The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

  He shrugged—well, it was more like a jerk of the shoulders he might not have been able to control. “I just want to get it over with. Prove her right, finally, about what a fuck-up I am. She wants me to have issues, I’ll show her issues!” He was trying to make it sound hilarious, but the words came out with a desperate edge. “How perfect would that be, if she got her way about keeping the affordable people out, I mean saving the planet, because her son burned the houses down?”

  All of this came fast and it was hard for me to follow, but the danger was loud and clear. “I don’t believe you mean that,” I told him, trying to keep my own voice calm. “But if you do, maybe you are insane.”

  It wasn’t what I’d intended to say—it just came out. But instead of looking insulted, he smiled, and I felt a chill. “You’d be burning your own house down with it,” I went on, I babbled . . . what was I doing? Trying to reason with him, as if that made any sense. “This house. The whole neighborhood. It’s been so hot lately, you don’t know how far a fire like that would spread.”

  Now he laughed outright. “Wow, I really had you going there for a minute! You actually think I would do a thing like that? It should hurt my feelings, but I won’t hold it against you. I heard what’s happening. I know you’re not—yourself.”

  What did he mean by that? Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. How dare he say such a thing to me? “Of course I think you would do it,” I told him. “It’s the next logical step from the things you’ve already done. Like calling in that bomb threat at graduation. If you didn’t want to go, you didn’t have to. But a lot of us were looking forward to it. Why would you do a thing like that?”

  He squinted, so much that his eyes virtually disappeared. I’d forgotten that about him, the narrowness of his eyes. “I didn’t, Mrs. Chase,” he said. “I know everybody thinks I did, but that wasn’t me, either.” He said it quietly, as if he wished he could avoid causing me the pain of understanding.

  At this I had to gasp a little and bend over the island between us. He retreated a few steps toward the back door, then paused with his hand on the knob. “Listen, I’m leaving now, okay? Would it be the worst thing you’ve ever done if I asked you not to tell my mother you saw me here?”

  His mother! What about the police? Did he think he was going to get away with what he’d said a few minutes ago, the threat he’d just made about torching Arcadia Glen?

  But I knew it was in my interest not to give away what I was thinking. I promised him I wouldn’t tell Trudy.

  He looked at me longer than I expected, when I knew he was eager to leave. My blood fizzed for a second or two. Then he thanked me quickly and turned the knob. But before he could escape, I called him back. “Derek,” I said, “you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” Giving him one last chance to persuade me. I was willing to let him if he tried hard enough, if only because I didn’t feel up to calling the police or anyone else.

  “No. Of course not. You know me, Mrs. Chase. I was just funning.” Hearing the word he and Will had used as children, I braced myself against the counter again.

  Before he slipped out the door, he mumbled something. “What?” I said, hearing a frantic note in my voice. I opened the door again, and from the yard he turned back and called, “Good luck, I said.”

  “With what?”

  “I don’t know. Just … everything.” He waved a little, then hopped the fence into the half-raped woods before I could wish him luck, too.

  Even before Derek was out of sight, I decided that despite what I’d told him, I would not be returning to Jack and Grettie’s later that day. The idea of the obligation hanging over me while I was with the therapist—knowing that I still had a chore to perform, even such a simple one—added to the considerable anxiety I already felt about the appointment. The only alternative was to load the bags of garbage and the recyclables into my trunk and drop them off at the dump, which was located on my way to the therapist’s office. That way, after the appointment, I would be free. All I’d have to do was get myself home, where I could collapse if I needed to, on the chaise or in my bed. (I knew I might have to sit in the office parking lot for fifteen minutes or a half hour before starting the drive home, but that was all right; there was a time that this had been routine for me.)

  Needless to say I was not thrilled about putting garbage in my trunk, but I figured it would only be in there for a short time, it shouldn’t create a lasting stink. First I filled the cloth shopping bags I keep in my car with all the loose bottles and cans and cardboard (as well as the empty Pringles can) to be recycled, and returned that bin to the garage. Then, holding the bags at arm’s length, I placed them in the trunk and wheeled the barrel away from the curb. Of course, because it was Jack and Grettie’s garbage, the bags had been secured tightly and neatly at the top. This gave me some measure of assurance as I closed the trunk, started the car (it took only three tries this time, it was getting better), and headed toward the dump, or what is more properly called, in this town, the municipal waste facility.

  Hauling away other people’s garbage! Virginia Woolf would be able to turn that into a metaphor that meant something, but I knew I could not.

  To my surprise, because it was two o’clock on a Wednesday, what seemed like an off time to me, there was a line to unload at the various receptacles—glass, paper, cardboard, aluminum cans. By the time it was my turn, the trash had been in the trunk for close to twenty minutes, and I was more worried than ever about being late for my appointment.

  It is at moments like these that I think most often of calling Grettie. That I do call her, when I can. But she was somewhere in the air now, no doubt. In flight to the surprise anniversary destination Jack was taking her to, wherever it was.

  Reciting in my mind what I thought she would tell me—You will only hurt yourself by panicking, you will only help yourself by remaining calm—I overturned the recyclables from my shopping bags into their appropriate Dumpsters. Pleasantly surprised by my own speed and efficiency, I tried to do the same with the garbage bags, grabbing two at a time in each hand with the thought of dumping them all at once, but the one closest to me broke open as I went to upend it, spilling the contents on the ground and—I realized too late to prevent it—on me. Egg yolks and avocado peels down the side of my blouse, coffee grounds on my shoe. Grettie cooked mostly with egg whites, because Jack didn’t like the yolks; they ate avocados every day for the healthy fat; coffee was one thing she splurged on, because she said there was such a big difference between an okay cup of coffee and a really good one, and choosing really good over okay could set the tone for the rest of your day. This had been true as far back as when we were roommates—we got to drink flavored gourmet coffee every morning from the subscription service her parents bought for her birthday, at Grettie’s request.

  The intention defines the experience, she liked to say, back then and for all the years I had known her. It was something she’d read or heard once that stuck with her. Later, Will told me similar things, passed on by his tai chi teacher. I’d never found it particularly helpful, because I rarely saw a connection between what I intended or wished for an experience and what the experience turned out to be.

  For example. I now had coffee grounds on my shoe, and a strong smell floating up of dark-roasted, expensive bitterness. I tried to kick the grounds off, but they’d leaked into the shoelace holes. Trying not to panic, but panicking, I grabbed tissues from my purse and did my best to rub the yolk-and-avocado-peel mix from my blouse, but I succeeded only in making it worse, fastening the stain to the fabric.

  I looked around as if someone might be available to help me—see my predicament, and offer advice or a hand—but they were waiting their turn to pull their cars in, and only wanted me out of the way. Someone shouted, “Hey! Clean up your shit!” meaning the garbage that had spilled on the ground, but even if I could have figured out how to do so, with all the interferi
ng thoughts and feelings in my head, I was late, I was late (this was really the only thought, the only feeling), and I got back in my car and sped off without looking back to see if anyone chased me, and without buckling up.

  The sudden sound of sirens made me gasp. Had they been lying in wait for me? That was ridiculous, I told myself. Nobody was trying to catch me, I hadn’t done anything wrong. But it wasn’t until I looked in my rearview, and didn’t see any lights flashing, that I realized the piercing police wails were more distant, they were coming from somewhere else.

  Those sirens had nothing to do with Derek, I told myself. He’d promised me he wouldn’t do anything stupid, and besides, there hadn’t been enough time.

  Now the smell was not only in the trunk, but inside the car with me. The smell was me. I lowered every window all the way down, and felt relieved that it seemed slightly better as I drove toward the road that would lead me to the therapist’s office. But when I reclosed the windows to test it, there it was again. I pulled into a parking lot, got out, and took a few steps away from the car. I’m sure I don’t need to say that the smell followed.

  I’d been sweating more than usual, I noticed, since my cancer came back. Was that a symptom of something? Besides, duh, cancer?

  All these months later I still have trouble saying or even thinking it: My cancer came back. It was the lymphovascular invasion that probably did it. The presence of LVI in my pathology meant that some of the cancer had already traveled to my blood by the time I had surgery. Here I’d been using those two captured convicts as a metaphor, when it turns out there was a third one nobody ever knew about, who got away! Metaphorically, at least. To treat it, I went through a short term of radiation a month or so after the surgery, which the doctors said reduced the chance of recurrence from about ten to one percent. But it couldn’t eliminate it completely.

  The day after the second presidential debate, a month before the election, I saw blood in the toilet again. I tried to convince myself it was just the result of stress—all the news was giving me headaches, I kept telling myself not to watch and then watching anyway. But I knew enough to go and get checked out. A week later I went in to have it confirmed: the chances had been slim, but they had always been there. The cancer had recurred, in my vaginal vault. (Vault! The place you put things to keep them safe. I would never see that word in the same way again.) “I’m very sorry,” Dr. Venn said. She did look sorry. It was all I could do not to say to her It’s okay. “I’m just so sorry that you have to be one of the rare ones this happens to.”

  They could do straight chemotherapy, she said, but my situation was such that she recommended we “think outside the box.” I couldn’t help a small smile and wondered if she found that as unfortunate a pun as I did, but I didn’t ask. She went on to describe something called sandwich therapy: chemo followed by radiation followed by chemo again. “I won’t lie to you,” she said, “it’ll be rough. But there’s promising research that suggests this may be the route we should consider for you now.”

  It was up to me, she continued—she knew it was a big decision, there was my quality of life to consider. But if I were her sister, she would encourage me to go ahead. I appreciated that, her making it personal. It was probably the reason I decided to take her advice.

  But I told her I’d have to put it off until after Christmas. Actually, until the second week of January, when my son would go back to school. I didn’t want to be in the middle of treatments when he came home for the holiday, I didn’t want him to see me that way, potentially so sick. I could start as soon as he went back, then be done with the worst of it—and back in recovery mode—by the time of his spring break.

  I could tell by the doctor’s reaction that she didn’t like this idea. “I wouldn’t recommend delaying,” she said, but when I told her it was the only way I’d go through with it, she sighed and said okay, it was my decision, she would write the order for me to begin on January sixteenth.

  She was right about the treatment being rough—that’s putting it mildly! But I don’t see any reason to spend any time describing what I went through. Remembering it is bad enough. People always say about a bad experience that they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy, but I don’t mind saying that I would. The chemo-radiation-chemo sandwich—yes, I think that would be just about the perfect punishment.

  The schedulers said I might want to have someone accompany me to each treatment, but it was also possible for me to take a cab or hire a car to and from the hospital. I deliberated about mentioning it to Grettie. I wanted her to be there, but I knew how much it was to ask. Instead of asking, I told her what Dr. Venn had said I needed, how often the treatments were. I could tell that Grettie wanted to say she’d bring me in every day I had to be there, but we both knew this was too much of a commitment: she had her classes, she had her family, she had her life, and she couldn’t put hers on hold just because mine would be. I remember thinking that if I had a partner, it would be different; a partner’s life is on hold along with yours. But she was not my partner. She is not my partner. How many times have I had to remind myself of that, in the past twenty-five years?

  In the end I scheduled most of my rides with a home health service that provided transportation. But Grettie brought me when she could, which turned out to be at least once a week for the five-week regimen, and sometimes twice. She made sure to be there for my first chemo appointment, and for my last. During the drive in for the first, we listened on the radio to plans for the inauguration; Grettie switched it off. During the drive in for the last, we left the radio on to hear about the latest court blocking the president’s travel ban. On a weekend in between, when I didn’t feel well enough to accompany Grettie and some of our friends into Boston for the Women’s March, she used her phone to have them send me a video of all of them chanting and cheering, and on her way home she stopped by to bring me soup and the sign she’d carried during the rally: Love Never Fails, which she propped up at the end of my bed so I could see it when I opened my eyes each morning and before I closed them each night. It’s still there, though I’m going to have to move it; the other night I woke up and mistook it for a person standing there, it scared me to death.

  During these weeks, I came to realize that I would never feel ecstatic again. A rise of the heart that hits no ceiling, that speeding rush of joy. Even in the printed word—ecstatic—I’ve always seen the features of faces crinkled in rapture, felt the stirrings of it in my own gut.

  So what if I’m done with all that? I tried to tell myself. Ecstasy is for children, who don’t know any better. For young people who still have their lives in front of them. For people who don’t really get that they’re going to die.

  After the first treatment, Grettie took me for ice cream. After the last, she brought me home to collapse on the couch, where she sat next to me and tucked the shorts strands of remaining hair behind my ear. It was something I’d always done with my little sister when she sat on my lap as we watched TV after school, waiting for our mother to get home, but I’d never told Grettie about that. How did she know to make just this gesture, how did she know it would bring me comfort like nothing else would?

  “Why are we friends?” I asked, not quite having realized I was going to.

  She paused in her hair-tucking, looking startled. “What?”

  “I mean, it’s obvious why I like being around you. Why everyone does. But what do you get out of it—our friendship?”

  “Oh, Roberta.” She put a hand on her chest. “Do you really not know?”

  I had to look away. “So you’re going to miss me?” Okay, this was why I’d asked the first question—I saw that then.

  “Oh, Bert.” I felt a twinge of guilt at the distress I saw in her face. “Of course I’d miss you, if it came to that. But please let’s not talk this way.”

  After my last treatment, she held the pail for me to puke in. Fed me ice chips, put a cloth on m
y head, brought me clear broth and then the pail again. We watched TV together that night, more episodes of the British crime drama she was so fond of. I confessed that I hadn’t gotten into it that much, I could barely understand what the characters were saying. “Oh, you should have told me,” she said, “I can fix that,” and she turned on the subtitles, but it was too late; I’d already missed too much of the story. She went into my bedroom and came back with the comforter, then wrapped it around both of us on the couch. I wanted to lean against her but when I hesitated, afraid she would pull away, she said, “Oh, Bert. We’re beyond all that now, aren’t we?” and reached to pull my head gently against her chest.

  She did know! At last, the answer to Sosi’s question, which (to be honest) had been my question, too. Had Grettie known all along, or had it dawned on her after we both moved here and later began raising our children together? I couldn’t tell whether it made me sad or happy, that she’d known for years how I really felt, and never ventured to bring it up.

  But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was what it felt like to lie against her, matching the rhythm of my breath to hers in the blue glow of the TV. I wanted to stay awake to savor the feeling, but it was too much for me. As she watched the show with a captivation I envied, I fell asleep—finally it happened!—in her arms. How wrong I’d been, I thought as I dropped off, to think I would not feel ecstatic ever again.

  And after all that—after I delayed my treatments because I wanted to have the holiday at home with Will—he blew me off. Well, that’s a harsh way of putting it. But that’s what it felt like. When I texted him to say that I knew he didn’t want me to contact him but I wasn’t sure when his vacation started, when to expect him home, I didn’t hear from him and didn’t hear from him and then he called—he called! I was so happy to hear his voice, before I realized he was delivering bad news—to say that he was sorry, but he’d decided to go with Sosi to her family’s over the break.