A Parallel Life

by Robin Beeman

  “The doctor went into her armpit and took a sample of the nodes there,” he said. “He found cancer in her lymph system. She’s at what they call Stage Four. They’re going to remove the breast tomorrow and then we’ll see what the next treatments are.”

  “It’s really bad then?”

  He finished the drink and got up and walked to the sliding glass door. “It’s not good.” He banged his fist on the wall. “I don’t know why the hell she waited so long.”

  “She’d known it was there?”

  “Yes.” He banged again. The framed Georgia O’Keeffe poster of the interior of a calla lily tilted over the leather couch. “Yes, yes, yes. She’s not talking about it to me but she’s known for a while. That’s what the doctor told me when he called me at work. She’d been feeling it there for months, running her fingers over it—fondling it.”

  “What would you like us to do?” I chewed the bread but it wouldn’t go down my throat.

  He turned to me, surprised, and didn’t answer.

  “I mean do you want to keep this up—what we’re doing—seeing each other?” It was obvious that this hadn’t occurred to him yet. It was as if I had become, like his job, another part of his life. My stomach knotted.

  “Of course,” he said. “Sure.”

  “Fine.” I went to the bedroom and took off my clothes and got under the sheets, but he didn’t follow as he usually did. I waited, stretching under the sheets, lifting the comforter with my toes. The room seemed wet, as if the rain had found its way in. The sheets clung heavily, weighted with dampness. After a few moments, he came in and sat on the bed. “I can’t right now,” he said. “I want to but I can’t right now.”

  “I understand.” I pulled the sheet up to my chin and lay like a mummy. I’d never felt so naked. He put his hand on my shoulder as if I were the one who was ill, as if I were Roxie. I wanted to shrug off his hand. I wanted him to go away. I wanted more than anything to get dressed alone and leave by myself.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, letting out a breath. “I don’t even understand.” He gripped my shoulder harder. I pulled from his grip, turned back the sheet, and moved to make room for him. He lowered himself and lay down without even taking off his shoes. Neither of us moved until the alarm that we set to remind us that we had lives to return to began to buzz.

  He called me at work the next morning and said he wanted to see me at lunch. We met outside the condominium door. He had trouble getting the key in the lock. His distress made him desperate. As soon as we were inside the door, he began to pull up my skirt. We made love not in bed but on the carpet in the living room with the draperies open and the louvers that protected the balcony from the eyes at the administration center open as well.

  We continued after that, meeting two or three times a week for the next two months as if everything would go on as before, as if Roxie’s crisis was happening in a foreign country and had nothing to do with us. And because Jack didn’t mention her, I made an effort to put her out of my mind. Like an oyster with a grain of sand in its shell, I coated thoughts of Roxie with a glaze that hid her from my mind’s eye. I made her existence easy to slip around.

  Then I saw her. Walnut Grove just isn’t big enough for these things never to occur. During my lunch break, I decided to go shopping. Mandy was going to be twelve soon and I wanted to find something for her. Bill had been a good tennis player when I’d met him and he and Mandy had begun playing last summer. With that in mind I thought I’d look for a decent tennis racquet for her, something better than the old wooden one she’d begun using as a beginner. I remembered a sporting goods store a few blocks from the library. It was one of several business in a small strip mall.

  I remembered a pizza place there as well, and a laundromat, and a printing shop. I’d never noticed that one of the businesses was a wig shop until I saw Jack and a woman coming out of the door. The woman was tall, almost his height, and very thin. She wore checked slacks and a raincoat, and she had a flowered scarf tied babushka style around her head. Jack carried a round box, like a hat box. The woman clung to his arm and talked softly but with animation, using her eyebrows a great deal and nodding her scarf-covered head from one side to the other. She was a pretty woman and there was a certain tentative seductiveness in the nodding as if, though she knew she had once been found attractive, she was not sure if she could still be found so. Jack nodded in reply and gave her attention so complete that he failed to notice me standing stock-still in front of the window of the printing shop with its arrangement of pink-and-silver wedding invitations.

  I kept my eyes on the display but watched him in the glass and saw his jolt of recognition as he looked my way. He made a swift recovery. Her back was to me and her monologue continued unbroken. She hadn’t noticed. I heard the words conference and then attendance records and then a small chirrupy laugh that requested the listener’s understanding and sympathy. He chuckled, three notes descending.

  In the window glass I watched him help her down from the curb and open the door of a station wagon for her to get in on the passenger side. I watched until they were on the street. Then I went into the pizza place, which I knew would be dark and empty at that time of day, and ordered a large Coke, which, although I sat in the booth for over an hour, I never managed to drink.

  In the library, I began my research. Stage Four meant that the cancer was advanced. Stage Four could mean that the tumors were over a certain size, or that the tumors had extended to the chest wall or the skin, or that there was evidence of cancer in the lymph nodes, or that there were distant metastases present. Or any combination of the above. None of these conditions held out much hope for an excellent prognosis.

  Roxie, the woman in the scarf, the woman buying the wig, had no doubt already endured radiation, then chemotherapy. Both were awful treatments in which the patient was subjected to assaults that were only narrowly nonlethal. The success rates for all of these methods of treatments were displayed on the various pages as a smorgasbord of bar graphs and pie charts, all of which offered survival rates as percentages, degrees, and fractions.

  Over the next few days, I read everything I could find on the subject and then tried to make myself forget what I had read. If Roxie had gone in as soon as she had found the lump, the buried deadliness, she’d have had great odds. But Roxie had waited and I didn’t want to know her reasons. I only wanted Roxie to live—to recover. I wanted her to recover and Jack to fall in love with her all over again.

  “She’s just fine,” he said when I asked about her the next day. It was the first time I’d brought her up since the day he lay fully clothed beside me. “The drugs made her hair fall out, but that’s to be expected. It will grow back.”

  “What color hair does she have?” I was unable to control myself. I wasn’t sure what I had felt when I saw them together but it was like the time Jonah had realized that I had a daughter. It’s a device of self-protection to pretend that the other lives of people you’re having affairs with are fictions. Before that day I had allowed myself to believe in Roxie’s existence to the same extent that I believed in Moby Dick. Now she existed. She had brushed by me. I’d heard her laugh. I’d heard her suck air between words.

  “It’s a real honey blonde,” he said. “Thick and blonde. It was the first thing I noticed about her. She was sitting at a table in a restaurant having lunch with a girlfriend and I couldn’t take my eyes off her hair. It was long, almost to her waist. Of course, she’s cut it since then.” He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling as if watching a movie of Roxie’s long blonde hair there. “The funny thing in the wig shop was that we couldn’t decide what color wig to buy. She wanted to think about another color, you know. There was this long blonde wig and I wanted her to try it on but she wouldn’t. I guess I understand that.”

  “It would be too close to what she’d lost.”

  “That’s it. That’s what I was thinking. But you know something very weird happened in there—something I wouldn’
t have expected.”

  I waited. I had, after all, asked the initial question.

  “She tried on this dark wig—dark and wavy to her shoulders, and when she did she looked like herself and also like someone completely new at the same time. And I got aroused—right there in the store.”

  “Oh God,” I said and rolled away from him. “Oh God.”

  “I know,” he said, sitting up.

  The apple tree in the backyard bloomed. The hillside at the end of our street flared with yellow mustard flowers. Amy’s final cast came off. Mandy’s twelfth birthday party was a success. Bill found a tennis racquet for her, and I bought her a sweater she’d admired that made her look like a small turtle in a very large shell. Amy gave her a Bon Jovi tape. My father came and brought a dozen pink roses and a gold chain necklace with a tiny diamond—her birthstone. The next day Bill went back east on business for two weeks and I missed him.

  On the day after Bill left, I got a call at work from Jack. He and Roxie were flying to Miami to take a Caribbean cruise. It was something they’d always talked about but had never done. “The worst is over,” he said. “She’s on the mend.”

  I wanted to believe him. He said he’d call me when he got back.

  I hung up and was surprised by how much relief I felt. I wouldn’t see Jack again. I’d talk to him on the phone and tell him I was out of it. If he wanted to have an affair, he’d find someone—probably in a matter of hours. Ben Michaelsen, a co-worker, had been looking for someone to trade hours with so he could go back to school part-time. I’d give him my split shift. I’d go home at five each day and work in the yard. I’d buy seeds and compost and fertilizer and plant a vegetable garden. I’d be home in a kitchen redolent with spices, with the juices of simmering stews, with fruit in golden-crusted pies when Bill got home from work.

  Mr. Boudreau called a few days later to tell me that my mother had slapped the cheek of the daughter of one of the other tenants in the front hallway of the building. According to the mother of the girl, my mother had come out into the hall to tell her that she played her stereo too loud. When the girl said she didn’t think it was too loud, my mother called her a bitch. In return the girl called my mother a bitch and my mother slapped her.

  “Your mother, she can be so sweet sometimes, but other times . . .” Mr. Boudreau let his voice drift off like a radio slipping out of range. “She always pays on time and I appreciate that but . . .”

  “She’s been there for years.”

  “I know . . .” He was waiting for me. I waited for him.

  “If she was my mother, I’d be worried . . .”

  I was worried, I assured him. But she liked living there. I didn’t want to relocate her against her will. I could see him shaking his head in agreement on the other end of the phone the way he always did, no matter what I said, whenever I spoke to him. I told him I’d drive down that evening.

  My mother had moved to Oakland to be closer to her sister. When her sister died, my mother stayed on. Her sister, a religious woman who heard the litany of my mother’s tribulations over and over again, had been her only real friend. “High strung,” they’d once called people like my mother. “Nervy.”

  She’d always had a temper. She’d pulled our hair when we were girls. Slapped both of us. She threw things at my father. She had a bone to pick with the world and for this everyone suffered. She was angry, she was anxious, she was miserable. When my father had been there, she said he drove her crazy with his demands. When he was gone, she wailed because she’d been deserted. She used menopause as an excuse for more erratic behavior for the next fifteen years. Bill had me take her to a doctor, then a psychiatrist. Both were vague. The psychiatrist prescribed tranquilizers. She’d take them for a while and then decide that they were destroying her—and in a way she was right. She was an angry woman—not a tranquil one. She felt like a traitor to herself when she wasn’t filled with rage.

  She let me in without any problems this time, but she wouldn’t speak. I followed her into the kitchen where she sat and stabbed a fork into some brownish mess sitting in an aluminum tray—Salisbury steak?—forked a piece into her mouth and began to chew, scowling as her jaws ground the meat into paste.

  “I’ve had a bad report,” I said, sitting opposite and feeling foolish and resentful for having to behave like a principal. “I understand you slapped the girl from the apartment upstairs.”

  She laughed, a sharp barking sound. “She had it coming. She’s a slut. You should see her. If one of your daughters dressed like that you’d lock her up.”

  “You can’t slap people. It’s called assault. They could have you arrested. You could be locked up.”

  She kept chewing and didn’t answer. I don’t think she’s ever enjoyed food. She always acted as if eating was a contest of wills between herself and whatever was on her plate. When the aluminum compartments were empty, she jerked open the garbage can and dumped the tray and then threw the fork into the sink. “Go to jail. That’s what you’d love. To see me in jail. Then I’d be taken care of—out of your hair.”

  “You’re going to have to move, Mother. I’m going to find you a place close to me. In the meantime, you have to take your pills.”

  “The hell with the pills.”

  The bottle sat on the table by the salt and pepper. I shook a pill into the palm of my hand, filled a glass with water, and offered them both to her.

  “The hell with you,” she said, but she took them.

  I made us each a cup of tea and sat with her through “Nova,” watching naked people in a rain forest hunt parrots and devour large white grubs found inside of dead trees. “Delicious,” my mother said, which I took as a good sign. “Time for the news,” she said when “Nova” was over.

  “Are you still praying the rosary after the news?” I asked as I got up to leave.

  “For me to know and you to find out,” she said.

  That night I dreamed that my mother was having a garage sale and that Roxie came and bought all of my mother’s sheets and blankets. I woke up in a sweat.

  For the first time since I’d learned of Roxie’s illness, I forced myself to explore the territory of my breasts. I placed my right arm behind my head and checked first the right breast, my fingers flat like a spatula, pressing gently. Then with the left arm behind my head, I checked the left breast. My left breast was larger than the right, although both were smallish. Throughout high school, my inability to achieve cleavage had seemed like a curse, but lately I’d been happy with my breasts. Smallish, they resisted sagging. I placed the pads of my fingers on the density of the fibrous tissue under the skin and moved it gently. I squeezed my nipple and thought of my mother. If my mother felt she betrayed herself by accepting tranquility, did I feel that to refrain from affairs would be a betrayal of some desperate concept I had of myself? And what would Roxie want with my mother’s bedding?

  I now spent my breaks on an apartment search. On the third day, I saw a place on the ground floor in an older but well-maintained building. It had a small patio and long windows facing south. The rent was quite a bit less than my mother was paying in Oakland. I wrote a check for a deposit and told the manager I’d be back with my mother on the first of the month. The building was on my way to work and I could stop by every morning to check on her. Each apartment had a separate entrance off a brick walkway. There was no hall for her to stand in to yell at the other tenants. Perhaps a change in architecture would encourage a change in behavior.

  I missed Bill. Not horribly, but mildly. I tried not to think of Jack, but that was difficult. If I thought of him, I’d remember the way Roxie had passed by. I’d remember the maze of the flowers on her scarf reflected in the window, her voice, her box carried by Jack. Two days before Bill was to get back, I decided to call Jonah.

  Jonah was a CPA in an office where he was constantly scrutinized by his boss. In the past, however, he’d managed to find time for me during the day. Jonah wasn’t Jack. He wasn’t really an adu
lterer. He was a lonely guy who just happened to get found by a woman. When I called Jonah, I told myself that I had really nothing in mind—no agenda—that I merely wanted to see him, to have lunch, to find out how he was getting along.

  Jonah sounded guarded on the phone but he named a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the library on the west side of town near the railroad tracks, a real Mexican place with good food. I decided to walk. This whole valley had once been planted in orchards, and in vacant lots and behind old buildings, fruit trees could still arrest passersby with the sudden cloudy voluptuousness of their blooming. As if born out of those same flowers, bees now appeared in my path, swirling around errant boughs reaching over the sidewalk. Green shoots widened the cracks in the pavement and petals torn down by last night’s rain filled the gutters. Because of the beauty of the day, I decided that I didn’t need to make resolutions about anything. I decided that to believe I could resolve anything would be an act of audacity. Life, I decided, had its own rhythms and patterns and to abandon myself to these was the greatest wisdom.

  Jonah had a cold—or maybe it was hay fever. His eyes watered and he blew his nose constantly. I couldn’t believe he’d chosen a Mexican restaurant on top of this distress, but perhaps some homeopathic reasoning lay at the heart of it, a belief that like heals like, and making your eyes and nose run by eating hot sauce would cure a cold.

  “I think about you a lot,” he said. He’d ordered a beer and it rested in a chilled mug in front of him. “More than a lot.” He looked down into the beer as soon as he’d spoken.

  “Well, I think about you too,” I said. I immediately regretted having called him. He wasn’t a player. He was for real in the way that Bill was for real. “I wondered if you’d found somebody.”