A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “A little company’s doing wonders for me, I guess.” She smiled. “Given me my appetite back.” Which was, of course, wonderful, but this company, Elaine? This company? Even with all this talk of therapy and the heavy, greasy platter of corned beef and pastrami, which they couldn’t have thought not to bring? And plastic tubs of chicken soup, as though you have a cold and not cancer?

  But suddenly she was standing at the marble breakfast bar, picking a slice of pastrami off the platter and eating it with her hands. “Yum,” she said. “I don’t know why, but it really does feel good to eat something solid.”

  “Well, that is wonderful, Elaine,” Mimi said, rustling through our cabinets for plates, knives, mustard. “Every day will be a little bit better, I think.”

  “Until the next round.” Elaine sighed and stuffed another piece of pastrami in her mouth. “You know what this nausea feels like today? A little like being pregnant. Like that weird kind of one-minute-you’re-starving, the-next-you-want-to-puke pregnant thing.”

  “I remember that well,” Mimi said.

  “I wish I could still get pregnant,” Elaine said. “Don’t you, Pete? Wouldn’t it be nice to have another baby? Maybe I still could. Maybe the chemo hasn’t destroyed all my goods.”

  “Really?” Mimi said. “You would have another baby? I could not even imagine. I don’t have the energy anymore. For me, I am just waiting for grandchildren.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Elaine smiled. “A baby in the house would be something to look forward to. Would make all this worth it.”

  Elaine was forty-seven and irradiated. She was having 50 milligrams of Cytoxan forced into her veins through a Hickman cath for the next six months. And even before all that, twenty years before all that, she hadn’t been able to hold on to an embryo.

  “A little brother for Alec,” Mimi mused.

  “What do you think, Pete?”

  “Just look at his face,” Phil chortled. “White as a ghost. He thinks he’s gonna retire in fifteen years. Big Brother doesn’t want to start paying for college when it’s time for him to buy a nice pad in Florida and sail off into the senior citizen sunset.”

  What were we talking about here? Was everyone in this room out of his mind? I stood and walked over to the window that looked out onto the backyard. Alec and his cousins were sprawled on the brick patio. They looked as though they were talking about something important, nursing their Cokes and pursing their lips. Alec needs therapy? Alec needs intervention? Alec needs a brother or a sister?

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Elaine called. “I’m probably only kidding.”

  But Elaine, even if you weren’t, it would still be impossible.

  “I’m just feeling some nostalgia for my feminine parts, is all. I don’t really want a baby.”

  “Okay,” I said, still looking out the window. All we’d wanted for so many years was a baby. Now here he was, long legs kicked behind him in our very own backyard.

  “Pete, can I make you a sandwich?” she said.

  “That would be great.”

  “Pastrami or corned beef?”

  “You decide,” I said, and I sat back down at the table to watch my flower-turbaned wife lick French’s mustard off her fingers one by one. A few hours later, Phil and Mimi and the girls left, and Elaine disappeared into the bathroom, where she vomited up everything she’d eaten that day and let me sit with her on the cold bathroom floor and rub her back and wash her neck with cool, damp towels. I put her to bed around seven o’clock, and afterward Alec and I decided to rent a movie, something loud and stupid with lots of explosions, and he and I sat on the couch and munched on leftover deli meat and went to bed much later, Bruce Willis’s cries for backup still ringing in our ears. If they wanted to try to pathologize our son, that was their prerogative. As far as I was concerned, he was about as perfect as a fifteen-year-old could get.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HAD ELAINE BEEN diagnosed in 1971, she would have had about a 30 percent chance of survival over the next five years. If she’d been diagnosed in 1981, the rates would have gone up by 15 percent. But she was diagnosed in April 2001, and therefore neither Rhonda Nighly nor anyone else on the cancer floor was terribly surprised when, just a few months after Elaine began chemotherapy, her estrogen concentrations were normal and she was as clean and cancer-free as she’d been ten years before. She’d lost weight. Her hair was growing back into a chic little pixie cut that she spiked up with her hands. She’d started wearing a bit more makeup to return the color to her cheeks and the sparkle to her eyes. She’d started wearing more jewelry, too.

  This was the renaissance of our marriage, the very heart of the renaissance, and who can say if our rebirth was due to her survival, Elaine’s new interest in herself and her own happiness, or my own deep gratitude that she’d made it through okay and still loved me, needed me? I started buying her little gifts I knew she’d like, a framed black-and-white photograph of Central Park, a big purple orchid in a little pot. And I planned weekend getaways to New England, bed-and-breakfasts, the sort of trip I’d always hated—show me a shared bathroom and I’ll show you the door—but Elaine began to take for granted. She clipped travel articles out of the Times and left them for me in my study; dutifully I’d make reservations and check in with my folks to see if they’d come watch Alec for the weekend (Alec, who was more and more resistant to babysitting, who was now taking driver’s ed, who’d grown two inches and dropped soccer and suddenly started hanging out with those idiots Shmuley and Dan).

  Elaine and I had started doing something else together, too, during this time, something we were ashamed to even admit to Joe and Iris, much less to our kid or our folks. We went about it with unpracticed secrecy, and when people inquired where we were on Saturday mornings, we’d mumble nonsense about “alone time” or, say, “Just out shopping, you know …” But the truth was that Elaine had read an article about a synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and wanted to try it. The place was a good hour’s drive from our house, a tricky-to-find neighborhood where neither one of us had ever been. But the appeal of this particular synagogue was that it was full of survivors and sufferers — as well as vegetarians, lesbians, Ethiopians, and hippies. The rabbi herself had lost a breast years ago. Elaine thought we could check the place out maybe one Saturday morning, if I didn’t mind. In accordance with the renaissance, how could I mind? We hadn’t been to services since Janene Rothman’s kid’s bat mitzvah two years before, but still, the morning after she’d read the article, we left the house at the crack of dawn to cross two bridges and several highways to reach the survivor’s synagogue in Park Slope.

  “Welcome, welcome,” said the rabbi, a heavy woman in a tight T-shirt that revealed every fold of her flabby torso and the great gaping space where her right breast should have been. “It’s wonderful to see you again,” she said, even though we’d never seen her before in our lives.

  “What have you gotten me into?” I whispered to my wife, who grinned sheepishly at me and spiked up her hair. There were Old Tes taments on desks by the entrance, song sheets in a basket by the door, and a basket of ugly hand-knit yarmulkes right next to the song sheets. I plunked one on my head and followed Elaine to a seat. In fact, there were lots of healthy-looking seniors and beautiful young people and a healthy sprinkling of forty-somethings in ugly knit yarmulkes and hip Brooklyn shoes. Elaine was on my left; to my right sat a lovely brunet, maybe thirty-four or-five, who wore a loose linen dress cut low in the front and the back. As she squeezed in next to me, her leg pressed accidentally against mine, and I felt an appealing tingle.

  When my grandfather was still alive, he and Phil and my dad and I attended the Orthodox shul down the street from our Yonkers apartment. Elaine attended her parents’ Orthodox shul her entire childhood. For both of us, the Jewish liturgy brought to mind the mingled smells of ancient prayer shawls and arthritic old men, the sensation of standing for hours on our feet. A female rabb
i? Mixed-gender seating? Brightly colored WEAR A CONDOM, SAVE A LIFE posters in the entrance hall? Every old Jew we’d ever known would have turned around and walked right out.

  But lessons from the anatomy lab came to mind: disregard the color of the skin or the gender of the specimen; inside, the blood and guts all looked the same. Books, hymns, prayers — they were all the same. The cantor had a husky singing voice, the rabbi read Hebrew with an authoritative snap, and within minutes Elaine and I lost ourselves in the words of the songs we’d sung growing up.

  Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

  Blessed be his glorious kingdom for ever and ever.

  Did we believe that once? I think we must have. It’s possible I’d never stopped believing, actually; I’d just stopped thinking about it.

  Remember these words which I command you this day, and bind them onto the doorpost of your house, and on your gates.

  I watched Elaine’s lips move as she repeated the prayer.

  “Do we believe all this?” I asked her after the prayer.

  “Of course we do,” she said, and I was glad.

  The Torah reading was about the rules for entering the land of Israel, and the pretty brunet next to me stood to receive an aliyah. She was introduced as the survivor of a car accident, and only then did I notice a long pink scar snaking down from her neck to some secret place underneath the linen shift. I crossed my legs. She read Hebrew poorly, and the rabbi leaned over to whisper the words in her ear. She giggled, embarrassed, and started over. Absentmindedly her fingertips traced the line of her scar. I crossed my legs again and looked down at my lap.

  Afterward the rabbi invited anyone who’d been through a recent trial to stand up and introduce himself.

  “Stand up,” I said to Elaine.

  “I don’t need to,” she said. She held my hand. “I’m here with you. That’s enough.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You’ve been through a trial. A big one.”

  “Maybe next week,” she said. I hadn’t considered that we’d be doing this again.

  The woman with the scar had wedged herself back next to me. “Good job,” I said to her.

  “I was terrible,” she said. “But I made a nice donation to the synagogue after the accident, so they have to let me up there to read. One of these days I’ll get it right.” And I was glad to see that in one more way, all these temples were exactly the same.

  On the car ride home, we listened to a British man read boring short stories on NPR and pretended to find the short story experience meaningful. Elaine mused, “Maybe we should bring Alec next time.”

  “Alec would rather clean toilets than go to services.”

  “How do you know?”

  “C’mon,” I said, turning onto the FDR. “I can’t even get the kid to apply to college.”

  “What does applying to college have to do with going to services?”

  “They’re just things obedient kids do. Alec hasn’t been particularly obedient lately.”

  “I’ll ask him,” she said.

  But upon our return, it was clear Alec was in no mood to discuss religion. “Where were you guys?” he asked suspiciously. “I wanted the car keys.”

  “You can’t use the car if we’re not here.”

  His feet were up on the table in the kitchen, and he smelled nastily of unwashed clothing and the hard detergent stink of Listerine.

  “Alec, get your feet off the table,” Elaine said. “I’ll take you for a drive later if you want.”

  “I don’t want to go for a drive with you,” he sneered. “I needed the car.”

  “For what?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “Well,” she said. “Did you have any breakfast?”

  “Not hungry,” he said, keeping his feet right where they were. “Where were you guys, anyway?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, thinking it sort of sweet that he cared.

  He sighed. He’d pierced both his ears and started wearing ugly little wooden plugs in each of them, the sort of thing you saw in National Geographic, what bushmen stuck in their lower lip. He’d also pierced one eyebrow with a tiny gold ring.

  “You were at Shmuley’s house last night?”

  He sighed again, which I took as an assent. Elaine hung her shawl on the peg by the door and went upstairs to take a bath. As far as our son went, I was the chief interrogator.

  “What did you kids do? Trigonometry homework? Discuss politics, maybe? Debate funding for the arts?”

  He stood up and let out an enormous, revolted grunt. “Jesus Christ.” He turned to leave the kitchen, stomp up the stairs to his bedroom. How was this the same kid who, just a single year ago, had attended to his mother’s health concerns with the diligence and tenderness of a visiting nurse? He’d been smoking pot all night (forget his breath, it was right there on his clothes wafting toward me) and I felt my stomach clench a little before I reminded myself what the therapist had said—it wouldn’t kill him.

  “Alec, come back here.”

  “What do you want?”

  “College visits,” I said. “You still haven’t made any decisions.” It was now the August before his senior year, and we had yet to take the requisite trips to hilly Ithaca, depressed Poughkeepsie, the frosty climes of Bowdoin and Bates—while already, months ago, Joe had taken Neal to Cambridge, New Haven, and Hanover. I had secretly hoped to cut Elaine out of the fun and take Alec myself, load up the Audi with some music we could agree on and a handful of AAA maps and recommendations for out-of-the-way upstate jazz clubs or Vermont breweries or New Hampshire theaters. I thought maybe even Springfield, the Basketball Hall of Fame, if Alec was interested in any colleges up around Northampton. (In my imagination, of course, Alec was in an unusually compliant mood.) The kid’s GPA was no better than average, but I was sure there’d be a handful of well-regarded liberal arts colleges with good painting programs that would be happy to accept our boy. We had, after all, no intention of applying for financial aid.

  But Alec continued to stymie my road-trip plans. He couldn’t have cared less about the little circle of higher education that I’d drawn in red ink on my newly purchased AAA New England, nor would he even agree to check out any university Web sites. Elaine was more relaxed than I was about these matters. “He’ll figure it out when he figures it out,” she’d say. But I knew what the deadlines were for early admission, and I knew most of the kids in his class had already written their essays.

  “I’ll get to it,” he said.

  “What about Rutgers?”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s a no-brainer application,” I said. “You could just fill that out so you have a backup.”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You want to go to Rutgers?” Rutgers was the state university, a good deal as far as higher education went, but this was the one big-ticket item in my life for which I was willing to pay retail. I’d been adding to Alec’s college fund since the day he started kindergarten, two grand every fiscal quarter, so that he could go somewhere leafy and expensive and I could spackle the school’s sticker on the back of our cars and drink my morning coffee out of its mugs. It was my right, my reward for having paid Round Hill Country Day tuition all these years, for sitting in on all those college advisement meetings, for watching my colleagues jog lap after lap around the JCC track in their Stanford shorts and Columbia T-shirts.

  “Alec, I’m not trying to nag you—”

  “You’re not?”

  “But if you don’t take this stuff seriously now, you might regret it later.”

  “Why don’t you let me worry about what I’ll regret later?”

  “How about Massachusetts?” I asked. “We could visit some Boston schools, maybe head down through the Berkshires on our way home.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Aargh.”

  “Alec? Is that a yes?”

  “Sure
, fine,” he said, in a tone of voice that let me know he was doing me a huge favor. “I don’t know when I’m free, though. I’ve got a lot of things going on, not that it seems to matter to you.”

  “Next weekend? Wait, damn, I’m on call next weekend. The weekend after? What do you think? I’ll book hotels.”

  Alec raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re serious? You want to do this in two weekends?”

  “Completely,” I said.

  “I’ll see,” he said.

  “What do you have to see?”

  “Dad,” he said, “I’m pretty busy. You don’t seem to respect that I have a life independent of your own.”

  “I’ll make reservations,” I said, and Alec rolled his eyes and went upstairs, which I decided was an assent.

  I ended up picking seven schools to visit over three days, and despite himself, Alec seemed to have a decent time at some of them; the most expensive ones, of course, he liked the best. He especially admired Hampshire, appreciated the school’s laid-back approach to required courses and felt the art studios passed muster. He also liked the student who led us on a tour, who sported the same hideous eyebrow piercing Alec did and spoke in serious tones about his research in comparative astrophysics. Neither of us were sure what comparative astrophysics entailed, but the kid seemed very authoritative and slightly condescending, so we didn’t ask any questions on that topic.

  Still, despite Alec’s clear preferences, he didn’t bother filling out the relatively simple Hampshire application online. I knew because I checked his personal computer, and though I felt a bit guilty, I reminded myself that parents have to monitor these things. When I asked him how his essay was progressing, he would snort at me and ask me to stop hovering for five seconds, please. We were still months away from the ecstasy bust or the opal brooch incident, and I tried to accede to his wishes. He wanted me to leave him alone; for entire days I’d leave him alone.

  But then Neal Stern got into college early decision and I knew for a fact that the Hampshire application, and all the others, were still sitting on his computer undone, and I almost had a fit.