by Mary Hogan
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“What I know is that you don’t have to be on my case every minute.”
“If I don’t say something, it doesn’t get done.”
“Try me.”
“Deal.”
Briefly, things get better. Until the inevitable relapse.
“You can’t smell that garbage?”
Cancer doesn’t listen. It doesn’t give a damn.
Let it go, you tell yourself. It’s beyond your control. Tuck your anger beneath the blessings in your life. Pray. Be strong and courageous. For the Lord, your God, goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.
It’s only garbage. Is it so awful that it reeks? Turn the other cheek. Walk away. And when you see the dirty socks on the floor, the wet towel draped over the edge of the tub, the pile of junk mail scattered on the kitchen table, the coffee mug making a ring on the bedside table with the coaster right next to it, turn away again. Let it go. Breathe. Focus on the positive.
Cancer doesn’t listen. It doesn’t give a shit. It’s a petulant, disrespectful man-child leaving bits of blackened tissue all over your body. Forcing you to clean up its mess. A bout with cancer? Who initiated that idiotic phrase? Cancer is a siege, a war, a massacre, not a spell. Jesus.
Will, God bless him, was suffocating. All that hovering. As if he could make Pia better by following her from room to room. Why had he never had time for her when she was well? Now, when she needed solitude to wallow, bald headed, behind her closed bedroom door, curled in a ball beneath the covers with her face buried deep in the pillow, screaming, now he was available to take her emotional temperature every minute?
“Feeling scared, honey? Sad? Frustrated? Upset?”
All of the above. Satisfied? Now leave me alone.
And why didn’t anyone warn her that her husband would leave her alone? He’d stop reaching for her in the middle of the night and she’d stop wanting him to well before that? That she’d cease to feel like a woman entirely?
The therapist who made the rounds each week in the chemo basement had a way of softly stroking Pia’s hand that drove her mad. She said, “It’s okay to admit you’re scared.”
Scared? Bullshit. Pia was exhausted. Bucking up wore her out. Pretending she wasn’t dying because nobody could handle it, well, that sucked the life out of her more than the rampaging cells now eating away at her lungs. Fury seemed to be the only thing able to fight its way through her collapsed veins.
“Want to help me? Explain why I got breast cancer at thirty-one? Not even old enough for a baseline mammogram! Explain to me how I was expected to believe that a mass in my breast was cancer? Women my age have cysts, not cancer.”
“I hear that you’re upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset. I’m not the cancer type.”
“What type would that be?” The therapist’s supercilious tone made Pia want to douse her in chemo juice.
“You know exactly what I mean—women who are unable to express their feelings. Doormats. That’s not me at all. How many times had I told Will that his twelve-hour workdays made me feel like a single parent? And when Emma’s school was considering adding more vending machines, I wrote a furious letter. Why, a couple of weeks ago, I asked Blanca to stop wearing that flowery perfume when she came to work. It was giving me a headache. Does a woman who can’t communicate say that?”
The damn therapist didn’t answer, merely nodded and stroked Pia’s hand as if it were a puppy’s paw.
Therapy was crap. All those platitudes: Put yourself first. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. The only help she wanted was a machete to hack through the manure. Someone to tell her how ashamed she’d feel. Embarrassed by her body’s weakness. Why didn’t the therapist tell her that everyone who saw her would Rolodex through their own lives to make sure they hadn’t done whatever she’d done to cause her cancer.
And what, exactly, had she done? Gone braless too often? Had overly spirited sex? Too many bong hits in college? Warm baguettes slathered in butter? Truth be told, she really had put Will’s needs ahead of hers. He gave her a great life, a perfect child. So many other women had to work, feel their lives press down on their shoulders like a rucksack full of books. Not her. Pia was blessed. God smiled upon her again and again. Had that fact been secretly eating away at her? Had guilt turned her pink cells black? Did she have Emma too late? Sex too early? Too many years on the pill? What the hell did she do?
Answers. That’s what she wanted. Not an insipid therapist with liver spots on her bony hands. Why had her body betrayed her? Been unfaithful, cheated on her while she was at the gym. Had she not treated it lovingly? Given it everything it needed? Vitamin water, yoga, Pilates. Was she not good enough? If she’d been paying more attention, this never would have happened. Why didn’t a therapist tell her that cancer would feel like the other woman?
It’s your fault. All your fault.
The murky shadow of guilt hung over Pia’s waning life. It followed her to the parent/teacher conference at Emma’s school that was cut short when she started coughing, into her walk-in closet as she tried to dress for the cocktail party Will’s firm was hosting—the one she swore she was well enough to attend.
“Wear that shimmery white dress,” he’d requested, both eyebrows pumping up and down.
“You got it,” she’d said, sexily, grinning through her nausea.
In the closet’s full-length mirror, the sight of her naked body was shocking. How had she ever carried Emma in that concave belly? Her kneecaps were the only part of her spindly legs that touched at all and her shoulders were two doorknobs. When she zipped up the white sequined minidress Will had bought her at the Greenbriar, the one she’d worn to dinner on their last night there, the dress he’d nearly ripped off her when they got back to the room, it swam on her. The armholes gaped. Her collarbone jutted out like a shelf bracket. The dress draped so pathetically on her skeletal frame she was ashamed to show herself to her husband.
Frantically, Pia flipped through her clothes for something else to wear, trying on every cocktail dress she owned. But the outcome was the same. She looked awful. Like Dachau. Like death. She couldn’t go. If she went to the party with Will, his office would be abuzz with whispers the next day.
“Did you see her?”
“She’s anorexic.”
“Poor Will. It must be hard living with someone mentally ill. Do you suppose he’s having an affair?”
“I wonder if they’re headed for a divorce. If so, I get first dibs.”
What she needed was permission to drop out of her marriage, miss family dinners, be a bad mom, sleep through breakfast. She needed Will’s assurance that he wouldn’t fall in love with someone else, that he meant it when he vowed, “In sickness and in health.” No matter how forcefully she pushed him away, she needed to know he’d stay put. Mostly, she needed him to help her bear the faraway look in their daughter’s eyes.
“Emma will pull away from you. She needs to protect herself right now and you have to let her. You’ll feel a crushing desire to grab your daughter and hold on so tightly she’ll melt into your ailing flesh. It will tear you up, but I’ll be here to hold you together.”
That’s what a good therapist would have said, instead of letting her see it—and feel it—for herself. Day by day, Pia witnessed her own disappearance through her daughter’s eyes. She became a hologram, nearly faded into thin air. Emma looked right through her. To Emma, her mother’s body seemed to have no blood in it at all; her loose gray skin looked like a dirty towel hanging in the bathroom. Seeing her constantly flat out on the couch or in bed was a pain. Always cold when it was a hundred degrees out. Too tired to do anything. And why didn’t she wear her wig all the time at home? That stuff sprouting from her head didn’t look like hair at all. It wasn’t blond anymore and it was completely gone in patches; the rest was see-through and as wiry as old sweater threads. A pointy ridge on top of her skull made her look like an ig
uana. It’s a total myth that heads are round; her mother’s head looked like a football, even in a scarf. Really, her mom didn’t look like her mom at all anymore and it made Emma not want to look at her because each time she did, she forgot what her real mother looked like a little bit more.
The truth. That’s what Pia needed. The bald truth that hope would slip away so subtly you wouldn’t notice until it was already gone. Life would become a counting of days. Minutes. You would look backward through photo albums instead of forward to anything. Why did no one tell her that?
“Next week, rybka, let’s treat ourselves to high tea at that darling new cafe in the Village.”
“Sounds fun, Mama.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, my kochanie.”
“I know. I miss you.”
“It’s a date then? We’ll meet Friday afternoon in the city?”
“Perfect. Oh, wait. This Friday?”
“Would Thursday be better?”
“No, Mama. I’m so sorry. I forgot all about Emma’s school thing.”
“What thing?”
“The parents have to volunteer at the school all week.”
“What kind of nonsense is this?”
“I know. Can you believe it? The principal is young and modern.”
“Ha. Old and old-fashioned worked fine for you, thank you very much.”
“How ’bout the Friday after, Mama?”
“Or this Thursday?”
“The Friday after is better for me.”
“Okay, rybka. We’ll meet then and treat ourselves to high tea.”
“Sounds fun. Can’t wait.”
Why didn’t anyone mention how good she’d get at lying? At keeping people at bay? It was the only skill that had sharpened since her body went south. Had someone told her she’d get good at something—even dishonesty—she might not have felt so useless.
Late nights were the worst. In the particled darkness when Pia’s sleep meds failed, with Will’s measured breathing the only sound in the room, the house, the entire universe, Pia’s demons effervesced. It was impossible to force them down. In those hours, fear literally paralyzed her. Curled in on herself, she was helpless to stop the sharp terror of death from stabbing her in the chest. My God, why have you forsaken me?
Unable to move, she confronted the relentless pain in her bones, the way they seemed to splinter against one another. She cursed her damned body for its hoggishness. A whole family depended on her. Her lovely Emma—the sparks of womanhood were beginning to flare. In her young face, you could see the faint outline of the woman she would become. Her stubbornness would flower into independence; those gangly limbs would grow into a body every woman would envy. Already, she carried herself with elegance beyond her years. Emma needed a mother to help her accept her extraordinariness without arrogance. As Pia knew well, beauty had to be managed skillfully. The line between self-assurance and snobbery was razor sharp. Will couldn’t do it with that damn iPad affixed to his hand. Stock reports ran silently on every television. He could raise a daughter on his own? Never. Not her daughter.
In the blackness of those endless nights, Pia tumbled into a pit of loneliness so deep she couldn’t see so much as a pinpoint of light. In despair, she envisioned a future without her. Emma would walk down the aisle with Will and his new wife. Another woman would clutch her daughter’s hand in the delivery room repeating, “Breathe, sweetheart. Hee hee hee. Whooo. You can do it.” Those tiny yellow socks, the kind that every woman holds aloft sighing, “Awww,” would be wrestled onto kicking, toe-splayed feet by someone else. There would be no birthday cupcakes to decorate with smiley faces, no chilly Halloween nights standing on the sidewalk watching little animals pad up to a front door carrying plastic pumpkins and chirping, “Trick or treat!” Will would never encircle his tan, muscular forearms around her waist while she cooked her mother’s hunter’s stew, pressing his front into her back while whispering, “I am one lucky son of a bitch.”
On those nights, too, in the deepest crater of her pain, Pia gave herself permission to fantasize about letting go. It would be so simple, so peaceful. The ecstasy of nothingness, the glorious end of expectations, the utter calm of passing. Cheating death was no way to live. Fighting was beyond exhausting. An extra Vicodin or two was all she needed to ease the fear and clear her way. Not suicide, but surrender. God would understand. Surely he never meant for his children to suffer when they could let go of this world and join Him in the next so easily. Life, she now understood, was a gift that could be returned. A heartbeat was a choice. She had the power to emancipate her body and free herself into the void. Knowing that was a comfort, a shred of control.
“I can go whenever I want to,” she whispered to Will one evening when even morphine failed to bring relief. Worn out, he nodded, honestly unsure of which option he wanted her to choose.
No one told Pia that she might want to let go.
The truth. That’s what she needed. In all its ugliness. The goddamned unretouched truth.
At her most defenseless, when Pia lay coiled on the bathroom rug, hollowed out from the constant retching, when the angry red radiation burn on her chest tugged at the scarred skin from her armpit to her sternum, when the swelling in her arm from the poisoned lymph nodes and the purple-black bruises where her plump veins were before they collapsed made her wince with every movement, when the central line in her chest infected her blood and all she wanted to do was lie down and give up, Pia needed someone to help her sit upright, fling open the bathroom window and knock out the screen so she could lift her chin to the sky and shout, “Fuck you, God, you prick. You goddamned fucking motherfucker.”
Had a therapist genuinely wanted to help her, she would have told her that death blackens your soul. It makes you hate everything, even God. She would have stopped petting her fucking hand and yelled at God with her.
That’s how she was feeling. That’s what she needed. Not that she could tell Will or anyone else. Who wanted to hear it?
“I don’t need a thing, sweetheart,” she said each morning as her husband propped himself up on his elbow and stared down at her with his shadowed eyes, as her queasy stomach announced itself and the day already felt like a sandbag on her chest. “I’m fine. How are you?”
Chapter 23
THAT DAY AT Columbus Circle, Muriel had watched her sister depart in a cab the way it would be filmed in a movie or staged on Broadway. The forlorn wave in the rear window, her lingering look of good-bye. On-screen there would be misty rain, a hosed-down street to make the asphalt reflective; onstage a yellow spill from an old lamppost would encircle the actress in a lonely spot. The scene would be underscored with chords from a single violin.
Long after Pia’s cab merged into the belching miasma of midtown traffic, Muriel stood on the sidewalk staring at the site where Pia had been, sensing the imprint of her kiss on her check. Smelling her clean scent. Feeling the corded handle of the dress bag resting in the nest of her curled fingers. She left Columbus Circle in a daze, crossing diagonally against all lights, wondering why drivers kept honking at her. At the bus stop, she had intended to wait for the M5, but climbed aboard the M104 instead, not even aware of it until the bus continued straight at Seventy-second Street instead of turning left. “Hey,” she shouted. “He missed the turn.”
As if speaking to a mental patient off her meds, an elderly passenger asked, “Where are you trying to go, dear?”
For days afterward, Muriel felt befuddled. Twice, at the Vaclav casting session, Joanie had to prod her.
“Miss Sullivant? Care to join us?”
With her script hanging limply in her hands, Muriel would jerk her head up and blush. The actor standing on his mark across from her would look all put out.
The strangest sensation settled into either side of her forehead. Static, almost, as if her brain was between channels. By the end of the week, however, she felt tuned in. Muriel became convinced that she’d misheard what Pia had told her. It would
n’t be the first time her nerves interfered with her hearing. On her first date with Kent Bond, she thought he said, “I went to Northwestern,” but he was really talking about his desire to visit Seattle.
In the hundreds of times Muriel had rerun the scene in the dressing room she was certain that “cancer” was never uttered. When you have cancer doesn’t the actual word come up? It’s not like there were synonyms for it. (Organistic erosion? Cellular chaos?) Besides, who died of breast cancer anymore? Why, the science section of the Times recently labeled it a “chronic disease”! Soon those pink-ribbon walks would fade in the same silent manner as the rainbow-hued AIDS walks had. On to the next trendy disease. Asperger’s, perhaps? What color would its ribbon be?
Yes, that whole messy business with Pia was a huge misunderstanding. Perhaps Pia had really been confessing her plan to get implants. Maybe Will had said something hurtful to her regarding her boyish frame. Which wouldn’t surprise Muriel in the least. On the class ladder, Will had always been a rung below his wife.
On her lunch break, in the dappled sunlight beneath a Siberian elm in Union Square Park, Muriel sat on a bench and called her sister. Together, they could laugh about how silly and self-absorbed she’d been. “Now that I can see beyond my own belly button,” she’d say, “tell me again why you want me to hang on to that gray dress?”
Pia’s cell went straight to voice mail so Muriel hung up without leaving a message and called the Connecticut house. The phone rang three times before Will picked up.
“Muriel.”
His voice was black. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he inhaled a breath that seemed to swirl up from his toes, gather in his throat, and tumble out past his teeth. In that audible breath, Muriel, too, lost her air. Her body sank onto the bench like a sack of rice. All of a sudden, she felt so tired she imagined sitting there, immobilized, as the sun darkened to orange and the park lights flickered on. Pigeons would land on her shoulders and shit down her back. In Will’s exhalation, Muriel’s denial dissolved like castor sugar in boiling tea.