Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  “Suz, you have to help me. I can’t do this. This is a terrible mistake.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “All I could see was—I was so wowed by him, but now—I don’t know. I’m not sure we even know each other. He thinks he’s getting this malleable, chubby Jewish girl—ten years younger, never got the memo. Oh, sure, I’m a quick study, so he can shape me however he wants, and what he wants is fat and happy and home while he’s out traveling the world, and I’ll be the mother of three children and never open my mouth.”

  “Nanny …” Suzy looked at me, nonplussed. “You are not chubby.”

  I sat on the edge of the tub and moaned into my hands.

  “And malleable—are you kidding?” She sat next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. “Nan, what’s this about?”

  The only concrete thing I could come up with was the shoe, so I told her about that.

  “Oh, dear.” Suzy bit her lip, then shook her head. “He’s nervous. You’re nervous. Everyone’s nervous. It’ll be fine. You look beautiful, Nan, and Bob … he’s perfect.”

  “He is. I know. And I want to do the right thing, but Suzy, I’ll never make him happy.”

  I didn’t know how to make sense of it. How could I not want to be with him? Made by him, I was more beautiful than I’d ever been. When he told me where to stand and how to act, I could be confident I’d never put a foot in the wrong place. There was no valid argument for backing out and countless valid arguments against it. I’d be humiliating our parents, embarrassing myself, wasting all that food, flowers, candelabras, and money—for what? To escape the certain hell of an affluent life with every girl’s dream husband?

  It was ridiculous even to consider such a thing at this stage in the game.

  But a desperate feeling swept over me, and it was still with me the next day as I walked down the aisle toward this flawless man with whom I was not in love.

  I’d made a lot of connections in and beyond Dallas through my involvement in a steady pace of arts, charity, and political endeavors. As president of the USA Film Festival, I’d brought some big names and illuminating cinema to Dallas and worked with other movers and shakers in the American Cancer Society to produce the annual Cattle Baron’s Ball. I enrolled as a nontraditional student and started taking courses in film and broadcasting at Southern Methodist University, and this all came together in a job as a talk show host at a local radio station. By the time I was pregnant with Eric, I’d been given the title “Talk Editor” at WRR, a Dallas radio station that was owned by the city but which ran on ad revenue, not as nonprofit public radio.

  Understandably, this caused some friction with other stations in the city, which for years called for WRR to be privatized in the interest of fair play. WRR (speaking of strange bedfellows) was a sometimes-troubled marriage of civic and commercial interests, but I loved the added challenge of that delicate balance. Our bottom line couldn’t be about money, but we didn’t have the luxury of preaching to the choir while someone else paid the light bill. We weren’t in a position to adopt one political view or another or to bend facts in the service of a biased agenda, but we felt a responsibility to raise difficult questions and hold people accountable for the answers.

  My on-air partner was the brilliant and hilarious Guy Gibson, WRR’s managing editor. He was huge and jolly, but didn’t spare the conversational lash, and people loved him. “Gibson and Goodman” brought together topical subjects, provocative discussions, lively audience participation, and an amazing lineup of guests ranging from artists and actors to politicians, doctors, and scientists. Every hour of the talk show required at least two hours of homework. I wasn’t about to settle for the small amount of knowledge that makes a person dangerous. I made sure Guy and I were armed with the best available information, whether we were talking to the cast of a Broadway touring show or the grand master of the KKK. This was a real schooling in “consider the source” for me, a training ground where I first understood the toxic quality of misinformation and the motives of those who spread it. I had a high degree of confidence in science, but I started to understand what Mark Twain meant when he said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

  Our conversation with renowned economist Eliot Janeway was particularly eye-opening. I came away from it understanding that, almost always, the truth could be found beyond the numbers in the practical application of science to life.

  It was my responsibility to get people on the horn and convince them to be on our show, despite the fact that we had no budget to offer them any kind of fee or honorarium. It was a fascinating, creative learning experience. I talked to people I never would have talked to, read books I never would have read. I dashed through the airport with my portable tape recorder dangling from a strap around my shoulder, trying to catch up with my quarries as they changed planes or ran for a flight. I was utterly fearless, and that in itself was a joy. Bob arranged his lunch hour so he could critique my performance every day, and as much as that grated on me, I’d have to admit his comments were incisive and astute. I improved by leaps and bounds.

  One of the most fascinating guests we brought in was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who came to talk about her groundbreaking views on death and dying. In her book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, Kübler-Ross introduced “the five stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In 1975, when I was at WRR, she was touring to promote her third book, Death: The Final Stage of Growth, a sort of compendium of voices: people facing death, families, survivors, physicians, and others. It furthered her study of the dynamics of death and dying, but it also reflected on how profoundly the way people die is affected by the way they live.

  One thing that riveted me as I read her book was the description of the common near-death experience reported by so many people. I’d experienced it too, when I was a very little girl. After I had my appendix out, peritonitis had set in, fever and infection raged, and my intestines shut down. Mother and Daddy were terrified, but I remember feeling almost blissful, ascending through the rushing tunnel, emerging into golden fog and a feeling of immense peace.

  “Before I read your book,” I told Elisabeth, “I always thought it was a dream.”

  “Maybe it was,” she shrugged. “Does it matter? Does it change what you gained from the experience?”

  “Well, I don’t know that I gained anything. It was just … interesting.”

  She nodded. “Or maybe you gained something and don’t know it yet.”

  Every day that we were on the air, “Gibson and Goodman” was a sprinting, fourteen-hour-a-day job. My only complaint was that it didn’t last nearly long enough. Audiences embraced the news-talk format on WRR, but advertisers were slow to latch on. Guy was fired in the spring of 1975. Station management tried to spin it as a budget cut, but Guy was quoted in Texas Monthly as saying his removal was “systematically engineered by the city manager’s office” because our show was too controversial. A number of station employees walked out in solidarity, and for those of us who chose to stay—or stayed because we had no choice—the job wasn’t much fun anymore.

  For me, the situation was cut and dried. No one else was going to hire me. I was five months’ pregnant.

  Suzy was overjoyed. All her dreams of our side-by-side happy motherhood and doting grandmotherhood seemed to be coming together. She wanted my marriage to be as comfortable and enduring as hers and hoped the baby would smooth over or at least distract Bob and me from how ridiculously mismatched we were. I was thrilled about becoming a mother. I wanted to have a child … but not with Bob.

  There’s no point going into the particulars of a bad marriage thirty-odd years after it came apart. We were just catastrophically wrong for each other. I was deeply respectful of his talents, and I’d like to think he was of mine, but we were ill suited on every level, and because we were two hard-drivers unwilling to concede defeat, we trenched in and stuck it out a lot longer than we should ha
ve. I tried to tell myself it would all be different if we had a baby, and I tried. I did try. But the writing was on the wall.

  “I don’t know what to do, Suz.” Our daily phone conversations began to center on this familiar refrain. “I don’t think I can stay in this marriage.”

  “You know Stan and I are here for you. You can come home anytime you need to.”

  I did know that, but the thought of crawling back to Peoria, alone, unemployed, and pregnant—I couldn’t face the idea of my father seeing me that way. One way or another, I was determined to tough it out in Dallas. My main concern now was making a life for this baby.

  Eric was born in October 1975.

  “Sunshine breaks through.” Suzy pressed her lips to the top of his head, and he studied her with wide, interested eyes. “He’s perfect, Nan.”

  She was gaga over him. Mom and Dad rushed over from their vacation home in Florida. Couldn’t wait to lay their hands on him. My husband tried to dissuade Mom from her plan to stay a few weeks.

  “It’s really not necessary,” Bob said. “I’m bringing in a private nurse.”

  That didn’t go far with Mommy.

  “A nurse,” she said flatly. “Why? Are you ill?”

  It was a tense couple of months. In fact, it was a tense couple of years. The radio station switched to a music format, so I couldn’t go back after Eric was born. I wanted to work part-time so I could be with him, so I took a series of project-oriented jobs with various PR and advertising firms. Bob expected me to uphold my busy schedule of charity and social events. He expected the house to be sanitized, the baby food steamed and pureed by hand, and educational activities done by the book. He expected dinner every night on a formally set table with Baccarat crystal, fresh flowers, crisply ironed napkins, and polished silver. He expected the baby to be freshly powdered and dressed like the crown prince of Freedonia.

  Divorce was less common back then than it is now; I knew I’d be stigmatizing my son and setting him up for struggle. But I’d grown up in such a happy home, I was equally devastated by the thought of burdening his childhood with the cold war his father and I lived with.

  I took Eric to visit Mom and Dad in Florida as often as I could get away, and sometimes we went to Suzy’s and spent long weekends in Peoria, sitting in the kiddy area at the municipal pool, raking autumn leaves, and throwing those over-the-top birthday parties. Between visits, Suzy and I talked on the phone for hours every day. She was genuinely anguished by the way things had turned out for me, and looking back, I cringe at the amount of time we spent beating that dead horse. If we’d known how loudly the clock was ticking, we surely would have spent that time talking about something else.

  Suzy’s and my “dense breast” issues continued throughout our twenties, and now in her early thirties, Suzy had undergone a number of needle aspirations for cysts. On a Tuesday afternoon in the fall of 1977, she called me as she did every day, but something in her voice was off-key, forcibly unafraid.

  “This lump is different,” she said. “It’s hard. He did the needle biopsy. It wasn’t a cyst. I guess they have to take it out so they can say for sure.”

  “Oh, my God. Suzy, let me go with you.”

  “No, no, no. That’s not necessary, Nan. Don’t be silly. I’ll call you when I get the results. You know it’s going to be nothing.”

  “Right,” I said. “So I’ll be there to celebrate with you when it comes back negative.”

  I made arrangements for Eric, called the airline for a ticket, told Bob I was going, called work and left a message, all the while feeling like my heart had shifted into an uncomfortable thrumming overdrive. Flying out of Dallas, I was acutely aware of the vast emptiness between me and the earth.

  Daddy was waiting for me out on the tarmac in Peoria, his expression fixed and ashen. He didn’t say a word when I came to him.

  He didn’t have to.

  Suzy has cancer.

  This was now the fulcrum on which everything balanced. When we sat down to dinner, we didn’t know how to pray or pick up our spoons. How could we eat if Suzy has cancer? How could anyone lie down to sleep? Do you put sugar in your morning coffee when Suzy has cancer? Should I tie Steffie’s little shoe and send Scott outside to play or tell them to sit quietly in a chair and wait for the sky to fall? We sat around her kitchen table like soldiers in a foxhole.

  I could tell Suzy was terrified, because historically, in the everyday crises of life—a flat tire, a blown fuse, or a fender bender—she always required a lot of hand-holding. Now all she wanted to do was comfort me and Mom and stuff Stan and Daddy full of home cooking. She had the desperate bravado of someone rising to the occasion. Grace under pressure was something she’d always admired, and she was digging deep for it now.

  “It’ll be all right. You’ll see,” she said. “It’s not like I’m sick or anything. I feel fine. The most important thing is to get through it quickly and quietly so it doesn’t upset the kids.”

  “Yes. Of course. Right,” I agreed too much. “We’re not going to panic. Once we have all the information, we’ll move to the problem-solving stage.”

  “I have all the information I need, Nan. All I want to know is what time to show up for the surgery so I can get it over with and never think about it again. The surgeon says there’s no need for me to have a mastectomy like … like some people used to have.”

  “Suzy, a mastectomy wouldn’t be like Aunt Rose’s.”

  “I can’t even think about that,” she said. “Jesus. If anything like that happened to me, I’d just—I don’t know. I’d want you to find a way to kill me. I’d rather be dead.”

  “Don’t say that.” I bit my lip, tried to soften my tone. “Suz, it’s not like that anymore.”

  “Not at all. It’s just a small incision, then he puts in an implant, and you’re cured.”

  “Cured?” I echoed. “He used the word cured? He didn’t say remission?” My mind circled back through all the luncheon speakers I’d endured. Had any of them ever said cured in the same sentence with cancer? “Is he suggesting chemotherapy or radiation?”

  “No, no, no.” Suzy waved that off. “Dr. Moffet said something about radiation, but the surgeon says it can leave scars, and I don’t want anything like that.”

  “Suzy, M. D. Anderson is one of the best cancer centers in the world. I’ve worked on fundraisers for them, had physicians and researchers on my show. I’m sure one of them could help us get in. Just to get a second opinion before the surgery.”

  Suzy shook her head, adamant. “Nobody knows me like Dr. Moffet does. He’s been taking care of me since I was born. Why would I want some stranger?”

  “Because the stranger is an oncologist. A cancer specialist. Suzy, you have to get a second opinion. Mommy? Tell her.”

  Mom started to say something, but Suzy held up her hand.

  “Please. I’m not you, Nan. I need to get through this my own way. I love this surgeon. And I trust him. He and Dr. Moffet say I’ll be fine, and I will be.”

  The day of Suzy’s surgery, I met the surgeon and thought, What’s not to love? He was striking and suave, extremely good-looking. Most attractive was the way he told us all exactly what we dearly needed to hear. Confident as a big brass bell, he strode into her hospital room and said, “I got it all. She’s cured.”

  He didn’t ask if we had questions, and when I tried to volunteer one, he made it clear that he was not there to discuss things with us—only to inform us. He’d bestowed the blessing of his great skills and was handing our girl back to us, sewn up with a bow. Our gratitude was the appropriate response; our questions would be an insult to his expertise, and the answers would be beyond the scope of our intelligence anyway. He’d done a subcutaneous mastectomy, removing tissue through a deep incision and leaving the outside of the breast intact for the most part. Ten days later, he did an implant. It wasn’t beautiful work, but it made her feel whole again. Within a few weeks, Suzy seemed fine, a relatively small scar the only eviden
ce of her narrow escape.

  She was ecstatic and ready to blaze back into her life, but even after I went home to Dallas, I kept nudging her to get a second opinion. I tried to enlist Mom’s help, but I think she was as grateful and as happy as Suzy was to embrace the prognosis the surgeon had declared so confidently as fact. And besides that, Mom was always better than me at an aspect of patient advocacy that eludes a lot of people: respect for the patient’s autonomy. Ultimately, these were Suzy’s decisions to make. This was her body, her life. As far as she was concerned, she’d been cured of her cancer and didn’t want to spend any more of our daily phone conversations hashing it over.

  “You have no idea how terrified I was,” she said. “I just want to put it behind me.”

  “I know, Suz, but the thing is … I called a friend at M. D. Anderson and at the library this morning, I spent hours reading all about medullary carcinoma. What that means is …”

  “Nancy. Please.”

  “Sometimes a surgeon or a physician who’s not a cancer specialist—he sees the border of the tumor and thinks it’s okay, but this book said a lot of oncologists say it should still be treated as if it’s invasive.”

  She winced at the sound of the word.

  “Just stop, all right? I don’t want to hear about carcinoma and tumors right before I sit down to dinner. And I think the surgeon probably picked up a little more in medical school than you gathered in one morning at the library.”

  “Look …” I tried for a conciliatory tone. “Just come down for a visit. We’ll run down to Houston for the afternoon, get the second opinion, then hit the Galleria. Shop till we drop.”

  “Nan, let it go,” said Suzy. “You’re just fixating on this so you don’t have to deal with your own problems.”