The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  “Phew,” my mom says when she hears the good lymph node news. “I couldn’t bear checking out of this life without knowing you were going to be okay.”

  A gaze of raccoons. A rhumba of rattlesnakes. A float of crocodiles. A rafter of turkeys. A business of ferrets. An exaltation of skylarks. Groups of animals fill the room, and I drift back to sleep.

  I haven’t seen under the bandage yet—that foreign land, that new world. It does not seem obviously gory or bruised or swollen. (The surgeon did, in fact, do a great job.) But I don’t know what it is. It looks flat, almost concave—like a lake bed where a memory of elephants once drank. It is an absence, a memory itself.

  Right now my emotions around it are waiting as if on a shelf just out of reach. Right now the focus is completely physical, almost geographical. Right now: the drain in my chest, the sore armpit, the way my shirts sag on one side.

  But there are all the other things, too—the obliterated sense of femininity, the skewing of self, the strangeness of the body. I can’t quite find the terms to understand that part yet. I guess that’s why this fact is so very elephantine right now. It’s definitely there, but I can’t seem to figure out what to say about it yet.

  So right now I train my eye on these dreamlike certainties: A cure of doctors will examine me in the morning. And in the meantime, a cauldron of thunderstorms simmers on the horizon and an anticipation of cocktails awaits some ice.

  12. Reconnoitering the Edge

  Before he was conscripted into the family investment firm, my great-grandfather Raymond Emerson worked as a civil engineer and surveyor in the American West.

  I never met him—he died the year I was born—but my dad remembers him as a strange, brilliant, unsettling—and later demented—man who lost his mind maybe because he was forced to return to the button-down East Coast establishment. Or maybe because he spent a lifetime chewing on an old lead bullet.

  My most concrete and only intimate experience of him is the house he designed and built in the 1930s on the side of a remote bluff on an island off the Massachusetts coast where I have spent every summer of my life. It’s a simple house—long and sturdy and rustic with a memorable roofline and ample porches—in a dramatic, isolated spot, with a view almost as expansive as a Western skyline. It looks like it would be more at home perched on a prairie or at the edge of a canyon than staring out at sailboats and Martha’s Vineyard.

  When I’m there, I imagine him pacing out the house site on the empty hill—thinking it through in the tall grasses, his feet learning the contours and challenges of the land. The house is clearly one designed by a man who loved the outdoors above all else, and cared less for interiors. It is a portrait of his formidable grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson that dominates the mantel inside.

  Just yards from the house there is a drop-off into the Sound that everyone in my family has come to know as a kind of defining edge—where we’ve measured our steps in the dark. Where I’ve measured the thought that in the dark there is no bluff, only me and the noise of the bluff, the luff of the end, the bellow of something else beginning.

  Although it is the family of my great-grandmother Amelia Forbes—Raymond Emerson’s wife—through whom the island has been passed down, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to the island at least a few times in his life as a family friend and in-law. I am not sure that he preferred this stark, exposed seashore to his quiet Concord woods, but he wrote his poem “Waldeinsamkeit” here. Waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine solitude and contemplation in the woods. Church in the woods.

  Like my great-grandfather Emerson, my mom only started coming here when she married into the family. But nevertheless she has always said she would like to have some of her ashes spread up on this hill. Lately I am imagining this act in more detail.

  * * *

  The other night, in a fit of irritation and optimism, I tore out one of my surgical drains, and this evening the last of the Steri-Strips un-gooed itself. Now, for the first time since the mastectomy I am free of all the accompanying apparatus—all the not-me stuff—and I feel like I can finally get a decent sense of the landscape. I am pacing it out. I am reconnoitering the edge.

  Here are my untrained surveyor’s notes:

  I hadn’t really noticed before, but the scar is a stretched S-shape—kind of a meandering river—snaking about eight inches from my sternum to just under my armpit. John sees a sideways Superman-type S. I see a lazy question mark with no dot. The whole area is numb, so tracing it with my fingers is the disorienting gap between the expected and the perceived. It is not lovely, exactly, but it is—to my fingers—the new world. I cannot stop wanting to know it better.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson of course read Montaigne, too—and revered him as an example of healthy skepticism. Skeptic—from the classical Greek skeptesthai: to search, implying searching but not finding. Not a skeptic as in a nonbeliever, but rather, in RWE’s words, “the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own foe.”

  “I would rather have a good understanding of myself than of Cicero,” says Montaigne. He writes in great detail of his diet, his bowel habits, exercise, sex, his aches and pains, his kidney stones. “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”

  “You may read theology, and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere,” Emerson writes about Montaigne’s work. “Whatever you get here shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging.”

  Relentless searching, while at the same time unattached to the outcome of whatever is discovered. John is reading in bed. I shut the door to the bathroom, remove my towel, stand at the vanity.

  The terrain around the scar seems to be treacherous in some stretches, flat in others, with a fine ridge that slopes through the shallow crater of my right chest. The skin puckers near the incision in folds that remind me of my nipple after nursing: the baby’s head lolling back, the skin of the breast newly pliable and soft. There is no scar tissue there—just a thin strand that disappears into the freckles of my chest like a line of thought that bears forgetting.

  “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive,” says Emerson of the Frenchman’s writing style. Montaigne the surgeon: He probes and dissects and biopsies the thought. Chops and stains the slide, retrieves the microscope from the shelf. Montaigne the pathologist. “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences,” says Emerson.

  My remaining breast looks as ridiculous there as I imagined it would. Vesuvius rumbling over burned Pompeii. “Death everywhere mingles with and is blended into our lives,” Montaigne writes in his forties. “Decline foreshadows its hour and intrudes into our onward course itself. I have portraits of my appearance at twenty-five and thirty-five; if I compare them with the present what a difference! How much farther is my present image from these than from my dying!”

  I have recently turned thirty-eight. The hair that pokes through my scalp is white. I am pale from the opiates, from recovering indoors. I cannot yet lift my arm. I am a ghost of myself at thirty-five, at twenty-five. How much farther? Montaigne’s famous motto: Que sais-je? What do I know? I trace the scar again with my finger. Unattached to outcome, I try saying out loud in front of the mirror.

  * * *

  We have called in hospice for my mom.

  It’s strange, because hospice is one of those words that when you say it people’s faces fall. It is a word that evokes last breaths and hushed voices. But the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by what a beautiful word it is—hospice. It is hushed, especially at the end. But it’s comfortable and competent sounding, too. A French word with Latin roots—very close to hospital but with so much more serenity due to those S sounds. (You see, I am growing increasingly fond of the letter S.)

  It used to mean a rest house for travelers—for pilgrims. And is there anything mor
e welcome to a weary pilgrim than rest?

  * * *

  Some more surveyor’s notes:

  I get the full pathology back from the mastectomy. They have found the two tumors they expected in there—along with eight centimeters of noninvasive cancer in the ducts. The sentinel nodes are negative and the margins are clear although only clear by a tenth of a millimeter. The tumors have not shrunk in any measurable way, so unfortunately the verdict on the chemo is that it just wasn’t that effective.

  Dr. Cavanaugh wants to do further pathology and consult with her colleagues for input on my case. From there I suppose we’ll get a sense of the new landscape and what to expect as we pace about in the tall grass.

  Tracing my fingers again and again over the scar, I’ve realized that something is familiar. It isn’t a Superman S—or a question mark, or even a river. It’s a path—a path I know pretty well. It’s the one that starts in the weedy cove down by the boathouse, weaves its way past the cat briar and beach roses, and starts to climb up the hill through grass thick with berries and ticks and poison ivy, curving gently this way and that up the bluff to the house where I can see just now my mother is gliding out of sight, stepping from the southwest porch in through the sliding door.

  13. Party Sampler

  On nights when John and I can get a sitter we often gather in Tita and Drew’s writing shed in their backyard with a playmate of ice and some handles of liquor and a party sampler of Pepperidge Farm cookies and John deejays us through eighties and nineties dance grooves on his cell phone and we pretend we are childless. Tita and Drew have their kids asleep in the house on the baby monitor.

  Both of them are writing professors, and this semester Drew is teaching a class of freshmen who he swears hate him.

  “I lose them a little more every time I open my mouth,” he tells us. “I told them that before they could be writers they had to go out and get their hearts broken a little bit. They looked back at me with what I can only call disgust and pity.”

  “We are disgusting and pitiful,” I say. “And broken. We are so broken we count as the adults now.”

  John, who hates to dance, pulls me to my feet when “Take My Breath Away,” starts playing and sways me in his arms. Tita and Drew do the same. We are laughing. We are tired. We are drunk.

  “Take me to bed or lose me forever,” says John. My back aches, my chest hurts, and the old chemo nausea is rising in my chest. “Show me the way home,” I say.

  14. The Toll Collector

  Benny turns six. Last year’s passions: cats, baseball, Lionel Messi, outboard engines. This year: tollbooths, windmills, livestock, and black holes. He’s a tough kid to shop for. The recommended picks on our Amazon account look like we are planning to survive some sort of road-trip apocalypse.

  During one of the several candle-extinguishing ceremonies, Benny whispers to me that his birthday wish is that he could be a tollbooth operator when he gets older and that my breast would grow back someday without any cancer in it.

  I hope for both of these things as well (kid with a job, no more cancer)—and neither of them (a less exhaust-filled job, no mutant body parts). But I’m glad these are his wishes. They are a very Benny version of what I would have wished for if they were my candles—the same wish I make every year: that everyone I love will find what makes them happy and that the universe will keep them safe.

  * * *

  John arranges a birthday surprise visit to the tollbooth in the parking garage where he works. Carl, the parking attendant, hoists Benny up into the seat and shows him the register.

  “This is where you put all the money people give you, huh?” says Benny—giant grin, swiveling in the seat. Carl has a clip-on fan in the booth and a couple of books—the Bible, a Danielle Steel paperback. Carl has told John that the Bible belonged to his father, who fought with General Patton in World War II. “Every battle Patton was in my dad was there, too, with the Bible in his pocket keeping him safe.”

  “You know I don’t get to keep any of that money, right, little man?” Carl says to Benny.

  “Yes,” says Benny solemnly. “I’ve heard that.”

  Carl shows him how to operate the lever that lifts the arm of the tollbooth. “That’s how the magic works.”

  “I just cannot believe I am only six and I have already sat in a real, live tollbooth,” says Benny as we drive away.

  Days later John tells me that every time Carl sees him now he laughs and shakes his head. “Didn’t know I was such a celebrity!”

  One day he says, “Your wife sure likes to keep her hair real short.”

  “Yeah,” says John. “Chemo.”

  Carl says, “I was worried you were gonna say that, so I’ve been praying for her every day just in case.” From then on, he tells John I’m in his prayers every time he pushes the magic lever to raise the arm, every time John passes through.

  15. Nowhere

  John hates change, and cancer is change run amok. “Can’t we please just opt out of this whole cancer thing?” he asks one night in bed.

  “Nope,” I say. “And you have to love me even more now. You’re not allowed to leave your bald, one-breasted wife. That’s very gauche.”

  “Just tell me where I’m allowed to put my hands so I don’t hurt you,” he says during sex.

  “Nowhere,” I say.

  16. Personals

  One day Ginny texts: “Here’s a new card for our collection: Thanks so much for coming to visit and fucking my husband. I needed a divorce to keep my mind off cancer.”

  The visitor in question is one of her close friends from college who has come to help take care of her during chemo. A new level of casserole bitch. She catches them in the living room one night when she gets up to get a glass of water. Ginny goes into lawyer-warrior mode. She makes them sign affidavits before they even get up from the fold-out sofa.

  I have no idea what to say. I spend days scowling at every man I see. For the first time in all of this, I can’t sleep. John sees the silver lining: “I’m really looking better and better, aren’t I?”

  I text Ginny: “You are fully entitled to slap the next person who tells you that God only gives us what we can handle.”

  The day after the divorce finalizes she writes: “I’ve decided I’m going to take out a personal ad on craigslist.” We’ve been bemoaning our post-treatment bodies. “One-boobed, mentally unstable, newly divorced, borderline obese freight train with cankles, two kids, a silver-fox butch hairdo, and vaginal dryness ISO hot-bodied twentysomething with a large trust fund and larger hands who likes long walks on the beach, intelligent discussion, and uncomfortable sex.”

  I think of a match immediately: Montaigne. His middle-aged craigslist ad (not that he was on the market—his wife glimmers into view from time to time): Straight-ish White Aristocrat/Thinker with persistent kidney stones and gout, robust bowels and waning sexual appetite, impressive book collection in welcoming medieval tower, and a passion for the Ancients and spicy food, ISO moderation in everything, long walks in unsettled woods, and intimacy with fear. Bandits, skeletons, and Death welcome. Politicians and doctors need not respond.

  The man dreaded medical inventions as much as Ginny and I do: “To be subject to both kidney stones and abstention from the pleasure of eating oysters: that is two evils in one,” he wrote. “The illness pinches us on one side; the remedy on the other.”

  The illness, the remedy. We are such fragile creatures, although we feel far more like oysters until we are dying—those rough husks.

  Like Montaigne, Ginny has always lived not far from the coast—for her: the low country down in South Carolina. On one visit, she takes me out shell collecting with our kids and I can hardly believe the bounty: The lettered olive, she teaches me, looks like a rolled bill—smooth and heavy in your palm, rarely found intact. There is angel wing, moon snail, sand dollar, and slipper. The fighting conch is a beauty—midsized and spiky, and the unrolled lip at the edge is as inviting a castle as I’ve ever seen
.

  17. Tumor Board

  Tonight my dad has invited us over to eat his famous barbecued chicken, and my mom feels strong enough to come to the dinner table. Usually she eats in the room she calls “the salon,” a room she had my dad paint a warm yellowy orange a few years back—where she can recline on her favorite couch next to the gas stove. She looks like a child in the dining room chair—a tiny version of herself, half-there at the head of the table, her legs curled up under her body, picking at her food, smiling at me briefly when I catch her eye.

  Just as we start to eat, my phone rings. An unfamiliar Raleigh number—but I know right away who is on the other end.

  “Hi, Dr. Cavanaugh!” I answer, getting up from the table.

  * * *

  Several days ago we went to Duke expecting answers and a plan following the mastectomy. Unfortunately there had been a delay with the pathology and the tumor board so we came home with neither.

  Tumor board: the term kills me every time I hear it. You’re just saying that to freak me out, I think. What is actually a group of doctors from different specialties discussing the specifics of your case together around a table sounds like a cancer court-martial or a torture tactic. You could call it a “patient review meeting.” You could call it “checking in with my colleagues.” You could call it an “exaltation of oncologists.”

  “I promise I’ll call you right after the tumor board meets on Monday afternoon,” she’d said, “But you don’t have to answer the phone if you don’t want to. You can always just let it go to voicemail and I’ll let you know what we’ve decided.”