by Neil Hetzner
“Your father has a very rare lack of capacity for duplicity. He’s the most obvious man in the world. I was in stitches watching him before my sixtieth birthday. No one could have been more sheepish before a surprise party. Remember how many times at Christmas one of you, usually Dilly, of course, would pry from him what your big present was going to be? Now, he’s pulling away from me.”
“But…”
“No, Nita, please listen. When I came home from the hospital in September, and for several weeks afterward, we were distanced. But it was different. It was just like what you said earlier. Neither of us knew how for me to be sick. In a strange way it reminded me of the first time I was pregnant. He drew back then for awhile, but it was because he didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t know how fragile I might be, and he didn’t know who I was becoming. I think it’s hard for a man. The wife becomes a parent nine months before the husband. He can help set up a nursery and rub ankles, but it’s just not the same. The wife’s already jumped to the other side of the biggest change in any marriage, except maybe death. When I was carrying Peter, it took awhile, but, then, we were fine. It was the same thing after the hospital. He was tentative. He was… He was… Just like a cat. A part of him wanted to come close, but he just wasn’t sure. Of me. So he walked back and forth in front of me, but kept just out of reach. But in a couple of weeks, we drew close again. And we stayed close. My breast being gone seemed to be okay. The scar didn’t frighten him or appall him. That much. It seemed to be no different than my weight or wrinkles or varicose veins. Just part and parcel of a less-than-perfect, but perfectly fine, mate. When I started going bald he never stepped back. He was more accepting of that than I was. He even told me that he saw it as a sign of health. My hair’s dying meant the cancer was being killed, too.
“But, now. Now, Nita, it’s very different. Partly, obviously, because of how cruel I’ve been to him. But, I think, mostly because of this.”
Bett pushed herself back from the kitchen table. She extended her legs.
“This.”
She pointed to her right leg.
This sickens him. There is something about what’s going on inside this leg that disgusts him. He can’t look at me. He’d sleep in a separate bed every night if he had the courage. He sleeps as far away from me as he can, except that a lot of that time is not sleeping. We both pretend. I think the thought of touching me, or this,” Bett tapped her leg, “in the night is absolutely abhorrent to him. He’s been getting up in the middle of the night. I think it’s just to get away. To give himself a little relief.”
“I can’t believe it, Mom. It just doesn’t sound like Dad. Maybe you’re misreading things.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. You watch.”
“It could be he’s distracted by work. You said yesterday how crazy things have been. An honorable man with his honor in question. Or he could feel guilty because he’s so divided between work and you. Or he could be back in the cat phase—not knowing if it’s okay to approach you, yet. You just said how mean you’d been. Wounds take time to heal. Christ, look at me. Look at Peter. Maybe it’s just that knowing you are sick or in pain terrifies him and he withdraws. It could be a thousand other things.”
“Yes, it could, and I’ve thought of those things, but I don’t think that it’s anything other than revulsion. Honey, in forty years, I haven’t been wrong about your father very many times. My knowing him so well is something that makes it harder for him. He knows I know that I disgust him. That’s what’s so sad. He can’t get away from it. It’s very hard seeing him this way.”
“Sad, not mad?’
“At your father? No, Nita. After how I hurt him, how could I be mad at him? There are plenty of times when I think of what’s going on inside of me and I’m disgusted. I’m revulsed. I find it abhorrent.”
As she said “abhorrent” Bett slapped her leg in emphasis.
“C’mon, Mom. Don’t do that to yourself. Fight the disease. Don’t fight yourself. Let’s forget this stuff for now.”
Nita stretched forward to pull the health care form away from its place in front of Bett.
“Let’s get out of here. Let’s drive over to Narragansett, to the Pier or the lighthouse to watch some waves. C’mon, I’ll buy us some lunch. I’ll…”
Nita caught her mother’s look.
“Don’t worry, we don’t have to get out of the car, and you don’t have to eat anything. Let’s just get out of here for awhile. Let’s go fill up on water and big waves.”
Bett nodded. She looked at her leg and whispered “stupid” before she used her hands to push herself up from the kitchen chair.
* * *
That night Nita closely watched her father during dinner and, afterward, as they sat through the MacNeil-Lehrer report and a National Geographic special on endangered species. It soon became obvious to Nita that her father was very agitated. His eyes would not fix. They jumped from face to furniture to fantasy without finding anyplace to safely light. His body was pulled in as if he feared a sudden punch to the stomach. Although he sat on the same couch with Bett, he didn’t sit close nor stay in place long. Nita counted seven trips—to the bathroom, to the kitchen for a glass of water, back for a handful of raisins, to start tea water, and again to make the tea, to let Queenie out for a run and ten minutes later to let her in again—during two hours of television.
Nita purposefully had chosen the leather armchair because it would allow her to watch the TV screen while still being able to study her father; however she found that almost every time she shifted her gaze to him, he noticed her attention immediately. She guessed he must be anticipating her querying, if not accusatory, looks.
In bed, unable to sleep, restless from two days of not working, Nita reviewed her mother’s conversation and her own observations of her father’s behavior. After careful analysis led her to the decision that her own observations upheld her mother’s conclusions, Nita threw out that conclusion on the technicality that her mother’s conversation had prejudiced her own ability to observe and judge impartially. In the hour of agitation which followed, the daughter wondered if her father were awake two doors down the hall. She strained to hear a door opening and the creak the stairs seemed to make only at night. She tried to feel what her father was feeling. When she pared it down to just her father with her mother, it was hard to imagine anything other than a casual intertwining, a nocturnal sharing of sheets and heat and air. It was easy to imagine an unconscious sharing within their sleeps. The thought of the goodness that must go on between them in sleep was so strong it made her clench her teeth. She had never slept with anyone long enough, or with enough trust and assurance, that some part of her did not maintain a night-long vigil against betrayal from within the small confines of their redoubt.
Would she ever have a simple intertwining? She had come close to talking to her mother about Dan Herlick. She shook her head in the dark. Even though they had been in bed together, she did not think of him as Dan. It was always Dan Herlick. She wasn’t even sure that she liked him. In fact, there was much about him that she should dislike. He made a liquid noise as he ate as his asthma forced him to breathe through his mouth. He pushed his pants down below a growing stomach. He was… not exactly ill-prepared…but chronically disorganized. He was pompous during business. She wasn’t sure she trusted someone who changed from day to night.
Nita stopped herself. How did she know that the father she saw at home was the same person who worked at the bank? Didn’t she pretend to a competency that she didn’t always feel? Maybe part of her problem was that she didn’t separate day from night enough. How much did she unnecessarily burden herself by expecting that competency, forthrightness, orderliness and rationality should be as rewarded by love as they were by the law? How did she thwart her desire for love by bringing her cold skills of analysis to her bed?
There was no rational reason to like Dan Herlick. He was not as bright as she. Nor as attractive. Nor hardworking. Nor
as professional.
Nita forced herself to pause again.
This was not new thinking. This was a rut well-worn. She had counted and compared their qualities scores of times. It was stupid. It was unfair. She wasn’t looking for a law partner.
Or was she? She seemed to be. She seemed to assume that a good lawyer would make a good mate. She tried to push the old thinking, as slick and supple as old silk, from her mind.
Start over. Again.
Dan Herlick.
She had dissected him to find weaknesses and had found many. More than enough to have cause to push him from her life. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t pushed him away, but neither had she let him in. Like a true lawyer, she had made him wait. She’d kept him on the stoop. Sat him in the foyer. Put him on hold. Continuance after continuance while she researched and analyzed, considered and came to no conclusion.
There was little obvious to like about Dan Herlick. Yet, he remained in her brain. There was something of him which had insinuated itself into her. Something that couldn’t be easily dismissed, or ignored. He didn’t hide his heart. From what she herself did and from what she saw of others, especially those alone who had passed into their thirties and beyond, that was an irrational, but amazingly ingratiating, thing to do. It was one of the things that had made her parents’ marriage so attractive to Nita. They had always been open with one another. Had that really changed? Was her mother right?
Nita rolled over and enshrouded herself in her sheets. She wished her thoughts would stop pushing their jagged edges through her head. She tried to focus her attention onto her breathing. She worked to find a rhythm to her lungs which would allow a flow of calm to arms and legs and brain.
Within minutes Nita had stopped thinking of her lungs.
There couldn’t be anything wrong. How, after more than forty years of marriage, could something go wrong? What enormity could make a change in such constancy?
Nita made herself think of her mother as just her mother, as nothing less and, more importantly, as nothing more. Her mother’s fears must be wrong. Two doors down her father must be asleep, brought to that rest by his own temporary, nocturnal contentment and the unconscious comfort that her mother gave. Nita tried to hold onto those thoughts, but they wriggled from her grasp. She thought of Bett and, following her mother’s pronoun lead, that so the bed two doors down had three occupants rather than two. She found herself clenching her teeth again, but this time it was against the roiling in her stomach. She let herself go. She let herself think like her mother suggested her father was thinking.
She imagined the cancer in bed with her. She conjured up a pulsing knot of moon-green glowworms inside her thigh. After placing the knot midway between her knee and hip she drove it down into her bone. It wouldn’t stay. Her imagination couldn’t quite get it inside the cold white calcium corridor of her bone. She brought it out and wrapped it around her femur so that it resembled maggots on a chicken leg. With the lightest of touches she brought her fingertips to the blanket-warmed skin of her thigh. Tentatively, she pressed against her skin. She saw the slithery knot respond to the intrusion of her fingers by shifting to an ovoid shape which stretched itself out along a greater length of bone. She lifted her leg against the weight of the covers. Using both hands she encircled her thigh above the writhing knot and slid the noose of her fingers down her leg. The snarl of squirming life exploded into flight and escaped into her flesh like roaches into counter cracks.
Nita struggled against the grasp of the twisted sheets to vomit into the wastebasket she desperately pulled from underneath the nightstand. She was revolted. By her vomit. By the nest of worms she had put inside her skin. By her legal tricks and games to gain the truth. And also, as her father, by that which was growing in her mother’s leg.
Cancer.
She had dreamed of cancer for almost twenty years. Other teen girls dreamed of boys while she dreamed of cells. She had spent so many nights awake, lying still, listening for the sound of a small explosion as her cells burst their bounds. A wave of pain would splash through her insides. The pain would rise and swell and break inside her and when it receded she would see the cancer’s dirty spume coat the path where the pain had been. For years she had waited and waited knowing that this wave, this crest, or if not this, then, certainly the next would be the one that would wash away her life. The pain would grow and grow inside her guts and bring death so close she couldn’t scream. The wet weighted felt of death—smooth, seamless, soft—would wrap round her. Its oppressive weight would hold her fast. Breathless, voiceless, she would twist and thrash to avoid suffocation. Night fears of death had been Nita’s constant implacable companion.
Nita held herself very still. Another second’s thought and all the fear that had tracked her nights for years would come roaring back. She tried to curve her thoughts away from herself and back to Dan Herlick.
How thick-skinned he must be. Rebuff. Rebuff. He brushed them off. He pushed past her dismissals. Thick-skinned for himself, but thin for her. That day he had seen the quickest flick of pain upon her face and helped her to her car. Once, no, both nights they had spent in bed he had known just when things went bad. So big. So florid faced. Features sculpted from thick dough. That belly. Not soft, not hard. Weighty. All this mass of man. With features so blunted, so fleshy, it was hard to say just where one stopped and another began. Where were the metes and bounds of nose or lips? A blunt, soft-edged lump. Fingers as thick as votive candles. Bringing their flickering fire. Cream-pink freckled arms whose weight made the bed frame groan when they wrapped themselves around her. All blunt. So much soft-edged mass.
Until he had begun to touch her. Then it seemed his fingers tapered to the most precise of paintbrush points. The brush of his arm across her breasts had been so light it was more heat than touch.
An hour in the dark with his fine touch and she had chiseled him to a Giacometti man.
She had held to that as he rolled on top. They were the same. A match in mass. He had entered her and she had ridden that thought. Equals. Equals. E——quals. E——quals. A two-note song. All percussion. He had slid away on the first note and back on the second. E——quals. E——quals. Balanced so precisely in the night. Then one of them, she, had changed the rhythm. More.
She had wanted more from her. She had wanted to give past the barrier where her giving always stopped. More. He had felt the change and thought it was meant for him. More. He had given more.
More. More.
More.
She had felt his steady beat become a hammering. More she told herself. She had opened herself to his pulse.
E-quals. E-quals. A match in mass.
She had pushed harder. Hammering became battering. Despite her holding tight, e-qual e-qual had slipped away. She had slid down inside herself. To shiny-surfaced oysters pounded with a club. To okra pods being pummeled. To slick red cells bursting open. Pinocytotic vesicles bursting open. Nucleolonema ooozing through. She had tried to twist away. It was over. It was safe. Sing. Sing. E——quals. Equals. But she couldn’t get the notes to come. Fear’s black vacuum stopped all sound. Pain sprang up out of her womb and raced to wrap its wet felt around her face. She had tried to twist away. To escape. But, Dan Herlick’s weight had held her. Cancer was coming and she couldn’t move. The blunted mass of man, squamous man, held her pinioned to her fear.
She had screamed no, no, no.
Immediately, the pounding stopped. The weight was gone. The only sounds were her sobs and the slightest sibilance of his shushing. He hadn’t asked her why. She hadn’t offered. Not that first time and not the next. Would she on the third? Would there be a third?
Cancer. Cancer. A wilding of the cells.
The sharp acid smell of her vomit came to Nita. Would old thoughts ever leave? If the wonder of a two-note song couldn’t crowd them out, what could? The worst of thoughts took hold in Nita, burrowed deep and held on tight.
Now, Nita was sure her father was awake sharing her th
oughts. Although it hurt to believe he had the same kind of thoughts that she had been imagining, she knew it must be true. He, too, had lain awake nights sickening himself.
Nita willed her father to leave his bed. She wanted to look into eyes, flat-gazed but wide-open, dry and bitter as her own, to find some forgiveness in them that she could absorb and filter and return in kind.
Almost an hour later, Nita heard a stirring. She lay still for a moment before switching on the bedside lamp. Blinded, she shuffled herself into her robe. She started to use the wastebasket as her visa to join her father, but she set it down quietly by the door before entering the darkened hall.
Nita had just arranged the comforter around her on the couch when she heard a weight on the stairs.
“Hi, Dad.”
“No rest for the wicked?”
“Is that it?”
“I think maybe it was just too much dessert. I sometimes have these waves of doubt. Dilly may be right.”
“About?”
“Our sins of the flesh. I’d be better off finishing dinner with a big bowl of broccoli.”
“With caramel sauce?”
“Without.”
Nita had felt her skin galvanize when her father said “wicked,” “waves of doubt,” and “flesh.” After several minutes of dull banter as Neil set up the space heater, poured himself a drink and, after a glance, received a nod from Nita to do the same for her, they stared listlessly at one another.
Each in his bed had wanted to be with the other, but, now, both felt the strain. Being together in the middle of the night predicated an intimacy, but the strain of sleeplessness forestalled the connection by hampering thought and speech. The words they spoke were flat and when not flat were mis-emphasized. Nita thought that it was as if they were reading through a play for the first time. Words were correctly pronounced, but the knowledge of the emotions underlying the words was missing. Each wanted to be warm and understanding, to share a sad but intimate moment, but the weight of their betrayal of Bett and their best selves kept each feeling separate and alone, unworthy of warmth or understanding.