by Nina Riggs
After cuddling him for fifteen minutes, I struggle to get off the floor—I’m in my last cycle of chemo and my body aches and my back has been bothering me on and off. My dad gives me a hand and the Muppet lies down on top of my feet. The kids nuzzle his belly. John and I exchange hopeful looks.
“I noticed your head,” says Tony, addressing me directly for the first time. “You look like my wife. Ovarian cancer. It’s been one hell of a year. Almost lost her a couple weeks ago.”
He tells me their dog is responsible for finding the cancer. “Wouldn’t stop sniffing this spot in her abdomen. One day, he almost attacked her there—leaping on her and punching her with his nose—and she ended up in the hospital. Sure enough, doctors found a tumor the size of a grapefruit.”
“Amazing,” I say. “Dogs sure know how to take care of us when we need it.”
“I think you all found the right one,” says Tony. The Muppet and Ellie are sniffing something together under one of the pews. We adopt him.
We discuss names that night on the drive home. I want to call him Montaigne.
“Let’s not be assholes,” says John. We settle on MacDuff.
15. Twilight Zone
One Saturday afternoon in fall, my dad pulls into our driveway on a red and black motorcycle. I’m standing in the yard and I don’t realize it’s him at first with his helmet on.
“I did it,” he says, taking the helmet off but making no move to get off the bike. He’s bought it from a retired cop out in the county. It’s a Honda Shadow, in beautiful shape, and it comes with gear—luggage and chaps and gloves and multiple helmets. I can tell right away this must have been a death pact with my mom: “Over my dead body,” she must have said. “Okay,” he must have agreed.
“Want a ride?” he asks.
I hoist myself onto the back and put my arms around his waist and we head straight north out of town, up past the old defunct Revolution Mill and toward the windier roads that snake through the northern reaches of Guilford County. I rest my helmeted head on his back and feel the sun warming my arms and legs. My body feels young and someone is burning leaves in their yard and the rumble of the engine means there is no need to talk. Grief, I think. Sometimes it is not dark or crazy. On the way back into town we pass the hospice building, where several weeks after my mom died my dad and I sat together in stiff upholstered chairs crying to a twentysomething-year-old grief counselor with a handshake like a silk scarf to whom we’d been referred after my mom’s death.
My dad told her he’d been binge watching old Twilight Zone episodes.
“Sometimes it’s a little much,” he said. “Like I can’t tell what’s real and what’s on TV.”
“I can totally see that,” I remember she said. “Maybe just don’t watch so many episodes at a time? But otherwise, it’s normal. That’s what I like to remind people. Everything you’re feeling is completely normal.”
16. Symmetry
Dr. Cavanaugh doesn’t want me to have breast reconstruction at all.
“That’s a survivor issue,” she tells me. “We’re not there yet. And I don’t want your immune system focused on anything except fighting cancer.”
It makes sense, but I really miss being symmetrical sometimes. I stuff my bra with a little breast-shaped hand-sewn cushion that Benny dubs the Pink Critter when he sees it sitting on my dresser.
Pink Critter is lumpy and prone to awkward bulging, though. And then one day MacDuff hops up on our bed illicitly, finds Pink Critter there, and devours it—just a few pieces of wet batting left in the hallway as evidence.
Benny is devastated: “Poor Critter! He was so soft and useful! I’ll never forgive that dog!”
John calls a dog trainer and I call Dr. Cavanaugh’s nurse to ask for a more permanent solution—maybe something MacDuff will be less inclined to eat. Dr. Cavanaugh writes me a prescription for a breast prosthetic and tells me to go talk to Alethia in the gift shop down on Level 0 of the cancer center.
* * *
Tita comes with me. We find Alethia not so much in the gift shop, but in a windowless room behind the gift shop—a room of her own stacked with boxes, file cabinets, racks of specialty bras of all shapes and sizes and materials, and drawers upon drawers of breast “forms.” All the bras have sewn-in pockets where you can insert a breast form on either or both sides.
Alethia greets us like she’s been expecting us for a lifetime, hugging us both to her own bosom—by far the most impressive breast-related item in the room.
“Welcome!” she says. “Let’s find you a breast!”
She tells me that according to my insurance, I get to pick out six bras and a breast form. Black, white, beige—easy. A strapless. A sports bra.
“Do you want something lacy and sexy?” Tita asks. I think about John’s gaze falling on me, undressed. My body. My carved up, asymmetrical body.
“No,” I say. “Not really.”
I choose a second black bra, with a small bow and the slightest sheen.
For the breast forms, we poke our fingers into different degrees of density, different shapes. They all feel like something between a memory foam pillow and a balloon.
“The new ones are waterproof,” says Alethia as we browse. “And really keep their shape nicely.”
We are giggling and cupping them in our hands. We have no idea what to pick, what the best option is to get the right curve. I ask Alethia to choose for me. The one she picks comes in a fancy square box with gold embossed writing: Nearly Me.
“That one is made by the lady who invented Barbie,” Alethia tells us.
“Well, then that’s a done deal,” says Tita.
* * *
At home I model my new breast and bras under a tight T-shirt for John.
“What do you think of my optical illusion?” I ask. “The Amazing Appearing Woman.”
“Lovely,” he says. “But I still prefer you topless, even when you’re lopsided.”
“Aww,” I say. “Liar.”
I agree with him though. I appreciate having the ability to suggest symmetry, but sometimes I prefer the one-sidedness, the wrongness of it—the gap and the scar. It’s a truth, an artifact—a way to put my hands on my losses and take stock.
17. Not Men-o’-War
First major holiday after my mom dies, and we rent a beach house down on the coast. I wake and cook the pies early. My dad and John tend the turkey. The beach is deserted, except by sunlight and crab carcasses. The boys run until they cannot.
One morning we wake to a line of jellyfish rolling aimlessly in the surf for as long as the eye can see. Not men-o’-war, but not clear and harmless either.
“I know they’re kind of creepy, but I like them,” says Freddy, poking one with a stick. “The way they allow themselves to be swept this way and that. Like they’re always up for a new adventure.”
“I like how you can see their nice red hearts from the outside,” says Benny.
“Those aren’t their hearts, Benny! Jeez!” corrects Freddy. “Those are their stingers!”
“Oh,” says Benny. “Well, that way they can not get hurt as much on their adventure.”
Here we are closer to something I am trying to understand: that openness to fear. We are hearts and stingers. We ride the tide. We believe in resistance; we are made both of fight and float.
Freddy and I take sticks and write in the wet sand thanks to things we admit have made us stronger, but are ready to say goodbye to: CANCER and DIABETES. Then we stand and watch it wash away on the rising tide. Benny chooses to write POOP.
“What?” he says with one of his grins. “It’s good to say thanks and goodbye to poop, too.”
18. The Machine
Radiation is daily for a month—I start after Thanksgiving and am supposed to be done by Christmas. Freddy—who loves to stay up late reading about atoms and quarks—has been unfortunately stuck on the notion of being a Billionaire Weapons Inventor for a while now. And Benny has an entire notebook of recipes he’s conjured f
or how to turn humans into different animal species (tail hair of a Welsh corgi, saliva of an ocelot, chocolate chips, sea salt). Nudging them away from the realm of evil science toward the realm of medical science seems like it can’t hurt, and might possibly be at least as lucrative someday in their future, so I decide to bring them to see the machine.
My radiation oncologist Dr. Rosenblum—who has a little boy—thinks it’s a great idea.
“Make sure to tell your boys the machine is called a ‘linear accelerator,’ ” she tells John and me at the appointment before I start radiation.
“Ooh—and wait—how old are they again? Eight and six? Yeah, tell them we’ll be using lasers to guide the photons and electrons to the right spot and that we will be using the exact same technology we use for radar. And that we will do it all from a remote command center with closed-circuit monitors! And that each machine costs millions of dollars!”
Her eyes are glowing maybe a little too brightly.
I mention all this at the dinner table that night as casually as possible.
“Hmmm,” says Freddy, a little interested. “What are the chances you’ll come away from this with mutant powers?”
“I imagine not infinitesimal,” I say, getting kind of worked up myself.
“I have two things,” says Benny. “Is radiation a kind of technology, and will you have hair?”
My having hair again has been a primary concern for Benny for months now. He climbs into our bed each morning and vigorously pats my sprouting head. “You rubby little fuzzball I’m going to rub you all up because you are the softest thing.”
“Yes!” I say. “Radiation is in fact ultra-high-tech technology! And doesn’t affect your hair at all!” I can hear all the exclamation marks in my voice.
A week later when Veterans Day rolls around and the kids have no school and John is off work and I have to be at Duke, I think: perfect. Let’s all drive over to Durham and we can eat a hip foodie lunch on Ninth Street and browse through actual paper books at The Regulator and we’ll take the kids to see the Duke campus and the impressive gothic hospital that is saving my life and where I—and their grandmother—have spent so many important hours. Plus: science!
My first Spidey sense that there might be some reason why teachers don’t regularly take their eager elementary schoolers to tour hospital radiation facilities comes just as we step foot off the elevator into the waiting room—the same waiting room where I wait every day, where I have my usual seat and say my usual hellos and chat with the usual suspects and settle in for the usual routine.
Radiation happens in the basement—Level 00. There is a grand piano in the foyer where a med student has dropped his backpack and is playing “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
Suddenly I am aware of so many wheelchairs. So many unsteady steppers. So many pale faces and thin wisps of hair and ghostly bodies slumped in chairs. Angry, papery skin. Half-healed wounds. Growths and disfigurements straight out of the Brothers Grimm. So many heads held up by hands.
These days, these are my people—the Feeling Pretty Poorlies—but I haven’t really seen us as we are in a long time—the (mostly) walking wounded of the cancer militia. We’re kind of disheveled. We’re often asymmetrical. We’re wearing comfortable pants and bright scarves. We tend to either smile too quickly or not at all.
I watch my kids taking it all in—seeing me among my other kind. They are not the only children in the waiting room—school is closed across the state—and I see them all scanning the room for each other with urgency, like we look for channel markers in the fog.
When I tell Marie, my radiation therapist, that Dr. Rosenblum had said it would be okay if my kids came and took a peek at the machine, I mistake her skeptical eyebrows for being inhospitable. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
When we get back in the linear accelerator room, she starts to explain to the kids how everything works. “Your mom lies in there,” she is saying. “We keep the lights off so they don’t mess with the radiation.”
I notice Benny won’t stand all the way inside the room and that he keeps glancing at the oversize radiation symbol on the twelve-inch-thick door. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the sign or the thickness of the door before. It’s like the opposite of a nuclear fallout shelter, keeping the damage within.
Marie turns on the enormous machine to show how its monster arm can rotate to both take X-rays and deliver the radiation beams. The floor opens up beneath it to accommodate its massive orbit around the radiation board, and I see Freddy’s body visibly stiffen.
To be honest, I hadn’t realized that all this time during my treatments the floor had been opening beneath me like some Tony Stark–designed doorway to hell, and I sort of wish I’d kept it that way.
“I’m ready to go now,” says Freddy firmly. Fearless Freddy. Freddy who injects himself with his own insulin shots, Freddy who goes downstairs alone at night to get a glass of water, Freddy who marches into the bathroom when his brother spies a stink bug and dispatches it into the toilet with his bare hands, Freddy who sat for close to an hour on the corner of the bed where my mom’s body lay, stroking her legs the day after she died.
“I’m done, too,” said Benny.
In the hallway, we step aside as two techs angle a hospital bed around the corner. Under a mountain of white blankets, only a face showing. I cannot tell if the face is male or female, old or young. Only that the face is not well. Only tears leaking out of the closed eyes.
Neither of the kids have a single question for the techs. They usually live for the question portion of everything. Last summer when we visited Thomas Jefferson’s lesser-known house, Poplar Forest, the tour guide ran late fielding questions from my kids: Did Jefferson have a dog? Did he die of cancer? Did he like to go camping? Do people enjoy being president? Last year, at the open house for kindergarten, Benny raised his hand in front of the entire parent-student population when the principal asked if there were any questions and said into the microphone, “Um, so what are you supposed to do if you’re just really nervous about starting kindergarten?”
But here in the radiation chamber: silence.
That night at dinner my dad asks them what they thought of the trip to Duke.
“It was completely terrifying,” says Freddy matter-of-factly.
“I hated it,” says Benny. “I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
“It was pretty intimidating,” John admits. “I guess I just hadn’t realized.”
My dad and I look at each other. “Whoops! I guess I just damaged everyone for life a little,” I say.
“Yikes,” says my dad. “Sounds intense.”
But then the next morning: We are bumbling through our regular routine—me checking homework sheets while I drink coffee on the couch before getting myself dressed for radiation, John knotting his tie and packing lunch boxes, the kids shuffling into their shoes and coats—both boys come sit with me.
“Good luck at radiation today, Mom!” says Benny, rubbing my head. “I hope you’re not scared, but if you are you can hug MacDuff when you get home.”
Sometimes I think Benny conjured MacDuff from one of his recipes.
Freddy gives me a hug. “Guess what, Mom—I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. A writer!”
19. Level 00
Chris has a painful new nodule on his kidney, and he’s started looking more and more yellow. Margie’s husband won’t eat. The loud, nervous woman who is always on her cell phone has half her head shaved today. “Yeah, I’m downstairs on Level 00,” she is saying, “you know, with the nukes.” The man I sit next to when I get called back to the gowned area is so hugely tall that his gown looks like a blue napkin barely covering his naked thighs.
“You got you a nice tan going,” Marie says as she readies the machine and examines my chest and my mastectomy scar. It’s my twenty-seventh treatment of thirty. The skin is torched, even though it never feels like it’s burning during the treatments. “Looks like that part
of you has been to Hawaii.”
“Aloha,” I say when we’re done, floating out of the nuke room in my gown, back toward the changing rooms.
“Aloha!” the techs call, the three of them clustered in the hallway in their scrubs, two of them waving slowly like my cruise ship was just pushing off, Marie looking past me, beckoning the tall man back from the gowned area.
You see the same people every day and then suddenly you stop seeing them. You never know if they finished treatment or if it was something else. We ask around after each other but no one ever knows for sure. “Sorry—HIPAA,” the techs say.
* * *
“I’m so tired of this place,” I text to Ginny one morning from Level 00. “I’m not in the mood. You know how it takes a certain amount of energy to just be at the cancer center? I don’t have that today. I don’t even feel like making eye contact with anyone.”
“I would love it if you would just lose it,” Ginny texts back. “Stand up on a table and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. Even the volunteer with the warm blankets and the dude playing the piano.”
I scowl a little at the piano player who is playing the Cheers theme song when I go to fill up my water bottle. Immediately I feel better.
“How is Larry’s appetite today?” I have the energy to ask Margie when I get back to my seat in the waiting room.
20. Its Very Nature
“Let us make good use of our time,” writes Montaigne in his final essay. “We still have so much of it that remains idle and ill-used.”
He would not approve of how I have taken to sleeping in, how I spend the evening browsing seventy-two pages of ankle boots on Zappos, how I obsess over hair styles in magazines my sprouts and I are years from achieving.