
“I also made Micah’s favorite mashed potatoes with the baked garlic and chives. And green beans with those little bacon bits. See?” The pot lid comes off, enveloping us in a pork sauna. I wink at Tay. “I got green tea ice cream!” I hear myself singsong, vaguely aware that there is something frightening about my behavior but powerless to stop it.
“Mom, shouldn’t you be resting?” Micah seals the pot. Bye-bye, bacon.
I shrug. “I just felt like making dinner. I have something to tell you guys. Something great.”
“It’s just . . . We didn’t expect you to be, uh, cooking and stuff,” Taylor says.
“Why don’t you all sit down and get comfortable?” Before they can argue, I strip Phil of his papers, briefcase, and jacket and give him a wifely peck on the cheek. He leans over. I swear I hear him sniff my breath.
“Are you all right?” he whispers.
“Hon, I couldn’t be better.”
I steer the three of them into their seats and proffer the platters I created. Between the giant sunflowers, their faces peek at me, creased with worry. Oh well, that’ll change when I drop my bombshell.
Back to biz as usual.
“Isn’t this nice?” A droplet of sweat tickles the trough between my breasts, itching against the synthetic fabric of my minimizer bra.
Raquel, don’t be a freak. Just get on with it.
“Guys, you’re not going to believe this, but . . .” Why is Micah looking at Phil like that, like there’s a feral bobcat loose in the house and nobody else has spotted it yet? “I don’t have, you know, um, cancer.”
Silence.
“They mixed up the test results. It was all a big mistake.”
I smile, expecting glad cheers, backslaps, relieved tears.
Something . . . considerable.
Nothing.
“They mixed them up with somebody else’s. I know, I know. . . it’s hard to imagine, but I guess even computer networks aren’t perfect. Dr. Meissner told me today. Isn’t it terrific?” I stab my fork into a pile of green beans with a satisfying crunch. A weird giggle escapes me, as disconcerting as a public fart.
Taylor gets up, crosses the room, and kneels beside me. She grabs my hand and stares into my eyes. “Stop it, Mom. Just stop it!” Her whole body issues a rolling but subtle spasm, as if it’s coming from so deep inside her, it’s emerging diminished.
Huh?
“Dad, I think Mom needs to go to bed,” Micah says. He says it almost leisurely, as if he needs time in between words to locate the stun gun.
Phil stands up. The logo on his white T-shirt, advertising some off-Strip hotel in Vegas, filters through his gray dress shirt. What does he do with the dozens—hundreds—of plain white undershirts I buy him? Why does he think it’s okay for the world to know he’s too cheap to spring for the Bellagio or Mandalay Bay?
“I don’t need to go to bed! Why aren’t you listening to me?” I don’t mean to cry out, but nonetheless, green-bean paste dribbles from my lips. Embarrassed, I wipe it away, which only results in the formation of a big veggie mouth booger that I am forced to deposit on the tablecloth because I have forgotten the napkins. “I’m trying to tell you something important! Something important to me! You never listen! You just. Never. Listen.” I realize I am whining.
“Quel, come on. You’re tired. You’ve worked so hard on all this. And it’s great, it really is. But you just want to go to bed, right?”
I feel myself nodding. They’re right, of course. I do want to go to bed. Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t want to go to bed after slaving over a hot stove and, like, arranging flowers for four fucking hours? That doesn’t mean I have cancer. Or that I’m crazy.
Does it?
I let them lead me to my fluffy cell of a room because, truth be told, a goodly part of me does not believe what Meissner said or what I’m saying, either. Who ever heard of someone getting cancer—then ungetting it? Perhaps I imagined the conversation, or maybe this is all another dream, my version of Dallas and the Sue Ellen yearlong nightmare that won’t end until somebody important gets shot for ratings.
When I wake up, there is breakfast on a tray on my bedside table, and the room is ruddy with morning sun. My neck feels stiff, as if I dreamed too deeply to make the usual nighttime movements. I lift the platter lid, which some resourceful person has created out of an only slightly dingy hatbox, and sniff: steaming eggs crisscrossed with shredded cheddar and chives, chubby strawberries, and a fragrant sprinkling of bacon over the eggs that was probably rescued from last night’s green beans. Still, I have to give it an A for effort. I lean over the accompanying pink and yellow mottled rose and inhale deeply before drifting back into the mound of pillows. Delicious. A rose! A freakin’ rose!
Shit, I’m dead.
I have entered the hereafter. I must have. How else to explain the otherworldliness of my current circumstances? Breakfast in bed. Uninterrupted sleep. Absence of needy humans. Starched sheets. Quiet. Good smells. These are not things that happen to me on a regular basis.
I wiggle my toes, wondering at the authenticity of sensation, the clarity of sight. I’d envisioned something more ephemeral, gauzy, a simulation of real life, minus the bad parts, of course. Breezy islands and starlit nights. Gentle slap of angels’ wings. Skinny jeans. Sweeping flights over the unknowing heads of my loved ones, me impishly dropping hints of my presence— a whiff of perfume here, a ghostly reflection there. Piles of M&M’s. Good books. Viggo.
“Mom?”
Taylor pokes her head into my afterlife bedroom. The living spend so much time enticing the dead to return to the corporeal world; nobody warns you (the dead) about them (the living) dropping by.
“You were a wonderful daughter,” I say. I want her to think of me fondly after Phil remarries.
“Uh, thanks, Mom. Do you need me to feed you the eggs now?”
I breathe in the unmistakable aroma of laundry detergent, which seems to be emanating from the basket in Taylor’s arms.
Laundry. Basket. Taylor?
Yep. Definitely dead.
“Everything smells so real,” I whisper.
Taylor drops the basket and kneels next to me. “Mom, Dad and Micah and I talked after you went to bed, and we want you to know we’re going to do everything we can to help out right now. You have to rest, you know? You’re, like, the most important thing to us. We know you’re going to get better.” Her pretty brow puckers. “Mom, where do you keep those little bags that make the clothes smell good? I couldn’t find any, so I squeezed in just the littlest bit of that Tom’s toothpaste. It smells, like, almost the same.”
Toothpaste. In the dryer.
Alive. Fuuuuuck.
I sit up. Then I instruct my daughter on the particulars of all things domestic, laundry-compliant, and lavender-scented. I eat my eggs, which have cooled under the hatbox and taste somewhat of cardboard. I read the style section in the newspaper. I worry. I try to decide if I really do have cancer after all, or if I am insane, or something infinitely worse.
CHAPTER 5
Night of the Living Dead
Later, I attribute it to being one of those hell-bent days. Every mom has them. The kind of days when you’re in and out of the minivan a dozen times before noon, strangling on the seat belt, racing from school to market to soccer field, flinging a batch of snickerdoodles in the oven, forgetting to set the timer, burning the batch and (unsuccessfully) substituting corn syrup for the goddamn depleted sugar when you have to mix a second batch, dropping the dog off at the vet and discovering it’s the wrong dog, returning home to find you left the garage door open and the tandem bike’s gone, stolen by some neglected neighborhood rich kid or flinty-eyed gardener, forgetting you told Carla Bonafacio you’d water her hydrangeas while they were in Pue
rto Vallarta, discovering said hydrangeas lifeless with heat, accidentally taping over Phil’s ’Niners match, thereby giving weight to his argument that we need TiVo, screening your mother’s calls so ruthlessly that she shows up at your door at 3:35 P.M., just when you’re supposed to leave to pick up the (cone-wearing, drugged, bladder-control-impaired) dog.
You know the kind of day.
I guess what I’m trying to explain is, I didn’t set out not to correct their mistaken notion that I was sick. Certainly not. How maladjusted would that be? It’s just . . . the opportunity didn’t present itself. Nor had I managed to clarify things on the committing-fraud-on-live-TV or causing-the-financial-ruinof-a-do-gooder-organization fronts. For all I know, I could be disowned by my family. I could go to jail and serve hard time without a single visit from a loving family member, with nary a care package to ease the journey between crime and a San Quentin–cured complexion. Clearly, I mishandled things the last time I tried to break through. Clearly, you can’t rush into this sort of thing. You could give someone a shock.
“Hey, Ma,” I call when my mother’s shouts that she knows I’m in there watching Maury can no longer be ignored. A little guiltily, I turn off the TV— which I’m using only to keep me company while I chop beets for tonight’s salad—and check my eyes for latent mascara circles while I trot to the door.
My mother, Minna Louise Schultz Abramson, peers at me over the waning moons of her reading glasses, which hang around her neck on a beaded string embellished by slack-breasted fertility goddesses. Ma is old-country short but has a tall voice, like Bea Arthur in The Golden Girls.
“What is it today?” she rasps.
“High school teachers who married their students.”
Ma wrinkles her small, straight nose. “You would have been lucky to marry what’s-his-name, that chemistry fellow, Mr. Profitt?”
“Why would I have been lucky to marry him?” I say, barely recalling a balding, rotund, Socratic type with a disobedient walleye that constantly slid toward the girls’ chests.
“He won the lotto a few years ago. Used his cats’ birthdays or some foolishness. Came in and quit his job the next day.” Ma nods approvingly. “Married some little Oriental girl, I think. Hair down to her tushie. They bought a place in Los Altos Hills.” She names a tony community slightly south of our own Palo Alto digs.
“Asian, Ma.”
“Okay, Asian.”
“Oriental is for carpets,” I add. “Or food.”
Ma flings her hands up in supplication. “I come over to check you’re alive, and this is the thanks I get? A language lesson?”
Ma enjoys playing the role of long-suffering mother and has been performing it off-off-Broadway to great acclaim since about the time Dad’s sperm wiggled its way toward the plump, too-tall ovum that would become me, Raquel Rose, née Rachel Schultz. It is a testament to Ma’s commitment that her enthusiasm has not diminished in the wake of my diagnosis.
Okay, misdiagnosis.
I slide the puddle of bloody-looking vegetables off the wooden cutting board into the salad bowl and try to think tactically while I hack at a stinky block of feta. Phil will be home by eight P.M., assuming he hasn’t already switched his racquetball game to Wednesdays to accommodate Ren’s latest goodwill project—performing life-or-death surgeries on needy women who, like the rest of us, suffer the scourges of saggy eyelids, collapsing jawlines, earthbound tits, and laissez-faire stomachs. Micah promised nine P.M., which really means ten P.M. Taylor. . . I realize with a hot, fleeting spark of guilt that I have no idea where my daughter is, whom she is with, or if she plans to consume an item from the vegetable food group for dinner.
I am indeed slipping.
“So, how are you feeling, kitten?” Ma says, stroking my back.
“Pretty shitty,” I say. It does not feel like a lie.
Ma takes off her glasses. Without them, squinting, she looks older, more vulnerable. She is so small, it is a miracle I baked to ripeness in her womb, all future five-ten of me curled inside her like escargot on the shell. Laurie, at a reasonable five-seven, is less of a surprise, her height the natural progression from the unwholesome Warsaw ghetto to California’s hearty breadbasket. Our mismatched heights and bodies are a symbol of the fundamental ill fit that has plagued my family since I was born, the surface sign of a schism that flows deep and decaying through our bones.
Ma withdraws her hand, frowns. “If they let you on Laurie’s show again, make sure you remind the audience to get their mammograms.” She shifts her Raisinet eyes toward the heavens, which, in my world, masquerades as a greige, lumpy ceiling shot through with très eighties gold sparkles. “She’s on television like a movie star, and she forgets the mammograms! Oy, gevalt.”
With that, the confession bubbling on my lips, the one that would have given my mother the quick, sharp, narcotic shot of relief she needs, bursts and dies, unspoken. An idea blossoms in its place: Raquel, honey, Laurie ain’t the only one who can do Mama proud.
Good Raquel: Excuse me?
Naughty Raquel: Do I need to spell it out? You raised bank for cancer research, girl. Not Laurie. You.
Good: I suppose that’s true, but . . .
Naughty: But nothing. You want to talk truth? How about Mama Schultz always treating Laurie like the cat’s meow and you like the dog’s dinner?
I couldn’t argue with that. It’s almost as if Ma doesn’t know I’m a breast-cancer-community icon, able to leap enormous budget shortfalls in a single telethon.
I also noted that Ma’s perennial pride in Laurie, golden of touch and fair of head, has even managed to cut through any despair she might have had over my death notice.
Naughty Raquel: Stop feeling sorry for yourself and slice me a hunk of that cheese. You’ll see, Ma’s gonna be impressed.
Ma hands me the olive oil. I pour it on and toss the salad. Rice vinegar. Lemon squirt. Dash of salt to provoke Ma. I am sealing it in Saran Wrap when Naughty Raquel pipes up again.
Glad that’s settled. Let the games begin!
“Get you something else to drink, hon?” Phil grasps my jersey-covered elbow lightly and dusts off the secret Phil-and-Quel smile that had been pulled from rotation these last few years, until the (mis)diagnosis. He is being so solicitous. Tonight. After the party, I’ll tell him with a flourish, like a general returning victorious from battle. I’ll share the astounding Wendy Yen–Jailbait Meissner love story as background, and we’ll laugh together. Then we’ll have delicious, dirty, celebratory sex. Relief sex. “Thank God I’m Not Going to Be a Widower and Have to Do My Own Laundry” sex.
I tilt my head to say no to his offer of a drink and try to remember not to slump. In heels, at parties, I tower over all the women and many of the men. Supermodel mystique to the contrary, my height, swarthy coloring, and ampleness have always made me feel awkward and mannish, a Valkyrie among Tinker Bells.
“Raquel, you’re looking lovely tonight.”
I lean over and accept Ross Trimble’s dry kiss. With what I am realizing is a side effect of being diagnosed with cancer— obviously not contingent on having cancer—I sense that my husband’s boss knows about my diagnosis. The extra-intense eye contact, the sympathetic just-longer-than-normal brush of hand on upper arm, the ember of interest burning behind heavy-lidded, pale brown eyes that has never been there before, as if I’ve acquired a patina of charm that was lacking before my cells ran hopelessly amok.
“Happy birthday, Ross,” I say.
He shrugs. “Come with me a moment. I need your artistic opinion of something.”
I acquiesce and let Phil’s slim, distinguished-looking, slightly older, and filthy-rich employer lead me down a sleekly modern hallway barely lit with wall sconces.
In my experience, private high school staffs are populated with two types: wealthy trust-funders who fancy their teaching or administrative duties a natural and pleasurable extension of a privileged life; and idealists or lapsed idealists who can’t hack it in the loftier, cru
eler pool that is university-level academy.
Ross Trimble is the former. Phil is the latter.
Ross stops in a small room lined with books and a discreet computer system. Two prints have been tacked to the wall over the daybed, which is, to my surprise and slight embarrassment, rumpled and emanating a distinct air of debauchery.
“I’m thinking of acquiring a Miró. I can’t decide between these two. What do you think?”
In my postgraduate days, before Micah came along, I briefly curated a small surrealist collection to underwrite my sculpting. I distinctly remember imagining future versions of my life, which typically featured me, an enormous studio filled with ground-breaking conceptual pieces, and lots of sycophantic admirers. What they did not include: mommy-and-me mall walks, gassy husbands, and mothers who accuse their daughters of being quitters when life gets in the way of career brilliance.
The two paintings—prints, actually—are of nudes, one standing, a jumble of curvy, slightly anatomical-looking limbs topped by a brunette bun. The other is seated, holding a mirror, slouched and plump. Something about the way her knees come together seems inhibited and relatable.
“This one,” I say, pointing at the seated nude. “She’s softer, more real, more accessible. . . see how her shoulders hunch over? She’s trying to shield her breasts—” I realize I am speaking too personally and abruptly cut myself off.
Ross gazes at me warmly. “That’s what I was thinking, too.” Then he does that thing with his eyes, the one where you can tell someone wants to touch you but is heroically restraining himself. “Raquel, I hope Philip knows what a lucky man he is.”
Death has made me a winner like nothing else I ever did prior.
Over the years I have jettisoned all but a few house rules, freeing myself of ballast so that I might float, unconstrained, into the expected delights of the empty-nest years. One of my few requirements is that everybody appear for Sunday-night dinner. A proper dinner, with the TV off, music—Bud Powell or Charlie Mingus or, if we are feeling racy, something Latin— seeping gently through the speakers, loving communication flowing between parents and offspring in which the pertinent details of our busy lives are exchanged and contemplated.