by Bob Harris
Months later, on our way to a ballgame, I was grumbling to David and Danny about how things had ended with the tall glamorous woman. They both had an idea for a fix-up: the woman who’d written the all-Danny episode. Jane.
I was feeling down and reluctant, but I agreed to meet her as friends, just because I admired her writing. Danny called her on his cell phone, and David introduced me—for I believe the final time—as a five-time Jeopardy! champion.
I could hear Jane was reluctant as well. I respected that. I couldn’t speak to her myself because I was driving on the 101 freeway, and earlier in the day John Stamos had eaten a bad piece of fish, so traffic was monstrous. Through David and Danny, Jane and I picked out a restaurant in an undistinguished shopping mall, thinking only of convenience and getting it over with.
So one cloudy afternoon of no symbolic significance, I didn’t dress up and arrived a few minutes late to meet Jane by a decaying brick wall in a dusty construction site at the edge of an unromantic mall. The restaurant, I discovered, had been closed and torn down, leaving only the nondescript bricks.
Jane hadn’t dressed up either, and was only seconds less late than I was.
So far, so good, we both thought.
It wasn’t love at first sight for either one of us. I had described myself to her as “balding and nailbitten.” She called herself a “tiny nerd with delicate hands.” These were both pretty accurate, but we had fun right away.
We traded our flashiest conversational thumbnails—my game shows, her rhymes-with-Squeema—and laughed without force. We were friends by the time we found a place to eat, completing each other’s sentences by the time dessert came, and officially dating by the time I called David and she called Danny.
In fact, I’m not sure I ever actually fell in love with Jane. It was more that I liked her so much that it crossed into passion. I mean, Jane’s explanation of linguistic morphology involved the “Manamana” song from The Muppets.
This was someone to spend serious time with.
There was one thing about Jane that bugged me, however. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a few weeks. Just something that made me edgy around her.
And then I realized: she was in a good mood almost all of the time.
Jane didn’t speak harshly when she was upset. She’d just be upset, and speak plainly, and try to solve the problem. And then she’d go back to being in a good mood.
I mean, come on. How creepy is that?
This was a woman who could throw sharp verbal knives. In a script, her characters could wield words as edged weapons, slashing and dicing and wounding precisely. But in life Jane would throw only cotton balls filled with chocolate. Even anger came wrapped in cushioning Styrofoam.
How long could you stand to be around that?
Plus, she would sometimes start to sing and dance for no reason. We’d be walking down the street, perhaps discussing ancient writing systems ( Jane was learning to read many Egyptian hieroglyphs), and then she’d suddenly break into a semi-related song, dance an impossibly silly new dance, and—worse—implore me to join right in.
How disconcerting. Obviously, this would have to stop.
Either that, or I’d have to learn how to calm down and dance.
People who really are happy, it turns out, usually don’t go around wearing billboards announcing it, handing out fliers, or evangelizing other people to be exactly the same. At least Jane didn’t.
She was just happy. Glad for every day.
We talked about it a little at first. And then we talked about it a lot.
I took the position that being happy required some definite knowledge that there was something to be happy about—that choosing to be happy for no particular reason was not only slightly unhinged, but possibly counterproductive. There are grave problems that must be addressed in the world, you know.
Jane would usually get up and start dancing.
And as she danced, I’d hold still in my seat, while we’d talk about the overuse of antibiotics or coastal populations threatened by rising sea levels, in all seriousness, while she was shaking her hips to the rhythm of something by Cher.
Jane almost always knew something I didn’t about the subject. Jane almost always had more fun in the process.
Eventually, she got me to stand up in these talks.
Sometimes I’d even let my hips move a little.
One day we’re curled up in a bed, and Jane finds a lump in one breast.
Of course, we’ll just go get it checked out, and it’ll soon be forgotten, we think.
Jane’s too young for this to be anything much, and there’s no environmental or dietary or other risk we can think of. So we’ll go, and they’ll say it’s nothing, and we’ll get on with our lives.
I think of my sister and missed diagnoses.
I think of my father at the end in the hospital. The doctors were sure he was cured.
I am secretly terrified, right there in that bed.
If Jane is, she doesn’t let on.
We go in. They do tests. And it’s something.
It’s something that has to come out.
So they cut.
They got it all, they say.
They didn’t get it all.
We go back. They cut some more.
This time they say that they’re sure.
They didn’t get everything. And there’s a chance it might have spread.
The doctor speaks in lots of technical terms. Jane asks him to fax all the test results to me. I volunteer to sort through it and translate. We both want to know every detail. It’s in our nature to know.
Jane sleeps in the bed in my book-cramped apartment while I sit up at my desk and read, looking up unfamiliar words. Cramming like Jeopardy! for a quiz we don’t want. If we win, the only prize for Jane is survival.
I learn about ploidy, which is the number of copies of DNA. In a tumor, you get extra sets. Hypertetraploidy is bad.
Jane’s lump has hypertetraploidy.
I learn about hormone receptors, indicating a tumor has integrated with the body. Having lots of receptors is bad.
Jane’s lump has lots of receptors.
I go through category after category, and Jane runs the table. Maximum bad. Maximum bad. Maximum bad.
I stop panicking halfway and notice fascination growing alongside my sadness. Grief, fully felt, can give way to sheer wonder as you realize how much you can lose.
I fall asleep at my desk, too tired to cry, just wishing I didn’t know.
How would I tell her?
How would you?
So one morning we’re driving and singing the tune of “Sing Hallelujah, Come On Get Happy”:
It’s a Giant Drug Store
But they don’t sell Giant Drugs.
They don’t sell drugs to giants,
So what the hell kind of drug store is it anyway?
The melody always sort of peters out at the end, incidentally. That’s the part where we’d trail off into laughter.
We’re going for another round of cutting, and this time they’ll look at her sentinel cells, which are camped out at lymph nodes not far from the breast. If the sentinel cells are still normal, the disease hasn’t spread.
If not, then things can get very bad.
The doctors have promised that Jane will be fine.
Doctors said exactly the same things, in exactly the same tones, about Dad.
Part of me will forever be in that waiting room. I have never left, even now, as I write this. It’s the biggest Hiroshima flash of my life. You know how memory kicks in.
At the other end of a very long hallway, too far even to shout or cry out, is a pair of double doors. Through these will soon come a doctor.
And then comes the rest.
The Cleveland Browns, you should know, aren’t the only losing team I’ve cheered on.
The Cleveland Indians haven’t won a World Series since fifteen years before I was born. In 1994 they had their best season in
forty years, but there was no World Series to go to. It had been called off because of a strike.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have never won an NBA title. In the year still most cherished by fans, they heroically managed to make the playoffs and not immediately lose. This is still called “The Miracle of Richfield,” named for the remote village where the now-abandoned arena was built. The Cleveland Barons hockey team folded, was reborn, and then folded again. The Cleveland Crusaders just folded.
Losing is what Clevelanders learn to do well to survive. Losing, in truth, is something we’re good at. Tomorrow, next year. We tried, we played well, we go on. This, too, is an essential survival skill. Understood, it should be a source of great pride.
When the Cuyahoga River caught fire when I was a boy, it made the national news. What the world didn’t know was that the river burned often. The fire chief called it “routine” the next day. Not very long later, the mayor himself caught fire. A forgettable fellow named Ralph Perk went whoooom, or at least his hair did.
I got used to the idea that anything could suddenly go up in flames.
Not just in Cleveland, of course. It’s just life itself, really. Losing is what we do in this world.
Two out of three Jeopardy! players lose, game in and game out. More than that, even, since winners return and keep hogging the wins. And by the standards of life, Jeopardy! is actually kind.
One-third of humanity doesn’t even have clean water, the single most basic necessity. Nearly half of our kind will be born randomly into war or famine or poverty or some other great ill. This is rarely the fault of the infant.
Most people are good, with a deep need for fairness. So the world and the present can be painful to look at directly, assuming you’re lucky and aren’t forced to notice every day. We can hide, we can rationalize, we can look away and go on with whatever. We can scream our denials with anger or smiles, with whispers or cries. We can build complex ideas to create explanations and demand our own permanence. This is a good deal of work, but it gives us a past we can live with and a future to live in.
And even so: We didn’t ask to be here, and we don’t ask to leave. While we’re here no one shows us the controls. We don’t stay very long in the end.
Heaven and Earth are not humane. Life is terminal, whatever we do.
But newborns don’t ask why they’re laughing or crying. A newborn just is.
And when they’re happy, that’s it. They’re alive, glad for the moment, glad for air or the hug or the glimmer of light. Glad for the warm human heartbeat nearby.
Joy is in every moment of waking in life. So is grief. We can embrace both and still choose well.
Jane was awake on this morning. She was alive. So she sang.
She was glad for the day.
This is still my one favorite moment on Earth.
I am still awake in the waiting room. Right this minute.
I will never again hope for any One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™. I don’t want more anymore. I don’t want plans for the future. I swear off false permanence. I only want to see my best friend well. I want her to live a long time before we die. I will trade everything I’ve ever learned, had, or done, just for one extra day for Jane.
I am trying to find joy. Even now.
In this very moment, even now as I write this, I believe I will fail.
On the day that it happens, I glance up. In the distance, the double doors move. I stop breathing.
Jane’s surgeon emerges slowly, taking a breath. He looks tired, I think.
He sees me now, standing to meet him.
But I’m too far away to address in hushed tones and kind calmness. I am too far away to console.
So instead he just stops.
He stops.
Is he afraid to face me? I think. How would I give someone the news?
He stops in the spot where he’s standing. A tenth of a second. A Jeopardy! buzzer fraction. Considering his expression. Choosing his words and his posture.
He stops, and his arms start to rise.
Oh, no, I think. Here comes consolation.
He stops, and his arms start to rise.
Here come soft murmurs. Here comes grief counseling. Here comes empty space.
He stops, and his arms keep on rising.
What’s that? I wonder. That’s not a hug. It’s not solace. What is it?
His arms start to rise, and keep rising, until they’re straight up in the air.
It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.
A touchdown.
It’s a touchdown.
He’s signaling. A touchdown.
A winning touchdown. Like a victory.
Like we’ve finally won at the end.
He’s sharing the good news, down the hall, right this instant. From a distance. Not wasting a second.
Jane’s doctor is signaling victory. His arms are rising up in the air.
We won.
And now I’m running, excited. I am running to hug him. I need to hear words. I need to see eyes and smiles. I need to see Jane. I can scarcely believe it.
Jane’s doctor is standing, his arms going straight up in the air.
I shake his hand and I grab him and hug him and I think pretty soon I am crying.
No galoshes.
I am dancing.
Days later, I’m driving home from the hospital. Rainy and gray, water stacked at the curbside going whissssssh in my wheels. Smell of ozone and sound of windshield wipers wubbity-wubbity-wubbity.
Jane’s half-asleep, leaning back, at my side.
She has fragile bits still that can’t be jostled, so I’m focused, alive in this moment. Careful with the brake, just as Dad taught me once. Avoiding every bump in the road.
We pass a certain drugstore. I start to sing, quietly to myself:
It’s a Giant Drug Store
But they don’t sell Giant Drugs…
I glance over. And Jane is smiling.
Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy…
CHAPTER
20
THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY IN RECOVERY
Also, A Brief Look at Estonian Revolutionary Movements
The next several months involved doctors, procedures, exams, and much indiscreet poking and probing. There were tubes that took draining and drains that took tapping and taps with new tubing. Fluids and goos went inside and out at all hours. I’d give lots more details, but you would remember them, and you’d probably rather not know.
But Jane was alive every day and still is. She is fine. She is great.
She had long days in bed and long nights uncomfortably not, in such number that they blurred even at the time.
But these were not difficult days. Only long ones. There was no chemo and no radiation. There were no experimental drugs, harsh side effects, or recurrences. Jane was lucky as hell.
Jane’s tumor was a type that can look truly horrible in all the tests but that turns out to be no big deal after all.
It was small. They got it all. They really did.
All we needed now was time.
When Jane was back on her feet, we went out to a park by the beach for a walk. And without meaning to consciously, we found ourselves approaching a fifteen-foot religious statue, meant to honor Saint Monica. Instead it looks more like an erect human penis.
This was not far from the spot where I’d once said the wedding vows, the spot that fell over the cliff. Jane knew how much this patch of dirt (or at least its vicinity) had once meant.
This wasn’t planned. We were just walking, and arrived at this spot, which we noticed. So for a moment we weren’t quite sure what to do or to say.
So we just did a happy little not-dead-yet dance—which in this case looked like a little sidestepping Bob Fosse sort of thing, as if performed by arthritic pandas who’d just had their first beer.
And then we walked away, holding hands.
Incidentally, if you were surprised by the end of the previous chapter, well, good
. I was pretty thrown by it myself when it happened. I wanted you to feel it exactly as I did, so I kept the verb tenses ambiguous about Jane’s future existence (life does that to all of us, anyway), and implied doom (which we all face) through other means. I wanted you to feel every ounce of joy and surprise when that touchdown thing happened. It was just a small gesture from the doctor, but it’s my favorite slow-motion highlight ever, better than anything I ever saw with Dad. So I hope you’ll forgive me. And maybe even cheer like something’s unspooling.
Either way, there are some pretty cool twists still coming, and nobody else gets cancer that I know of. Honest.
Plus, I hid a dollar between pages 320 and 321. But you have to read straight through. It’s only there if you don’t flip ahead.
OK. Now, that was a complete lie. I thought I’d write something actually deceptive, so the difference was clear.
Still, I bet you still have a slight urge to flip ahead, looking for the dollar.
It would be really cool if completely impossible things happened like that.
“Hi, is this Bob? This is Susanne from Jeopardy!”
I had overslept and was still lying in bed, half-groggy, not familiar with sleeping in my own apartment of late. I looked at the clock radio, which had arrived years earlier as one of the Johnny Gilbert some-contestants-receive prizes during the Berlin Random Noun Airlift. It was just after 10:00 a.m. on some December weekday.
“Hi, Susanne! How are you?” I replied cheerily. I sat up, squinting and sniffing and squirming awake. I was trying not to let on I was only half-conscious.