I was not pregnant.
At last, it was my turn. A nurse called my name and beckoned me from the bus station into a windowless room with an accordion door made out of a material that was just a step up from cardboard. She handed me a gown, a voluminous no-colour thing.
Change into this, she said, you can leave your T-shirt on, and your socks.
I put my arms through the gown like a pre-school art smock, and then fashioned the remaining billowing fabric into a sort of wrap dress in the style of Diane von Fürstenburg.
I took off my sweatpants, my underwear, and put them in a plastic bag that I hoped would be returned to me, not to another person waiting in the bus station. I sat, and waited, and then the accordion door started pulling back and I thought, Aha! It’s my turn! but the person pulling the accordion was an elderly man who was also waiting for a colonoscopy. He seemed confused. I looked at him and he looked at me, we were both wearing the same wrap dress, and then he staggered back into his own cardboard-doored area.
In time an anaesthesiologist showed up. He stuck an IV port in my arm. Weeks later, I got a bill for $7000 from this anaesthesiologist. When I protested the bill, the office told me that the doctor charged me because he didn’t accept my insurance.
You should have said something, the anaesthesiologist’s secretary said, in an accusing tone.
I was literally asleep, I replied.
Wrap this blanket around your waist, the anaesthesiologist said, handing me one.
And I did so, obedient, even though there was no chance that I was going to flash my bum at any of the other colonoscopy patients in the voluminous gown. Even though if I did expose myself to any of the other colonoscopy patients, I’m sure they would have observed it with nothing more than a frisson of empathy. We were all in this together, having cameras shoved up our asses.
In the procedure room I lay down on the bed and assumed the required position, which was on my side and involved straps and felt like the precursor to something sexually humiliating. My old pal the gastroenterologist entered the room.
Hello, he said, and then he stroked my hair, as if I was a child.
Hi? I said.
I’m not sure that it was appropriate for the gastroenterologist to stroke my hair. But by then it was quite some time since I had felt that able to draw normal boundaries between doctors and my body. I signed my self-determination away when I consented to have the procedure, or maybe on the day that I let the depressed nurse draw blood from my arm for the blood test.
The doctor put on a gown, and a face mask. He checked his phone.
I wonder if he’s on Tinder, I thought.
Do you have any questions? the gastroenterologist said, when he was done with his phone.
Yes, I said. How long will this take?
This is not really a question that I had, but I felt like I should ask something, like at the end of an interview for a job that you know you don’t want when the interviewer says, Any questions, and you say, Are there free snacks in the office? or Do you enjoy the commute?
Because when someone asks you if there are any questions, they’ll generally feel good if you have a question, and for some reason I wanted the gastroenterologist who had just stroked my hair to feel good.
Twenty to twenty-five minutes, the gastroenterologist said, and then said, Sometimes patients with Lynch syndrome have colons that are carpeted with polyps! And then I was waking up in the recovery area.
Someone said, It’s over, and someone else handed me a stack of paper. I dropped it in my lap and closed my eyes again.
The gastroenterologist arrived to tell me the results. I opened my eyes. He smiled.
You’re fine, he said, I didn’t find anything.
OK, I said, carefully shaping the sounds with my mouth. The anaesthetic had not yet worn off enough to return feeling to my face.
Yes, he said, you’re all clear. Some people who have Lynch syndrome, their colons are already carpeted with polyps. You can come back again in two years.
You love saying ‘carpeted with polyps!’ I thought.
But of course I just said: Great, thank you.
So, said the gastroenterologist, how was your visit to the geneticist?
Not great, I said. He told me I have to have a hysterectomy. But I’m not going to do that right now.
Yeah, said the gastroenterologist. You know, I was thinking about you.
He paused, furrowed his brow.
And what I would do, if I were you, is I wouldn’t have a hysterectomy.
In the moment this struck me as so incredible and kind, this man telling me that he wouldn’t have his uterus removed. I waited until the gastroenterologist wandered off to shove a camera up someone else’s asshole, and then I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling tiles. This time, I could not control the crying. I was silent, but the tears streaked down my face and soaked my wrap dress.
Zoe was on her way to pick me up. While I waited for her to arrive, I flicked through the stack of paper. My discharge notes. No evidence of polyps, they said. Beware of post-operative bleeding.
I flipped a page, and there in front of me was a selection of colour photos of the interior of my colon, pink and clean and uncarpeted.
I squinted at the photographs.
Maybe I’ll put these on Facebook, I thought.
8
I met Martha the way that I met men in New York: on the internet. I went to a website and ticked the boxes to indicate what it was I was looking for and she came up in the search results, along with some others. Martha was a schnauzer mix, or at least that’s what the website said. She was a stray dog from Puerto Rico, of unknown parentage. Found on a beach where Puerto Rican families leave the dogs they don’t or can’t love any more, Martha was flown to New York in a private jet by an animal-rescue charity funded by a banker who loved dogs. It was an unlikely life journey for a schnauzer mix. But Martha and I were a perfect fit. Like me, she had enormous eyebrows, and like me, she could be a little aloof, but she wanted to be loved.
When I told people that I was getting a dog, many of them told me not to. Don’t get a dog, some of them said, you’ll never go on vacation again. Other people said: Wait until you find a boyfriend, then get a dog. When those people said that I shrugged and said: Well, then I might be waiting for ever. I’d say it as if it was a joke, but it wasn’t.
What I didn’t say to people was: I’ve realized that I need to do what I want because I could get cancer any day now! I decided to get a dog just after my thirty-fourth birthday. I decided to get a dog because on good days I told myself that I still had my whole life ahead of me, and on bad days I thought about my grandmother who died at forty-two, and felt like I was living on borrowed time. On bad days I remembered how I used to tell people, after my dad’s diagnosis with Lynch syndrome, that it was probably not nice to have an idea of how you were going to die.
Now I knew it for sure: it was not nice at all.
That’s part of the reason why I decided to get a dog.
I got a dog because I love dogs and I couldn’t think of a reason not to have a dog, not any more. I lived in an apartment where dogs were allowed, I worked in an office where dogs were allowed, and I made an amount of money that meant that I could afford to have a dog. I started a special savings account, for dog emergencies.
When I found Martha on the internet she was living in a foster home in Inwood, which is at the uppermost point of Manhattan, almost in the Bronx. A neighbourhood I’d never go to under normal circumstances, just because of the distance. So after I was judged by the dog adoption organization to be a suitable dog owner – You have a great energy, the woman said over the phone, and I said, . . . Sure? – I took a long subway ride to Inwood to pick Martha up and a very long and expensive cab ride back to Brooklyn, to bring her home. Martha was not called Martha when I picked her up, it seems necessary to mention, but when she climbed out of the car and we went up the stairs into the apartment I put the new nametag on
her collar, which I had made in a machine at a large chain pet store the night before. The nametag was pink and heart-shaped and it said ‘Martha Dogelstein’.
I sat on the couch and the dog sat on the floor and we looked at each other as if to say: Now what? We went for a walk and then another one, and then I did some work on my laptop while she took a nap in a patch of sun on the kitchen floor. At night, I put her bed on the floor next to mine and in the morning I woke up and she was staring at me again, and I looked at her and she looked at me and I thought: I’ve ruined my life!
But then I got up and took Martha for another walk.
I hadn’t ruined my life, it turned out. I’d opened it up to something else. Now I was part of the local dog culture: walking down the street to and from the dog park, I passed people I’d seen daily for months, without acknowledgement, but now they stopped to say hello. They learned Martha’s name, even though they never learned mine. Martha weighed about eight kilograms and had dark grey fur on the top of her body and light tan fur on her legs. A white mohawk grew out of the top of her head and her black-lined eyes were so big in her small head that people thought that she was a puppy even though she was two or three years old when I adopted her, the mother of two herself. I had a photo of her with her puppies, in a cage before they left Puerto Rico. The puppies went to live in New Jersey.
What’s it like to be a mom? I would ask Martha, sometimes, when we were on our own. Martha would say nothing.
Sometimes people would say: What’s it like to be a mom? to me, and this would make me mad. I think they were saying it because they believed that I had gotten a dog to fill the emptiness of being a single woman in my early thirties with no partner or children. I think they were saying it because they wanted to show that they supported me and my choice.
The people from whom I received the congratulations did not know, by and large, about the recommended hysterectomy.
I’m not her mom! I would say. Martha is my roommate!
Martha was a reason to rise, to move, to stare less at a screen. You’re the finest dog in the land, I said to her, as we walked down the street, and I didn’t care at all who heard me. If the person who heard me was also carrying a plastic bag of shit, they’d understand. If the person who heard me was not carrying a plastic bag of shit, then I didn’t care what they thought. Martha’s face is abnormally cute and so people stopped us quite often to remark upon it. What a cute face! they’d say; in one case, You’re a little greeting from heaven! I felt proud, almost as proud as I would if they were talking about me. Sometimes, Martha would lunge at another dog on a leash, and the owner of the other dog would apologize, because Martha was so cute that it seemed like she couldn’t possibly be the instigator of violence. Martha was so cute that she got away with anything.
With Martha, I told friends, I have finally come to understand what it is like to be unbelievably good-looking.
But Jean, they said, if they were nice friends, you’re—
I interrupted them.
No, I said. No. I mean it. Unbelievably good-looking.
Now I didn’t take the train to see my mother as often as I once did. She was busy getting ready for her move, which was just six months away. I was busier with my life in Brooklyn: I’d made new friends. I’d changed jobs. I had plans on the weekends, was taking up hobbies. But when I did go to see my mother, I took Martha with me. She had a small black travelling bag that I would put on the floor at my feet. She would sleep through the journey and then pop her head out, curious, when my mother picked us up at the train station to take us back to the Baltimore house. My mother had once been one of the people who had told me not to get a dog: she knew the reality of it, from her days as the primary caretaker to the family dog, Maisie.
Now that I have a dog, I said to my mother, I realize that when we kids said we would help with Maisie, we really weren’t helping. I’m sorry!
It’s OK, my mother said.
My mother was very fond of Martha, too. She gave us something to talk about. She was not the third person we wanted, but she was someone.
Was it pathetic to be a single woman who got a dog to make me less lonely? Because that is definitely what I did. Maybe it was.
One day, I took Martha to the park to meet a man I’d been on a couple of dates with, and she responded to him with intense ire: she barked and growled and wouldn’t stop, which was most out of character for Martha.
It’s OK, he said, when I apologized, she’ll get used to me!
No, she won’t, I thought.
That was the last time I saw him. Martha and I had rescued each other.
9
In Baltimore, as my mother increased her efforts to clean the house out ahead of her return to Scotland, every visit required me to go through piles of belongings with her. My old belongings. My father’s old belongings. The old belongings of people that my parents had kept because they felt some obligation or loyalty to those people, not because they wanted to keep those things.
I also found a photo of Dad’s grandfather, my mother said. Maybe you’d like it?
This great-grandfather was born in America, unlike my father’s other grandparents, who were immigrants. He was the son of a jeweller who came from Europe during a wave of immigration that happened in the 1850s, long before things became really uncomfortable. A jeweller himself, by name and profession. A man who died, all of a sudden, when my grandfather was eighteen. Before he died he told my grandfather to study optometry and not engineering, because it was a better profession for Jews, and gave him a gold pocket watch engraved with his name.
My father died when I was eighteen, my grandfather told me once, just when I was getting ready to go to college.
My grandfather was so old at the time – at least eighty – that it was hard to imagine him being a person who’d had a father, or lost one. Now, if I could talk to him, if he wasn’t dead as well, I’d say: I’m so sorry. I get it. It’s awful for your father to die.
In the photograph, my great-grandfather was wearing a nice black hat, smiling at the camera, proud, a twinkle in his eye. He had a sweet face with contours that weren’t unlike mine. The photo was probably taken by a photographer on some important family occasion like a bar mitzvah, because it’s not like they were a family who could often afford professional photographs. It was probably a photograph that was taken quite soon before he died. The photo was enormous. I made Martha sit next to it, for scale. The photo was much bigger than Martha.
This is a great photo, I said to my mother, but I’m not sure I can take it. If I hang it on the wall of my living room in Brooklyn, it’s so enormous, the theme of my living room will become: My Dead Great-grandfather. People will come over and the people will say: Who’s that guy? Why is your living room a shrine to him?
This photo will be terrible for my love life, is what I was thinking. When I said people of course I meant men, or at least a man, an unknown man who I anticipated inviting into my apartment in the hopes that he was in the process of falling in love with me.
I see what you mean, my mother said.
I mean, I said, I feel bad, because I’m sure that this was an expensive photograph for the family to have made. They probably had it made after he died. Dad’s grandmother probably hung it on the wall, a special tribute.
That’s true, my mother said.
But I never met my great-grandfather, I said, he died in the 1930s. Dad didn’t even meet him.
That’s also true, my mother said.
I remembered the time some years ago when I went to the big flea market in Brussels on a weekend trip with Frank. It was one of the weekends when Frank and I were getting along the best. At the flea market, stacks upon stacks of black and white photographs in elaborate frames were for sale: important ones. Wedding photos, christening portraits. Sepia-toned pictures of young women with Gibson Girl hairdos and young men with confident waxy moustaches.
How sad, I said to Frank, that all of these pictures are here, for sale
, like trash, because the people who cared about them must be dead.
I guess so, Frank said.
I don’t understand how their families can be so callous unless they’re all dead, I said, I don’t get why they wouldn’t care.
In the basement, regarding my great-grandfather’s enormous portrait, I recalled the flea market in Brussels and I thought: Now I get it. What a short time passes between people being very precious and people being unfamiliar.
Then I had a brainwave. We could send the photograph to my father’s sister. At least she was one generation closer to this great-grandfather.
Let’s send it to Aunt Barbara, I said to my mother, she’s one generation closer to Grandpa’s dad than I am. She never met him either, but she’ll appreciate it.
That’s a great idea, my mother said.
Great! I said.
Great, my mother said. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Now it was a while since Dad died. Months had ticked by, and in those months, my mother and I had gotten good at solving problems together.
I went back to Brooklyn on the train with Martha. I ate another packet of eggs. A few days later, my mother called me.
I just remembered, my mother said, that a few years ago, before Dad got sick, Aunt Barbara gave that enormous photograph of your great-grandfather to us.
It was Christmas when my mother unearthed her grandmother’s fur coat. That Christmas was a year and a half since my father died. A year and ten months, but who’s counting? In that year and ten months, I had kind of built a life in Brooklyn, at last. I had an apartment and some furniture. I had friends and I had a dog. I went to a writing conference, travelled across the country to it. In a workshop at the conference I shared an essay I’d written about the time that my dad died and I was diagnosed with Lynch syndrome.
No offence, said a woman in the workshop, but you’ve kind of hit the jackpot . . . narratively.
That Christmas was quite some time since my mother told me that she was going to move back to Scotland. I was used to the idea. My mother was slow but determined, disassembling her home with the kind of care and precision that she used to bring to removing knots from my hair. My mother refused many of my offers of help.
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