by Dan Noble
I went back and forth on the whys and the hows, but I was one hundred percent certain: I felt ready for action. I felt I could begin my story, that this collision with the handsome newspaper reader was a starting point, my inciting incident. Despite my desire to be everything Mother was not, I couldn’t help but think in terms of story, books, words. These were as much a part of me as my own feet, and I couldn’t shed them, though I tried.
I had a sense my life was only just beginning. This meeting with the newspaper man broke the rules. But I didn’t know which rules to follow anymore. It had been a long while since I had.
Rose is still napping, and though I’ve reminisced, I haven’t found any sense of purchase or way forward. I am reeling still. And I certainly can’t approach Kennedy about his terrible secret in this state of mind. Panic never helps a situation. So, I open the laptop and click around on Google, the way everyone looks for answers today.
The scans Kennedy paid for were used to diagnose so many cancers and problems that it was impossible to glean anything specific they may have been after. Thirty-five minutes down this rabbit hole, I realize this is only making things worse. And that’s when I type something very different into the search bar: liminaire, the word that had enchanted me yesterday. The first entry is from Wikipedia. And I click on it:
“In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"[1]) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rites, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”
There’s something hypnotic and attractive about the words, a beautiful equation of meaning. I snap the laptop shut and lie on the sofa on the day a receipt might change my whole world and try to let the beauty and promise of them calm me. Next thing I know, Rose’s creaky calls wake me, and for a brief, welcome second, I forget about the big cancer question.
When I remember, I know immediately I need to work out what’s wrong with Kennedy on my own, and as quickly as possible. I can’t go much longer feeling as desperate as this. And if he’s hiding it, I don’t want to disturb whatever delicate balance is allowing him to function.
Rose and I do lunch, painstakingly slow sips of water punctuated by dramatic sighs, and a particularly poignant round of kickles before I have the chance to sit at the kitchen table with the receipt again. This testing could be about anything. It could be a funny-looking freckle that needs to be lasered off and never thought of again. It could be administrative clearance for health or life insurance. There’s even the possibility of hypochondriasis. There is only one way to find out.
“Doctor Kanter’s office. This is Cindy.”
“Cindy, I’m calling on behalf of a patient of yours—John Kennedy.”
“And this would be—”
“His secretary. Excuse me. Yes, I have her on the phone right now, Mr. Kennedy.”
I take a risk. “He says hello, Cindy.”
I can sense her blush. I’ve seen it so many times.
“Yes, well. What can I do for Mr. Kennedy?”
“He asked if you could fax his records to his home number. His insurance carrier is giving him a hard time about some of the bills.”
She clucks her tongue. “Disgusting isn’t it?”
“A dirty, dirty business.”
“Well, normally he’d have to sign for it, but seeing as he’ll be here in a few days, I’ll just go ahead and grab his John Hancock then. You tell him that’ll just be our own dirty little secret.”
“Yes, of course.” Floosy. I give her the number, set our home machine to receive the fax and hang up, holding the handset in my fingers for a long while.
The fax says it all. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Hasn’t presented mortal danger until now. Atypical case. Lots of students following up in the lab. Could be helpful for other people. The upcoming appointment is to repeat tests, and looking ahead, to prep for surgery—fill in forms and take blood tests.
An hour later, I’m washing serving bowls I will never use just for something to start and fucking finish. Easy. And I’m startled by a connection my brain fastens together. When Kennedy disappeared all those years ago, he was very sick. How could I have overlooked this? I recall my conversation with Angie as if it were four weeks ago instead of four years.
I’d brought up sickness as a possibility. But it went the way of other excuses we conjured: maybe he joined the circus or decided to become a top-secret boutique cheese maker and had to cut all ties for marketing cache.
People have always disappeared on me. I’ve found ways to deal with it. But I wasn’t happy. With Kennedy I am happy. Surely, if he came back, I could excuse one little disappearance without too much bother. If I didn’t, I couldn’t have had everything else—the peace, the love, the happiness with which Kennedy had crashed into my life, which had previously been just a list of backstory, foreshadowing, darkness, and intentions with no structure. By the time I’d run into him at the diner, I’d become excellent at compartmentalizing. Sometimes it scared me, what I could not think about.
Rose is singing stupid-califragilistic-crispy-salad-oceans. One day someone will have the heart to correct her interpretation of Mary Poppins. But for now, we idle away hours arranging our imaginary sea: sometimes with arugula, sometimes iceberg tossed with frisée. Is it so bad to keep our salad oceans crispy a bit longer? Kennedy, what is happening to our salad oceans?
I keep my hands submerged in the sink full of steaming water. Just words on a page, I tell myself, though this runs counter to everything I’ve ever believed, despite trying to talk myself out of it. I force myself to feel the water’s burn, if only to prove I’m still here, that my life hasn’t yet dissolved around me. To prove that I can take the pain. Just not yet.
Nearly as soon as he’s in the door, Kennedy starts in on his dinner at full speed—probably wanting to tick off the days to get whatever he’s doing at the oncologist next week over as quickly as possible; take that cancer!—and I feel rushed to get started with the talking, or put it off for another night, or, I don’t know what.
When he’s finished, he gets up to put on the news, but Rose intercepts him squeaking with delight, and perhaps he remembers there’s still a life vying for attention; a wife, a daughter, and all the mundane rituals that keep life tacked down. He sits with what yesterday would have been an innocuous sigh.
“Why don’t you help me with the dishes, Rose?” She can’t resist squeezing the dish soap and swirling the sink water into bubbles.
He nods a thank-you and envelops Rose in a hug, carrying her to the stepstool that allows her to reach the sink. No sooner has he put her down than he swoops her up again, twirling her, her tiny legs blurring with speed; she’s watching me to make sure I notice how loving they are. I can’t help but think of her accusation earlier. I feel the shift in his energy, in her energy, in mine. I am reminded of the butterfly affect. He’s worried we will lose him. Am I crazy or does he smell different, slightly acidic, the way he does when he’s got a sore throat? Wouldn’t I have noticed that before?
I watch them, my feet stuck to the wood planks, reminded of the early days of Mother’s mutism, when I was glad for the showing over the telling, the beautiful unsimple simplicity of it, for the lovely, if lonely, infinitely-nuanced power of it. There was always pleasure in deciphering her intentions, as if she were a fictional character herself. She had me hooked from page one. That night, I can’t bring myself to say anything to Kennedy.
5
MILLIE
The next day, Kennedy’s mother and I prepare to serve lunch in Kennedy’s childhood kitchen, in the family home that he and I refer to as the Kennedy Kennedy house, because I’ve grown so used to calling him by his surname that it always jars to say Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, which they still insist I do. With the signed portraits of the real JFK in the family room, you’d think they might be related. It’d be creepy if Kennedy didn’t j
oke it off so compellingly. Welcome to Camelot, he whispered in my ear right as his mother opened the door on my first visit.
“Will you plate up the crudités?” Mrs. Kennedy says to me. “I just learned that term ‘plate up’ on the cooking channel. It’s what you say for the way you serve everything. Isn’t that great? I love to watch language change.”
I like it to stay the same, but who am I to say how things work in Camelot, so only say, “Sure. I’ll plate up for you.” I also leave out the comment about perhaps updating your recipes while you’re watching the cooking channel; there aren’t too many households where you can still find Jell-O molds clotted with cottage cheese and canned fruit cocktail.
Through the doorway, I see Kennedy helping his father to adjust the lock on a window. There is nothing kuh-kuh-kancerous about this scene. I catch him watching me through a window as I arrange vegetables in a retro baking dish, losing myself in the creativity of it, wondering what kind of birthday gifts Kennedy will receive and how each will play against the context of the ominous receipt. This day could have been so different.
“You’re so good with that,” his mother, Mrs. Kennedy, says. But behind every comment is the menacing shadow of kancer.
“Oh, it’s not very different than decorating.”
“Is that something you’re interested in?” Though worn, I’ve always thought our house lovely, enchanting; though this is just the kind of passive-aggressive way she has of making her opinion known, it still stings. She has a way of keeping me at arm’s length. I could counter with a comment about not knowing her son’s got kancer. But I don’t. I may not be so innocent in this area myself.
“It is,” I say. Kancer, kancer, kancer. Why hasn’t he told any of us? It is ruining everything, even the fun of comebacks I’d give if only she weren’t my mother-in-law. “It’s a family thing,” I say before I know I’m about to.
“That’s lovely, isn’t it?” She can really hurl that word. And I hurl her first name at her in my mind: Diane, Diane, Diane. Diane opens the squeaky oven door and pulls out the roast that’s been resting there. She waits there a moment too long, as if taking a break from everything around her—it looks almost as if she’s lost consciousness. Should I poke her?
“Isn’t it lovely to have everyone together?” she says, finally, returning to me, to lovely, as if she hadn’t just zoned out.
Now I’m the one playing pretend. I tell myself it was nice for a minute to have a break from bristling over her canned lines punctuated with jabs in place of proper talk—all on a day when all I can think about is the possibility of her son dying.
Before I know I’m going to, I say, “It’s good to have light conversation at the ready, isn’t it? In your young housewife days such hollow commentary was probably all that was expected of you.” I guess this is the kind of thing that comes out in place of that which we shall not speak. Maybe this is how Mrs. Kennedy came to be this way? I’m immediately sorry—not to have thought it, but to have said it—though I don’t say so.
“Why don’t you take the salad out to the table?” she says, using her power of diversion for my benefit now, and hands me a china bowl that must have cost a fortune.
I nod and smile, not quite sorry, but not exactly proud, my chest tugging with tenderness for Mother, a special woman—perhaps too special—who would look at this macerated salad in this priceless bowl and say, “Curly parsley? Who bothers with curly parsley? Only you, Millie, would manage to find in-laws who garnish with curly parsley.”
And again, my mouth goes rogue. “You know about the Kancer, don’t you, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“I do,” she says. “Don’t forget the salt and pepper shakers.”
At the table, Kennedy leans in to kiss above my blouse’s high neckline. My hair is up, and my entire neck breaks out in gooseflesh. Sadistic possibly, but there is something erotic in not knowing how long you’ll have with the person you love.
He jiggles his fussy Queen Anne chair closer to mine and keeps his hand at the base of my back all through the salad course. Our palpable intimacy is striking to his brothers and their staid, capri pants-wearing wives who we barely get a straight look from.
Kennedy turns to smile at me every few minutes as if the prize in some contest he’s won. Despite everything, I feel the same. He makes his way to Rose, two seats down, and hands her a plate of finely chopped roast beef, though we both know she won’t eat it. The day before the receipt, she declared herself a vegetarian. She pronounced it refrigeration, but when she pushed away her ham sandwich, we knew what she meant.
“Good thing we’ve got oceans of crispy salad,” Kennedy had said. We all sang Stupid-califragilistic-crispy-salad-oceans, and Kennedy said, “God, I love that refrigeration song.”
His arm brushes mine now as he returns to his seat, and vertigo rips me. I have to sit on my trembling hands, wait before I attempt to pick up my fork. It’s too much, the way I love him. He knows, and I swear, in front of his family, he flaunts it, as if to say, “This is the way it’s done, folks!”
Before, though, he never would have been so in-your-face. Perhaps he feels there’s only a short time left to show them the way; he will not die in vain. Stop, I tell myself. You don’t have the full story. I put my fork down and kiss him on the ear. He beams. Teamwork! Rose would say if she understood the gesture. Sometimes it’s like she’s following a script.
“What a roast!” Diane says with the slightest tinge of annoyance in her tone while Kennedy’s smile gleams. Nobody likes change in real life, even if they don’t think it’s so bad in language. I certainly understand this, and for her benefit, I shimmy slightly away from Kennedy. He yanks my chair back. Fuck, I love him.
We pass the platters, tuck in, compliment the various side dishes, laugh when Rose and her cousin Stewart launch into a conversation about whether roast beef (which she is ignoring for her peas) is considered a white meat because a lot of white people they know like it, but so do a lot of brown ones, so they start to call it “everybody’s meat,” which we all agree is much better—except for Stewart’s pre-teen sister, Kim, who thinks we’re all criminal for supporting factory farming, and for not explaining to a couple of three year olds about the term African American ‘right this instant.’
Kancer.
For a subject change, Kennedy, with whom I’ve shared Mother’s view on parsley, runs effusive about how pretty it looks. I kick him under the table.
How can humor rear its head now? It’s criminal. Or delusional. He lays his fork against the rim of his fussy floral plate and takes a knife to his wine glass. “I’ve got an announcement,” he says as if my toe in his shin has just reminded him of something.
Kennedy’s energy flows well in crowds and diffuses the sudden tension. “Roast beef is officially the new mascot of this family.”
The table erupts in laughter, probably too effervescent. Even Kim smiles.
“No, really,” he says, taking my hand, looking at me. Is he going to speak about the Kancer? To be so direct about it with his family, it must be as bad as I suspect.
“The Kennedy family is expanding. Millie is having a baby.”
My exhale is audible. Rose claps though she looks unsure. Fair enough. Everyone else applauds loudly and whoops. I am just beginning to show and we agreed today would be the day we shared the news, but I forgot about our plan, amidst the receipt and everything.
I look back to Rose, who spears a carrot with her fork—the special silver one Kennedy used as a child. I remember the way he apologized when his mother made a big deal of showing me how she’d kept it all these years. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I’d told him. I wanted him to have a wonderful life. It made me happy to think of such care taken on his behalf. Still does. I would never want my mother for him.
After, Kennedy secures the wilted, sleeping Rose in her car seat and then loads his gifts in the back: a barrage of electronics, an Over the Hill tee shirt, some hand drawn cards from the nieces and nephews, and gift certific
ates to two of the three upmarket national department store chains. When he sits next to me and starts up the car, I look at him and nearly spill it.
“So, tell me how you feel, Millie.” Is he asking me about the Kancer?
“How do I feel?” I say. “How do I feel?” I look out at Third Avenue. “Isn’t it obvious? I love you and all I want in this world is to continue our lives together with Rose and the baby. And I’d do anything it takes to do that.”
“I hoped you’d say that.”
Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?
6
MILLIE
In the years leading to Mother’s second suicide attempt, I mastered the art of carrying my book around, had one of her old satchels for the purpose. God, I loved the worn canvas of that thing, sucked its strap almost as much as the ear of the stuffed beagle I’d carried around throughout childhood. By the time I was in junior high school, I was wearing ribbed turtlenecks and vintage floral skirts, my nose in a book by my own accord. Emulating her containment, I amassed my own admirers, who didn’t realize I was all show.
The act crumbled soon enough. When I pretended to master the magnificence of books (err, had one with you, acted like you understood why), she started in on something else.
“How do you know what’s real, Millie?”
I always offered the wrong answer. She wouldn’t speak to me all afternoon, so I could take time to work it out. Which I wouldn’t. I often took my dinner alone. She didn’t tell me where she was going. She’d just be there, and then she wouldn’t. It would have been too juvenile, too much of a failure in her eyes for me to hate her. Besides, I couldn’t.
And so it began.
Something I did learn from books is that you must trust that eventually everything will come together to make sense, and though I couldn’t understood exactly why Mother was so focused on “experiencing” books, and separating fact from fiction, in the meanwhile, the learning curve made me into a clever party trick.