Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Hi,” I said to a cheery-looking brunette in glasses. “I’m Jacob Neulander’s mom. He’s in Mrs. Crane’s class.”

  “Natalie Kennedy,” she said. “My daughter’s in Mrs. Hook’s.” And we stood there amiably and talked about nothing, and I was filled with the glee of being just like everyone else. For the first time in months I felt like I had a real appetite. I decided I would take you to Serendipity for an early dinner, those awesome burgers followed by ice cream sundaes the size of your head.

  A big group of kids emerged from the exit: adorable, multicultural, high-end sneakers. A little too tall to be kindergartners. Then the next class emerged, also adorable and multicultural, and this time just the right size to be you, but I didn’t see you.

  “Is that Mrs. Crane’s?” I asked Natalie Kennedy.

  “Sure is.”

  I scanned harder. I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything to you about remission because I didn’t want you to confuse it with a cure, but still I wanted you to celebrate with me. We finally had something to celebrate! For the first time in so long I was an approximation of a healthy person. I wondered if you’d be able to tell. Then suddenly there you were, in your Lego Star Wars backpack, your curling-at-the-edges hair. You were talking eagerly to another kid, not even looking my way. I waved at you, but you didn’t see me. It was nice, in a way. A bit like spying.

  And then you looked over at me and instead of smiling, your face seemed to—well, not exactly fall, but sort of settle. You trudged over. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes! Yes, I’m so okay. I wanted to take you to Serendipity! Ice cream!” My voice was scaling up like a teenage girl’s.

  “Now? Why?”

  “We’re celebrating!”

  You looked suspicious. “What are we celebrating?”

  I didn’t want to explain it. “Just life,” I said.

  “But it’s Tuesday.”

  “We can’t celebrate on a Tuesday?”

  “Tuesdays I go to Aiden’s to play Pokémon.”

  “You do?” Did I know that? I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of Aiden.

  “Julisa is friends with his nanny,” you said. “His older brother has like five thousand Pokémon cards. He’s teaching us how to use them.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “You can go next week.”

  “But . . .” You looked crushed. “But I want to go now,” you said. “Aiden’s waiting.” I looked up and sure enough, the kid you were talking to before I interrupted was standing a little behind you and to the left. Right next to him, the nanny. They were waiting for us to finish our chat.

  “You don’t want to go to Serendipity?”

  You kind of slumped, shook your head. “Maybe some other time?”

  “But we can get ice cream!”

  “I’d rather play at Aiden’s.”

  Jake, it’s a little embarrassing telling you this now, but I felt, at that moment, like I’d been dumped. I wanted to kill Julisa—how could she not tell me you had this Tuesday routine? Except that maybe she had. It’s possible she had. My attention had become so scattered.

  “Okay for him to come?” asked the nanny. It turned out Aiden lived on Seventy-Fifth, a block away, and the nanny had no problem walking you home, and you really wanted to go, please please please, so how could I say no? I didn’t say no. Instead, I stayed rooted to my spot in front of the school and watched you leave, and then I dawdled home by myself after the crowd had dispersed, you, the nanny, Natalie Kennedy, just like I used to all those years ago when I walked home from my own elementary school. In my head, I was writing you an angry letter: Don’t you see this is a movie where I’m dying? And the doctors pressed Pause? We don’t know how long the pause will last, Jake! We have to celebrate every fucking second of the pause! Cancer might press Play any second!

  And then I took a breath and erased the letter.

  How good it was that you were making friends, and how good it was that you were starting to feel comfortable with new people. And how good that you didn’t feel overly protective of me, like you could never leave my side.

  But I never wanted you to ever leave my side. I sat on our stoop for two hours, until I saw you bouncing up the street, the nanny and Aiden a few steps behind. And the sight of your face mended my heart and felt like enough of a celebration.

  THE PAIN WOKE me up at four in the morning. Sharp, in my stomach. Right there, right below my stomach. Not my stomach. Or was it? They said, after the debulking, this wouldn’t migrate to my stomach. Metastasize. They said it wouldn’t. Not there—please, I still wanted to eat, I couldn’t bear a colostomy bag, please God, please, I thought, I know I don’t believe in you, please someone, please don’t let me scream in pain, please don’t let me wake up Jakey—please, oh God —I would type. Sometimes that helped.

  I stood. That helped. I sat down to type. The pain now came and went in waves. I remembered the instructions: Hold your breath at the top of the wave, let it out at the bottom. It was okay. Typing made it better.

  I will write this down, I will write this away, I will let you know what this was like. I will pass on this wisdom. I will let you witness what this was like. Your mother at the end of her life. If you don’t want to know you don’t have to read it.

  This was me. This is me.

  Please don’t let me wake you up. I will not wake you up. I will not wake you up. Please please please please please—typing helps. I will type this.

  I called Allie. She didn’t answer. Thank God. I didn’t want go to the hospital.

  Then it hurt more. I stood, then sat. Didn’t help. I called her again. She woke up, groggy. “You okay?”

  “I’m not okay.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  I HAD COME to know these aches and pains, had told myself that’s what they were. Scar tissue. This was not metastasis. This was old hat. I was in remission, wasn’t I? But I was writhing on the bed when Allie came. “I’m calling an ambulance.” I looked at her, my I’m-gonna-kill-you look.

  “Codeine,” I managed.

  “Karen.” Was she really going to fight me on this one? I gave her again my death look, but it was dark in this bedroom, she might not have been able to see it. She picked up the phone.

  “Codeine,” I hissed, and she relented, put down the phone, went to the bathroom. Returned with a pill and a Dixie cup of water.

  “Karen, come on.” She held me up as I took the pill. It was almost four thirty and the relentless Seattle day was about to break. We were so far north here, almost Alaska. I thought about everything I needed to do, track down Ace, finish some PowerPoints, check in with everyone in New York, and there was you, quality time with you. There was a private tennis coach at the camp; I wanted to sign you up for lessons. I wanted to take you to the toy store in Pioneer Square for the Playmobil pirate ship you’d been inquiring about.

  I gagged on the pill but got it down. Allie lay down next to me in the big soft bed. She put quality mattresses in the guesthouse. She had never stinted on a thing.

  “Are you okay?”

  I was not. The codeine worked fast, but I still had twenty minutes to wait. “I won’t be able to take them to camp,” I said.

  “Karen.”

  “You’ll have to—” It was so unfair so unfair so unfair. I wanted to take you to camp. I wanted to meet your tennis instructor. I did not want to be high on codeine I did not want to miss breakfast I did not want to miss you Jakey.

  “Karen, after I get the boys to camp, let’s go to the doctor, okay?”

  “I have to work today.”

  “The doctor,” she said again. “Please, Karen.”

  “Let’s see,” I whispered, “if the codeine helps.”

  “Please.”

  “Let’s see.” It was already helping. It worked fast.

  Allie and I lay there in the same bed the way we used to when we were little, in that ho
use on Long Island, the grandparents asleep upstairs. As I drifted, I remembered feeling their heavy unsettling sadness even in their sleep. I remembered the way the sadness would permeate the night, and the way Allie’s flaxen hair would fall against the pillow in our shared bed. I would look to see patterns in her swirls of hair. I knew she was faking sleep just like I was. I would close my eyes; she would open hers.

  I saw her now. She was faking sleep now. Her hair was still long and blonde against the pillows. Her mouth drawn tight.

  I rolled over, stuck my hand in the cool space between the mattress and the wall. There was something lumpy there. A dried avocado? Why would—I pulled it out, inspected it through my medicated haze.

  You’d left me your gourd.

  Jesus Christ, Jacob. How would I live without you?

  I clutched it in my hands for a long time as the light grew brighter outside. I listened to my sister’s breathing deepen. She was no longer faking it and neither was I. I could feel my own breathing start to grow longer, deeper. I would be asleep very soon. I tucked the gourd to my chest, clasped my hands around it. I closed my eyes and fell asleep and soon I knew I would dream sweet dreams.

  5

  One of the pleasures of being a six-year-old is that you find farting one of the most expressive of human activities, and occasionally, when you have a really substantive specimen building up, you quiet us down in the room so that you can perform. “Shhh, guys, check this out!” But as I’m sure you now know, once they hit puberty, most women no longer find public displays of flatulence entertaining. In fact, most women start pretending they never fart just around the time they start realizing boys always do. Which is to say, I was embarrassed before I was worried about a persistent and noxious gassiness that hit me right around my forty-first birthday and refused to dissipate or even, sometimes, be relieved. (What I mean is that I wanted to fart all the time and half the time I couldn’t.)

  Well, probably this is what it means to get older, I thought, and tried to stay away from roughage. When the Times did that piece on me, the one where it called me “equal parts sweet and tough” (which I loved), I looked notably bloated in the accompanying photo. But we were wrapping up a busy 2011 and I was on my usual autumn diet of pizza and Tums. Who wouldn’t have been bloated? Then, just after Election Day (DiFierro won by six points, Johnson by four, bonuses all around), my back started aching and also I had this scratchy voice and—well, there’s no need to get into the whole story. What’s there to say about the story? Ovarian cancer is called a silent killer, but unlike what it says on the internet, that’s not because it’s asymptomatic. I was doubly, triply, quadruply symptomatic. It’s just that my symptoms were the sorts of small or embarrassing annoyances that were easy to ignore or to blame on myself.

  Within days of my diagnosis, I met Dr. Steiner, who was going to do something called a debulking, a surgery that would remove many of the organs I had previously considered crucial to my staying alive. Exactly how worried was I supposed to be?

  “We’re going to find out what’s going on inside you,” Dr. Steiner said, which wasn’t really an answer.

  “Will I at least get skinny?”

  “You will get very skinny,” Dr. Steiner said, half-frowning; he did not seem to realize I was joking.

  The debulking took nine hours, I was told, and was not optimal (they couldn’t get all the cancer out without damaging my distal aorta) but not too terribly suboptimal either (they managed to get a lot of it out, they thought). This was the good news, such as it was.

  “But then there’s bad news,” I said to Dr. Steiner, because I was getting used to his half frown.

  “Well, mixed bad,” he said. He was scratching his nose. Despite his nebbishy demeanor, Dr. Steiner had kind eyes, and in my foggy imagination, I thought maybe he too was trying not to cry. I thought that was sweet of him, not to cry. Allison had come out for the surgery and she was in the room with us, holding my hand. Her own was cold.

  The mixed-bad news was that this was stage IV cancer. The mixed-bad news was it had spread to lymph nodes in my pelvis. The mixed-bad news was that they weren’t able to scrape out every bit of tumor.

  The bad news was that I would not live to see you turn ten.

  The good news was that they would be able to slow it down, if I were willing to endure periodic rounds of chemotherapy, if I were willing to endure living, knowing how soon the end would come.

  “And that’s the good news?” Allison said.

  “Mixed,” Dr. Steiner said. “She’s young, she’s healthy.”

  “I’m not healthy,” I said. “It sounds like bad news to me. Just bad. Not mixed.”

  “No, really,” said Dr. Steiner. “Really, it could be so much worse. I’ve seen it worse. And there are new therapies that are being developed, therapies that might extend your life span.”

  “Clinical trials?” Allison said. “Can we get her on some clinical trials?”

  “First,” Dr. Steiner said, “first let’s just go with what we know works.”

  “And what works?”

  “Chemo,” he said. “Chemo and surgery. Standard protocol.”

  “But you just said there are new therapies that—”

  Dr. Steiner looked exhausted. “Your sister needs rest,” he said. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

  SO HOW MUCH time, exactly, did I spend thinking about the mixed bad news? More time than the social workers hoped. More time than Allison wanted. Enough time, actually, to think about just ending it all right away, to forget about the good fight and the long game and—I’m sorry, Jake—deciding to die right then, while you were at school, while Julisa was in the other room, doing the dishes. While Allie was running in Central Park. A gun, a rope, pills. All of the above. That felt like the brave choice to me, even braver than living. But I didn’t know where to find a gun, and I didn’t really want to die (I still don’t want to die).

  Maybe there still are alternative therapies, clinical trials. Maybe there are other things I could be doing right now. But instead I’ve been doing what the good girl does, just following orders. Chemo, surgery. More chemo. Writing my will. Writing this.

  Anyway, while I was in the hospital, Allie and Julisa divided and conquered, getting you to school, making sure the house was clean and the hamster was fed. Allie fed me ice chips while I blinked in and out of consciousness after the debulking, thought about bringing you to visit me, took you to the movies instead. After I got home, she shuttled me back and forth to my chemo appointments, kept me well stocked in the food I felt like eating (pureed soups, cantaloupe) new issues of People and Us Weekly, Julia Roberts movies. I thought about how grateful I was to her, how much I hated being grateful to her. She had left her own kids across the country, her husband, her life, and moved in with me. Without blinking. She had done this, even though I’d been so mean to her in high school, even though I teased her behind her back and even to her face about her life of tennis and yoga and float planes to the summer house. She stopped her life to come save mine. She wouldn’t let me say thank you. She got you to school five minutes early for the first time in your life.

  DO YOU REMEMBER the first time you saw me after the surgery? You were barely five, but you were worldly. You said, You don’t look as bad as they said you would, and snuggled up in bed with me, unafraid to wrap your arms around me, even though Allie had told you not to, that it might hurt me. Of course it hurt me; of course I didn’t let you go.

  Six weeks after surgery I started chemo, which took place in a weird-looking office-type room with beds and televisions. Four or five days after chemo I’d feel good enough to work again, to live again, and that’s when Allie would take you to the museum or soccer or swim lessons, Julisa would go back home to Queens, and I would spread out my documents or get on the phone or even powwow with Chuck spread out on the apartment floor over pizza, like we used to back when we started the business. He pretended not to notice when I didn’t eat the pizza. We were starting to get r
eady for the 2012 races, had taken meetings with McClear in New Hampshire and Fussell in Rhode Island. So we talked about that. And we reached out to the people we knew on the Democratic National Campaign Committee, to talk to them about their 2012 plans. But our work meetings also had a sort of Potemkin feeling about them, as though we were proving to outsiders (our clients, our consciences) that everything inside was just fine.

  One night, Chuck asked, gently, if I thought we should consider expanding our hiring in light of my inevitable absence. Not a replacement, he said, there couldn’t be a replacement—but just some reinforcement. I said I didn’t think it was necessary yet. We didn’t hire anyone.

  I went into remission after eight rounds of chemo. Before she flew back to Seattle, Allie treated me to a long brown wig of Jennifer Lopez heft and luster, and I started wearing it around the house. Do you remember how you admired my hair and remarked on how quickly it grew back? Once I realized you thought the wig was real, I decided I would never take it off, not even while I slept. I wanted you to think I looked healthy. I wanted you not to look afraid the way you did when you saw me in my headscarf.

  Then one Thursday—do you remember?—I took you to free swim at the JCC. You begged me to get in the pool like I used to and I didn’t know what to do—I had my swimsuit in our locker, but no swim cap—but you kept begging. You wouldn’t take no for an answer. Did you want to see if I could still do it, could still swim? Did I want to see it? I still had some weight on, the swimsuit still fit. But I knew I shouldn’t get that wig wet, or at least I thought I shouldn’t, and what if it fell off? In front of your friends? In front of you?