by Kim Green
“What special guests?” I ask Laurie.
“Oh, just a few experts.”
“Therapists?”
“Well, not really.”
The first notes of “Raquel” tinkle over us. Laurie ignores me and readies herself to go on-air.
“Hello. I’m Lauren White, and this is Living with Lauren! For those of you just tuning in, we’re talking to Raquel Rose, a woman who pretended to have breast cancer for almost a year.
“Raquel, what do you want now, more than anything?” Laurie says.
“I wouldn’t mind entering the witness protection program.” Small redux. Big laughs.
Laurie grins. “Besides that.”
“I want to apologize. Not just to my kids and my husband and you and Ma and everyone in our family, but to all the people who supported me during this, uh, misadventure. Jean and Kendall and all the ladies from the awesome support group”—I inhale deeply and pinch my thigh brutally, just in case a nervous giggle tries to emerge— “Women Expunging Cancer of the Breast Because Life Endures. That’s WE COBBLE, and they’re wonderful, funny, brave women, and they meet every week in San Francisco. And Saskia Waxman and everybody who bought or reviewed or supported my work in any way. And my friends and neighbors, especially Sue Banicek, my best friend, my rock.”
I follow Laurie’s lead and turn directly to the camera. “Sue, I know you’re watching even though you’re mad at me—Sue thought I had Munchausen syndrome, but really, I’m just an idiot. Anyway, Sue, I just want to tell you that I love and admire you so very, very much. There aren’t many people in this world who inspire us to be our best selves, and you’re mine.” My head hangs slightly from the weight of the truth. “I abused that trust when I asked you to lie for me, and I know now how very wrong that was. And I’m sorry I said bad things about Tamarind, because anyone with a taste bud knows your apple-stuffed pork loin is to die for”—I turn to the audience—“which is why I once ate four of them, and that was just for lunch!” Laughs. “That’s Tamarind, people, and it’s a hot little restaurant on Potrero Hill.
“And, let’s see, my doctors, Dr. Sam Meissner and Dr. Minh, because they were nothing but professional throughout”— why not throw Minh a bone, since he’ll be on the crapper for the next three days after that hot dog—“and really, everyone whom my lies touched. And hurt.”
I take a deep breath. “Laurie, I’m glad I came on today. It wasn’t easy, and it means a lot to me that you were willing to take a chance on me, especially after my actions on your show and how I deceived you.”
“Raquel, this seems like a good time to read you a message I have here from the Living with Lauren! team, all the producers and technical personnel and stylists and interns who make it happen every day.” Laurie smiles at her people. If someone told me to bend down and smooch her butt on alternate cheeks right now, I would.
“‘Dear Raquel. We know how much courage it takes to admit a mistake to so many people, not to mention your loved ones. You are not the same Raquel we admired when we thought you were a cancer survivor: You are so much more than that, even. We believe in second chances, and we know that your example will help others face their personal demons and move their lives forward in more constructive, productive directions. We wish you the best and hope you return to spend time with us again soon.’”
“That’s”—I am too choked up to speak—“that’s too much . . .” There’s no other way to describe it: I am bawling.
“Raquel, if you’re up to it, I’d like to bring out some very special guests who want to talk to you.”
I assent through my tears and then nearly faint, because the special guests walking uncertainly through the curtains are Phil, Micah, and Taylor.
The fam.
In an extremely Maury-ish move, I leap to my feet and fling myself into the arms of my exceedingly grown-up-looking children, who—blessed be me!— hug me right back in front of everyone. Somehow the microphone attached to my slacks pops off during the melee, and Shiny has to run out and reaffix it. Unfortunately, I am unable to sit still due to the flurry of embracing, and the mike picks up the resounding rrrriiiiiipppp of my butt seam splitting as Shiny, Raquel, and too-snug pants move in three different directions at once.
“Oh my God!” You’d think Shiny Pony had never seen a woman in a pair of tightie whities that say PHIL’S MEAT DEPARTMENT.
I stare into Phil’s wolfish green eyes. “It made me miss you less,” I explain.
My husband raises my hand to his lips and kisses it perfectly—dryly and full of pent-up passion, no tongue.
Before any of us can react further to the horror, Cleo— who, as far as I know, has never trod the stage during a broadcast— waltzes out like Princess Diana, mincing and waving, and— this has to be one for the books—removes my pants on live TV, replacing them with a pair of sweatpants. Upon glancing backstage, I realize that the provenance of the sweats is none other than Boss of Shiny Pony, who is standing there blushing furiously in a pair of faded boxers, his skinny, hairy gams poking out like ectomorphic palm trees.
Laurie digs deep and finds her aplomb. “Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it? It’s not every day we have a guest in her underwear—especially, uh, those underwear.” Mass hysteria. Laurie speaks loudly and firmly. “I’d like to welcome Raquel’s family to the show today to hear their side of the story. Phil Rose, Raquel’s husband, is a high school math teacher. Phil and Raquel have been married for twenty years. Phil and Raquel’s children, Micah and Taylor, are a freshman in college and a junior in high school, respectively.”
Everybody nods. Phil, I realize, is still holding my hand tightly in his, just like the guy on Maury who still claimed to love his wife even after she came back from her Florida vacation with FFF breast implants and a new face. Somebody must have helped dress Phil today, because in addition to a very sleek charcoal suit and lavender shirt that brings out the color of his eyes, his shoes are shined, and he’s had his salt-and-pepper hair mowed into a youthful spikiness that does not say Mel’s barbershop.
There is no mud brown anywhere on his person.
Micah, whom I haven’t seen since he left for school at the end of August, is as collegiate and self-assured as I could have dreamed. His hair is a little longer and darker—no surfing in Ann Arbor—and he’s wearing his team’s soccer sweatshirt. Taylor has not changed since our last biweekly visit, except she has parted her chestnut hair down the middle and let it fall in natural waves, like mine, instead of blowing it fearfully straight. Her legs underneath the modest pencil skirt are long and brown; they will perform well in focus groups with just about everybody except the violently jealous.
“Phil, tell us what those first days were like, when you thought you could lose Raquel,” Laurie says.
Phil glances at me and gives my hand another squeeze. “The news was a shock. A brutal shock. It’s hard for me to explain how difficult it is to accept something like this at first. It just doesn’t seem real. One minute your life is normal, and the next this bomb has dropped. You don’t want to accept it, because there’s a strong sense that everything else you rely on will start tumbling down. There’s a sense that nothing is as it seems, and frankly, that is extremely frightening.”
Laurie turns to Micah. “Did you feel conscious of having to support your mom, or were you thinking mostly about yourselves and the effect it would have on you?”
“We were really upset. My mom and I may not always see eye to eye on things”—quick grin, which I lap up like cream-top milk—“but she has always been the center of our family. Despite what she says, she’s the one who holds us together. One time she went away to a spa with her friend Sue for the weekend, and we almost burned the house down trying to cook bacon. And nobody could find the checkbook, so the bills were late. And the dogs escaped—one of them ate our neighbors’ flowers that had just been treated with weed killer, and almost died—so you see how it is without her. It’s terrible. When she told us, I felt sick to my stomach
, as if everything was, like, tilted. I was angry, too. I didn’t want her to be the one who got it. I wanted it to be somebody else.”
Laurie smiles at Taylor. “What about you, Taylor?”
Taylor glances at Phil. “I was scared. What was going to happen to me? How was I going to deal with school and things without my mom? I thought about her being in pain, being bald and sick and getting operated on and everything, and I almost freaked out.” Tay starts crying a little, and I reach out my hand. She takes it.
“As we know, Raquel did not have the disease, but she neglected to inform you of this for almost a year. How did you feel when you found out she lied to you?”
I shrink in my seat and start to sweat again. Watching their sweet, worried faces, I cannot believe I really did it. I am a
maniac, I think. I should be put down, like a dog with two legs.
Phil clears his throat. I can tell this is going to be ugly, but something in me seeks the punishment, relishes it. I try to convey this to Phil with my eyes: Pull no punches.
He gets it. “I couldn’t believe she had done this to our children. It was so far off the scale of what a reasonable person would do, I even wondered if she was mentally ill. I was appalled. I wondered if I really knew my wife at all, or if I’d been sharing a life with a stranger all these years.”
“I didn’t want to ever see her again,” Micah says.
“I thought she hated us.” Taylor.
“That’s understandable,” Laurie says. “Do you feel different now?”
Micah raises his hand. “I do. I guess it’s because I, uh, learned some things in the past year. I started to understand what it’s like to have a secret eating at you, to hide who you are from people you care about. I thought a lot about Mom and how her life was before this happened. It’s not like I’m making excuses for her or anything, or that it justifies what she did, but I understand a little better what it does to a person to feel like you’re living a lie. Especially when it started out, you know, innocently—it wasn’t her fault they got the test wrong and she went on TV and everything.” He gets up and comes over to me. Phil releases my hand. Micah and I hug, a big, comfy, delicious, forgiving hug that does a lot to make me feel like the cells of my body are rejoining, forming a whole again, something I can live with, maybe even happily.
This is really, truly the best day of my life, I think.
Micah places his hand firmly on Phil’s shoulder. “I’m gay, Dad. I’m sorry.” He turns to the crowd. “I know this show isn’t broadcast in Michigan, but I just want my teammates to know I’ll be back for this weekend’s game against Northwestern. Go Wolverines!” he howls. Everyone cheers.
I check to see if Phil is going to collapse, but he just sits there, a glazed look on his face.
Taylor raises her hand next. “Nobody’s perfect, okay? And anyone who thinks they are is just a douche. Mom, I’m sorry I was so hard on you. I wish I hadn’t been. I was really mad at you, but I’m not anymore. You took care of me my whole life, and you’re a good mom.” She faces the crowd. “I thought about pretending I was pregnant so my dad would come back home to live with us. How lame is that? Although it probably would have worked, since my parents were already sleeping together anyway”—she frowns—“but I don’t recommend it or anything. Also, to anyone out there from Tater who’s watching, Biter Caldwell has the puniest—”
“Phil,” Laurie interrupts quickly, before her show implodes due to profanity and generalized tackiness. “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”
“Uh, I bought some of Raquel’s pieces to get her shows moving,” he mumbles.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
“I said I have something to confess, too. I bought a few of Raquel’s works anonymously, so that people would start taking her seriously and the galleries would know they’d made the right decision to show her work.” I feel my face burn. I can’t tell if it’s from affection for Phil or consternation that I wasn’t the bona fide popular genius I thought I was.
I think it’s the affection.
“We’re in over our heads financially,” he explains. “That’s one of the things we always argue about.” He squeezes my hand again. “It was just to jump-start things. I only bought two.”
“Oh, Philly.” I don’t know what to say.
From out in the audience, a voice booms. “I knew there was bovine growth hormone in the school milk, but I let ’em put it in anyway, ’cause it was cheaper. I’m Eliot Abramson of Abramson Integrated Foods, Raquel’s stepfather. Proud stepfather, I should say. I agree with Taylor. Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I’m sorry.” Eliot sits down, banging his bony ass on the upright flip chair in the process. His “goddammit” reverberates through the room. I don’t think this family will ever grace the Living with Lauren! studio again, if Laurie can help it.
Ma stands and peers down her glasses. “I’m Minna Louise Schultz Abramson, Rachel and Lauren’s mother,” she says in her Bea Arthur rasp. “I’m so proud of both my girls. You carry them inside you all those months, you give them the milk from your breasts”—oh, Ma, for God’s sake— “you’d lie down on train tracks for them, and still, you have to let them fly free, let them make their own mistakes. It’s a mother’s curse . . . What did I want to say? Oh yes: I’ve always told everyone I met my second husband in the doctor’s waiting room—that’s Kolodnick, over at Stanford, by the way, the man’s a wonderful doctor, and he’s single, and he’s a mensch, ladies!—but anyway, actually, we had an affair years ago, when my first husband—God bless him—Stuart was still alive. It was just the one time, mind you, but I’ve always felt guilty about it. El and I agreed it was a bad idea to break up our families, but when we met again by chance all those years later, we knew it was fate.” She grabs Eliot by the T-shirt. They kiss passionately, two shriveled little Jews in matching black stretch pants. The crowd goes wild. I try to remember if I have a panty liner on under Phil’s tightie whities, because I think incontinence is only a giggle away.
Laurie’s eyes are closed. For a moment I’m scared she’s the one having heart failure. She’s always been the normal one in our family, and thus the one with the lowest tolerance for Clan Abramaschultz’s shenanigans. For perhaps the first time ever, I see what Ma was talking about when she characterized Laurie as more vulnerable than I; with more conventional success to lose, she’s always been a little less free to make mistakes. Suddenly, I feel the weight of all that implies for Laurie—along with a surge of gratitude for what was doubtless a lot of heated explaining and convincing on the front end of this deal.
As I’m reaching out to steady my sister, she waves me away and speaks. “Since this seems to be confession day, I’d like to get something off my chest that’s been bothering me for years. Everyone: I’m infertile.” She glances quickly at the crowd. “That’s no secret. I’ve even done shows about it. But it’s my infertility—and my inability to cope with it—that led me to do something terrible to someone I care about very much. Something I’ve always regretted.”
Laurie stands up as if offering herself to her fans as sacrifice. “My secret is, I was so jealous of Raquel’s ability to have beautiful children that I once intercepted a letter to her from a foundation informing her that she’d won a grant to serve as a resident visual artist.”
“Not the Headlands Center for the Arts?” I’d always had a strange, inexplicable feeling of loss about that one, but the lack of a formal response—even to reject me—had so damaged my confidence that I’d never again applied to another program.
Laurie nods gravely.
“I won that?” I know it’s ridiculous, but instead of being furious or sick with betrayal, I feel gratified to have beat out such grand competition for the prized residency. A memory of myself plucking out the smiling newsprint eyes of the winning Stinson Beach snack-bar painter—she of the Scotch habit and laundry list of food allergies from Ross Trimble’s dinner party—floods my brain. I am suddenly quite happy.
&n
bsp; “It was lying there on the counter when you brought the mail in one day,” Laurie explains, sounding miserable. “You went to the bathroom. I read it and stuffed it in the bottom of the recycling.” She sniffles softly. “Please, will you forgive me?”
I put my arm around her. “Given that I might or might not have had sex with your husband, I’d say we’re even.”
Epilogue
(One Year Later)
Have you ever wondered what you’d do if they told you that you weren’t dying? Not like, someday you’re not going to die. Imminently. As in today.
I used to think about it periodically. Lately, though, I’ve been too busy. Between the book tour to promote Sick of It: How Opting Out Can Help You Opt into Success and my latest show at the LACMA and private commissions and taping new episodes of Living with Lauren & Raquel!, I don’t have time to watch Desperate Housewives on TiVo, let alone brood about big life questions that really don’t matter much to me anymore. Also, in spite of the fact that not dying certainly qualifies as the less morbid side of death, it’s still a relatively gloomy topic, and I’m trying to keep things light and positive for the baby.
Baby?
Yes, baby. What, you thought I was done with all that procreation stuff just because I’m forty-four and counting and my kids not only have drivers’ licenses but five tickets between them?
You thought wrong.
I’ll admit it: Being knocked up at this age is a whole different ball of hemorrhoids. If someone had told me beforehand that the indigestion, swollen ankles, bleeding gums, and pesky zits I endured in my twenties would revisit me in my forties, I’d have run screaming for the nearest empty nest. I’ve even had restless leg syndrome, if you can believe it. Restless legs! Afflicting me, an avowed believer in death by exercise. The nerve!
I can’t complain, though. After all, it was my decision. I guess the temptation of having Ren’s baby never really fled the coop completely.