by Margo Rabb
Now, leafing through my father’s Green Springs brochure, I felt tired. I checked my own legs for spots.
I was afraid that something could be in me too, ticking away, ready to strike at any moment. Or if not a disease, then an accident, coiled in the future like a cat waiting to spring. I’d lived all my life not worrying at all—never once had I worried about my mother having melanoma and dying in twelve days, or fifteen-year-olds catching fatal diseases. What an ignoramus! What a naive, unknowing, sheltered newbie.
The cancer guy had spoken to me once. It was in the solarium, the day after his birthday party. He said, “I like your dad. He’s funny.”
“Thanks,” I said, and stared down at my book. The cancer guy was talking to me. To me. Why me? I tried to see myself in his eyes. It would probably make him happy to have a healthy, regular girl talk to him. I mean, what girls did he meet in here? Cancer girls?
A wave of shame engulfed me. Shame that I was thinking these thoughts, that I kind of liked him, and I was afraid that the thing I liked was his cancer.
I’d watched too many TV movies—I’d always felt sorry for those young main characters—and now here was one in front of me. Dying. He was dying. Of cancer. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. He was only four years older than me.
He was kind of cute, though, despite the baldness and pale skin.
He hovered beside me, waiting for me to say something. I forced myself to speak. “Did you, um, have a good birthday?” I asked. My voice sounded like an ad for Cheer laundry detergent.
“It was splendid,” he said.
More shame, hot and sickening. I was such a doofus. To think that I found his cancer appealing, that I felt attracted to his horrifying tragedy like a gnat to light. A rubbernecker, that’s what I was. I’d been so mad at Melody Bly and those who’d wanted to crash my own grief party, and now I was doing exactly the same thing.
I was disgusting. My face flushed; I gazed at my book.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
It was a romance novel entitled Larissa’s Love Royale, which I’d bought in the gift shop. It wasn’t one of those romances with a subtle cover that try to pass themselves off as ordinary books, either. No. This was all luscious bosom, gold embossed letters, and tanned male chestage, set on a Renaissance pirate ship. Why hadn’t I brought The Canterbury Tales, which we were reading in school, instead?
Perhaps because it was hard to lose myself in Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages in the death ward.
“Um,” I said, “nothing.” I kept gazing at my open book, maneuvering my arms to shield the page from his view. I was afraid to look at him. I tried to think of how to slip the novel into my book bag smoothly and non-embarrassingly when he said, “Well. Bye.” And he walked back toward his room.
That was it.
I didn’t even say bye back. I didn’t call after him, Wait! Sorry! Or Get well soon! Or Actually, I really like you!
I replayed, rewrote, reimagined the scene in my head many times after that, developing it into further interactions with plot twists and revelations. In one version the cancer guy said he was in love with me and wanted one last hurrah before death. In another, he helped me with my homework while I consoled him with understanding Florence Nightingale-esque gestures and an assured knowledge of the afterlife: I’ve seen death too. Don’t worry. It didn’t look all that bad, really. After a while I almost believed we’d had this connection, that I’d helped him. I wanted to help him, I told myself. Secretly, though, I was nervous every time I stepped out of the elevator and walked toward my father’s room, afraid to see an empty bed, to find out that the cancer guy had died. I was relieved when, the next day, my father was transferred to another room.
My father and I packed our suitcases. I used a flowered one that my mother had bought but never used; I clipped the Bloomingdale’s tags off it.
“Alex is on the phone!” my father shouted just before we left. We phoned her in Ithaca every day; usually she was out. She’d sent us a postcard that said Ithaca Is Gorges. She seemed to be having a grand old time without us.
“What’s up?” she asked me.
“Nothing. I’m a little nervous.”
“I know—a vacation with just you and Daddy. Sort of weird.”
“Also, on long drives you’re at risk for deep vein thrombosis, which could lead to pulmonary embolism and you could die. The only symptom is an achy calf—and sometimes there are no symptoms at all.”
“Huh?”
“Deep—”
“You’re insane. Stop reading Mommy and Daddy’s disease books. I have to go,” she said. “Have a good trip.”
“Do you miss us?” I missed her—the house felt too empty without her sulky presence in it. We were soldiers in the combat field of our disintegrating family, and I wanted to be the one who’d deserted, not the one who’d been left behind. Sometimes I would go into her room and just look around; I’d pick up the stuffed animals she hadn’t taken with her, examine the earrings left in her jewelry box. I caught my father in there once too, sitting on her bed, staring at her old sneakers.
“Yeah. Everyone’s leaving for breakfast—gotta run, see you!”
We loaded up our blue Zephyr. My mother used to criticize my father’s driving—he drove too fast, too close to trucks, he passed too much on the BQE—and now he seemed to drive more cautiously, out of a sudden regretful respect. He also seemed curious about me in a new way, as if I was an odd foreign being. “Who are these musicians?” he asked when I popped in my Go-Go’s tape as we drove over the Verrazano Bridge. I told him their names.
“Belinda.” He nodded. “She has a nice voice.”
He glanced at the Beauty and the Beat tape case resting on the dashboard. “What the hell’s all that paint on their faces?”
“It’s not paint! It’s a mud masque!” I shook my head. “Haven’t you ever noticed me in mud masques? I’ve been using them since I was twelve!”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I watched New York Harbor go by in a blur. I didn’t want him to like my music—it felt as if he was peeking in my journal. A few minutes later he belted out, “Everybody get on your feet, we got it!” in his gravelly, off-key voice.
I pressed the stop button.
“Don’t turn it off,” he said.
“No more Go-Go’s. But we’re not listening to any country.”
I picked up Depeche Mode, but after imagining him crooning All I ever wanted, All I ever needed, I put on Judy Collins instead. My mother had been crazy about Judy Collins; she had all her records. I liked her voice—it was strong and sort of soothing and reminded me of my mother.
We cruised past Staten Island. My father said, “When Greta and I were courting”—Courting? I pictured a horse and carriage bouncing down a country lane, my mother in a hoop skirt—“I gave your mother a Judy Collins record. I forget which one it was. Golden Apples? I can’t remember. Anyhow, I gave her the record, and she loved it—it wasn’t an easy one to find. She was almost in tears, she was so happy to have it—she said it was the nicest gift she’d ever gotten. Later, when we moved to Queens, I see she has two Golden Apples. She didn’t want me to feel bad that she already had it. That’s the kind of woman your mother was.”
A part of me wanted to roll my eyes as usual and snap: Thanks. That’s really illuminating. But it was. How had I not heard this story before? My mother was nice enough to lie effusively when given a double gift—that’s who she was, a tiny piece to attach to the sprawling, incomprehensible puzzle of her. I envied my father for these secret nuggets of knowledge, for knowing so much more of her than I did. Sometimes I imagined that if I could stick a key into his chest it would open up like an armoire and reveal all the secrets of her life, all the stories and memories, and I could page through them and know her, really know her. My memories weren’t enough. I wanted his. I once asked him, “Tell me stories about Mommy,” but his face was as blank as mine when Ms. Poletti asked me to r
ecite Sonnet 38 from memory. I had to wait for these things to come out on their own.
We drove on and I did my ankle exercises when I remembered. The city evolved into trees and towns and farmland. After we’d exhausted three Judy Collins tapes we decided to stop for lunch—we wanted to find something healthy to eat, to start our week off on a good footing. When we saw a Wendy’s sign I yelled, “Pull over!” He headed into the exit lane. “They have a new grilled chicken sandwich I read about in Health Now,” I said.
We parked, waited on line, and ordered two grilled chickens with dry baked potatoes on the side. “No fries,” I instructed.
“She’s the boss,” he told the cashier.
We settled into a shiny lacquered table by the window—my father wanted to keep an eye on our car in the parking lot. He took a bite of his sandwich. “Not bad,” he said.
“Kind of yummy,” I said.
“Could use some butter,” he mumbled over his potato.
“I should’ve brought the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.”
“The I Can Believe It’s Not Butter? That stuff is bleh,” he said.
I’d bought it after reading a Health Now feature on it. “It’s not bleh. It tastes just like butter.”
“Bleh.”
“You need to change your attitude,” I said.
A man at the table beside us eavesdropped and laughed.
I glanced around the Wendy’s and wondered what these people thought of us. Who did they see, looking at us? This isn’t us, really, the two of us alone, I wanted to tell them. We don’t know how the hell we ended up here by ourselves.
We took our iced teas to the car, but as soon as my father started driving again I fell asleep. An hour after I woke up, we approached the Green Springs driveway.
“I guess this is it,” he said.
The driveway was lined with stone walls; a guard poked his head out of a wooden booth in the middle of the road. “Healthy Heart check-ins?”
“That’s us.” My father told him our names, and he compared them to a list.
“Straight ahead.”
The resort looked like a mansion that had hired the cast of the Golden Girls to decorate. Inside was all big pastel flowers and gilt moldings and overgrown ficuses.
We registered at the front desk and received two green folders and Hello My Name Is stickers to put on our shirts. The receptionist pointed us toward a banquet room, where an entire Golden Girls convention seemed to be taking place.
My father and I hovered by the food table, wallflowers at a school dance. I filled a plate with grapes and what looked like a hunk of cheese but tasted like an eraser.
“This is a lot of old ladies,” I said, scanning the room. It was old-lady summer camp, all bouffant hair and honey-thick perfume.
“What’s this, hoomis?”
“Hummus. It’s hummus, Dad.”
“Tastes like creamed sawdust.”
After a while a man moved to the front and asked us to take our seats. He introduced himself as Dr. Milken.
“Welcome. We’re so glad you came to Green Springs.” He launched into a “health, happiness, and longevity” spiel, which suspiciously resembled the Healthy Heart brochure, and began to introduce about twenty different doctors and explain their specialties. As he droned on, my mind shifted to the cancer guy. I wanted to ask him if he ever thought about what might have caused his disease. Had he grown up near power lines? Was there something bad in their water? Pesticides?
Had he ever read Health Now?
I felt a sudden chill and knew for certain that I couldn’t ask him. I knew the cancer guy had died. I felt it, the absence. He was gone—somehow I was sure of this. In my mind I watched his body being wheeled away like my mother’s, Gigi picking up his hand, kissing his nose, his forehead, leaving the hospital with the plastic bag emblazoned with Patients’ Belongings in purple letters. A friend would pick her up and as she was waiting in the lobby she’d almost want to stay in this hospital where she’d spent so much time over the years, with its familiar rush of visitors, almost like a busy office building, except for all the hope and dread. And now when she walked out that door: only dread.
She’d sit in her friend’s car and talk about how it was over finally—a relief. Relief? Not the right word. The friend would discuss the traffic on First Avenue, the weather, it was time for dinner, she must be hungry.
She wasn’t hungry.
Had she eaten?
Not really. (An orange on Tuesday. A packet of saltines.)
She should eat. Did she feel like Chinese?
Chinese would be fine.
At the Chinese restaurant she’d think the whole time about the bag of belongings in her friend’s car, that she shouldn’t have left it there. She’d regret leaving it on the backseat throughout the entire dinner. What if someone broke in and took it? She’d never forgive herself if that happened.
I looked up—green folders were flipping open all around me. Dr. Milken asked us to take out a card inside that divided us into groups called “families.”
“Are you okay?” my father asked. “You look lost.”
I tried to find my voice. “I’m fine.”
“We’re in Family Three,” he said, and he led me toward the designated room.
There were seven members of Family Three plus two doctors, Dr. Marcy Fishbaum, a redheaded psychologist with a bowl cut, and Dr. Henry Jackson, a cardiologist in a blue sweater with a metallic sheen that had a certain Liberace-ness about it. You’d think with their kind of money he could buy a nice-looking sweater.
Dr. Fishbaum asked us to go around the circle, introduce ourselves, and say what brought us to Green Springs. She asked Nikki Glimcher to start.
Nikki and her husband, Tommy, resembled two giant human dumplings. “We’re in our sixties now, and I kinda had to drag Tommy here—he didn’t wanna come,” she said. Tommy examined the ceiling. “Six months ago, he had a heart attack.” Her voice cracked; she took a deep breath.
“But no way am I gonna eat rabbit food,” Tommy said.
Next was Cindy Curry from Florida; she’d come with her mother, Alva. “My husband died four years ago during a routine angioplasty,” Cindy said, her friendly, seahorsey face bobbing. “And my dad died of stomach cancer five years before that.”
“We have high cholesterol—runs in the family. We’re on Questran,” Alva said.
My father took Questran also, that chalky powder he stirred into his orange juice every morning.
Shelly Petra shifted in her seat and tugged at her gingham headband. She was the youngest person in the group besides me. “I came here from Chapel Hill. I’m a professor of anthropology at UNC.” She pushed her purple-rimmed glasses back on her nose. She opened her mouth and paused for a long time. Dr. Fishbaum seemed unsure whether to move on to me, or wait for her to speak, but Shelly finally continued. “I came here by myself because Ron, my husband, passed away last year. He had a severe myocardial infarction and he was thirty-five.” Long pause.
“Do you have high cholesterol or other risk factors yourself?” Dr. Jackson asked.
She shook her head. “No. But I eat a nearly fat-free diet. I’m very careful. I saw an ad for this retreat in Health Now, and I decided to take the plunge.”
“We’re glad you’re here,” Dr. Fishbaum said, and nodded at me.
“Um, I read Health Now too,” I said. “I’m here with my dad. My triglyceride count is borderline high—one forty-five. I have a genetic predisposition for heart disease. And melanoma. I mean a predisposition for melanoma—I don’t have it of course, ha ha ha. My mom did—she died. But my father and I are eating well. We’re doing really good.” I sounded awful; I should’ve rehearsed what I’d say while the others were speaking.
Alva clucked her tongue, and Shelly and Cindy nodded sympathetically. I couldn’t believe all these people had lost someone as well. What a sorry lot we were. But people died every day, didn’t they? Every minute. While we’d been sitting here
hundreds of people had died. Hundreds of families were getting their hearts torn out. I couldn’t fathom it. I wasn’t sure how it was possible, really, all these people all over the world quietly grieving. You’d think that if everyone was going through this, you’d see them all on the street in a communal howl. There’d be grief riots, Healthy Grief Week, and grief spas. Grief mud masques. Grief nail polish.
My father was saying, “I’ve had two heart attacks in my life now, and triple bypass. Well, as my daughter said, my wife died in January. My health is good! I’m in good shape. My daughter’s watching my diet. We had a Wendy’s grilled chicken on the way down—no fries—and the chicken wasn’t half bad.”
“I’m glad you brought up the subject of healthy eating,” Dr. Fishbaum said. “We’re going to start with a simple exercise tonight, to begin the process of examining our lifestyles closely, to make room for change.”
We were supposed to recall everything we’d eaten in the last three days, to the best of our memory. I felt virtuous, writing it. No Twixes, fries, or burgers for me of late. Even at the Queens Burger I’d been eating simple pastas and the vegetable plate after my shift.
Nikki Glimcher whispered to her husband, “Don’t lie! You had three Big Macs!”
“What’s in the past is in the past. We’re making room for change in the future,” Dr. Fishbaum said.
“Thing is, I’ll eat the rabbit food and make myself miserable and then I’ll probably get sideswiped the next day by an eighteen-wheeler on I-78 like my uncle Jarvis,” Tommy said. Nikki glared at him.
But I thought he had a point. In the end my father’s death would probably not come from a heart attack, and I wouldn’t get melanoma—no, that would be too expected. It would be something else—a staph infection, an aneurysm, pneumonia. I’d read of people who’d died unexpectedly from all these things, how their families were shocked by the cruel twist.