“Just give me one more minute!” he says. “Jesus Christ.”
“No stairs, no heavy lifting,” the surgeon had warned us. A flight of stairs separates me from sustenance. We live in Harlem now, in the top two and a half floors of a narrow brownstone we rented after our third child was born, and the rent on our Upper West Side home was hiked up beyond what we could afford.
On the third floor of the brownstone, which is where our apartment begins, sits the master bedroom: Getting up here, after arriving home from the hospital the day after surgery, had required my husband to push the small of my back as I ascended at an angle, as if I were a dining room table: a climb so painful I can still, typing these words, feel the agony of it. On the fourth floor is the kitchen and dining area. Mounting that flight of stairs alone seems impossible, post-op, without a hand at my back, but I have no other option. The kids are in school. None of the restaurants I know and like will deliver above 96th Street. Hamilton Heights, my area of Harlem, has few options in terms of restaurants in the spring of 2012, and none, that I know, will deliver. All of my friends live too far away to make it here in the next five minutes, which is all I can take before I will lose it.
I climb out of bed, hunched over in pain.
“Stop being so dramatic. I’ll get you some food in a minute. Get back in bed!” my husband shouts, but he does not try to stop me or step in to help, and I don’t have time to wait. I need food. Now.
I crawl up the steps, one at a time, on hands and knees. The pain is shocking in its breadth and scope, not just inside my now empty pelvic cavity but all over my abdominal area, including externally on each point of entry as well. At the halfway point up the stairs, I pause. Unsure I’ll be able to make it. I look down at my white T-shirt, now dotted with drops of blood from the still-raw incisions that have begun to bleed from the strain of climbing. Eight more steps. Then three. Now one. I stand up, leaning on the banister to ease the pain as I make my way into the kitchen, but it hurts too much to stand. I’m crawling on hands and knees again, reduced to pre-toddlerhood.
I’m desperate to talk to Nora. I want to tell her I’m sorry: I’m sorry we disagree about my husband’s Asperger’s; I’m sorry I can’t put up with it anymore, whatever “it” is called. I’m also sorry I listened to her and gave him one more shot. His last straws have been so numerous at this point, the burden of this pain now lies solely on my shoulders: my inaction, my lack of agency, my staying when I should have left years ago. I was less than honest with you, Nora. Even this morning, in my email, I wrote to say the hernia was surgery-induced when in fact it popped out when I started screaming after hearing they couldn’t find my husband. I’ve told you some of the disturbing things I’ve experienced in this marriage but not all of them because, also, who has time? Our lunches were only an hour to two tops, with a lot of ground to cover each meal, and I didn’t want to spend the entirety of those hours complaining about something that was fully within my control to end. She will understand. She has to. If she could walk out on her husband for cheating on her while her uterus was filled with child, surely I can walk out on mine for negligence after its dissection and removal. In fact, if I’m to adhere to the rule she herself wrote and lived by—“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim”—then my only options right now are to find food and get divorced. In that order.
I reach the refrigerator door, but, hard as I try, I cannot open it. My Ginsued stomach muscles hurt too much when I try to pull on the handle. Who knew pulling a fridge door requires so much core strength? I slump to the floor defeated, my back against the refrigerator. An ugly cry geysers out of my throat, blubbery and full-snottled.
Then suddenly, there on the kitchen counter, I spot my salvation: three yellow bananas, within easy reach. I pull myself up, nearly screaming in pain now, and grab them, slinking back onto the floor to peel and swallow each one with all the grace of Goodall’s chimps. That is to say indecorously and as fast as primately possible.
Later that day, back in bed, I’m awoken to a series of urgent texts from a friend, asking if I’ve heard the news: Apparently Nora is in the hospital, gravely ill. What????!!!!! I quickly scan Google for any hint of this. Nothing. I call Nora’s cellphone again. She doesn’t pick up. “These rumors better be untrue,” I frantically write in the subject header of my next email, weeping. “I can’t imagine life without you. Please please please. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
That night, after midnight, my husband’s cellphone rings on his desk across the bedroom. I scan the darkened room to look for him. He’s not there. I let it keep ringing until it stops. Whoever it is can leave a message. A few seconds later, the phone starts ringing again. The third time it rings, I yell my husband’s name. “Your phone! Are you there?” Nothing. I pull myself up out of bed, gasping with pain, to retrieve the phone from the desk, on which our son’s name appears. It’s the beginning of his summer vacation. He’s between his junior and senior year of high school. He’d left for a friend’s party hours earlier. “What’s going on?” I say, picking up. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, Mom!” he says. “I’m so sorry. I deliberately didn’t call your phone. I didn’t want to wake you up. Are you okay? Are you in pain?”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “What’s going on?”
“Ugh, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck downstairs in a taxi without enough money to pay the driver. I just need three more dollars. I’ll pay you back, I promise. Can you ask Dad to bring them? The guy won’t let me leave the cab until I pay.”
“Of course,” I say. “No problem.”
My deal with my teenagers has always been thus: I take the subway, so you take the subway. If you’re going to stay out late enough at a party that it would feel too risky to take the subway home, please take a taxi, but it’s your responsibility to pay for it. That way, the burden of getting home at a decent hour lies on their shoulders, not mine.
I walk to the bedroom door, propping myself up with my hand on the jamb, and shout upstairs to my husband, calling his name once again.
“What?” he shouts back. I can hear the low hum of the TV two flights up.
“Please come down,” I say.
“Why?” I hear.
“Our son is stuck in a cab downstairs!” I can feel the hernia popping out with every word. “Please, come down. It hurts to shout. He needs three dollars.”
“I’m watching a movie. Can you bring it to him?”
“Jesus Christ, no!” It’s been one day since my uterus was removed. Yes, in any normal first world society, I would still be in the hospital, recovering under the care of nurses. In the UK, the NHS would allow me to stay in the hospital for up to five days. In France or Canada, I’d get up to four. But this is America. Hospitals have to turn a profit. I’m much more valuable to them undergoing the removal of my uterus than I am lying in bed recovering from it. So I went in for surgery one morning and was back home within twenty-four hours.
“Okay, okay, tell him I’ll be down in a second.”
“Mom! Just hand the phone to Dad,” says my son. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m in my room, and Dad’s upstairs watching TV. Don’t worry. He says he’ll be down in a minute.”
“Thanks, Mom. I love you. I’m so sorry I woke you up.”
“Don’t worry about it. I love you, too.”
Ten minutes later, my husband’s phone rings again. This time I’ve put it on my bedside table, so I don’t have to get up out of bed to fetch it. It’s my son again. “Mom! Why are you answering Dad’s phone again? Where’s Dad?” he says.
“He didn’t bring you the money?”
“No! Not yet! And the meter keeps running. I now need, um, eight dollars I think? Plus tip. And the driver’s getting pissed. What’s going on?”
“I’ll get him,” I say.
I
hang up the phone to shield my son from my primal scream. This scream goes on. And on. And on and on and on, seemingly forever. I’ve arranged for our other two children to be at sleepovers, thank god, because the guttural noises coming out of my throat are frightening even to me. I’m spouting a combination of profanities and demonic howls. The hernia is now sticking out of my inflated pelvis as large and visible as, well, a baby’s hand if I had to name it. I need to stop screaming to keep it from pushing out farther, but I can no longer control myself.
“What is wrong with you?” says my husband, finally descending the stairs. “You’re going to wake up the neighbors!”
“I’m going to wake up the neighbors?” I say. “That’s what you’re worried about? WAKING UP THE FUCKING NEIGHBORS? I just had my uterus removed yesterday! How about worrying about me? How about worrying about your son, who’s been stuck in a cab downstairs with an angry cabbie for fifteen minutes?”
“Stop being so dramatic!” he says: his go-to retort anytime I get upset.
“Look at this!” I lift my shirt and point to the hernia, which is now sticking out of one of the larger incisions and oozing. I am literally turned inside out with rage.
“Eyew,” he says. “What’s that?”
“Fury!!!!!” I say, weeping harder. “That’s it. I want a divorce. No more second chances. No more thirty-fifth chances. We’ll figure this out in the morning, but please sleep upstairs tonight. I can’t even look at you, I’m so angry.”
“No,” he says. “I’ll sleep wherever I want.”
I cry myself to sleep, next to him.
Nora’s death is officially announced the next day. I have to shut off the TV and radio to keep from weeping every time her face or voice is broadcast. Her husband, Nick, invites us all to the apartment the following night to eat the chicken salad sandwiches Nora herself, ever the den mother, has picked out and ordered for the occasion from William Poll. I’m still in a lot of post-op pain, and I can’t stand for more than a few minutes at a time, but I make it down the stairs and take a cab to Nora and Nick’s—No, I think, it’s now just Nick’s—crying anew.
I hug Nick. He recounts the story of Nora’s jellyfish sting, after which her cancer had suddenly and mysteriously gone into remission for several years. Exhausted from the effort of standing, I sink into the fluffy cushions of Nora’s white couch, feeling suddenly enveloped by her. “All couches should be white,” she once told me. “That way you can bleach the slipcovers when you wash them, and it always looks brand-new. Plus white is bright and fresh and always looks good in a room. There’s no reason to have a couch in any other color.”
I’m in shock. All of us in that room are, since most of us hadn’t known she was sick. There’s Meg Ryan, on the other end of the white couch, weeping. There’s Rosie O’Donnell, chatting with one of Nora’s sisters, wearing a thousand-yard stare. There’s J.J. Sacha, Nora’s assistant, trying to make everything better as usual, but this is one wrinkle he cannot smooth. There’s Barbara Walters, shaking her head with tears in her eyes. There’s Diane Sokolow, one of Nora’s best friends and my favorite running charades partner, coming toward me with open arms. “Why didn’t she tell us?” I say. It’s the question on nearly everyone’s lips. At her memorial service two weeks later, Meryl Streep will accurately express the pain of this not knowing, transforming her hands, during her eulogy, into Nora’s: upturned like the queen’s and slowly twisting outward, then inward, her thumb meeting the tips of her fingers. Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, will perform as Nick and Nora, on a typical night at home. The whiplash between laughter and tears will be fierce, as in any of Nora’s films. A year later, during a different tribute, Hanks will talk about her accessibility as a maternal figure, despite the fact that being a mother, he’ll say, was the least instinctive of Nora’s abilities.
No, I’ll think. Being a mother was what she was at her core. Not just to me. To everyone she loved.
Back home, I’m stopped by my teenage daughter as I head into the bathroom.
“Mom,” she says, shutting the door behind us. “I need to tell you something really personal, but I’ve been worried about telling you while you’re recovering. I didn’t want to bother you. The coincidence is just too…weird.”
“Hit me,” I say.
“Okay, so,” she says, “while you were in the hospital? Like, literally during the exact hours when they were removing your uterus?”
“Yes?” I say.
“I got my period.”
“What?!!! No!!! That’s so crazy! Congratulations!” I hug her. I kiss her. I am filled with sudden ecstasy. The torch has been passed. Life goes on. What comes out of me next can only be described as craughing: that particular combination of crying and laughter during which neither emotion quite wins. They simply exist, side by side, in perfect balance. “Wait. Do you have everything you need? Oh my god, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for that. Do you even know how to use a—”
“Mom! Oh my god, stop. Yes. I’m the last one of my friends to get it. They taught me everything.”
“Okay, okay, but promise me one thing,” I say, channeling Nora.
“Sure,” she says, “what?”
“Promise me you’ll never be afraid to talk to me about anything.”
“Oh my god, Mom. Chill. It’s just my period.”
“No, no!” I laugh. “I’m not talking about periods. I mean, like…anything.”
“Duh, of course,” she says, shutting the door behind her, and suddenly it strikes me: Of course Nora told no one about her illness. The transmission of woes is a one-way street, from child to mother. A good mother never burdens her child with her woes. She waits until they become so heavy, they either break her or kill her, whichever comes first.
“What happened?” says my surgeon, palpating the hernia still protruding from one of the incisions, when I go back to the hospital the next morning to see her. She’d felt it before I left the hospital, back when it was still tiny, and had simply said to take it easy: It would probably retreat on its own once the incisions had healed.
What happened? I don’t even know where to begin. “I got upset with my husband and started shouting,” I say. Sure. That works. Keep it vague, as usual. When you actually try to explain, people look at you as if you’re crazy.
The literature of autism spectrum disorders refers to this as Cassandra syndrome. Cassandra, in Greek myths, was the Princess of Troy who was consigned to uttering true prophecies no one ever believed. Similarly, with Cassandra syndrome, it’s nearly impossible to explain to outsiders—let alone to yourself—the true scope of what’s going on inside your home: the chronic, repetitive, psychological trauma that can occur behind the curtain of an intimate relationship with someone on the spectrum.
“Why were you shouting at him?” says the surgeon.
“All the normal reasons,” I say. You know, like when you’re home from the hospital, and he won’t bring you food. Or when your son’s stuck in a taxi without any money, and he keeps watching TV.
My doctor lowers her eyebrows, concerned. “Do you have enough help at home? You shouldn’t be doing any chores of any kind.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
She orders a CT scan. I swallow the contrast dye prior, not knowing that I am allergic to contrast dye. I bring home fiery, itchy hives covering the entire surface of my body, because of course this happens. After a week of itching and scratching my skin until it bleeds, the hives fade. Soon thereafter, the hernia retreats into the pelvic cavity behind the muscle wall on its own.
I ask my husband, once again, for a divorce. Once again he refuses to accept that we are over. This, again, according to the literature, is typical in a marriage to someone on the spectrum. So I decide simply to act as if I’m separated and getting divorced, even though we’re still living under the same roof. As it turns out, he will continue to stay in both ou
r apartment and our marital bed for the next year and three months, even going so far as to book a family vacation we cannot afford in the hopes of salvaging our relationship.
Two months after my hysterectomy, feeling somewhat better, I escape once again, this time to Sun Valley, Idaho, to present two lectures at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. There, I meet and fall into bed with the author of a novel that had hit it out of the ballpark that year. I show him my still-fresh scars. They do not make him flinch. In fact, just the opposite: He asks questions, shows empathy for the ordeal. His calm and shy presence are healing. His dry sense of humor makes me laugh. When “Livin’ on a Prayer” pops up on the speaker, he suddenly pumps his fist above the bed, without missing a beat, and starts to sing: “Whoa, we’re halfway there, whoa, livin’ on a prayer…” I laugh. Once I start, I can’t stop, and this laughter transports me to a new place: joy. So this is what I’ve been missing, I think, giggling, staring out at the mountain I’d just scaled, with only some residual post-op pain. This is the magic possible, even between strangers.
I suddenly have the distinct feeling that Nora is in the room with me, shaking her head. Giving me her Nora Stare™. This will continue happening throughout the rest of my life, whenever I’m doing something she would neither have done herself nor approved of in others. “Him?” she says. “Seriously, him? Mr. It-boy novelist?”
“No, no!” I respond in my head. “It’s not what you think.” He’s nine years younger, still capable of starting a family. I’m forty-six with three kids and no uterus. As it turns out, the novelist and I will never set eyes on each other again. We will barely even text, after we each return to our homes in distant cities, and only then for a day or two to say “Thank you” and “Did you get back okay?,” “Yes,” but still: carpe fucking diem. “Don’t worry, Nora. He’s just the catalyst. I have the rest of my life to figure out what comes next.”
Ladyparts Page 9
