The best thing about this party was always the food. The company? Well, these were people with whom I spent eighty hours a week already; honestly, was it any surprise that we all had to be sloshed to endure the night? True, there were often various dignitaries and fairly high and mighty government officials in attendance too, but still, it was the buffet that beckoned—thus my rationale when, just before I left for the affair, I sat on my couch, with the lights dimmed and Van Morrison playing on my stereo, and smoked through nearly two joints by myself. When I felt sufficiently high, and by that I mean high enough that even the buffet at the Olive Garden would have looked five star, I opened my windows to air out my living room, grabbed my black cashmere overcoat and leather gloves, and left Manny in a plume of smoke. No need for a hat: My embroidered black scarf already kept my head warm enough.
As it always was, the party was held at the Rainbow Room, perched on the top floor of Rockefeller Center. When the elevator landed on the nearly sky-high floor, just for a second I felt a flash of vertigo—like the car was going to plummet as quickly as it rose. But then we settled to a stop, and it let me off with nothing more than a pleasant ding. I followed the holiday music around the corner to the ballroom.
Each year, the senator hired one of the city’s top party planners (“I pay for it myself,” she said, in case anyone worried that this was on the taxpayers’ dime), and this year, Parker Hewitt had outdone himself. The theme was White Christmas, and everywhere you turned, there were glowing white lights; blossoming, fragrant gardenias; and stark, towering candelabras. Cascades of white rose petals hung from the ceiling, so that it literally looked like it was snowing. In each corner, Parker had erected regal Christmas trees, replete with glimmering, silver ornaments and topped with perfect, radiant angels. Maybe it was the two joints or maybe it was simply that it really was magical, but either way, when I stepped into the room and inhaled the scent from the rose petals, spiced cider, and glorious buffet, I felt like I might faint. My eyes saw double, and my head started to spin, and when I looked down at my silver Stuart Weitzmans, they barely seemed connected to my feet. I was contemplating my ethereal, world-spinning existence when Senator Dupris came up behind me.
“Natalie, so glad you could make it,” she said, as she air-kissed both cheeks. Then she caught a look in my nearly glazed-over eyes. “Is everything okay?”
Nodding yes, I forced myself to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth and tried desperately to focus. I grabbed a glass of sparkling water from a passing waiter and felt my pulse slow down.
“Good, dear, because as Blair might have mentioned, I’d like you to compose yourself and go speak to Susanna Taylor.” Dupris cocked her perfectly bobbed head and peered around. “Oh, there she is. By the piano in the blue dress. Please take care of this before anything else, dear. Oh, and Merry Christmas, Natalie. Good things are in store for you next year, I’m sure of it.” She leaned in to give me another air kiss, and before I could wrap my brain around her missive, she flitted off.
Fuck. I clenched my jaw and heaved my feet forward. What the hell do I say to a woman whose life I torpedoed like a submarine? I still didn’t have an opening line by the time I reached the baby grand. So instead, I stuck out my hand.
“Susanna, I’m Natalie Miller, Senator Dupris’s senior aide.”
She offered a thin smile. “Yes, I know who you are. I’m sorry to hear about your ordeal. I certainly know how it feels to be struck with something so debilitating.” I met her eyes and took her in. Her hair was already growing back—longer than a crew cut but shorter than a pixie, the style reminded me of the hip late nineties androgynous model look. She was thin, but not emaciated like me, and underneath her silk shawl on her shoulders, I could make out the shadows of growing muscle tone. She was a veteran of war, rehabilitated, sent home from the front lines. I was the reinforcement.
“Yes, well…” I stopped, unsure of how to fill the dead air. “Look, I just want to cut to why I came over here.” I paused, slowing down so that the room wouldn’t spin. “And that was to say that I’m sorry that the campaign got so nasty. Some of the things that we did, well, we shouldn’t have, and for that, I’m truly regretful.” I looked at her as I spoke. What I didn’t see when I first took her in was that a darkness had been cast over her eyes, a weariness had washed across her face, even though her makeup was immaculate and her diamond earrings sparkling. And I realized that though I was just recognizing it for the first time, I was truly sorry. Not even for what I did, but for the wreckage it could have caused. I reached out for her arm. “Honestly, Susanna, I wouldn’t do it over again.”
She looked down at her feet and sighed. And then she shook her head and said, “People have certainly made worse decisions in their lives. And it’s not as if my husband didn’t give you ammunition.” She smiled.
“So you knew about it?” My eyes widened.
“You know, Natalie, if there’s one thing I’ve learned through this whole horrific mess, it’s that the world isn’t necessarily black and white. I’m a good person, and yet…and yet this.” She gestured down at her body. “I love my husband, and yet, he does what he does. People do the wrong things and people certainly say the wrong things—I’m sure you’ve gotten some outstandingly inappropriate comments since your diagnosis—and then you have a choice: to either stew in it or to move past it.” She shrugged. “I moved past my husband’s ‘problem’ because for me, right now, there is no other way.”
I nodded and pressed my lips together as if to say that I understood. “Well, anyway, I just wanted to come and say that our office regretted it. It was nice meeting you.” I smiled and turned to go.
“Natalie, listen.” She touched my shoulder. “I run a support group for women who are dealing with cancer: breast, ovarian, uterine, you name it. If you’d like to come to a meeting, I’d love to have you there.”
“Oh, well, I’m not sure if that’s really my thing,” I said, as I looked at my feet. There’s no ‘we’ in Natalie.
“It tends not to be anyone’s thing until they discover that they have cancer.” Susanna laughed. “Look, it’s not touchy-feely, and we usually don’t even discuss our illnesses, but it’s nice to know that we can if we want. Sometimes we’ll go shopping and sometimes we’ll sit around and cry, but I think that most of the women have found it very therapeutic.” I thought of a group of sorry sobbing thirtysomethings sitting around in a circle, and my nonexistent hair stood on end.
Look for small gifts, I heard Janice’s voice, and quickly pushed it away. “Yeah, I’m not sure.”
“Well, just in case you change your mind.” She reached for her purse and pulled out a card, pressing it into my palm. “Call me. It would be nice.”
I assured her that I would, though I had no intention of ever, ever engaging in public displays of grief with various other cancer victims, but I lost track of that thought because suddenly I was ravenous. Rabid, fervently hungry. I pushed past a swarm of VIPs to the buffet table. A mountain of hors d’oeuvres awaited. A virtual volcano of dips, vegetables, fruits, cheeses, crackers, quiches, crab cakes, skewers, samosas, spanakopita, and sushi. And this didn’t even include dessert. I reached for a plate just before a congressman and squeezed past him. I had tunnel vision and no one—not a congressman, not his wife, not even the senator herself—was getting in my way. I was eating before things even touched my plate. I’d put one quiche in my mouth, then grab two more and move on. I’d stuff fried shrimp in with the quiche and barely wait to swallow before inhaling another. By the time I made my way down the buffet and stacked my plate so full that not even a speck of white showed through, I’d practically eaten an entire meal already. But, you see, when you’re a novice toker and still gauging the impact of marijuana on your system, and when you’ve recently smoked two joints by yourself, that was neither here nor there.
I was standing near a small, round cocktail table, halfway through my second serving, and licking my fingers when suddenly, just
as I had when I entered the ballroom, I felt a rush of blood to my head. I twirled around, hands outstretched, looking for a chair, a windowsill, anything to sink into until the floor stopped moving like I was on a cruise ship. And in the absence of these stabilizers and with the ever-increasing spinning of my brain, coupled with an extreme drowsiness that almost instantly walloped my system, I half-leaned, half-sat on the cocktail table, pushing aside the partly drunk plastic cups and balled-up, dirty napkins. Feeling perhaps overconfident by the relief this half-lean brought, I scooted my butt nearly completely on top of the table, and for a second, heaved a sigh: The twinkling white world high atop Manhattan had stopped rotating. I nodded my head. This, ladies and gentlemen, was good living.
I heard the crunch before I felt it. Rented cocktail tables—and let me be the first to tell you this, in case you are unaware and should find yourself in similar such circumstances—are not made to support the weight of a grown woman, even if said grown woman has recently lost a healthy portion of her body fat. Because as soon as I heard the metal legs collapsing, I felt them, too: I was sucked to the floor as the table folded nearly on top of me.
The impact of my crash landing was so loud that the band stopped playing, and the guests literally spun around and jumped, as if a bomb had exploded. I might have died of embarrassment underneath the mound of broken plates, half-eaten appetizers, and splashes of white wine and vodka if I hadn’t found it so damn funny. By the time Kyle made his way over and managed to unwrap me from the previously lustrous white tablecloth and pull me to my feet, I’d nearly cried off all of my makeup, I was laughing so hard.
“Are you okay?” he asked, with a sympathy not normally heard in his voice. “Let’s get you home.”
“That would probably be best,” I responded, mocking his solemnity and brushing off tiny bites of pigs-in-a-blanket from my black A-line dress.
“I suspect you may hate yourself in the morning,” he said, as he handed the coat checker my ticket.
“That probably won’t be hard,” I replied, as we got in the elevator and I pressed the button to take me down.
ON A BLUSTERY day in mid-December, my mom cashed in some personal time from work, took the train up from Philly, and embarked on an adventure that most mothers would consider themselves lucky not to endure. Wig shopping.
“This should be fun,” my mom said in a halfhearted tone that I recognized from high school, back when, in an effort to add some extracurricular activities to my resume, I’d signed up to be in charge of the costumes for the drama department’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. My mother, who left the house at exactly 8:15 every morning, silver coffee cup in hand, Ferragamo pumps clicking on our marble foyer floor, had been taught to sew by my grandmother. You wouldn’t think it, not with her couture-filled closet that was steadfastly organized by color, but when my parents first married, long before she became the first woman partner at her law firm, long before my father became a preeminent engineer who helped construct Philadelphia’s largest buildings, she whipped up her own outfits and living room drapes. So I figured, when I announced my new costumer position just as she arrived home at 7:15 sharp—this was every night for as long as I could remember—that she would be thrilled. Instead, she pressed her lips together and said, “This should be fun.” Thus, for the next few weeks, after some initial instruction, she left me on my own, and I spent the bulk of my free hours huddled over an old sewing machine in the garage, shoulder blades aching, neck in knots, kept company by nothing more than the smell of oil cans, Y 100 radio, and our golden retriever, Curly.
And although wig shopping was not exactly the wedding-dress-must-have-Mom-there experience, I wanted my mother there all the same. Because now that I had adjusted to the cycle of chemo—exhausted, then somewhat delirious, then a-okay—I wanted to go back to work. True, I was mortified, almost wary to the point of paralysis, to show my face at the office, but it was a risk I had to take. As Janice predicted, my journal did indeed point my thoughts elsewhere, but it wasn’t enough. I could watch only so much daytime television and hunt down old boyfriends without turning into my own personal soap opera. So I put my pride on hold and called the senator.
“Are you sure that you’re ready?” she asked, politely overstepping the elephant in the room; namely, my performance at the Christmas party.
My impulse was to jump in with an overly confident yes, but I held it back for a second, because the truth of the matter was that I had no idea if I were ready or not. So instead, I answered, “The thing is, Senator, I know that I can make a difference. And I’d really like to this term. Remember how inspired we were when you first won your seat?” She murmured that she did. “Well, that’s how I feel now. Inspired. Like I’ve been given a new shot. And I’d like to make something of that.”
And it was true. The more information I garnered about stem cell research, the more I felt the fire rise up inside of me. At first, after the senator asked me to start digging on the subject, I’d logged on to the Internet whenever I had a free moment from my time spent watching game shows on the couch or Googling my exes. But as I dove further and further into the research, and uncovered the potential miracles that it held, it snowballed on me: I began to tear into the task like Cujo does to his next victim. Namely, rabidly. And my ferocity arose because I had a genuine interest in advancing a bill that would allow for public funding of stem cell research. Not just a genuine interest, but a personal one. I knew that if my cancer chose to launch a new attack on me or if the doctors hadn’t found it in time or Ned hadn’t rubbed up against my breast that morning, the insidious disease might have made its way into my bones, and that one day, whether in the near or distant future, stem cells might save my life. Or the life of someone just like me.
“Fair enough, Natalie. We’ll see you when Congress resumes session in a few weeks,” Dupris said, and I heard Blair enter her office in the background. The senator paused. “Are you feeling better? No more ‘incidents’ like at the party?”
And there it was. My cheeks burned as if on fire. “No. No. Definitely not.” I paced up and down my living room. “That was, uh, a weird response to my medication. It won’t happen again.”
“Very good. I’ll see you then. Looking forward to having you back on the team.” Before I could say good-bye, she’d clicked off.
Now, I know that it would be wonderful and heartwarming and terribly brave of me to tackle the Senate or even just the subway with my cue-balled head. And I know you’d be reading this and thinking, Hurrah! Go her! She’s triumphant: staring down cancer and defying it to rob her of her pride. She’s a Lifetime television movie and a feminist icon all rolled into one. And I know that I might have mentioned that getting a wig was maybe not my thing, that I took it as a sign of weakness, that I saw it as a crutch.
But the truth of the matter was that over these months, cancer had robbed me of enough. It stole my health, along with my confidence, my sense of self, and my understanding of how life evolved. And yes, it also stole my pride. So I figured that if donning someone else’s hair that had been fashioned into something that I could pass off as my own somehow gave me just a small sliver of my dignity back, so help me, I was reaching for it. And besides, really, look around. How many bald women do you really, truly see on the streets of New York City? Don’t get me wrong: I have total respect for them. They are, indeed, terribly brave. But I figured that brave was all subjective. The mere fact that I was still alive in light of what I was facing made me brave enough to live with myself. And that’s all that mattered to me.
So I ignored that tiny voice in my head that still softly reminded me that “There’s no ‘we’ in Natalie,” and I called my mother and asked her to join me for my appointment to one Mrs. Adina Seidel, wigmaker to the stars (or New York’s upper-crust Orthodox set, at the very least).
“This is just the pick-me-up you need,” Mom said, reaching for my hand as the subway rattled and clanked and hurled us to the outer stretches of Brooklyn to p
ay a visit to the infamous Mrs. Seidel. I was too self-conscious of our hand-holding to answer her back. Never in my thirty years had my mother ever reached for my hand. Not when Jake left me, not when I got wait-listed at Harvard, not even when she sat with me through my first round of chemo.
The train lurched to a stop, and I wearily climbed the two flights of stairs, leaning on my mother’s arm with each step. Though it was December, the sun shone brightly, so I squinted my eyes and peered around. Brooklyn. Tiny storefronts cluttered every last open space on the street. Electronics. Shoe stores. Family-run grocers. The din of voices rose above the honking of taxis, and I noticed an overweight man with a bloodied apron tied around his waist shouting and raising his arms at another man just to my right. The sidewalks milled like ant farms with bearded men in long, dark coats and high hats who took pains to walk around my mother and me, casting their eyes downward, touching their tzitzit as they passed. Sometimes, they strolled with gaggles of children, one on each hand, along with a woman, I’d assume the wife, who would try in vain to discipline them. My mother and I pushed off from our perch on the subway, wordlessly taking it all in. It felt like a foreign country, this little outpost of Manhattan, as if their little community was protected from the thriving metropolis that pulsed to their north. Here was what mattered. Here, they had everything they needed.
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