Through the Heart

by Kate Morgenroth

  “Look at Eleanor’s lawn,” my mother went on. “The grass is so long it’s almost gone to seed. That’s such a shame. One house can bring the whole neighborhood down.”

  I looked over to Eleanor’s lawn. There were exactly three stalks over near the curb that Eleanor’s husband must have missed when he mowed.

  We reached the car, and I stopped to dig in my bag for the keys.

  Then my mother’s critical gaze moved from the neighbor’s unkempt lawn to me, and she found a problem there as well. “Did you even brush your hair this morning?” she asked.

  Of course I knew the answer to the question. It was no. But still I automatically raised a hand to my head as if to check.

  “It won’t matter,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to see anyone.”

  My mother’s eyebrows went up and her forefinger came out and started wagging in the air: a sure sign that a cliché was coming my way.

  “You never know who you might meet and when,” my mother said.

  “But I did meet someone,” I said.

  I had told my mother that much. She wasn’t a stupid woman. She wouldn’t have bought the lie that I was going out with Tammy five nights a week.

  I found the keys in my bag and clicked open the locks.

  “So does that mean you’re not going to do something about your hair?” my mother asked tartly.

  I opened her door, then looked up across the car at her. “Mom, it doesn’t matter. Honestly. Don’t you think it’s just a little more important to be on time for your appointment?”

  “The hospital isn’t going anywhere,” my mother said.

  I opened my mouth to argue. But then I thought about whether I wanted to listen to comments about my hair for the next three hours in the car, and I shut my mouth, turned around, and started back to the house. I wasn’t sure if it was capitulation or self-preservation; it was a slippery slope.

  “The grass,” my mother reminded me, as I was about to cut across the lawn again.

  I changed course and took the pathway.

  “And don’t do that awful braid. Wear it down,” she called after me. “You’re always putting it back. I don’t know why you don’t try harder. If you did, you might be married by now . . .”

  I wasn’t sure if my mother stopped talking or she just got out of range.

  I took extra care with my hair, not just running a brush through it, but using some gel and a couple of passes with a straitening iron that had been my sister’s, because I had a feeling that if my mother started in on me again I might not be able to hold back. It seemed I did a good enough job, because she didn’t comment when I returned to the car. That was as good as it got. There was never a compliment. The only reward was the ceasing of the constant drip of criticism. Tammy was brilliant with her metaphors: it was exactly like water torture. And the power of water over time—it was water that carved the Grand Canyon out of solid rock.

  It was three solid hours on the highway. Mile upon mile of wheat fields and sky, and after the sunrise, the clouds moved in: big billowing cumulus clouds that sat low in the sky and mushroomed up, making me feel like an ant crawling across a huge expanse. My mother didn’t want the radio on, so I drove with the sound of the road under the wheels and the wind and the occasional truck that roared past.

  After taking the exit ramp, it was only a short drive to the hospital. I usually let my mother out at the front, then I pulled around to the parking lot and waited in the car.

  I didn’t wait in the car out of choice. I waited in the car because my mother never let me come inside. “You do enough,” she always said. “This, at least, I can spare you.”

  It was so important to her to feel like she was sparing me that I had to actually put up with more to maintain the illusion that I was being spared. If I thought about it too much, my head started to hurt. The layers of pretending, all in the name of caring. It never ended, and I wasn’t sure that anyone ended up better off in the final tally. I had decided the best way to deal with it was not to think about it.

  I hadn’t been able to resist bringing it up a few times in the past, but every time it ended in an awful fight. The last one had been a few months before, at the time when I ran into Dan in the 7-Eleven.

  Maybe it was all the comments leaving the house, maybe I had bit my tongue one too many times and it wasn’t even ten o’clock, but this morning I decided I wasn’t going to sit in the car again. I decided this time I wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  “I’m coming in with you today,” I announced as I pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll let you off at the front, park the car, and then come meet you inside.”

  “I told you, I don’t want you to see me like that,” my mother said. “I want to spare you that. It’s important to me.”

  “It’s worse waiting in the car, sitting here wondering what’s going on. I never know if you’re telling me the truth about what the doctor says.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. And anyway,” she went on, “the doctor isn’t going to be in today. There’s another doctor covering for him. My doctor went skiing in Colorado. He’ll probably come back with a broken leg or something. Why people want to put those things on their feet and go down a mountain, I don’t understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I can talk to the other doctor. Anyone. Or I’ll sit in the waiting room with you. Just so I don’t sit out here in the car feeling like you’re keeping me from what’s really going on in there.”

  My mother’s frown returned. “I told you how I feel about this. Do I have to go through it again?”

  “But Mom—”

  And then my mother kicked it up a notch. She went from relatively calm to furious in a split second. It had been like this the whole time I was growing up. It took a long while for me to figure out that it was my mother’s way of keeping me from crossing her. It was very effective. Even after I figured it out, it still worked. I’d almost always rather give in than have to go through the battle that was required to get what I wanted.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” my mother practically spat. “And you’ve chosen now to talk to me about it? You have a strange way of showing me that you care. I swear to God, you’re the one who’s going to be the death of me, not this cancer. The cancer I can handle. But you . . . it’s too much. I told you what the doctor said about stress. I can beat the cancer, but not if you’re going to act like this.”

  When I started out, I had been so certain that this time I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Now I wondered what I had been thinking. I was no match for my mother. I never had been.

  “All right,” I said, wearily.

  “All right what?” my mother demanded.

  “All right, I won’t come in.”

  “I don’t believe you. Now I’m going to sit in the waiting room the entire time, wondering if you’re going to pull some stupid stunt and come in anyway. Do you have any idea how bad this is for me? Especially right before a treatment?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t come in. I promise.”

  My mother opened the door, but she didn’t get out yet—not without a parting shot. “Sometimes I think I wouldn’t have relapsed if I’d had more support from you. You say I never tell you anything, but you just don’t listen. I told you what the doctor said about how important it is to have family around and supporting me, didn’t I?”

  I felt inexpressibly tired. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d had the thought before, and yet I kept doing it. I wasn’t sure if it was guilt that kept me there or love. Maybe I didn’t know because growing up in my house there was no distinction made between the two.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  My mother didn’t answer. She just looked at me a long minute and finally shook her head. Then she got out of the car and shut the door. It wasn’t hard enough to be called a slam, exactly.

  I watched my mother go in through the automatic doors, and I sat there a moment l
onger. Then I pulled the car around, parked, and sat watching the people come and go through the hospital doors.

  Usually I read while I waited. I’d brought Jane Austen’s Persuasion . Austen’s heroines always got their happy endings, but today that wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t help remembering that even though all the heroines in Jane Austen’s books got happy endings, the author herself did not. Jane Austen died young and unmarried and childless. There are books, and there is life, and I often thought, thank goodness for books because sometimes they’re what makes life bearable. But sometimes even a book won’t do it.

  So I just sat there, watching the entrance, waiting for my mother to emerge. On good Saturdays, she walked back out to the car. On bad days, a nurse pushed her out in a wheelchair.

  That Saturday was one of the bad ones.

  When I saw the automatic doors slide open, and my mother appear in the wheelchair, I started the car and pulled around under the carport. Then I got out and went around to the other side of the car to help the nurse get my mother out of the wheelchair and into the front seat.

  “It feels cold in here,” my mother whispered. “Is it cold in here, or is it just me?”

  “No, it’s cold in here,” I said. “I’ll turn on the heat as soon as the car gets warmed up,”

  We drove in silence until I pulled onto the highway. Then I finally asked, “Did the doctor say anything to you today?”

  “What?” my mother asked, coming back as if from a million miles away.

  “Did the other doctor say anything?” I asked again.

  “I told you, my doctor is away.”

  “Then the doctor that’s filling in?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Nothing?” I glanced over to see if I could read my mother’s face. I could always tell when my mother was worried because there was a little crease between her eyebrows that would deepen—despite the Botox treatments, which even through the chemo, she kept up religiously. That was my mother for you: second round of chemo and still going for Botox. But when asked about it, she simply said, “Just because I’m dying, doesn’t mean I can’t still look good. Besides, without hair I have nothing to hide my forehead.”

  I had to admit, my mother looked better than she ever had. It’s a strange aspect of leukemia that often you don’t look sick. And during the first round of chemo, two years before, in anticipation of her hair falling out, my mother went to the hairdresser and got a pixie cut. It was one of those magical beauty moments that just worked—after the haircut her dark hair framed her face and accentuated her features: the upturned Irish nose, her pointed chin. It gave her a delicate, impish look that suited her. She looked a good ten years younger than her actual age, fifty-four. My mother never tired of telling the story about how, once, when she went out with Deirdre, someone had mistaken them for sisters.

  “The doctor didn’t say anything at all?” I asked again.

  “Nothing new,” my mother amended. Then she reached over and turned on the radio and was suddenly very intent, looking for a radio station.

  I let it drop. My mother pretended to leave it all in the hands of the doctors, saying they knew best and she’d do whatever they recommended and beyond that it was in God’s hands, but I could go on the computer and look at the history of Web sites that had been visited and see what my mother was searching on the Internet. I could see that she was looking up the same things I was: every week there would be some new search into chemo and it’s effects, it’s success rates, the probabilities of second rounds, the different techniques, and the indications of white blood cell counts. The searches meant that even though she pretended not to worry, she was lying. Once I tried to tell her how much easier it would be if she were just honest and talked about these things, and she nodded and said, “Of course,” and “I understand,” and absolutely nothing changed.

  We drove back with the radio tuned to the news, some talk show about investing money, which was completely useless, because to invest money you had to have it in the first place.

  The one thing the radio program was good for was exactly what my mother had intended: it stopped me from talking or asking questions. We drove home with the radio going the whole way, and when I pulled into the driveway, my mother got out of the car before I could get out and around to help her. Once inside, she simply said, “I’m going to go rest a bit in my room,” and then she climbed the stairs and shut the door of her room behind her.

  And I knew. I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know what was right or what was wrong, but I knew I couldn’t do it. I had made my decision; I was moving to New York.

  Timothy

  Back in New York

  The first thing I did after I booked my flight back to New York (commercial since I had long since sent the plane home) was to send an e-mail to let the other woman in my life know that I was coming back.

  I knew she would be anxious to see me. I didn’t realize she would be waiting for me in my apartment. But I knew she was there the second I walked in. The foyer was dark, but I could see down the hall, and there was a strip of light under the bedroom door. I tossed my keys on the hall table, took off my coat, and hung it up, and I was about to go back to the bedroom to say hello. Then I thought better of it.

  I went into the kitchen and flicked on the light. My apartment had a view looking uptown, and I could see the Empire State Building. It was red.

  Red sounded like a good idea—a really good bottle of red. I uncorked a bottle, poured my glass half-full, swirled it to give it a little air, and then took a sip.

  I had to admit to myself that there had been things I missed. Living in a motel out by the highway hadn’t been exactly easy for me. I stood by the window and looked out at the lights of the city and took another sip. And I waited.

  I heard a rustle from the bedroom.

  Eventually, she came out in my robe.

  I heard her walk down the hall, and when I knew she had reached the kitchen, I turned around. She looked incredible, even wearing a man’s robe. For conventional beauty, my best friend’s wife was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

  I took another sip of wine. Then I said, “Hello, Celia.”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You knew I was here.”

  I didn’t contradict her. “Would you like some wine?”

  Instead of answering, she took my wineglass out of my hand. “Let me taste it first,” she said, but she didn’t take a sip. She set my glass down on the counter, moved in closer to me, and raised her face for me to kiss her.

  I want to take a moment here to say what I had intended. I had intended to tell her that I’d fallen in love and that it was over between us. In fact, I was looking forward to it. But when she looked up at me like that, I kissed her.

  One kiss and it was over for me. I didn’t pick up my wineglass again. I picked her up instead. Not to go to the bedroom, not even to the couch. I picked her up and put her on the kitchen counter. I laid her down there and opened the robe, and, as I suspected, there was very little underneath. The lingerie she was wearing made her seem more naked than if she’d been wearing nothing.

  What can I say? I loved Nora, but the sex with Celia was out of this world. It always had been. It was forbidden and illicit—and irresistible. At one point I thought I was in love with Celia. I met her after she started dating Marcus. I remember wondering how on earth he’d found her first. Of course, the answer was that he went to gallery openings and crap like that, while I never bothered.

  I won’t bore you with the short, sordid story of how I started sleeping with my best friend’s girlfriend. Or how, for months after that, every time I saw her, I tried to convince her to leave him.

  She always said no to me. But when Marcus asked her to marry him, she said yes. She explained to me that I was not the kind of man a woman should marry. I was the man you should have an affair with. Marcus was the kind of man you should marry.

  At the time I thought it was my first heartb
reak. Now I can see that it was just my ego that got bruised. I comforted myself with the thought that I didn’t want to marry a woman who would cheat on her fiancé—and with his best friend no less. (I know, it doesn’t say a lot about me either, but you have to remember that I was used to that vision of myself.) The funny thing is, it was a very good reason not to marry her, but when I was using it, I didn’t really believe it.

  After she got engaged, I stopped the affair. Or maybe she did. I don’t remember. At any rate, we didn’t see each other for a while.

  I was the best man at the wedding. And Celia and I started sleeping together again two weeks after they got back from the honeymoon.

  That’s why I wasn’t so comfortable going out for drinks with the two of them. I don’t think that makes me a better person or shows that I have scruples. It wasn’t that I felt guilty. I just found it unpleasant. I don’t have any explanation as to why she always tried to set something up with the three of us, or when she succeeded, why she seemed to enjoy it, except that she is a very twisted woman—in so many ways.

  That night we went from the kitchen counter to the couch to the shower and finally to the bed. After we finished, normally she rolled away from me, but this time she wanted my arm around her, and she rested her head on my chest. So I couldn’t see her face when she said, “I’ve missed you. Where have you been for the past month? You can’t go disappearing on me like that, damn you.”

  For most men, that might have made it harder to say what I was about to say. But I was heartless.

  “I was in Kansas.”

  “What on earth were you doing in Kansas for a month?”

  “I met someone.”