Cures for Heartbreak

by Margo Rabb

  For a few moments, in that hazy transition into waking life, a dream lingers as reality: Rolf’s form strong and permanent, my mother lithe and healthy and satisfied. The peacefulness that surrounded them was what stayed with me the most in the seconds before I completely awoke—the rightness of it, of true love reunited. It seemed like the perfect ending to their story, a story Ms. Poletti might write, one she’d certainly approve of.

  But I’d barely become accustomed to that picture when it began to evaporate. Outside, the garbage truck creaked, car horns honked, a taxi driver yelled. On the dining room shelf—the shelf my mother had once tossed objects off—lay one of the oversized buttons my sister and I had made of our parents’ wedding photo. In that photo my mother smiled with the same satisfaction she’d shown in Maplewood. The same expression she’d had in the dream.

  My father had said to me once, soon after he came home from the hospital, in the car driving over the bridge to Manhattan: “The problem with Mommy was that she never believed I loved her. I told her I did, but she never believed it was true.”

  At first I balked, not believing that any of my father’s perceptions could be right. But of course he had loved her: his grief was as clear as mine since she’d been gone. And I thought about my mother, growing up without ever being hugged. Despite the lack of love she’d felt in her own life, she’d managed, somehow, to love me. The night we left Maplewood, after the long bus ride home, I awoke in the middle of the night to find a tray of ginger ale and sandwiches, the crusts cut off, and my mother next to my bed, her hand on my stomach, assuring me then and always that the pain was natural after all.

  THE HEALTHY HEART

  That is the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you, and you’ve only to slip through.

  —Katherine Mansfield

  The Letters of Katherine Mansfield

  The worst thing I ever saw in the hospital was a birthday party. It was one of the nights that my father shared a room with three other men. Curtains were drawn, but you could easily peek past the orange and brown stripes to the other beds. In one corner, a few tufts of white hair curled out from a lump under the sheet; in another, a gray-bearded man gazed at his electronic heartbeat as if it was a lava lamp; and diagonally, in the fourth bed, a young guy had his nineteenth birthday party.

  I’d seen this guy’s party in April, soon after my father’s bypass surgery; it was August now, but I still couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  His stubble-covered head had been shadowy with sprouts of longer, darker hair. He had friends, cake, and balloons around the bed, like a little kid’s party. They couldn’t light the candles because of the oxygen in the room, so he made a wish and pretended to blow out the nonexistent flames. His mother offered cake and soda to my sister and me.

  “Thanks,” we said, and she served a slice to each of us. It was a grocery store cake with yellow layers like a dish sponge and thick globs of icing that tasted like marshmallow and lard. I picked at it, thinking that I’d better eat it, considering.

  His mother touched my elbow. “I’d like to find a doctor while I’m here,” she said. “If you know what I mean.” She had a thick Brooklyn accent and gesticulated as she talked, her gold bracelets jingling.

  I thought of Richard Bridgewald and cringed. I tried not to stare at her son, but my eyes kept darting back to him.

  Alex asked her, “Do you need a checkup?”

  “He can do what he wants.” She laughed. “See, if they know you, then you got it made. Then you can trust them. If you’re married to one of them, you get the best service. My friend Patty, she has a cousin in Vegas who’s married to a doctor and always gets a private room. It’s about connections. Look here. If I was married to one of them, we’d be in a private.”

  I glanced at my father. He’d never had a private.

  “You know, in street clothes, though, they’re not so good-looking. I saw the oncologist, Dr. Kornovoy—I saw him on the corner of Thirty-fourth, and he had this green sweater on with these huge purple dots. You’d think with their kind of money he could buy a nice-looking sweater.”

  Her son, in the bed, rolled his eyes.

  She introduced herself—her name was Gigi Backus—and her son, Sasha (a girl’s name, I thought, though he didn’t look girlish, even though he was thin and pale with blue eyes and jet-black lashes). Gigi’s eyes were lined in smeared charcoal, her lips glistened with gloss, and her hair was whipped into a yellow froth. She looked too young to be his mother.

  She lowered her voice. “They’re flushing out his system.”

  I pictured a huge toilet with hoses or some hulking vacuum cleaner.

  “Mom,” the boy said. Gigi went over to him, and he whispered something in her ear.

  I knew I should wish him a happy birthday, but I couldn’t. A part of me wanted to be extra nice, and another part thought I should ignore him—he wouldn’t want my charity. And what could I say? Happy birthday! says the healthy fifteen-year-old girl. Many happy returns! Thanks for the yummy cake!

  I felt sort of sick from the whole thing, stunned by the whole soap opera traffic-accident scene of the young guy dying. But in a soap opera he’d get up at the end and walk away and live. If he died, it would be because he was a dispensable character, unimportant to the show.

  When we left the hospital that night I told my sister, “I feel bad for him.”

  “Who?”

  “That guy—Sasha.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. The cancer guy.”

  “Oh. The cancer guy.”

  After that, we referred to him as the cancer guy. As in: Be quiet, the cancer guy is sleeping. And: I saw the cancer guy in the hallway, he’s looking better. And in my diary: I think the cancer guy is kind of cute.

  Now it was four months later, long after my father was home from the hospital, and I was still thinking of the cancer guy, wondering if he was still alive. He was in my mind even as we waited at the Port Authority bus terminal with my sister, who was about to leave for college. Our father was going on about having to give up smoked fish.

  “Sable. Lox. Kippers. Sturgeon,” he incanted, as if in a trance, as if reciting some kind of smoked-fish poem.

  My sister rolled her eyes. She shifted her purple knapsack on her shoulder and stared down the dirty red-and-beige-tiled corridor.

  “What about nova?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Nova. Still too salty.” The saltiness was the problem: he was prone to fluid in the lungs, which was aggravated by salt.

  My sister took her knapsack off and stuffed her Curious George even deeper inside, though he didn’t entirely fit and part of his head poked out. He’d been slept on so long he looked like he’d been stuck in a flower press.

  She’d received a scholarship to Cornell and was leaving early for her orientation program. My father had wanted to drive her to Ithaca, but she preferred to take the bus.

  The driver approached the line and started taking tickets. “Well, bye,” my sister said, and hugged us quickly.

  “You have the calling card?” my father asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Call when you get in,” he said. She nodded and gave her ticket to the driver.

  “Bye, Curious,” I said to the ear sticking out of her knapsack.

  “Bye,” she said again. She walked to the bus, loaded her duffel bag into the luggage compartment, waved, and disappeared behind the tinted windows. Just like that, she was gone.

  My dad said: “Well.”

  We kept standing in the corridor. “Let’s wait till it takes off,” he said. We moved to the uncomfortable swing-down bench (invented to stop homeless people from sleeping on it, my father declared) and waited. Neither of us mentioned my mother. She would have insisted on driving to Ithaca, I thought, or accompanying my sister there on the bus. She would have made her pack an extra duffel filled with brand-new towels and sheet
s. My father had told Alex to take her old Snoopy sheets with her; they were good enough.

  Not that I could feel sorry for us anymore. Ever since seeing the cancer guy I’d felt guilty for mourning my mother because she had been so much older than him, decades older; compared to him she’d lived a long life. Who was I to complain over old Snoopy sheets?

  The bus groaned, exhaled, and squealed off. When it was out of view we got up and headed toward 39th Street, where the car was parked.

  The air felt heavy and strange now that my sister wasn’t with us—it seemed as if all of New York had been rearranged. The streets looked unfamiliar and wrong. My father walked in front of me; he wore shorts in the August heat. Frankenstein-like scars ran down the insides of his legs, where they’d removed veins for his bypass surgery. The scars mortified me—why did he flash them for all to see? Most things about my father had begun to mortify me. He wore T-shirts splotched with coffee or mustard stains and didn’t notice. He chewed with his mouth open. He had bad teeth—horrible teeth that had been capped when he was little, and now the caps had worn through to rings of silver and gold and raw beige aging tooth.

  “I wish you’d just wear pants,” I said.

  “It’s hotter than hell out here. The street’s melting.” He got in the car and unlocked the passenger door, and I sat on the hot velour seat.

  My father said, “I want you and me to go on a vacation.”

  “What?” The only vacations we’d ever taken as a family were to the Poconos; we’d rent a house for a week, swim in a lake all day, and stare up at the stars at night. My mind was deluged by disturbing images of my father and me alone in the Poconos, him trying to canoe in his Gilligan-style sun hat. Or, even worse, of us driving to the Grand Canyon in our ailing Mercury Zephyr, spending untold hours listening to his beloved Willie Nelson tapes. (Who could spend his whole life in New York City and love Willie Nelson?)

  “I still have summer school,” I said. “It’s not over yet.” I seemed to be passing my summer school classes, for which I was thankful. Ms. Poletti had actually approved of my final, completely fictional “True Love” story, which had featured a girl named Catherine and a tempestuous lad named Heathcliff and which took place on the hidden moors of Queens. I’d even woven in an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem for good measure. She’d loved it.

  “You only have three days left. We won’t leave until next Sunday.”

  “I have a job. The Queens Burger needs me.” I’d been waitressing there after school three nights a week.

  “It’s a diner—they don’t need anyone. You can take a week off.”

  He took a return envelope from AT&T out of his shirt pocket; he liked to use garbage as his daily planner. “It’s the Healthy Heart Week,” he read off the torn flap, “hosted at the Green Springs Health Resort, sponsored by Virginia University Hospital. A companion is suggested for attendance. Also, it’s underenrolled, so they dropped the price.”

  “I don’t want to go to Virginia.”

  “You’ll love it. They have a swimming pool.”

  “I can’t swim!”

  “You’ll take a lesson.” He tuned the radio to a country music station, to some man crooning about his bruised heart or burnt-down house or dead dog—I could never tell the difference. I pictured my sister’s bus barreling up the highway to Ithaca. Where was Ithaca, anyway? She’d shown me on the map, and I couldn’t even remember. It seemed so far away it could’ve been Nebraska or Idaho. It seemed even farther away than Virginia. I pictured the college’s castle-like buildings and gorges, its campus paradise. “You’re going to be living in the middle of a park,” I’d told her.

  She’d beamed. She couldn’t believe it either.

  At home, my father went about his business as if nothing had changed—he turned on the air conditioner and poured himself a glass of caffeine-free Coke. I wished I was the one on that bus.

  “Look at this.” He handed me the Green Springs brochure.

  THE HEALTHY HEART WEEK

  HEALING AND RENEWAL FOR THOSE AT RISK AND THEIR FAMILIES

  Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women. Are you or your loved ones at risk? Learn how to modify diet, stress, and exercise habits to increase your health, longevity, and happiness. Our program has three pillars: diet, stress reduction, and exercise. Take a cooking class, learn tennis or tai chi, and acquire the ability to relax even under the most stressful circumstances. Physicians will be on hand for personal evaluations.

  Because your family deserves a bright future

  Beneath this was a picture of two parents, a son, and a daughter frolicking on a hillside. The rest of the pamphlet delved into a range of subjects from HDL, LDL, triglyceride counts, and artery plaque to beneficial cooking oils and relaxation techniques. I knew all about these things. I knew my triglyceride count (145), and I knew the benefits of monounsaturated fats versus polyunsaturated, saturated, and trans. I knew the difference between isoflavones and bioflavonoids. I knew all about deep breathing. I understood these things because my parents had amassed an impressive library of health books over the years, and in the past few months I’d begun to make my way through them. The library included, but was not limited to, volumes on heart disease, assorted cancers, autoimmune conditions, intestinal disorders, the efficacy of sundry medications, preventative diets, and the meaning of vague symptoms—basically, everything that could go wrong with the human body, and a plethora of theories on how to fix it.

  My sister, my father, and I used to think that my mother was a hypochondriac because she kept buying and reading these books. She always thought some strange thing might be wrong with her; throughout her life she kept going to the doctor with notebooks of her symptoms (I found them after she died—ulcers, cluster headaches, random aches and pains, indigestion, a swollen knee, canker sores). We thought she was insane. We rolled our eyes and whispered that she was crazy for worrying so much over nothing.

  Over nothing.

  That was what made me feel queasy now even to think about. What if we’d taken her complaints seriously? What if we’d known about melanoma—had known that it even existed? She hadn’t even been in the sun that much, but we should never have let her sit on a lawn chair in our tiny yard at all.

  The disease books also gave me a strange sense of companionship—we weren’t the only family who’d been blindsided. It was astonishing how many diseases could be lurking in you without your knowledge, how many health hazards were waiting to sneak up on you. My father’s Health Now newsletters were the scariest. They were filled with terrifying stories of people who’d died from eating contaminated radishes, or from a blood clot that they’d gotten from sitting too long and which had traveled to the lung. All sorts of cancers took people by surprise. My mother hadn’t been the only one to die in two weeks from what seemed at first to be nothing.

  My father saved all his Health Now back issues, and I read them like a Stephen King novel. In addition to profiling little-known diseases, the newsletter blew the whistle on the worst cancer-causing, heart-disease-inducing foods in articles like “Ten Foods for an Early Death” and “A Sure Path to a Heart Attack.” One issue had stories of E. coli and salmonella, and a tale called “Death from Eating a Hamburger.” Another issue featured “Candy: Trick, Not a Treat,” which informed me that “just one Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar looks innocent enough—but are thirty seconds of pleasure really worth half your day’s saturated fat? Call it the death snack.”

  Death snack? I’d stared guiltily at a Twix wrapper poking out of my book bag.

  July was the carcinogen issue, with its never-ending list of foes: burnt toast, shampoo, cleansers, grilled meat, peanuts, water, air. One article ended by stating: “People everywhere are unwittingly causing their own diseases—staying out in the sun too long, eating the wrong foods, being exposed to unfortunate chemicals.”

  Right after my mother died, my father took us to a dermatologist to have our skin checked, just to be sure the bad genes
we’d inherited weren’t already wreaking havoc, that it wasn’t already too late. I lay on the dermatologist’s table as he removed an atypical nevus (aka a weird-looking mole) from the skin over my stomach. I could feel the blood dripping painlessly (he’d shot it with anesthetic) and felt almost comically lackadaisical: Eh, who cares. Whatever. If I die, I die. So what. Dying didn’t look all that bad.

  Because, then, for a very brief period after my mother’s death, when I thought of that specific nanosecond in time, it had seemed almost calm. It had seemed strangely quiet or peaceful, in retrospect—it seemed, really, like passing. She was there, and then she wasn’t. Her body was hers, and then it was something she’d left behind.

  Bashert, my mother used to say to comfort herself when someone died of natural causes, like our elementary school principal, Mrs. Kouliadades, who had breast cancer, or Mrs. Hamish across the street, of diabetes. It was Yiddish for “fate,” for “meant to be”—something there was no point arguing about since there was nothing you could do, she’d said. It seemed like a word for coming to terms with things and accepting chance. Not to dwell. To move on and forget.

  I said bashert to myself after she died, but it didn’t make me feel any better. And that feeling of calmness surrounding her death hadn’t lasted long—the memories of the horrible parts won out. Her suffering and vomiting, peeing the color of coffee; my sister screaming and crying; the feeling of machines grinding inside me—that’s what was most vivid to me now. What were the stages described in that grief book? I couldn’t remember, but I was sure that worry should be one of them.

  The mole turned out to be benign, but I got scared. I started examining my moles closely and keeping detailed notes on them, as the dermatologist had instructed, on the lookout for suspicious growth or changes. I memorized the ABCD’s of Melanoma pamphlet he’d given me.

  Then I met the cancer guy, and my worries increased. “He was tired—that was the first sign. He had to lie down in the middle of the day. Then he had these red spots on his legs,” Gigi told us in the hallway one afternoon, remembering. “It happened when he was fifteen. I called the doctor and he said to come in right away. He knew what it was off the bat, I could tell from his face. But he ordered tests before he said anything. The tests came back, and sure enough: acute lymphocytic leukemia. Next thing I know we’re in the hospital.”