by Joni Cole
Going on. This takes me back. The weeks after my dad’s first stroke, our family stood vigil by his hospital bed, watching his left side. There! He wiggled his toe! But as it turned out, nothing was really going on.
My mom is still talking. “I know what they’re going to say to me.” More than grief or fear, I hear anger in her voice. This is how she copes, I remind myself. “Those damn doctors are going to want me to pull the plug. I will not murder your father.”
Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste.
The room where I am working is on the shady side of the house. I can’t seem to get warm, even though I am wearing a hooded sweatshirt. I don’t know much about Feng Shui, but I do know my home office shouldn’t be facing the trash cans on our porch. Part of me though, thinks this is funny. I light a tea light candle on the corner of my desk. This will cheer things up. Then it occurs to me, I should have lit the candle for my dad.
My dad died on Mother’s Day. When my sister called early yesterday morning to tell me how it looked like this was the end, I imagined myself saying this for years to come. My dad died on Mother’s Day. But yesterday came and went. I opened cards from my daughters. I didn’t think of my dad when the girls and I went shopping for shorts and tank-tops. I didn’t think of him when I wolfed down a second piece of pineapple upside down cake. I felt sorry for myself because I had to do data entry on Mother’s Day.
Copy. Paste.
I’m almost through the pile of Ls. I should go for a run but I don’t have the time. Oh, and I might miss an important phone call.
I stop what I am doing. Your dad is dying, I tell myself. What is your problem? I make myself think of him, force a memory. One eventually surfaces from the distant past.
It is summer and we are in the backyard of the house where I grew up. My dad’s wearing baggy shorts and dark socks. He looks like he always looked before he got sick, like a dad. I am in my bathing suit, impatient to work on my tan. Finally, he has finished mowing the lawn. Now he is giving our Saint Bernard, Alice, a drink from the hose.
“Want to help water the garden?” he asks. I am a teenager; I don’t want to help with anything.
“It’s what I live for.” I spread my beach towel on the grass. As soon as I roll on my stomach, he sprays me with the hose.
“Daddy!”
He is lying on a hospital bed, on life support.
Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste.
My computer dings, signaling a new email. I need a break so I open my inbox. The message is spam; the subject line reads: Can you imagine you are healthy? What’s that supposed to mean? I am healthy. Is this some kind of sign?
Last night, I dreamed a miracle. My dad stood up from his wheelchair, took a few tentative steps, and then he was walking just fine. Everything about him was normal. I’m not dreaming this, I told myself in the dream. I’m really not dreaming this! I woke myself up crying. The bedside clock read 4:07 a.m.
You hear stories about people knowing, just knowing, the moment someone close to them dies. I had hoped this was a sign. Then I remembered my dad can’t die. My mom won’t let anybody pull the plug.
Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste.
I am halfway through the pile of M’s. This whole process is taking forever. I hate it and just want it to be over.
Identity Theft
Every New Year’s Eve, I type up a list of resolutions to help the Old Me become the New Me. While the list tends to be really long, the upshot is that I resolve to be a perfect person and lose seven pounds. Then the year dawdles and waddles away. Another December 31 arrives. Once again the Old Me, still imperfect, still carting around those seven pounds, recommits to becoming the New Me. And so it goes, year after year, a ritual as comfortable as it is familiar.
One June, my good friend Frances and her ten-year-old son moved in with my family. They were in the process of relocating, our kids were about the same age, and we have a big house with a big mortgage. So this arrangement made perfect sense for a few months or maybe even longer. Frances seemed to think I was doing her a favor, but I viewed our house-sharing more as an opportunity for middle-aged sleepovers, built-in child-care, and anthropological study.
Frances is a totally different species than me. While we share certain superficial traits (both white, American, born at the tail-end of the baby boom generation), that’s where our similarities end. Whereas I was born over-caffeinated, Frances takes one breath to my three. She makes gratitude lists that get on my nerves. In her room, she designed a pretty little alter with candles and incense and inspirational quotes. Frances works as a healer, practicing the ancient art of Reflexology, which involves touching people’s feet. I don’t even like touching my own feet, let alone someone else’s.
What’s more, Frances is gorgeous. And when I say “gorgeous,” I am quoting the bearded guy I was flirting with at the local pub who exclaimed, “My God, you’re gorgeous,” as he leaned over me to address her. In contrast, later that same week I was at my daughter’s school. Another parent pointed to my then twelve-year-old girl and said, “Is that your daughter? She’s so beautiful. She must look like her father.”
The following interaction between Frances and me speaks to our fundamental differences. I am hunched at my writing desk, dressed like a slob. I smell like garlic. A puckered scum of cream drifts on the surface of my cold coffee, thanks to reheating it in the microwave seventy-five times. I am about to gnaw off my knuckles, which is my creative process.
“Love, light, laughter?” Frances asks, dancing into the room. She aims a pretty silver spritzer in my direction. Frances is a walking apothecary of essential oils. She is also one of maybe nine people in the world who actually looks good in form-fitting yoga pants.
“Okay.”
She mists the miasma of garlic above my head. The scent of geranium and essence of orange wafts over my keyboard. Then off she goes, as bright and bouncy as Tinkerbelle’s light. I take a sip of cold coffee. The cream scum sticks to my upper lip.
Given these differences between Frances and I, the mind boggles that she would even consider stealing my identity. But steal it she did, bit by bit over the months we shared a house.
It started with jogging. When I was in my twenties and living in Philadelphia, I jogged about eight miles a day. This was around the time of Rocky I, and part of my route included running up the art museum steps and then jumping around with my fists in the air. These days, I jog exactly 2.9 miles to the local mini-mart, where I usually have to pee. It’s not a long distance; still, it’s enough to give me a feeling of smug superiority.
Then one day, out of the blue, Frances announced that she was going to start jogging. And just like that, she ran my 2.9 miles. This was just wrong, a violation. I would never think to steal her yoga, which she teaches part-time, and which she blatantly used to divert my children’s affections. Evening after evening, I would catch her and my daughters in the back room, stretching and posing on side-by-side floor mats. So this was how my girls were spending their free time, instead of doing something mother-daughterly with me.
But as it turned out, stealing my jogging and my children were only the beginning. Out of the kindness of my heart, I introduced Frances to my friends—Judy, Anne, Carole, Melissa. “Look,” I would point to Frances, “here is the lady to whom I have graciously opened my home. Aren’t I a nice person?” Of course, those weren’t my exact words, but that was the gist. In return, within my social circle Frances was supposed to remain a friend of a friend, nothing more. If by chance any of them did encounter her when I wasn’t around, the conversation was supposed to have gone something like this:
“Aren’t you Frances, Joni’s housemate? Isn’t she the best?!”
“She sure is. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Then one day the phone rang and it was Judy . . . calling for Frances! They talked for ages, and I can tell you they weren’t planning my surprise party. And later, I learned that Carole and Frances had met for tea. Herbal tea! This was so unfair because h
erbal tea-drinking is one category in which I can’t possibly compete, even though I am a very competitive person. And then another major blow. One day I was having lunch with Anne who gushed on and on about how Frances was a miracle worker. Apparently, ever since Frances had started working on her feet, her aches and pains were gone. Plus, Frances had been helping her become gluten free. All behind my back!
Lest this read like I am over-reacting, I should add here that Frances also stole my men friends, or at least the single ones. They would meet her. Taken with her ridiculously luxurious hair and ability to let them finish their sentences, they would ask her out. Whether she actually dated them or not, at that point they were lost to me. I couldn’t possibly phone them because I knew if they saw our number on their caller ID, they would get their hopes up that it might be Frances, and then I would have to endure the disappointment in their voices when it turned out to be only me.
With each passing month Frances and I lived in the same house, she continued to abscond with more and more of my identity.
She signed up for swing dance lessons, even though I had been saying for years that I was going to learn how to swing dance.
When I generously allowed her to borrow my library card in exchange for returning my seriously overdue books, she stole my meager fame. The librarian, not knowing me personally, but recognizing my name on the card, congratulated Frances on my last book!
Frances also stole the biceps I had been hoping to develop, by going to the gym while I stayed home and ate gluten. She actually read some spiritual guru’s bestseller that I’d told everyone I had read. And she had the audacity to lose my seven pounds, which was just spiteful because she didn’t even need to lose weight. In fact, this made her slightly underweight, something I have always aspired to be.
But the last straw came when I ran into a mutual acquaintance who mentioned in passing, “Oh, I saw your friend Frances the other day walking down the street. She looked so happy.”
I couldn’t believe it! This was what people were supposed to be saying about me. In fact, being happy was central to my annual New Year’s resolution to become a perfect person. Yet the last time I happened to catch my reflection in the coffee shop’s long glass windows, my expression looked like I’d just smelled a dog fart.
Finally, I caught on to what was really happening. Frances hadn’t just stolen my identity; she had stolen the New Me. She had become the person I resolved to be at the beginning of every year. Now I understood why the Old Me was feeling so put out. She didn’t like seeing her potential fulfilled by somebody else.
A few months ago Frances moved to her own place a couple miles away from our house. Since then, my family and I haven’t done much with her room. The corner where she had arranged her little alter with inspirational sayings and prayer beads is now a refuge for dust balls and discarded, empty boxes earmarked for the landfill. She took her yoga mats with her. The smell of geraniums and essence of orange has dissipated.
Living together for almost two years afforded me the opportunity to observe Frances first-hand—her habitat, her eating habits, her social interactions, all so foreign to my own. Time and again, I experienced a form of culture shock as I witnessed how she lived her life, and questioned her about her strange practices:
“You mean you honest-to-goodness don’t cook with Teflon?”
“But what do you think about when you’re meditating?”
“Seriously, are you really going to just let that slide?”
I’ve read that in any anthropological study, the cultural distance between the ethnographer and the people being studied is reduced over months and years. This seems to be true in my case as well. Almost as soon as Frances moved out, I missed her and forgave her for stealing my identity. After all, I realized, who wouldn’t want to be the New Me? But as it turns out, forgiveness was just one of Frances’ traits that had rubbed off on me.
The other day, Frances and her son dropped by for a visit. When she knocked on the front door, it didn’t feel right, not right at all.
“Come in, come in,” I welcomed them into our home. “You know you don’t need to knock.” Already the kettle was heating on the stove, and a scented candle flickered on the kitchen table.
Frances and I stretched out on opposite ends of the comfy couch in the kitchen, while her boy and my girls went off to another part of the house to play. We gabbed and looked through catalogs, just like old times. She sipped her tea and I drank my coffee. I felt happy just sitting there, hanging out, hearing our kids’ voices in the background. And while neither of us said the words “love, light, laughter,” I was thinking them all the same.
Grieving My Left Foot
Denial
One recent summer morning I woke up, went to take my first steps out of bed, and felt like someone had stuck a knife in my left heel. The pain was so piercing I actually collapsed back on the dog burrowed under the covers. I tried again. Tentatively, I put weight on my heel, experiencing the same excrutiating jab. What had happened to my foot?
As the day wore on, the pain in my heel settled into more of a generalized throb, but the next morning, and the next, and the next, the stabbing was back with those first few steps. Apparently, a little swordsman had taken up residence in the floorboards next to my bed.
“Will you please go see a doctor?” Steve said.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing.” What was a doctor going to tell me, except something I didn’t want to hear? Besides, what few random ailments I had suffered in the past had always disappeared on their own. The latest example was my self-diagnosed, deadly stomach tumor, which had miraculously shrunk after I stopped eating so many carbs.
This situation, however, seemed to be growing worse. Over time, the heel pain wasn’t just during those first steps, but every time I tried to walk after having been off my feet for a few minutes.
To get anywhere, I had to resort to creative means of ambulation. Sometimes I shuffled. Sometimes I clutched door jambs and armrests to avoid putting any pressure on my heel. If I was in a hurry, I tended to step normally with my right foot, but tiptoe with the left. This gave my gait a bobbing effect, but allowed the best speed-to-pain ratio. Most of the time, I just limped.
A funny thing happens when you limp. Suddenly you notice all these other people who are limping, too. One time I was limping behind a limper and for no apparent reason the woman turned and gave me the Evil Eye. Did she think I was mocking her? I worried about this, especially when I overtook other limpers, given that I tended to be a speed limper, just as I was a speed walker before my foot problem. I would never dream of mocking the infirm, of this I was certain, but then I remembered one of my favorite gags:
“Walk this way,” I would motion whomever I was with to follow me. Then I would hunch my shoulder and start lurching across the floor, dragging my foot like Frankenstein’s assistant Igor.
With the help of the Internet, I medically diagnosed myself. What I was suffering from was something called plantar fasciitis, one of the most common orthopedic complaints, with symptoms exactly mirroring my own. The plantar fascia, I read, is a thick band of tissue that connects your heel bone to your toes, and supports the arch of your foot. Repeated strain of this ligament causes tiny tears that lead to swelling and pain. Among those at highest risk for developing plantar fasciitis are: 1.) Runners (I have jogged off and on for thirty years); 2.) People who have high arches (yep); and 3.) Men ages forty to seventy.
Ignoring that bit about aging men, I could rationalize that what was really wrong with my heel was a sports injury. I liked the sound of that—a sports injury—which is something that afflicts athletes, rather than people who are just falling apart. In fact, the evening before my heel pain started, I had taken a cardio kickboxing class that required us to jump around on mats in bare feet and hit a punching bag.
Jab! Jab! Cross!
I was new to kickboxing, and the worst in my class, but this seemed like my ideal form of exercise. Before taking this cl
ass, the only outlet for my aggression against the many, many people who had wronged me was to scold them in my imagination. But now I could visualize their faces on the punching bag; I could target their vulnerable body parts.
Jab! Jab! Hook! Take that, and that, and that!
Even after my foot pain developed, I kept kickboxing, though not without sneakers because going barefoot only exacerbated the problem. The odd thing was, sometimes my foot actually felt better after exercise, at least for a little while. So if I just kept moving around, I figured, my sports injury would heal itself.
Anger
Why me? Why should this have happened to my foot? It wasn’t like I was a two-ton Tessie; I was too vain to let myself go. It wasn’t like I had bad genes. Over decades of annual physical exams, I had prided myself on being able to mark all those “no” boxes in that scary health history checklist.
“I guess I’m lucky,” I would say to the nurse or doctor, handing over my completed form. This lip service was for the benefit of the humility gods who didn’t take kindly to people overlooking their good fortune. But secretly, I couldn’t help feeling a smug superiority. My body was a genetic algorithm, evolved far beyond those other poor people with columns full of yeses.
Two months after that first agonizing step, with no relief in sight, I finally went to see a doctor. Or to clarify, I went to see a certified nursing assistant at my primary care physician’s office, in order to get a referral to a physical therapist, in order to get a referral to a sports medicine doctor, in order to get a referral to a specialist in podiatry. There is something wrong with a country where you have to go through three people to get an appointment with the person who might actually help you.
And another thing! I hated the term plantar fasciitis, which might as well be called old person’s disgusting warty toes because, to my mind, that’s exactly what it sounded like. What’s more, it was nobody’s business why I was step-tiptoeing around town. I didn’t make a habit of nosing into other people’s problems, asking them why they lisped or what happened to their other hand, so why should they keep prying into mine?