Live a Little

by Kim Green

  “I’ll send a messenger to pick up your portfolio.” She hands

  me her card. “You’ll e-mail me your address?” “Perfect.” “It’s been really nice meeting you, Raquel. I can’t wait to

  see your work.” She turns to Sue. “Darling, I want to book

  something for Jacob’s birthday.” “Just e-mail me, and I’ll talk to the reservationist myself.” “Great. See you.” We watch as Saskia Waxman’s trim backside and dark presence disappear behind a wall of matzo boxes and gefilte fish. “Fuck,” I say too loudly. The construction workers look up at me, corned beef stuck in their teeth. “Double fuck,” Sue concurs.

  CHAPTER 7

  Francis Hale’s Manicure

  The waiting room is comfortingly bland, wallpapered with smears of asylum-approved salmon and sage that smother dark thoughts, and filled with the sort of nubby-upholstered chairs that never show wear, no matter how much effluvia spills on them. Nice magazines, not random or dog-eared or germy-feeling. Firm yet caring receptionist with subtle, not tacky highlights. Kleenex for the teary. Soothing music.

  I am a nervous wreck.

  Phil is downstairs somewhere, hopefully prowling the flower shop or watching TV or sipping watery coffee in the hospital cafeteria. At any moment he could show some uncharacteristic initiative and breach the office of Samuel Meissner, M.D.—down the hall and to the left fifty feet—and unearth my moral depravity. Or he could get lucky and stumble into the restful interior of the oncology office I selected at random because I liked the combination on the nameplate: Lourdes Ruiz-Milligan, M.D. This is where I currently wait out my sentence, clenched in terror at my own audacity.

  You see, it is one thing to decide you are going to temporarily not correct your family’s misapprehension that you have cancer while you swan about raising money for the cause. It is another thing entirely to continue as if the wheels of Western medicine are churning onward with your treatment regimen. That is some kind of tricky.

  “Is this your first time seeing Dr. Ruiz?”

  I put down the Dwell magazine I was fiddling with. The woman sitting next to me is about my age, freckled and blowzy in that Shelley Winters way. Her red hair is pulled back in a careless knot. It is flattened on one side. I notice this at the same time I realize that her velour sweatsuit has the pilled, shiny look that comes from sleeping in your clothes.

  “Yes,” I almost whisper. For some reason, deceiving this woman, a stranger, presumably one with actual cancer, feels worse than lying to Phil, Ma, the kids, or Laurie’s old-lady viewers as they scratch out spidery signatures in checkbooks. I want to help this woman somehow, take her home and launder her clothes, or go to a salon for one of those blowouts so sleek you can’t help but feel important and nurtured afterward.

  “What are you here for?” the woman asks. She pops open her purse and fondles a king-size bag of nutless M&M’s. In stark comparison to all other aspects of her person, her manicure is flawless, her nails long, arched, and coated in coral enamel.

  “Sentinel node biopsy.” I have done my research. This dye test for lymph node involvement is the latest if not the greatest. It is also the best way to stop Phil from trying to come in with me, since it can be done under local anesthesia and isn’t as nauseating as chemotherapy or as momentous as tumor removal. In other words, it is the perfect way to keep Phil out of the doctor’s office and roaming the hospital, waiting for me to stumble out, frail and ripe for emotional succor.

  The woman nods and gives me her hand. “Frances Hale. Stage three, two-neu-positive, lymph-node-positive.” She takes in my wedding band. “Do you have kids, honey?”

  “Two.” Hellion One and Tasmanian Devil Two, I don’t say. “You?”

  “Five boys.” Frances Hale pauses with practiced good humor. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. The twins are mama’s boys, and the older ones are away at school. And I have some help.”

  My promise to gallery owner Saskia Waxman to show her my (fictitious) series of plaster casts pops into my mind. A bubble of excitement fizzes in my chest. I recognize the feeling as the one I used to have as an artist when I figured out the missing crucial element in understanding a piece.

  Frances Hale’s manicure.

  Those nails are that single, uncompromising act of resistance that says, You can attack my body, decimate my blithe sense of normalcy, burgle my will to do laundry, even murder my marriage, but you cannot take away my conviction that I deserve to be adorned. To be gilded. To be cherished. To be honored.

  The thoughts swirl around in my head so forcefully they nearly drive my head between my knees. Frances Hale, looking worried, taps the top of my hand with one perfect nail.

  “You get through it,” she says.

  I squint at my notes, trying to mold them into something I can express visually.

  Your body betrays you—yet you must nurture it more than ever.

  Your loved ones fail you—yet you must rely on them more than ever.

  You are a stranger to yourself— yet you prefer what you’ve turned into.

  You are dying—yet you are more aware of being alive than ever before.

  Ideas skip through my internal eye. Pride. Acceptance. Rage . . . What do they look like?

  I get to work.

  Four hours later, I push aside the pile of sketches and glance at the clock, flushed with exhilaration. Dang—two hours left to shower, throw dinner together, pack for Mexico, and make the house presentable so that Phil and Micah have something to destroy while Taylor and I are in Sayulita.

  I manage everything but the shower before Phil comes home. It’s funny how knowing you’ll soon be downing Modelos and waking up at noon makes even vacuuming rewarding.

  Phil is sitting on the toilet when I emerge from the shower, his briefcase standing sentry next to his holey tube socks. In most cases, such a picture would prompt one to inquire about a sudden attack of dysentery; Phil, I have learned over the years, simply enjoys spending time here.

  Oh, the romance.

  “Hey,” he says matter-of-factly. While I dry off, he wraps up his little siesta and takes off his shirt, rubbing it across the back of his neck, which tends to sweat. “You packed?” he says, as if the suitcase is not sitting openmouthed on the bed.

  “All set. Did you remember to get dog food?”

  “Damn.” Phil eyes the pile of clothes. “I’m supposed to meet Ren at the club in fifteen minutes.”

  “Phil, I asked you to do this one thing!” My annoyance propels me back into the shower, where I grab a wad of shed hair from the side of the shower stall. “My hair’s falling out!” I say triumphantly, nuzzling it like a house pet.

  Phil blanches. Then, without speaking, he picks up his keys and walks out. I hear the car rev into gear. It is hard to believe, but I guess he never noticed me painstakingly gathering my fallen hair, post-shower, for the past two decades, so that he wouldn’t be grossed out and our marriage would, you know, thrive.

  With a little reluctant help from Sue and an amenable Internet, I cooked up a treatment regimen. First chemotherapy. Then surgery. Next radiation. Since I haven’t yet conceived a way to fake post-surgical trauma, I’ll need to have a tumor big and vile enough to require chemo before surgery. This is called neoadjuvent chemotherapy. It is a horrible thing, but I guess it works.

  Wait . . . the hair. Emboldened by Phil’s acquiescence, I pick up his electric razor and tentatively attack a small square near my ear. Nothing happens. After a few hacks with scissors, I am good to go. Giant sheaves fall to the ground, then tufts, then nothing. I look like a kosher chicken.

  I have been told more than once that my hair is my best feature. (Let’s face it, brawny shoulders don’t earn a girl many points in this world.) Vanity must be more than insecurity plus a dash of lipstick, because I shed real tears as I check out my plucked visage in the mirror.

  Oh well. As they say south of the border, Hasta la vista.

  “It’s fucking beautiful, isn’t it?”

&
nbsp; The boyish voice snaps me out of my reverie. The combination of the sun’s caress on my bare head and the hypnotic embrace of wave and shore has lulled me into one of those fantastic fugues where the eyes narrow to slits, identity blurs into sea and sand, and crazy stuff seems more than possible.

  The person who made the remark is pretty fucking beautiful himself: medium height, lean and muscled, smooth chocolatey skin, gold-tipped silky-shaggy brown hair, and the brightest aquamarine eyes I’ve seen outside of a mascara ad.

  “I’m Duke,” the vision says. He shakes my hand.

  “I’m your student’s mother,” I answer in return, anxious to pop the bubble before he does.

  Duke smiles. His teeth are—of course— white and enhanced by a slanted bicuspid, which happens to be a particular obsession of mine. “Do you have a name, or should I just call you Mom?”

  I cringe. “God, anything but that. It’s Raquel. Raquel Rose. Taylor’s my daughter. I brought all the girls to the camp.” We have been in Mexico for three days, most of the daylight hours spent at the beach under the bright blue/green/brown eyes of the various Apollonic surf gods the school gifts us with like flavors of the day.

  “Nice to meet you, Raquel.” Duke smiles at me in a decidedly nonpitying way that makes me wonder if he has a sick fetish for geriatrics with thickish waists.

  Before I can do something unwise, unseemly, or illegal, I recline in my lounge chair and close my eyes, relishing the soft touch of the late-afternoon sun on my eyelids. Something about having a shaved head makes my skin exquisitely sensitive. Sue once got a Brazilian bikini wax and said the same thing, but I thought the kick only pertained to depilation down there.

  “You ever surf?” Duke says.

  I open my eyes. The boy—okay, man—no, guy—has stretched his very fine body out beside me on his stomach, clad solely in a pair of ragged blue board shorts that hang from the moon of his butt as if on a coat hook.

  “Three times. In college. That was almost twenty-five years ago, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You should be.” Okay, I have officially flirted with my daughter’s ten-year-old surfing instructor.

  Duke just grins at me in that-I-may-be-ridiculously-underagebut-still-possess-the-skills-to-corrupt-you kind of way. Then he tosses his hair back and stares out to sea. It is impossible for me to discern if his gaze is vacant, because of the strong glare. I decide to be optimistic for a change.

  “Mom, can I have some money for lunch?” Taylor and two of her girlfriends, Lindsay and Savannah, have beached their boards and blocked our sun, their bodies nubile and tanned in their bikinis and rash guards. Yesterday they had their hair braided into cornrows by an Indian woman on the beach. They look like Bo Derek on Botox.

  “Your mom’s going to surf with us tomorrow,” Duke says.

  “Uh, I don’t think so.” I fish around for my wallet.

  “Moms don’t surf. Besides, Mom doesn’t like getting her hair wet. She always swims like this”—Taylor mimes a clumsy breaststroke with her head sticking up, turtlelike, and her friends laugh overenthusiastically for Duke’s benefit. Realizing what she’s said, Taylor stutters to a stop.

  I squint into the searing Mexican sun. “Maybe I will go surfing tomorrow,” I say. The girls don’t hear me; they are already heading toward the stand that sells fish tacos and lovely, sweaty bottled beer.

  “Go Mom.” Duke grins.

  “Okay,” Duke yells against the roar of the waves. “Paddle! Paddle, paddle, paddle!”

  He shoves me forward, and I windmill my arms through the water as hard as I can. The surfboard rides the crest of the wave

  for a moment, then slides down the backside, bobbing gently.

  “Damn. Missed it,” I say as I row my way back to him.

  Duke squints into the sun, his legs spread on either side of his shortboard. His chest and shoulders are dotted with salty drops, as if his skin is impervious to damp. My ribs are killing me, knees scraped raw, wax ground into my elbows, arms paralyzed from overwork. I cannot remember the last time I felt so good.

  “You need to paddle harder. I’m going to push you again. You’ll know when you catch it. It just feels . . . sweet. Then you stand up. Don’t worry about falling. You won’t. Don’t crouch. Just stand up.” Duke slides off his own board and pulls himself onto mine near the nose. He looks like Gael García Bernal, the Mexican actor with a name like a chocolate Kiss and eyes that make you want to purr.

  “You know when you’ve just had sex and everything’s all loose and easy and spent-like?” His mouth is four inches from the top of my head.

  “Oh . . . um, sure.” I ransack my memory for this sensation and manage to uncover something vaguely reminiscent of it in a compartment marked SPRING BREAK: SOPHOMORE YEAR.

  “Just channel that feeling,” he says. He scans the horizon. “Okay, here you go. That’s your wave, Raquel. You got it. Easy now.”

  Duke jumps into the water, lines me up, and gives me a monster shove. The wall of water grabs me and then I am a speck, a nothing, merged with it as we hurtle into space. My mind sifts through the possibilities and chooses one. I stand up. No wobbles. I am easy. Spent-like. As if I’ve just had great sex. I even have the presence of mind to pull my dark blue swim dress out of my crack.

  Next thing I know, the sky is gone and I am stuck in the dishwasher on power cycle. I feel the ocean bottom reach up and scrape my back raw.

  Strong fingers clasp my arm and drag me up. I explode out of the water into the light, filling my lungs with sweet air.

  “It’s a good thing you’re bald,” Duke says. “You’re really easy to spot.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Signs of Good Breeding

  I love my kids.

  Perhaps this is self-evident. Who doesn’t? What kind of egotistical harpy has children and then consigns them to the bitter trough of a loveless rearing? Often just looking at them is enough to send a spurt of adoration through my veins. The curve of their foreheads, the timbre of their laughs, even the shape of their insubordination thrill and mystify me. In their presence, I am no better than a drug addict, intoxicated by some unidentified maternal potion, without judgment or instincts for self-preservation. I am all good intentions and unappeasable need.

  Or perhaps I doth protest too much.

  There are times—I would not call them rare, perhaps infrequent—when I am convinced that my offspring thrive not because of but at the expense of, well, me. That they are the parasites to my host, feeding on my affection with the canny resoluteness of soul-eating aliens. That their ascent toward greatness fills my own place in the universe, snatches at the space left by my own dissipation, leaving me less and less nourishment as my aspirations wither toward their final puny end. (I always picture myself in a housedress at this point in the dark fantasy. The sort of worn, faded garment whose provenance is known only by Sicilian grandmothers and a few old-fashioned maids.)

  Before you have kids, parents, especially mothers, will hasten to disabuse you of your romantic ideals of procreation and especially its compatibility with maintaining some semblance of what you currently refer to as life. They use words like “sacrifice” and “dependence,” “surrender” and “spawn.” They drone on about the horrors of maternal sacrifice and end with an abrupt “But it’s sooooo great” that resonates about as profoundly as the Bradley childbirth instructor’s prediction that you will feel no pain.

  Nevertheless, there are varying definitions of sacrifice. The divergence on the subject of mom-child love is maddening. Once, when I was discussing this very topic with Ma, she told me without flinching, “You have one kid, you look into that little punim and you think, Okay, this is it. This is the great love. This is where it ends. What’s the husband next to love like that? You think, God forbid something ever happens to this kid. God forbid! Then you have the second kid. You’re surrounded by kids! Kids all over the place, turning the house into a war zone, playing their cockamamie m
usic and blabbing on the phone. They don’t listen, because who listens anymore? Suddenly, the husband’s not looking so bad. You’re thinking, As long as he’s around, we can always make more.” Ma smiled as she bestowed this great gift. “That’s motherhood!”

  I’ll be honest. My mother? Not always wrong.

  Still, I love my kids.

  Next: I love my husband.

  It is fun, after twenty years of marriage, to try saying this with the appropriate gravity, to imagine yourself choking on the rich bile of spousal passion as you once may have. If it were posed as a question—Do you love your husband?—you would feel “yes” bubble up inside your vascular cavity like carbonation in a Diet Coke. The silliness of the question is exceeded only by the pointlessness of the answer. You have kid(s). You have house(s). You have car(s). You have bill(s). You have shit(s) to deal with. The tentacles of partnered life bonding you to your husband are guaranteed to both murder the triumphant passions of early marriage and build, in their place, an infinitely less destructible set of sentiments. The fact that Phil takes me for granted these days and shows me less ardor than he does heated toilet seats does not negate this basic truth.

  The impetus for my marriage is as old a story as the love triangle that imprisoned Tristan and Isolde. No, I wasn’t knocked up. Nor was my biological clock ticking itself into a time bomb. Nobody arranged it; I wasn’t sold to the highest bidder with a chest of baubles and a gaggle of chickens. My beloved didn’t croak, leaving his brother no choice but to save me from the dire straits of widowhood. Did I wake up one day and find myself floating solo in a pool of merry marrieds? Nope. At the time most of my friends were in the same boat as me, wedded to nothing more convoluted than pulling off a successful Friday night, obsessed with our careers, warmly embraced by our first post-graduate apartments, our friends, our naked selves stripped of clingy college sweethearts. In fact, the artlessness of it all is almost embarrassing.