“Certainly,” she says, attempting very hard to summon the strength and courage for this occasion, whatever it is; her throat has tightened to a fist.
From inside his white coat, the surgeon removes a thin paperback book and thrusts it toward her. “Will you sign my copy of your novel?”
The Mother looks down and sees that it is indeed a copy of a novel she has written, one about teenaged girls.
She looks up. A big, spirited grin is cutting across his face. “I read this last summer,” he says, “and I still remember parts of it! Those girls got into such trouble!”
Of all the surreal moments of the last few days, this, she thinks, might be the most so.
“Okay,” she says, and the Surgeon merrily hands her a pen.
“You can just write ‘To Dr.—Oh, I don’t need to tell you what to write.”
The Mother sits down on a bench and shakes ink into the pen. A sigh of relief washes over and out of her. Oh, the pleasure of a sigh of relief, like the finest moments of love; has anyone properly sung the praises of sighs of relief? She opens the book to the title page. She breathes deeply. What is he doing reading novels about teenaged girls, anyway? And why didn’t he buy the hardcover? She inscribes something grateful and true, then hands the book back to him.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“The boy? The boy is going to be fine,” he says, then taps her stiffly on the shoulder. “Now you take care. It’s Saturday. Drink a little wine.”
Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge. The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone. In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children’s amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on—endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter’s lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net—ah, words. “After all that business with the tutor, he’s better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife’s cousin’s husband, who did dental school in two and a half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.”
“Life’s a big problem,” agrees the Mother. Part of her welcomes and invites all their tales. In the few long days since this nightmare began, part of her has become addicted to disaster and war stories. She wants only to hear about the sadness and emergencies of others. They are the only situations that can join hands with her own; everything else bounces off her shiny shield of resentment and un-sympathy. Nothing else can even stay in her brain. From this, no doubt, the philistine world is made, or should one say recruited? Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge—no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust. Oprah has nothing on them. They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them.
Some of their friends visit with stuffed animals and soft greetings of “Looking good” for the dozing baby, though the room is way past the stuffed-animal limit. The Mother arranges, once more, a plateful of Mint Milano cookies and cups of take-out coffee for guests. All her nutso pals stop by—the two on Prozac, the one obsessed with the word penis in the word happiness, the one who recently had her hair foiled green. “Your friends put the de in fin de siècle,” says the Husband. Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.
She loves her friends, especially loves them for coming, since there are times they all fight and don’t speak for weeks. Is this friendship? For now and here, it must do and is, and is, she swears it is. For one, they never offer impromptu spiritual lectures about death, how it is part of life, its natural ebb and flow, how we all must accept that, or other such utterances that make her want to scratch out some eyes. Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter “Jesus Christ!” and shake their heads. Plus, they are the only people who not only will laugh at her stupid jokes but offer up stupid ones of their own. What do you get when you cross Tiny Tim with a pit bull? A child’s illness is a strain on the mind. They know how to laugh in a fluty, desperate way—unlike the people who are more her husband’s friends and who seem just to deepen their sorrowful gazes, nodding their heads with Sympathy. How exiling and estranging are everybody’s Sympathetic Expressions! When anyone laughs, she thinks, Okay! Hooray: a buddy. In disaster as in show business.
Nurses come and go; their chirpy voices both startle and soothe. Some of the other Peed Onk parents stick their heads in to see how the Baby is and offer encouragement.
Green Hair scratches her head. “Everyone’s so friendly here. Is there someone in this place who isn’t doing all this airy, scripted optimism—or are people like that the only people here?”
“It’s Modern Middle Medicine meets the Modern Middle Family,” says the Husband. “In the Modern Middle West.”
Someone has brought in take-out lo mein, and they all eat it out in the hall by the elevators.
Parents are allowed use of the Courtesy Line.
“You’ve got to have a second child,” says a different friend on the phone, a friend from out of town. “An heir and a spare. That’s what we did. We had another child to ensure we wouldn’t off ourselves if we lost our first.”
“Really?”
“I’m serious.”
“A formal suicide? Wouldn’t you just drink yourself into a lifelong stupor and let it go at that?”
“Nope. I knew how I would do it even. For a while, until our second came along, I had it all planned.”
“What did you plan?”
“I can’t go into too much detail, because—Hi, honey!—the kids are here now in the room. But I’ll spell out the general idea: R-O-P-E.”
Sunday evening, she goes and sinks down on the sofa in the Tiny Tim Lounge next to Frank, Joey’s father. He is a short, stocky man with the currentless, flatlined look behind the eyes that all the parents eventually get here. He has shaved his head bald in solidarity with his son. His little boy has been battling cancer for five years. It is now in the liver, and the rumor around the corridor is that Joey has three weeks to live. She knows that Joey’s mother, Heather, left Frank years ago, two years into the cancer, and has remarried and had another child, a girl named Brittany. The Mother sees Heather here sometimes with her new life—the cute little girl and the new, young, full-haired husband who will never be so maniacally and debilitatingly obsessed with Joey’s illness the way Frank, her first husband, was. Heather comes to visit Joey, to say hello and now good-bye, but she is not Joey’s main man. Frank is.
Frank is full of stories—about the doctors, about the food, about the nurses, about Joey. Joey, affectless from his meds, sometimes leaves his room and comes out to watch TV in his bathrobe. He is jaundiced and bald, and though he is nine, he looks no older than six. Frank has devoted the last four and a half years to saving Joey’s life. When the cancer was first diagnosed, the doctors gave Joey a 20 percent chance of living six more months. Now here it is, almost five years later, and Joey’s still here. It is all due to Frank, who, early on, quit his job as vice president of a consulting firm in order to commit himself totally to his son. He is proud of everything he’s given up and done, but he is tired. Part of him now really believes things are coming to a close, that this is the end. He says this without tears. There are no more tears.
“You have probably been through more than anyone else on this corridor,” says the Mother.
“I could tell you stories,” he says. There is a sour odor between them, and she realizes that neither of them has bathed for days.
“Tell me one. Tell me the worst one.” She knows he hate
s his ex-wife and hates her new husband even more.
“The worst? They’re all the worst. Here’s one: one morning, I went out for breakfast with my buddy—it was the only time I’d left Joey alone ever; left him for two hours is all—and when I came back, his N-G tube was full of blood. They had the suction on too high, and it was sucking the guts right out of him.”
“Oh my God. That just happened to us,” said the Mother.
“It did?”
“Friday night.”
“You’re kidding. They let that happen again? I gave them such a chewing-out about that!”
“I guess our luck is not so good. We get your very worst story on the second night we’re here.”
“It’s not a bad place, though.”
“It’s not?”
“Naw. I’ve seen worse. I’ve taken Joey everywhere.”
“He seems very strong.” Truth is, at this point, Joey seems like a zombie and frightens her.
“Joey’s a fucking genius. A biological genius. They’d given him six months, remember.”
The Mother nods.
“Six months is not very long,” says Frank. “Six months is nothing. He was four and a half years old.”
All the words are like blows. She feels flooded with affection and mourning for this man. She looks away, out the window, out past the hospital parking lot, up toward the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon. “And now he’s nine,” she says. “You’re his hero.”
“And he’s mine,” says Frank, though the fatigue in his voice seems to overwhelm him. “He’ll be that forever. Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve got to go check. His breathing hasn’t been good. Excuse me.”
“Good news and bad,” says the Oncologist on Monday. He has knocked, entered the room, and now stands there. Their cots are unmade. One wastebasket is overflowing with coffee cups. “We’ve got the pathologist’s report. The bad news is that the kidney they removed had certain lesions, called ‘rests,’ which are associated with a higher risk for disease in the other kidney. The good news is that the tumor is stage one, regular cell structure, and under five hundred grams, which qualifies you for a national experiment in which chemotherapy isn’t done but your boy is monitored with ultrasound instead. It’s not all that risky, given that the patient’s watched closely, but here is the literature on it. There are forms to sign, if you decide to do that. Read all this and we can discuss it further. You have to decide within four days.”
Lesions? Rests? They dry up and scatter like M&M’s on the floor. All she hears is the part about no chemo. Another sigh of relief rises up in her and spills out. In a life where there is only the bearable and the unbearable, a sigh of relief is an ecstasy.
“No chemo?” says the Husband. “Do you recommend that?”
The Oncologist shrugs. What casual gestures these doctors are permitted! “I know chemo. I like chemo,” says the Oncologist. “But this is for you to decide. It depends how you feel.”
The Husband leans forward. “But don’t you think that now that we have the upper hand with this thing, we should keep going? Shouldn’t we stomp on it, beat it, smash it to death with the chemo?”
The Mother swats him angrily and hard. “Honey, you’re delirious!” She whispers, but it comes out as a hiss. “This is our lucky break!” Then she adds gently, “We don’t want the Baby to have chemo.”
The Husband turns back to the Oncologist. “What do you think?”
“It could be,” he says, shrugging. “It could be that this is your lucky break. But you won’t know for sure for five years.”
The Husband turns back to the Mother. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
The Baby grows happier and strong. He begins to move and sit and eat. Wednesday morning, they are allowed to leave, and leave without chemo. The Oncologist looks a little nervous. “Are you nervous about this?” asks the Mother.
“Of course I’m nervous.” But he shrugs and doesn’t look that nervous. “See you in six weeks for the ultrasound,” he says, waves and then leaves, looking at his big black shoes as he does.
The Baby smiles, even toddles around a little, the sun bursting through the clouds, an angel chorus crescendoing. Nurses arrive. The Hickman is taken out of the Baby’s neck and chest; antibiotic lotion is dispensed. The Mother packs up their bags. The Baby sucks on a bottle of juice and does not cry.
“No chemo?” says one of the nurses. “Not even a little chemo?”
“We’re doing watch and wait,” says the Mother.
The other parents look envious but concerned. They have never seen any child get out of there with his hair and white blood cells intact.
“Will you be okay?” asks Ned’s mother.
“The worry’s going to kill us,” says the Husband.
“But if all we have to do is worry,” chides the Mother, “every day for a hundred years, it’ll be easy. It’ll be nothing. I’ll take all the worry in the world, if it wards off the thing itself.”
“That’s right,” says Ned’s mother. “Compared to everything else, compared to all the actual events, the worry is nothing.”
The Husband shakes his head. “I’m such an amateur,” he moans.
“You’re both doing admirably,” says the other mother. “Your baby’s lucky, and I wish you all the best.”
The Husband shakes her hand warmly. “Thank you,” he says. “You’ve been wonderful.”
Another mother, the mother of Eric, comes up to them. “It’s all very hard,” she says, her head cocked to one side. “But there’s a lot of collateral beauty along the way.”
Collateral beauty? Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!
“Thank you,” says the Husband.
Joey’s father, Frank, comes up and embraces them both. “It’s a journey,” he says. He chucks the Baby on the chin. “Good luck, little man.”
“Yes, thank you so much,” says the Mother. “We hope things go well with Joey.” She knows that Joey had a hard, terrible night.
Frank shrugs and steps back. “Gotta go,” he says. “Good-bye!”
“Bye,” she says, and then he is gone. She bites the inside of her lip, a bit tearily, then bends down to pick up the diaper bag, which is now stuffed with little animals; helium balloons are tied to its zipper. Shouldering the thing, the Mother feels she has just won a prize. All the parents have now vanished down the hall in the opposite direction. The Husband moves close. With one arm, he takes the Baby from her; with the other, he rubs her back. He can see she is starting to get weepy.
“Aren’t these people nice? Don’t you feel better hearing about their lives?” he asks.
Why does he do this, form clubs all the time; why does even this society of suffering soothe him? When it comes to death and dying, perhaps someone in this family ought to be more of a snob.
“All these nice people with their brave stories,” he continues as they make their way toward the elevator bank, waving good-bye to the nursing staff as they go, even the Baby waving shyly. Bye-bye! Bye-bye! “Don’t you feel consoled, knowing we’re all in the same boat, that we’re all in this together?”
But who on earth would want to be in this boat? the Mother thinks. This boat is a nightmare boat. Look where it goes: to a silver-and-white room, where, just before your eyesight and hearing and your ability to touch or be touched disappear entirely, you must watch your child die.
Rope! Bring on the rope.
“Let’s make our own way,” says the Mother, “and not in this boat.”
Woman Overboard! She takes the Baby back from the Husband, cups the Baby’s cheek in her hand, kisses his brow and then, quickly, his flowery mouth. The Baby’s heart—she can hear it—drums with life. “For as long as I live,” says the Mother, pressing the elevator button—up or down, everyone in the end has to leave this way—“I never want to see any of these people again.”
There are the notes.
Now where is the money?
Revelation
Flannery O’Connor
The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There was one vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady. He was five or six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose ran unchecked.
Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud’s shoulder and said in a voice that included anyone who wanted to listen, “Claud, you sit in that chair there,” and gave him a push down into the vacant one. Claud was florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told him to.
Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the room besides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on a well-dressed gray-haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would have some manners and move over—there’s plenty of room there for you and him too.
Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Turpin said. “You know you’re not supposed to stand on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg,” she explained.
Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble-white calf.
“My!” the pleasant lady said. “How did you do that?”
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules Page 24