Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  I SUPPOSE, JACOB, that right about now you’re starting to think of the person you want to be as an adult. If you’re lucky, like I was, you’ll discover a particular passion for something (Tennis? Video games?) and you’ll be able to translate that passion into your life’s work. If you’re a little less lucky—but still lucky enough—you’ll find a job you enjoy and be able to do this thing you love during your free time. I know people in their forties who still rock out with their bands on the weekends. Your school nurse at PS 199 is also a poet. My hope for you, Jacob, is that, like them, you’ve found a real passion.

  I try to imagine you at eighteen, where you’ll be, what you’ll look like. I assume you’ll be tall, since you already are. My guess is that you’ll wear glasses, since I started needing them when I was eight. I have no idea where you’ll go to college, but I like to envision you in some liberal arts college somewhere in Massachusetts or Vermont, where the students wear long woolen scarves and play lacrosse and get drunk on the weekends because there’s nothing better to do. Anywhere you want to go, Jake, you can go. I’ve put away money. Get in somewhere good and go there and love every minute of it. That’s my advice for you. Oh, and learn a foreign language. I’m thinking probably Spanish or Mandarin.

  The next morning I was asleep when Steiner called.

  “You awake?” he said. I lied and said that I was.

  Some of the lab reports they did at the hospital were back, he said, and they were a little troubling.

  “How little?”

  “Just a little.”

  He began explaining and I heard him and then I didn’t; I said, “I don’t think that’s right.” But, he said, from some samples they took it was possible that, well, anyway, not to get too worried, they were just going to change the medication a little, put me on a more aggressive regimen.

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means we’re going to be more aggressive. That’s all.”

  “But why do we need more aggression?”

  “To keep you going as long as possible.”

  “But what—”

  “That’s all, Karen. We just want to be aggressive. Outsmart the cancer.”

  “But what’s different now? Did the cancer get smarter?”

  “You should tolerate this new medication well,” he said. “Most people find the side effects to be minor.”

  “I don’t mind side effects.”

  “Good,” he said. “So I’ll see you in the office tomorrow?”

  “Yes, but—” I said, and then, “You will,” and then, because I was still in those golden seconds before he hung up, I said, “This doesn’t change my prognosis, does it? I still have the time you promised?”

  “It’s hard to say, Karen. But it doesn’t necessarily change anything. It’s hard to say.”

  “But what would you say?”

  “It’s hard to say.” My golden seconds were over. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll talk some more.”

  Well.

  Jakey, this sounded more like bad news than mixed. Didn’t it? I mean, what would you have said to that? More aggressive? Hustling me on the phone? I could do nothing—what could I do? It was nine in the morning and you and Allie were watching television; I could hear the animated squawk of something infernal, Lego Ninjago. I allowed myself five minutes of crying, three hundred seconds and no more.

  “Hey guys,” I said at 9:08 as I creaked to the door. You both looked at me with concern. Did I look that bad? Sound that bad? It was only five minutes of crying.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m going to work,” I said. Did this change my prognosis? Yes, it did. I was going to work now.

  “Working where?” you asked.

  “The Bronx,” I said. I still had one client left. I still had one campaign. I would win this campaign with everything I had. If Jorge Grubar thought he had some dirty tricks up his sleeve, he had no idea what he was up against. I had dirty tricks up my entire shirt.

  “How are you getting there?” Allie turned down the volume on the television, as though we were having a big-deal discussion, even though we were just talking about me going to work, which wasn’t a big deal. I was a working mother. I worked. I touched my face. It was hot and puffy.

  “Cab.”

  “Can you handle it?”

  “Why couldn’t I?”

  Her expression was bleak. I should have pinched my cheeks before I left the bedroom to make sure I looked nice and rosy; I should have put on my wig. “I can go to work.”

  “You look tired,” Allie said. “Or something. Who was on the phone?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Can Aunt Allie take me to FAO Schwarz?” you asked.

  “FAO Schwarz is for tourists.”

  “Aunt Allie’s a tourist.”

  “I grew up here,” Allie said, eyeing me like she didn’t trust me.

  “You can go, but no candy,” I said.

  “Who was on the phone?” Allie said.

  “No candy?” you repeated, uncomprehending. You liked FAO Schwartz only because there was a gigantic and overpriced bulk candy department on the ground floor, a treat for when you were good or I was wiped out. “Please, Mom? Just a little?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Please?” you whimpered as though you were the one facing mixed-bad news.

  “I have to shower,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Mom, please can we go to the candy floor?”

  “Not now, Jacob,” Allie said.

  “Please?”

  “Jacob, leave your mother alone.”

  “Please! You said we could go!”

  Did I? The medication made me so foggy, and I’d been promising you everything lately, Yankees games, pizza, the moon and stars, that it was quite possible I’d promised you a trip to the FAO Schwarz candy floor, but that didn’t mean that you got to go now or that you got to whine your way into it or take advantage of the opening you clearly saw. I was twine-haired and stooped, older than the universe. I was holding on to the back of the chair.

  “Jacob, give your mom a break,” Allie said.

  “Mom!” And then you threw yourself on to the floor. Where had this come from? You’d stopped throwing temper tantrums months ago, maybe even years. I touched the scraggly hair on my head, my puffy face. I thought I might faint.

  “Mom!”

  “Jacob, if you don’t stop right now, you’re locked in your room for the rest of the day,” Allie said. The television was off, and she had her arms crossed on her chest and a don’t-fuck-with-me look on her face, God bless her.

  “But you said!”

  “Now,” Allie said.

  “You’re not my mother!”

  “Now,” I whispered. You looked from her to me and back again and saw no soft place to land. You went to your room and slammed the door, but there was an iPad in there, so I knew you wouldn’t suffer. We were quiet as we listened to you freak out, scream at your pillows, and then stop freaking out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a few minutes of quiet.

  “For what?” Allie said. “Who was on the phone?”

  “Steiner’s changing my medication.”

  “Why?”

  “Cancer’s stronger now.”

  She stood, began picking breakfast plates off the coffee table. You’d been eating peach yogurt and English muffins. “Is that what the doctor said?”

  “He said he wasn’t sure.”

  “So then you don’t know—”

  “Allie, I know.”

  “If the doctor didn’t say—”

  “I know what he was implying.”

  She didn’t look at me, began bustling. There was crap everywhere, magazines, your toys. She put them in their bins along the wall. I listened for you in your room.

  “But if he didn’t say—” Allie said.

  “He said it was troubling.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  She rubbed her hands up
and down her arms, just looking at me. Then she blinked. “Can I make you something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry.” I watched her ferry plates to the kitchen sink, come back to wipe off the coffee table. She was wearing a gray U Dub T-shirt and exercise pants, blonde hair in a ponytail, looking like a mom in a commercial, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “Okay, an English muffin,” I said, even though I had no idea how I was going to eat it.

  “Okay,” Allie said. “Good.”

  From your room, the blips and bleeps of Big Win Hockey on your iPad.

  “Sorry he’s acting like a shit.”

  “He’s just being six,” she said from the kitchen, where she was slicing me a muffin, pouring me some coffee. “Believe me, it’s easier than dealing with a teenager.”

  I would be leaving her to deal with one more teenager.

  “Do you want me to stay?” I asked, helplessly.

  “Go to work,” she said. She was trying to smile.

  And of course I felt bad because (a) I didn’t want to worry my sister and (b) she shouldn’t have had to do this for me yet. I mean she shouldn’t have had to be your mother yet (and you were right, she wasn’t your mother, but soon enough she’d be the closest thing you had, and at some point you might even refer to her as mom, and that would be okay with me, that’s what I wanted, for you always to have a mom, and for that mom to be Allie if it couldn’t be me), but also she was healthy and I wasn’t, so she had to suck it up and deal with you and I was going to go take a long hot shower for as long as I could stand it then get in a taxi like a person who wasn’t dying and go to work.

  ROOSEVELT MEDICAL CENTER was the opposite of the swish Manhattan hospitals I was used to—Sloan Kettering, NYU—with hushed hallways and cafeterias that could double as executive lunchrooms. Roosevelt was loud and grimy and smelled powerfully of cheap disinfectant, which brought me back in a not-unpleasant way to my years at SUNY Binghamton. There was no cafeteria, only a snack bar filled with vending machines. Outside there were smokers.

  Like a lot of borough hospitals, this one dated from the fifties, when New York’s postwar population exploded and so did the idea of acute care. Roosevelt originally served a middle-class population, but in the seventies it was known as one of the few hospitals in the city whose doctors cheerfully took Medicaid, whose staff spoke languages from Portuguese to Farsi, where someone in the ER would probably see you within twenty-four hours or faster if you were clearly in labor or bleeding to death, and whose bill collectors wouldn’t chase you down for money they knew you didn’t have.

  I had the cab leave me off at the entrance, in a scrum of traffic and wheelchairs and security people staring passively at all of us like UN peacekeepers. It took me an embarrassingly long time to maneuver to the hospital’s broken sliding doors. But I must have looked pretty sick because eventually people let me pass.

  Slowly, I traversed Roosevelt’s long and cluttered hallways, every so often landing in a small lobby filled with people in wheelchairs or filthy toddlers running freely. All the televisions were playing dismal talk shows. There were more women in full Muslim dress than I was used to seeing; more people on stretchers. Every so often I would try my luck at a broken drinking fountain. I could have asked someone where to find Bev, but I couldn’t find anyone to ask.

  After about fifteen minutes of meandering, I ended up by Oncology, which was at the end of a hallway on the second floor that I wasn’t even sure how I found—I didn’t remember any elevators or stairs. I stood at the doorway of an infusion ward, which even from the perimeter seemed sticky with nausea. People were sleeping with their mouths open; the place smelled like rotten bananas and the small televisions were old and the nurses looked bored. Spanish newspapers lay about. At Sloan Kettering I had a choice of wonderful magazines and satellite television. In the corner of this room I spied a woman my age, staring at me, a tube in her arm. Or maybe she was younger than me. Her skin was bluish gray.

  “Can I help you?” asked a nurse after I’d been standing there, just watching—Watching what? Lives less privileged than my own sad dying life?—for quite some time.

  “Are you scheduled to come in today?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your name?”

  I was in my healthy drag, the wig was on, the makeup, but still there was no concealing what I was. I wondered if Dr. Steiner would keep me alive longer than a Roosevelt doctor would. I wondered what this new aggressive medication was going to do to me. Someone was groaning in the corner and was ignored.

  “I’m not a patient. I’m looking for the executive offices,” I said crisply. I had my briefcase with me, although it was empty. I held it up a little.

  “Ground floor,” she said. “You need a visitor’s badge if you’re going to walk around. Security will escort you out otherwise.” She looked at my face and felt pity. “Just a minute, I’ll get you one.”

  With a white sticker stuck on my lapel, I found my way to the ground floor. Then I found the executive offices, Bev’s office, where her secretary listened to R&B music in a cube covered with baby photos.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Beverly Hernandez.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” The secretary had long nails painted in a checkerboard pattern.

  “It’s about the campaign,” I said. “For city council.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  I shook my head.

  “Your name?”

  I didn’t want to tell the secretary who I was because I didn’t want Bev to think I was the enemy. “Karen.”

  “Just a second,” said the secretary. She picked up the phone, spoke quietly in Spanish, and then said, “If you can make it quick, you can go in. She’s got a meeting in five minutes.”

  I stood. I felt obscurely embarrassed. I was thinking of the woman with the bluish-gray skin, the one who was my age. “Go on,” said the secretary. “You only have five minutes.”

  Bev’s office was small, the size of our kitchen, or maybe smaller. There was one chair for visitors, but it was jammed into the corner of the room by a filing cabinet, and there was a purse on it, so I stood.

  “Just a sec—” Bev said, holding up a finger at me without looking away from her computer screen. Her office was cluttered in a friendly way, papers on the desk, a wall of framed photographs and diplomas; it looked out on a Bronx streetscape of fruit vendors and buses. Bev herself looked just like she did on Facebook (and why should she have looked any different?): dark close-cropped hair, no visible gray, slightly yellowish-tan skin, a broad face, rimless glasses. Maybe the yellowish tan was jaundice? Maybe she was sick again? “Okay,” she said, looking at me. Her voice was familiar from her video. “You want to talk about the campaign? Your name is Karen?”

  I stood by her desk, my briefcase in both hands. I realized suddenly how tired I was.

  “May I sit?” I croaked.

  “Chair’s over there,” Bev said, but a fleck of worry creased her eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

  “I—my name is—I’m Karen Neulander.” I felt enormously foolish. “I’m here—I wanted to meet you.”

  “Karen Neulander?” The crease of worry deepened. “You’re that shark Ace hired?”

  All you had to do was look at me to see I was no shark.

  Bev sighed heavily, picked up the phone receiver again. “It’s not appropriate for you to just show up at my office without an appointment.”

  “I just . . . I wanted to say . . . I’m not here for any real campaign purpose. I just honestly wanted to meet you.” If it was true Ace was in trouble, maybe I could learn something about Bev, enough to go back on the attack. If I needed to. Would I even need to? I supposed I could have raised questions about her health.

  “Meet me?” She hadn’t dialed a number on the phone yet. The photos on the wall behind her, interspersed with the diplomas, were all of bright-eyed young women and their children. Bev’s family. I recognized Monica, the grand
daughter from YouTube. Ace’s office was festooned with pictures of him playing golf with other politicians, radio hosts, celebrity restaurateurs.

  “We haven’t had any events yet, so I haven’t had a chance . . .”

  Bev just raised an eyebrow.

  “You were diagnosed with stage III cancer four years ago?” I said. It slipped out.

  She gave me a look. “That’s right,” Bev said, crisply. “But I’ve been cancer-free for more than two years.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Her computer made a beeping noise, which we both ignored.

  “I have ovarian cancer,” I said. This slipped out too. “It’s spreading. The doctor called—the doctor called me this morning.”

  She put down the receiver. “You weren’t diagnosed this morning,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve known for almost two years. The doctor just had more bad news for me today. Stronger medication. The cancer’s changing. I’m not sure how much longer I have.”

  “Nobody is,” Bev said. She turned off the beeping noise on her computer. For a moment we looked at each other. I was using my cancer to gain her trust, so that she’d tell me she was sick too, and then, if we needed to, we could use that and win. I felt my adrenaline coming back. That’s why I was here! That was the reason.

  “Does Ace know you came here?”

  I shook my head. “I was on my way up to the Bronx and I asked the cab to stop here. I would have told you I was coming, but I didn’t know myself.”

  “Surely you know other cancer survivors besides me,” Bev said. “You didn’t need to come all this way to meet someone else who’s had cancer.”

  “Of course,” I said, although the truth was my contact list wasn’t thick with cancer survivors, and the few I knew had escaped the relatively toothless ones, thyroid, early stage colon or breast. A handful of basal cells. Nobody with ovarian; almost nobody escaped that bitch alive.

  “So then what can I do for you?”

  “Did the doctor ever tell you it wasn’t working? The drugs weren’t working? Did you ever lose hope?” I kept slipping.

  “No,” Bev said, steely. She was a candidate for public office in New York City. “Not once.”