“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling stupid. “You won’t be here for Christmas?” We’d never missed one together; the prospect of not seeing him on Christmas was something I hadn’t considered. He promised he’d come home for spring break, which—really, Mom, when you think about it—wasn’t so far away.
I should have just told him on the phone that day, that the cancer had come back. I could have written a note, I could have typed an email, I could have sent him a text. I could have called him on Skype or FaceTime. But I didn’t want to do any of those things—I wanted to be there with him when he heard it. In person, face to face, without any screens or electronic signals. I wanted it to be part of home for him, not school.
But he has not come home. So I have not told him.
After we hung up, I knew I should call Dr. Venn’s office to see if was in fact possible to switch back to an earlier set of dates for my treatment regimen. But my nerve failed me. What if this was my last Christmas? Did I want to spend it puking into a bucket, and missing my son to boot?
I have a hard time answering some questions, but this wasn’t one of them.
My sister called on Christmas morning. We reminisced—if you could call it that. Reminisce, to me, conjures an image of happy people sitting around together, talking about happy things. This was on the phone and it wasn’t happy, but maybe it still counts.
“I woke up this morning thinking of all that phlegm,” she said, when I answered.
“Merry Christmas to you, too.” Then we both laughed a little, even though what we were talking about was our mother’s death.
“Sorry. It’s just that it was so vivid—I dreamed there were rivers and rivers of it. I was about to drown.” In the background I heard her take a sip of something—coffee, I hoped. It was eleven o’clock where I was, which meant it was eight a.m. out there for her. But it was a holiday. “If she’d gone in sooner, do you think they could have caught it in time?” Whenever I spoke with Steph she was obsessed to some degree with the question of whether our mother might have lived longer if this or if that, to the point that I never bothered to answer anymore.
And this was my opening, I realized. Speaking of diagnoses, of catching things in time. But I let it pass. With it being Christmas and everything, I didn’t have the heart (not just for her sake, but mine, too) to tell her the latest news about my health. Besides, if those were ice cubes I heard rattling, now that I focused harder on the sound, who knew if she’d even remember, once we got off the phone?
“Oh, well. Never mind,” she sighed, the way she did so often. I’ve been listening to that sigh all my life—first from our mother, then from her. “What are you guys doing today? Going to Grettie’s, I assume?”
Steph lives in California with her husband, a cyber-security specialist named Harley Davidson, I kid you not. He’s not a biker himself, but both of his parents were. If you were to meet him, he would tell you very early on that he started going by Hal in kindergarten, inspired by the name of the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He likes to brag that he can hack into any system, given enough time. He’s quick to add that he doesn’t do anything illegal, but I have my doubts. How else would he have taught my son the things he’d needed to know, to go as deep as he did in my hospital database?
Steph and Hal don’t have any children. I remember asking her about it, during a visit she made to see us shortly after Will’s second birthday. She and Hal weren’t married yet, but they were planning on it. We sat outside as Will played beside us in the courtyard. This was back when he used to say Look what I can do! all the time, before somersaulting or twisting his arms into a pretzel or hopping on one leg.
“Are you guys going to start trying right away, or wait awhile?” I asked her. It was lunchtime and I served iced tea, but she asked if we could open the Chardonnay she’d seen in the fridge, that I was saving for dinner.
“I don’t think we’re going to have them at all,” she said.
This surprised me. When we’d met her at the airport and Will ran straight into her outstretched arms, I saw a look on her face I thought I hadn’t seen there before, or at least not since she was little: the kind of happiness that makes you close your eyes so you can shut everything else out, and savor how good you feel. Yes, she’d looked ecstatic.
He has so many women who love him! Yet how many of them would he trade to know just one man—that one specific man?
“But why?” I said. “You’d be such a great mother.”
“I don’t think so.” She lifted her glass to drain what was left, but it was already gone. “I can’t drink and have a kid—I won’t do that to her.”
I’ve always wondered whether Steph realized that she said her, as if she possessed knowledge of a destined daughter about whom she was making decisions before the child could be conceived. “You don’t understand, Bert. I get Mom, now. This”— she gestured at her empty glass—“is the only way I can be, in the world. I’ve found something that works.”
“What are you talking about?” Sure, she’d had her wild times in college. But I’d never seen her out of control. “What do you mean ‘something that works’?”
She looked pained, as if it hurt her to have to have this conversation. Or maybe it hurt her that I had to ask, that I didn’t already know something this important about my own sister. “I can’t explain it, and to be honest, I’m glad you don’t understand. For your own sake. For his.” She nodded over at Will, who lay on his back in the grass with one chubby leg folded over the other, looking up at the sky.
“It’s the only way I can relax,” she told me. “I mean completely. Otherwise I’m on edge all the time, even when I’m home, even when nobody’s expecting anything from me. It’s in my body, this perpetual tenseness. I probably inherited it from Mom.”
I wanted to say bullshit, but I knew this wouldn’t do any good. “There are other ways,” I said instead. “Therapy! I went to a therapist, you know that.” Though I’d never told her about the night in the cemetery, the wanting to die. I felt an obligation, as the older sister, to protect her from my own frailty, especially since I’d been at least as much of a mother to her as our actual mother had been. “Meditation. Yoga. Exercise, for God’s sake.”
She waved a hand as if to say Been there, done that, they don’t work. Or They don’t work well enough. Then, to signal that she’d had enough of being interrogated for the time being, she changed the subject. “It still amazes me that you had a baby. On your own like that. Like this. I mean, you’re only thirty. What’s the rush? Why didn’t you wait to see if you met someone you wanted to marry, so you could have kids together, and not have to do it all on your own?”
There were a lot of questions in there. I understood that some had been spoken, and some had not. “Haven’t you met any nice guys?” she persisted. “I mean, it’s a big city. There must be some nice guys around.”
There was a man, I could have told her. There were a few men—some before Will, and one after. That one, I even thought I might marry. But when it came right down to it, I couldn’t be sure there was enough love in the circle among the three of us—him for Will, or me for him—to make it worth it. To think that the odds of us being together after a few years, or even a year, were better than the odds of us not. I didn’t want to inflict a divorce upon Will, so I called it off. Soon after that, he began to have problems anyway. But I’m sure they would have been worse if the man had still been around.
On top of which—who am I kidding?—he was not her. I murmured something to Steph about being so busy now, as the mother of a toddler, that the last thing I thought about was going on dates.
But this didn’t satisfy her. “It would be one thing if you had a boyfriend and you found yourself pregnant, and decided to go ahead and have the kid instead of an abortion.” Her wine glass was empty. When I didn’t make a move to go inside to get the bottle, she drew her hand reluctant
ly from the stem. “But to go ahead and pursue it—find a sperm bank, buy the sperm, get inseminated … how many times did it take, anyway? I don’t think you ever told me.”
“Just the one,” I said, then coughed before adding, “I got lucky.”
“I just don’t get it. You never wanted a kid that much, at least not that you ever told me.” I heard hurt in her voice. “So how does it work, anyway? How’d you decide what sperm to order?”
Dammit, I thought. Why hadn’t I just decided to tell everyone, if and when they asked, that I’d gotten pregnant having sex with someone I never saw again? Yes, it would have been completely out of character. But it was also pretty much true. As it was, once I lied about having a donor, I had to keep compounding it by coming up with answers to questions like the ones my sister was asking.
“The donors fill out questionnaires. In longhand, so you even get a sense of their handwriting.” I’d done my research. “Everything from favorite color to taste in music to where they’d like most to travel in the world. The administrator picked out the closest matches to the things I said I was looking for, and sent them to me. I got about six or seven. I chose one, ordered a vial, made an appointment, and—voilá!” I waved at Will, who’d called to us Look what I can do! and was now walking in a circle on his tiptoes.
Watching him, Steph smiled; she might challenge me on the advisability of single motherhood, but I knew she loved being an aunt. “You only ordered one vial?”
“Well, they’re not cheap. I figured I could always get more if it didn’t work the first time.”
“But what if you want to give him a sibling? I would think you’d have ordered extra, for when that time might come. In case they run out, or whatever. In case the guy—his sperm—isn’t available anymore.”
“Wow,” I said, after a moment. “You’re a Chatty Cathy about this, aren’t you?”
“Sorry.” She looked as if I’d hurt her feelings. “I didn’t mean to be, I’m just curious.”
I could see that she wanted to ask more, so I told her it was okay. “Probably no on the siblings,” I said. “In fact, definitely not. But Cam’s only a little older, and we spend a lot of time with him and Grettie, so it’s like having a brother around. Or a cousin.”
She nodded. “And what kinds of things were you looking for? In a donor. If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I thought about the things I loved most in Will. “Intelligence. Sensitivity.”
“Well, you got those for sure.” She smiled as he came over to hand her a dandelion covered in white fluff, and told her to make a wish.
She closed her eyes and thought for a moment before blowing the wisps into the yard.
When he’d run off again, she said in a low voice, “I wished for him to have a father someday. I hope that doesn’t offend you.”
“No,” I said, although it did, a little; the implication seemed to be that I wasn’t enough. “But Will isn’t going to be able to track down his donor.”
“A father, I wished for. It doesn’t have to be the biological one.”
I stood and picked up my own plate, but she hadn’t eaten all of her lunch. “Are you going to finish that?” I asked.
“No. Can you bring the bottle out? I assume you got a full medical history and the guy’s healthy. No mental disorders or anything, right?
I could have commented on the irony of her bringing this up right after invoking our alcoholic mother and requesting a refill of the wine she was drinking with lunch. But I didn’t. Instead I made my habitual murmuring sound and stacked our plates. I could tell she’d expected more in the way of an answer, but she didn’t press. She remained seated at the table, watching Will, and I brought the dishes inside, put them in the sink, then did my best to regain my composure before I went back out to join them. I set the Chardonnay in front of her but declined to pour it; if she wanted to destroy herself, she’d have to do it on her own, I wouldn’t help.
From across the table I watched her fill her glass, seeing on her face an expression I would have called reverent, if someone had asked me just then. “Could I see his questionnaire?” she asked, after the first few sips.
I looked at my fingernails. “No. I got rid of it.”
“What?” She practically gasped. “You did not.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But why?”
I shrugged, trying to give the impression that it didn’t matter. “What would have been the point?”
“You did not do that,” she said again. “I know you, Bert. You hang onto everything. You kept my report cards from middle school, you still have Mom’s bracelet from the hospital.”
“Well. Yes, I keep the things that mean something to me.” It was hot under the sun that day, and all this talking was making me sweat; I ran my fingers across my forehead and they came away damp. “But the questionnaire was just—I don’t know, it was like a brochure or something. Once I put in my order, once I got what I wanted, I didn’t need it anymore.”
She made a noise I couldn’t read, and shook her head. “What?” I said.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that he might want to see it?” She nodded toward Will.
“I remember everything. I can tell him what it said.”
“That’s not the same as seeing what the guy put down. How he described himself. What his handwriting looked like, for God’s sake.”
I was not accustomed to having my little sister call me out on things, and I didn’t like how it felt. But I didn’t want to say this, I didn’t want to fight. I decided not to respond, and this must have caused her to reconsider at least the tone she’d taken. “I’m sorry, Bert. I don’t mean to criticize. I’m just surprised, that’s all; it’s not like you, to throw away something like that. I’m sure it was a hard process, the whole thing.”
You have no idea! I wanted to shout, but of course I would not. It was so tempting, but I’d made a promise to myself.
“And I’m sorry I wasn’t here for it. I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”
I wasn’t alone, I reminded her—I’d had Grettie.
At this I saw Steph hesitate. “Did you show her the questionnaire?”
I shook my head. This made her feel better, I could see.
Steph and I don’t see or call each other too often, anymore. It’s hard for her to drink the way she wants to, around me, and hard for me to watch her do it. But we always talk on Christmas, because it was our mother’s favorite time of year. She especially loved composing her annual Christmas letter. I can still conjure up the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling on a yellow pad, a glass of wine nearby for inspiration. Who am I kidding—it was a bottle, not a glass. “Both girls continue to enjoy and excel at their various pursuits. This year Stephanie took up riding, while Roberta mastered the art of the self-portrait in pen and ink.”
I had “mastered” the art of the self-portrait—oh, Mom! I was a doodler. And it was not horses my sister rode, it was the back of Trent Green’s Kawasaki. The year my father left to move to Texas with the wife of one of his poker buddies, my mother wrote that he was “traveling the country in pursuit of new opportunities.” But that, of course, is what the Christmas letter is for. A way to imply (and in my mother’s case, I’m sure, to believe) that things are different from what they are. That they are better. It always made me nervous. I knew that anyone who received my mother’s letter would see right through it.
She used to leave up the red-ribboned pine wreath on our front door until well into the spring, sometimes even till summer. It still makes me nervous to see Christmas wreaths up that late in the year. Don’t people realize? It makes me anxious to think they aren’t paying the right attention, things aren’t getting taken care of the way they need to be.
Fittingly—or was it the opposite of fitting?—our mother died on Christmas Da
y. The nurses’ station at the hospital was draped in green and red tinsel. This was St. Elizabeth’s. Christmas carols were piped in over the PA. Steph and I spent a lot of time, at the end, inventing our own version of a Christmas letter, in an effort to assure our mother that her life had been better than it was. What would have been the point of insisting on the truth, at that point? The woman was dying. And we loved her.
Will heard Steph and me recalling this during one of her visits to us when he was about ten. “I can’t believe you guys did that,” he said. “So the last thing Grandma ever heard was you lying to her.”
“It wasn’t lying,” Steph told him. “Or, it was, technically, but it was for a greater good.”
Will made a scornful noise. “I would never do that to you,” he said, but it didn’t really register back then, it wasn’t something I imagined him someday having to decide.
I don’t believe Steph and I ever regretted the things we said to our mother in the hospital. What was it she said, at the end? “Certain parts I could have done without, but on the whole, I liked it.” As if life had been a book somebody asked her to review.
Since then, Christmas has always been a hard time for both my sister and me. That’s one of the reasons I was surprised when Will didn’t come home this year—he’s aware that it’s a sad anniversary. When he was growing up I did my best to hide my sadness from him, but I knew he could see it. From the time he was little he always tried to cheer me up, making a big deal out of how much he loved the presents Santa had brought.
During our Christmas phone call this year, I told Steph when she asked that yes, I’d be going over to Grettie’s later.
“Just you? By yourself?”
I had two choices, the only ones any of us ever has: lie or tell the truth. I didn’t like deceiving my sister, but neither did I want to hear myself say out loud that I wouldn’t be spending Christmas with my son. So instead of answering her question I told her that Will had a girlfriend, whom I’d met at Thanksgiving, a nice girl with red hair who seemed to like him a lot.
The Gretchen Question Page 13