by Laura Roppé
Alan laughed heartily. “That’s okay, Laura,” he said. “I thought you were a short, fat Latina.”
Even through my laughter, I immediately recognized the important lesson: Books don’t always match their covers.
When the time came for me to defend a corporate client in my first big trial, I was thrilled when I caught our adversary, the company’s former employee, in an outright lie on the witness stand. I was Matlock! Victory would be mine!
But when the jury read their verdict a week later, they had found in favor of the former employee and against my big client. Not only that, but they had further found that my client had “acted with malice” in firing this gentleman, meaning the jury could now consider an award of punitive damages, the granddaddy of damages awards—a potential catastrophe for my client.
The judge scheduled the punitive-damages phase of the trial for the following day.
That night, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was flabbergasted that I’d lost. I had believed in my case, but the jury hadn’t believed in me. And now the jury was poised to render a verdict, in perhaps the millions of dollars, to punish my client. I thought I was going to be sick.
The next day, I had dark circles under my eyes and my face was tight.
I stepped in front of the jury—the same jury who had just condemned my client the day before—and pleaded my case for them to deny punitive damages. As I spoke, I could feel my knobby knees knocking together underneath my gray pencil skirt.
When the jury returned its verdict later that afternoon—glory be!—they awarded a pittance, hardly anything at all. I thought I might pass out from relief. I made my way into the hallway outside the courtroom, where I was allowed to speak with the jury now that the trial was over.
“Laura,” the foreperson said to me (and I recall distinctly that she addressed me by my first name), “we hated your client.” Everyone added their vocal agreement to that sentiment. “But we loved you.”
Another juror added, “You’re so funny!”
More vocal agreement, and warm smiles.
The foreperson continued, “You looked so nervous this morning, we decided we didn’t want to ruin your career by awarding big punitive damages against your client.”
Excuse me? I was grateful for their mercy, of course. The verdict had been a huge relief. But this wasn’t my idea of justice—this was a crapshoot!
In an instant, I realized something that shook me to my core: I was living my life, both personally and professionally, in pursuit of external approval. And that dangling carrot, I suddenly understood, was a prize as fickle as the wind.
The whole affair left me wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.
As the years passed, I continued working the crazy hours required of a litigation associate. I worked and worked and worked, and received bonuses and assurances that I was “on partnership track.” And though I relished the praise, as well as my time with Janice and other friends I’d made at the firm, I became overwhelmed with the stress of my job.
Every morning as I drove in to work, my stomach turned to knots. As I sat down at my desk to start each day, I gave myself a pep talk about facing the confrontations that awaited me. This is what they pay you to do, I’d tell myself before picking up the phone to call a particularly rude opposing attorney.
Night terrors regularly interrupted my sleep (and Brad’s). One night, I turned to Brad in the middle of the night, waking him from a dead sleep, and shouted at him, my heart racing and my eyes bulging, “Who are you?!” In the morning, my throat was raw.
Year-end bonuses and incentives didn’t motivate me anymore. A bone tiredness overtook me.
“I feel like I have a terminal illness,” I lamented to Brad one day during a grueling case.
Supernatural prophesy yet again? Nah. I was twenty-eight years old, and as far as I was concerned, I was immortal. But I felt like my soul had been sucked dry of all moisture, like a sponge that’s turned rock-hard sitting too long on a sink ledge. No, I didn’t think I was actually terminally ill; what I meant to say was, I was terminally tired.
“Hang in there, Buddy,” Brad consoled me. “You’ll be fine.”
Chapter 14
Countdown to chemo: two weeks.
By this time, I had long since passed the denial phase. Now, I was just petrified. It was now a reality that, yes, bad things could happen to me. A doctor had already called with unthinkable news. He had said “cancer,” and he had been talking about me. And then he had added words like “rare” and “aggressive” and “triple negative.” I had thought something was impossible, but it had proved entirely possible—and not in a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sort of way.
At my next oncology appointment, Dr. Hampshire told me, in no uncertain terms, that I would lose all my hair during chemo. Everywhere. Without a doubt.
“Well, you never know,” I countered. “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” I ran my fingers through my long, thick hair.
“No, you will,” Dr. Hampshire said matter-of-factly. “With this particular chemo drug [a beast called Adriamycin], there is no doubt you’ll lose your hair. One hundred percent of the people lose one hundred percent of their hair, one hundred percent of the time.” He didn’t want me to hold out false hopes.
I’d come to expect, and appreciate, Dr. Hampshire’s unflinching honesty. It was best to know what I was up against. I looked at Brad and sighed. I liked having hair. A whole lot.
“Don’t worry, honey. It’ll grow back,” Brad said with a sympathetic smile, and he kissed me on the forehead.
Cancer might take my hair, I thought, but that’s all it’s getting.
A week later, my sister, Sharon, accompanied me to my neighborhood hair salon. I had decided I would lose my hair on my own terms and donate it to Locks of Love, a wigmaker for children with cancer. And selfishly, I also figured it would be somehow less traumatizing to lose short hair.
“If I feel like we’re making a documentary, I can get through it,” I told Sharon. “Never stop taking pictures.” Thus, as the hairdresser cut my hair to pixie length, Sharon imitated a photojournalist, snapping endless photos of me. I made silly faces and gave her two thumbs up (my patented “stay positive” pose), and we laughed and laughed.
Sharon has always been my touchstone, through every form of heartbreak and catastrophe. As little girls, when our black cat, Kitty, went missing for over a week, Sharon and I cleaved to each other, stoking each other’s waning faith that Kitty was all right. After a tip from our neighbor that Kitty might have met his maker in the street, Sharon and I crept outside, trembling and holding on to each other for dear life.
Sure enough, we discovered what used to be our Kitty, now reduced to a furry lump on the asphalt. My brain could not accept that the mound before my eyes was my beloved Kitty, but Sharon understood. She broke into a horrified wail, clutching my slender body with the full force of her grief.
Sharon’s hysteria jarred me from my stupor—just as our kind neighbor swept Kitty into a dustpan—and I started screaming, too, almost collapsing into Sharon’s arms in my horror.
To this day, our shared grief at having found Kitty-Lump in the street is one of the defining vignettes of our sisterhood: Sharon and I were there to prop each other up through thick and thin, no matter what.
And now, just as I had done throughout my entire life, I was holding on to Sharon yet again, though perhaps not physically in this instance, as the hairdresser relieved my head of all its hair in anticipation of my imminent chemotherapy.
When I approached the front counter to pay for the haircut, still laughing with Sharon and making my “stay positive” thumbs up, the salon manager wouldn’t take my money.
“It’s a gift,” she said. “We just wish you a speedy recovery.”
In that moment, the full weight of my predicament fell on my head like a wayward theater sandbag from an episode of Scooby-Doo (“and I would have succeeded, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”). S
trange as it may sound, I had actually forgotten what had led me to the hair salon in the first place. I had tricked myself into thinking I was just a normal girl getting a “whole new me” haircut—as part of a midlife crisis, perhaps? Or maybe on a dare? But the salon manager’s kind gift reminded me: No, I’m a cancer patient.
I started to cry. Sharon did, too. We collapsed into each other’s arms, just as we did when we discovered that poor Kitty had gone off to take an eternal nap.
It was the first stamp in my cancer passport.
When I went to pick up the girls from school later that day, I wore a straw hat so they couldn’t see my new, short hair. I wanted them to be able to react to it privately, away from their friends.
I waited outside Chloe’s first-grade classroom, reminding myself to take deep breaths.
“Hi, Mom,” Chloe said when she emerged, her Dora the Explorer backpack slung over her shoulder. “Hey, your hair’s gone.” And then she started rambling on about her day.
Well, that went well.
But when Sophie made her way out of her third-grade classroom, her face turned pale the moment she saw me. Tears filled her eyes, and she tilted her head back to keep them from spilling down her cheeks.
“Baby,” I assured her, “it’s okay.”
“Don’t talk to me,” Sophie hissed between clenched teeth, and she marched ahead as if she didn’t know me.
As I followed Sophie’s angry little body to the car, my lips were trembling.
During the short drive to our house in our minivan, I could not find words. Every time I started to speak, my throat closed up and nothing came out. We drove in silence (and by “silence,” I mean that Sophie and I did not speak; Chloe, on the other hand, chatted nonstop about her day at school—about her boyfriend, Jackson; about her latest Geronimo Stilton book; about how her teacher had broken her toe on her coffee table—all the while not disturbed one iota that not a wisp of hair was peeking out from under Mommy’s hat).
When we got home, Sophie burst into tears. “Why did you do that?” she demanded.
“Baby,” I said, “I’m so sorry. The doctor says I’m going to lose my hair, and I wanted to beat it to the punch.” I started to cry, too.
Sophie was pissed. This was so embarrassing, so mean, so awful. How could I? Why was I doing this to her?
“I’m sorry,” I sighed. I sat down on the couch and took off my hat.
Sophie’s eyes widened. “Oh my God,” she gasped.
“What is it?” I was worried. I touched my head.
Sophie sat down next to me. “Mom, that’s actually pretty cute.”
Oh, geez, she scared me. “Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
I hugged her. “Thank you, Soph-a-loph.”
Chapter 15
Brad had always been moony-eyed about having kids; if I’d said yes, we would have started trying for a baby on our honeymoon. But I’d never given him the green light. I had invested a lot of time and money in law school, and once I began working, having a baby would have cramped my billable-hours style.
Even more than worrying about my career, I wasn’t sure I wanted children at all. As a teen, I’d done my share of baby-sitting to earn extra cash, but, although the kids in my care were cutie pies, I had never thought, Oh, I can’t wait to have kids of my own one day. Throughout my twenties, I’d never clamored to hold other people’s babies (though I did hold them, so as not to arouse suspicion about my lack of maternal instincts). My “oohs” and “ahhs” at baby showers about itty-bitty baby clothes had been forced, a total sham. I was missing the baby gene. I could easily envision a fulfilling life filled with Brad, work, and my crazy-ass dog.
Then one evening, at age twenty-eight, I popped into the grocery store to pick up dinner after a long day at work. As I waited in line at the checkout stand, shifting my weight from one foot to the other in my stiletto heels, my tired eyes settled on a baby boy sitting in the grocery cart ahead of me. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and his fat toes looked impossibly tiny. I hadn’t examined baby toes before. They were darling! A w.w.w, I thought, for possibly the first time in my life. When I looked up from those little sausage toes, the baby had fixed his gaze on me. His eyes were crystal blue. A w.w.w, I thought yet again. And then he smiled—a big, innocent, goofy smile that sent a thunderbolt zinging through my heart. Gimme that baby.
At home, I marched through the front door and beelined to the bathroom, calling for Brad to meet me there. When he arrived, a question on his face, I raised my packet of birth control pills into the air, like an Olympic diver about to swan-dive off the high platform. Brad raised his eyebrows at me, not understanding, and just as he opened his mouth to ask what was going on, I plopped the packet of pills into the metal trash can with a clank. There was a brief silence as Brad processed what he was witnessing. An instant later, pure joy washed over his face.
For months after my triumphant offering to the fertility gods, poor Brad would pick up the phone at work, only to be greeted by my screeching voice on the other end: “I’m ovulating! Meet me at home right now!” Two weeks later, I’d sit down on the toilet and pee on a stick, holding my breath and willing a pink line to show up. But it never came.
I continued to rack up the billable hours at work. Every day blended into the next, except that I had begun to wear a different brightly colored scarf around my neck each day—just like Janice did—though the look was ridiculous on me. (If my fourteen-year-old self had gotten a glimpse of her twenty-eight-year-old self in a fuchsia suit with gold buttons and a flowered scarf tied in a slipknot around her neck, she would have thrown her head back and bawled, “For the love of God, no!”)
I would stand in my office on the twenty-first floor, leaning my forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window, and gaze down at the ant-people below as they hustled and bustled across the crowded streets. Every one of them exists because a woman got pregnant, I would think.
Mom had gotten pregnant with my sister the first time she’d ever had sex (with my dad, at age eighteen), and she’d pounded this fact into my head and Sharon’s repeatedly, urgently, throughout our teenage years. As a result, my entire life I’d believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that one (itty-bitty) act of unprotected sex would result in pregnancy every single time. It was an absolute, proven fact.
So why wasn’t I Fertile Myrtle, like Mom?
I’d heard plenty of stories of vacation-induced pregnancies, so off Brad and I went on a ski vacation with friends. After a day of skiing, I made my way to the hotel’s fancy spa, where I drank cucumber water and flipped through Spa magazine while awaiting my massage appointment.
“Laura . . . Rope?”
“Yes. Ro-pay. Hi.”
My masseuse, a broad-shouldered German named Helga (actually, I can’t remember her real name, but she will always be Helga to me), led me to a dimly lit room, where I purred like a cat as I crawled onto the massage table. Helga drizzled oil on my back and began kneading my tight muscles. After a few minutes, she graduated to grinding her elbows into my back.
“Your tension is the worst I have ever seen,” she chastised me in a harsh German accent.
Was she serious? The worst she’d ever seen? C’mon.
“So much stress!” she accused again.
Was she expecting me to say something here?
After a few more minutes, Helga grunted, “You are trying to have a baby, yes?”
What? That got my attention. “Yes.” How did she know?
And then Helga dropped the bomb: “How do you expect to take care of a baby when you cannot take care of yourself?” She emitted a loud hissing noise that ended with “Tsk-tsk.”
I was floored.
I paid for the massage (which, in this case, felt like a punch in the gut) and shuffled back to my hotel room. I do take care of myself! Helga’s words had cut like a knife. Am I unworthy of having a child?
Back at the room, I told Brad about what Helga had said, and he told me not to worry
about it. “During my massage, she told me I was a merman in a past life,” he laughed.
But I did worry about it. Could there be a connection between my inability to get pregnant and the stress I was experiencing on the job? Was my body really the most stressed out Helga had ever seen? Her words continued to sting.
At home a few days later, I opened the phone book and scheduled a month’s worth of weekly appointments with the nearest massage therapist. I’ll show you, Helga.
Two months later, having dutifully attended regular massage sessions over the past several weeks, I sat down on the toilet yet again with a pregnancy test—wishing, hoping, and praying for a pink line to appear. And then . . . oh . . . my . . . God. There it was.
I ran out of the bathroom and pounced on Brad, who’d been fast asleep in bed, almost giving him a heart attack—which would have been a calamitous turn of events under the circumstances.
“Wake up, Buddy! Wake up!” I shouted, tears springing into my eyes. “We did it! We’re gonna have a baby!”
What I didn’t realize then was that I’d totally and completely missed Helga’s point. I’d been so myopically focused on achieving that little pink line, I’d missed the Big Picture. Helga hadn’t intended to enlighten me about how to board the Baby Express; she had wanted me to learn to appreciate the glorious views from the slow bus on the scenic route. If only I’d been able to understand what Helga was actually saying—that respect for the mind-body connection was the key to a healthy life, and not just a means of achieving my pregnancy goal—perhaps things might have turned out differently for me. Perhaps if I’d been capable of hearing the rallying cry of my knotted-up body, if I’d been humble enough to comprehend that my beleaguered pretzel body was shouting urgently at me, I might have avoided its exasperated, and inevitably violent, revolt nine years later.
But really, even if I’d known way back then that my body would eventually overthrow the existing regime in a bloody palace coup, I would have thrown my head back and laughed, “Let them eat cake!”—because at that moment, I was in mommy-to-be heaven. I was going to have a baby! And nothing else—absolutely nothing else in the whole world—mattered one little bit.