Live a Little

by Kim Green

  “Breathivores?”

  “Yes,” he says patiently. “We drink green tea, a little water-based vegetable, a little seaweed. It’s a beautiful, clean way to live. Of course, it takes some getting used to. But it sure beats breast cancer.”

  “What?” Did he say what I think he said?

  “Mrs. Rose, you’re going to have to make some lifestyle changes in order to detoxify your body. I don’t want to shock you, but the cancer’s the least of your problems. It’s your body’s way of telling you—shouting at you, actually—to wake up and start taking care of it. You should listen.”

  “What are you saying, that I gave myself breast cancer?” A vision of the other Raquel Rose pops into my head. Is she, in true desperation, also consulting a series of quacks, trying to “cover her bases” with visits to bossy herbalists and deranged chiropractors? Are they insulting her—our—dignity with such misguided accusations?

  “We’re all responsible for the health of our own bodies,” Dr. Minh says.

  “So if someone gets beheaded in a car accident, that’s their fault?” I can feel heat browning my cheeks.

  “Unfortunate, but there are cycles to these things. We’d all benefit from a little consciousness-raising, a little self-reflection.”

  “That should be challenging without a head.”

  I stand up. I think Dr. Minh can tell I’ve had enough without reading my pulses, because he stands up, too. I flex my calves to my full height, which is quite a bit more than his.

  “Mrs. Rose, if you change your mind, please feel free to contact me. Given a little time, you might see things differently. I mean, your colon’s so blocked right now—”

  My latent rage boils up and over. “Shove it up your ass, you vegan freak!” I mutter, the magenta glove of bougainvillea along the path muffling my words as I run.

  “You should have seen his face. I thought he was going to plotz.”

  “What could he plotz, a tea bag?” Sue giggles, her hand coming up in a habitual gesture to hide her teeth.

  “What a hypocrite. The prick was lecturing me on healthy living while he practically diddled his assistant.” I gave my friend an edited version of why I was at the acupressurist/ sadist’s in the first place. I was not worried about Sue seeing me on Laurie’s show before I could talk to her personally; she turns on her ancient black-and-white television for one purpose only—cooking shows—and that’s only when she’s depressed.

  Sue pads over to the pantry. “Chocolate-chip peanut butter or backpacker?” she calls, naming my two favorites of her restaurant’s arsenal of delicious baked goodies.

  “What do you think?”

  Sue hands me one of each, and I stretch out to full length on one of her Adirondack chairs. Susan Banicek’s funky little Victorian on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill is my absolute favorite home in the world. She’s transformed it from a warren of dim railcar rooms into a loftlike habitat that resembles a cat’s dream house, complete with exposed beams, platform nooks, and vast windows.

  “Where’s Fina?” I ask.

  “With Arlo.”

  “Ooh, I want to see her.”

  “I know. I called when you pulled up. They’re coming home from the park.”

  “Thanks, Soodle.” I lay my hand on my friend’s plump arm.

  She squeezes it and inspects my nails. “You need a mani.” Her gaze drops to my feet, long and battered in old sandals. “And a pedi.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about we go over to Mani/Pedi? My treat. They can meet us over at Klein’s after,” she says, naming a delicious delicatessen near the neighborhood nail salon.

  “Let’s go.”

  I follow my friend out the bright blue door. Sue and I have been friends since college. We met at U.C. Santa Barbara our first day. I knew instantly, taking in the pretty, curvy girl with wild curly hair, retro granny glasses, and Dalmatian-spotted suitcase, that we would be friends for life. Unlike my self-diagnostic romantic forecasts, which have been accurate only in their tendency to culminate in marriage—to somebody else, in every case but Phil—my friendship oracle has remained true.

  I’ve stuck with Sue through thick and thin. Through her parents’ divorce in college and the financial disarray that followed. Through her first, unplanned pregnancy and the abortion that ended it. Through the menial jobs and bad relationships with bad men. Through culinary school. Through the commune. Through Sarafina’s birth. Through the long drought between her daughter’s commune leader–musician father and the gentle motorcycle mechanic Arlo. Through the restaurant’s lean early months, before Sue’s unique blend of Mediterranean ingenuity and California freshness became the toast of the neighborhood and, later, the town.

  She was there for me when Ren broke up with me and pursued Laurie and I could eat nothing but jelly beans and creamy peanut butter for six weeks. When I pounded NoDoz and Diet Coke for five days to finish my thesis project, and when—courtesy of Sue’s tenaciousness and contacts—I won my first private commission. When I foundered in creative dry spells. When I married Phil. When we had the kids. When Phil dropped out of the Ph.D program and I went back to work.

  When our paths led Sue and me circuitously—me to marriage and stay-at-home motherhood in the suburbs, her to bohemian entrepreneurship and single motherhood in the city— we sought the other out like a tonic, basking in everything our life wasn’t.

  For the most part, it worked.

  “This one or this one?” Sue asks, holding up two bottles: demure pink and vixen red.

  “That one.” I point to a silver chrome instead.

  “Okay, but I get to pick yours.” She scans the rows of neat bottles and plucks out an iridescent blue.

  “Sue! It’ll look like toe fungus!”

  “No, it’ll look cool. You’ll see. It’s a good color for you. It matches your eyes and brings out your olive skin.”

  We sit down for a heavenly interlude of cleansing, exfoliating, massaging, and gabbing.

  We are just finishing up when Sue’s lover, Arlo, and daughter, Sarafina, come in.

  “Quel!” Sarafina flings her lanky six-year-old body into my arms. She smells of that scent unique to small girls, a heady mixture of grape juice, Play-Doh, grass, and string cheese.

  “Fina, watch out for Raquel’s nails, okay?” Sue admonishes.

  “It’s okay.” I tug on one of Sarafina’s tight faun-colored curls and peer into her face. The marriage of her father’s bronze skin and regal bearing and her mother’s enveloping sweetness produced a beautiful, strong-willed, sweet-spirited child.

  “Do you like my bindi?” she says with just the right amount of gravitas.

  “Yes. You look very spicy and Indian.”

  She giggles madly. With her coltish body squirming in my arms, I feel gifted and cool-mom and fantastic, Ellen De-Generes on a good day.

  “Hey, Quel. Nice to see you, baby,” Arlo says. We lean over and exchange a quick, fond hug. After I got over the initial surprise of Arlo Murphy’s intricately inked arms, grizzly-bear bulk, and grease-monkey dress code, I came to appreciate— love—what he brought to my friend’s life: fidelity, devotion, stability, and free oil changes.

  “You taking good care of my friend here?” I say.

  He chuckles. We go through this every time. “I know she deserves better than this old tomcat. But I do the best I can. The best I can.” Arlo is a good ten or twelve years older and served in Vietnam while we were still in kindergarten. He doesn’t talk much, but I know he considers himself lucky to have landed in Sue’s orbit.

  “C’mere, you big Wookie!” Sue says. They kiss passionately. The flock of Korean women around us stops filing toenails and collectively blushes.

  “Gross,” Sarafina says.

  “Yep,” I concur.

  After our nails dry, we move on to Klein’s Deli.

  “Don’t forget to leave the conditioner on her hair while you pick it out,” Sue tells Arlo as he gets ready to leave with Sarafina. “Other
wise it frizzes.”

  He nods and kisses the top of Sue’s head. Something about the way Arlo’s rawboned hand, with its row of hieroglyphic-marked knuckles, smoothes Sue’s hair makes my breath stumble in my throat.

  Sue and I watch them exit, Sarafina skipping alongside Arlo’s massive, leather-clad frame. Then Sue turns to me and fixes me with her potent gaze, which has always been as clear and resilient as gray pearls.

  “What’s going on with you?”

  Drat. The woman sees everything. Like a witch.

  “Nothing,” I say. “This salad is good. I like the cranberries.”

  The gray pearls glisten faintly, as if lit from within.

  “Okay, there is something,” I confess.

  She waits. Experience has proved that Susan Calliope Banicek can wait a long time for things. I don’t bother prevaricating further.

  “This is hard to say,” I begin, chewing my thumbnail. It already has a ridge in the blue polish, sort of like my life, which is unable to maintain its smooth veneer for longer than a few minutes at a time.

  “Jump in fast, like in cold water,” Sue suggests. “It’s easier.”

  “Okay. I went to the doctor two weeks ago. I mean, actually, I went earlier than that, but they called me back to get the test results, then . . .” I see my friend’s normally healthy color drain away and feel both sick and foolish at the way I am doing this. “Don’t worry! I’m fine. At least now

  I am.”

  “Cancer,” Sue whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my ever-loving goddess—”

  “Why are we whispering?” I murmur.

  “You better save this woman,” Sue goes on in fierce sotto voce as if she hasn’t heard me. “Because she’s the best god-damn friend in the world, and a loving mother, and a creative . . . creative, fuck, spirit . . . so if you think you can just do this to her, I’m here to tell you—”

  “Sue! Just listen!”

  “I won’t stand for it!” Sue nearly shouts.

  “I don’t have it,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I said I don’t have cancer.” The words make me feel a little giddy. And guilty, of course. Super guilty.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they gave me somebody else’s test results. Then they realized the mistake. She has it. I don’t. End of story.”

  “How does that happen?” Sue’s round, freckled face is stormy. “You should sue their ass! For scaring you!”

  “Well, there’s more.” I wait a moment while two construction workers with hefty guts squeeze past us to a corner table. I lean in close enough to shift Sue’s Raphaelite curls with my breath. “I haven’t told Phil and the kids yet. Or my mom. Or Laurie and Ren.”

  As I say this, I feel my face freeze in a weird parody of a smile. It’s like I’m talking about somebody else, living out one of those sad-sack stories in the National Enquirer where the one-legged guy loses his sprinkler-factory job and doesn’t tell his Dairy Queen–clerk wife and seventeen kids until after the bank has foreclosed on the trailer.

  “Haven’t told them,” Sue repeats slowly. Then her face brightens. “Hey, it’s okay, since you’re fine anyway!”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  I draw a deep breath. Clarity is everything when it comes to deception. “I told them I was sick.”

  The gray pearls cloud over. Sue is looking at me in a way that does not say friend or mutual respect or remember that time in Cancún when we screwed the Canadian Football League twins?

  “It’s just that. . . Okay, listen, I tried! I cooked dinner, and we sat down and I tried to tell them the doctors got the results mixed up, and honest to God, Sue, they didn’t believe me! They didn’t listen!”

  Sue’s face is still stormy. I see that I am going to have to dig deep.

  “Here’s the thing: The timing has been off. First Phil and the kids shanghaied me into bed. I was planning to try again last night, but then Laurie called and harangued me for, like, fifteen minutes about God knows what, and then she told me something Ma said about me and the cancer that really pissed me off, and by the time I got back to the table, the kids had taken off for their friends’ and Phil was watching the game and it just didn’t make sense to tell them then.” With great effort, I cut off the flow of word dung and just let it sit there steaming in front of us.

  “What complete bullshit,” Sue says quietly.

  “Sue!”

  “Well, it is. You just found out that you don’t have cancer, and you’re letting your family think you do? Quel, I’m worried about you, I really am. I’m more worried than if you had cancer, girl, because this is so not normal, it is scaring the crap out of me. This is sick, Quel. Really, really sick.”

  “I know.” I do. I do. I am going to tell them. It is insane to let this go on just because Laurie will lose her show, Ma’s being her usual hard-ass self who needs to remind me on a regular basis what a prototypical fuckup I am, the kids are treating me like a goddamn queen because they think I’m dying, and Phil thinks he owes me because he hasn’t fulfilled the feel-up quota since Donohue ruled daytime TV.

  I work at the knot in my throat. “Sue, I know it sounds bad, but there’s more. I went on Laurie’s show last week and talked about my diagnosis. They did a telethon and everything! They had a corporate sponsor! I had a corporate sponsor! On TV! And don’t ask me why, but the audience loved my ass—like, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of love! So there’s a lot of money on the line here, and frankly, I don’t know what to do about it. There’s this BC support group that’s getting all these programs started with the donations, and Laurie could maybe lose her job over this if they thought I faked it, plus her ratings have tanked, and if this comes out now . . . I guess what I’m saying is, it’s complicated.”

  Sue’s eyes narrow to slits. When she does this, she looks like Judi Dench, all stern and Church of England and intimidating. Predictably, I collapse under the pressure.

  “I know what I’ve done is really wrong—yeah, I know, it’s unforgivable. It’s just . . . Yeah, okay, I’m going to fix it. Tonight. When I get home. I mean, as soon as Phil gets home from the gym and Micah finishes baseball practice and Taylor is done studying after volleyball. Then I’ll tell them.”

  “You better. Or I’ll do it.”

  “You would,” I say sourly. I know she is dead serious. If I don’t tell them soon, I’ll come home one day and find her sitting at the kitchen table with Phil and the kids, everyone shaking their heads in aggrieved consternation while they plot my stay at Shady Acres and divvy up my miniature Snickers collection.

  “Hey, Sue!”

  A sleek reed of a woman slides up to our table. She has a cap of dyed apple-red hair and is wearing black from head to toe: black crocheted poncho, black tank top, black studded belt, black skinny jeans tucked into black wedge boots in crinkly, fashionably abused leather. She looks about fifty, her skin and body and voice cigarette-cured down to bone.

  “Hey, Saskia. It’s been ages,” Sue says. The women hug, and I pick at my salad, grateful for the reprieve.

  “How’s the restaurant?” Saskia says.

  “Good. The Chronicle updated our review, and it was good. They said the stacked crepes—I love this— ‘are lighter than freshly fallen snow.’”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Oh, Quel, this is Saskia Waxman. She runs a gallery South of Market”—Sue widens her eyes at me, needling me, as always, to promote my dubious (and increasingly untested) talent—“Saskia, this is Raquel Rose. We went to college together a hundred years ago. It’s so fortuitous, us running into each other like this, because I was going to introduce you anyway. Raquel’s an amazing sculptor and visual artist. She has a studio on the Peninsula and has been talking to some galleries about a show,” Sue improvises shamelessly. “You should really see her work.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Saskia has other projects going on right now,” I say
quickly. “But thanks for the suggestion, Susan.” I kicked Sue’s shin under the table, wincing as she kicks me back.

  “What are you working on?” Saskia Waxman says bluntly. The woman’s eyes are hazel and cold, with no buffer between her gaze and the mechanical precision of her thoughts.

  I feel my mind—sluggish and atrophied from so many years of nonartistic work that centered on provision of frozen food, cycling of laundry, and minivan travel—contort itself, grappling for purchase on something compelling and comprehensible to say. No thoughts coalesce in the dim space upstairs, but my mouth moves anyway.

  “Right now I’m doing a series of plaster casts of women’s torsos,” I hear myself say. “Women with breast cancer. All the women have had lumpectomies or mastectomies. I use plaster-of-paris strips for the mold and seal it in gesso, but they’re embellished with mosaics or decoupages that symbolize the, um, identity politics of breast-cancer treatment. I’ve done a couple in bronze patina and even one fountain”—the lies are flowing so freely that I almost believe I have indeed fashioned a fountain out of some poor woman’s papier-mâché nipples—“my idea is that while society focuses on what these women—we—have lost, physically, that is, the women have gained much more in the search for self than they’ve, as I said, lost,” I finish rather lamely.

  Saskia Waxman’s feline eyes glow. “This is personal, your plaster casts,” she says with calm assurance. Again, as with Ross Trimble’s awareness of my diagnosis, my not-cancerdriven sixth sense kicks in, and I know she herself has survived the disease.

  In a flash, I see the string of numbers on Living with Lauren!’s computerized pledge tracker, and I know what I have to do.

  “Yes,” I whisper. Sue’s gray eyes widen further.

  What have I done?

  My hand comes up involuntarily to stroke my long, thick wavy hair back from my forehead, as if in anticipation of its impending absence.

  “Yes,” Saskia Waxman echoes. We lock eyes like would be lovers who once made out briefly and find themselves together again in another stolen moment. After a second, Saskia manages to snap out of it and pull herself together.