by Diana Welch
Then he told me that he had cut down a bunch of trees in his neighbor’s yard, and that when his parents confronted him, he told them that I did it. I was shocked, like, “Dude, how could you do that?”
“Who’s gonna get mad at you?” he asked.
It seemed like Tim and I were always competing for everything. I was team captain and most valuable player on my eighth-grade lacrosse team, but I was jealous because Tim played on the high school team. Even though he got the lead in school plays, he seemed pissed that I had done two commercials that summer. Meanwhile, the commercials were ridiculous. For Chemical Bank, I had to dress in knickers and an old-timey hat and leapfrog over five other guys. And for Long John Silver’s, a fast-food joint, I had to eat flash-fried fish. Each piece was golden on the outside but frozen on the inside so it wouldn’t fall apart. I had to take a bite and then say, “It’s delicious!” After fifteen takes, I wanted to puke.
But our biggest competition was for the ladies. One time, Tim secretly taped me while I was telling him a sex story. I was bragging about being with a girl, being raunchy, laying it on thick. Then he played the tape for everybody at a party, so all the girls were like, “How could you?” I was really popular with the ladies, and Tim was sabotaging me in the worst way. I felt so betrayed. I started running down the road because I didn’t want anybody to see me cry. All these girls were running after me, screaming. I was just crying and running. I had to get away from them, but I was in the middle of Pound Ridge, and I didn’t know how to get home. I don’t remember how I did.
AMANDA
BY CHRISTMAS, MOM was completely bald and thinner than I’d ever seen her. Liz and I got a tree and decorated it with all our old ornaments from the gray house. On Christmas morning, Mom acted as if she was happy, opening her presents all wide-eyed, but it was all so sad and depressing. Karen Kayser was there. We’d known her all our lives. One of Mom’s best friends, she used to come from the city every weekend when we were little. Since Mom got sick, she started coming again. That Christmas, Karen gave Mom a Nikon camera. And Liz gave Mom a sequined, cobalt-blue V-neck sweater that she had stolen from Bloomingdale’s. Mom oohed and ahhed, but I doubted she would ever wear it. She barely got out of bed. Where in hell was she going to wear a sequined sweater?
Even though the chemo just seemed to make her sicker, Mom went in for her fourth and final round on December 29, and I threw a party. Liz told everyone at school, and again I charged at the door. We had kegs and a band down in the basement. It wasn’t the first time I did this: I called them chemo parties, and by then, I had perfected it. We kept the rowdies in the basement with the keg, and my friends and I partied in the kitchen with the liquor.
When Mom came back in early January, she was really weak and pretty much bedridden. She even had an IV. Ever since she’d driven herself to the emergency room in September, I was trying to stay home more. I’d even go and check on her, but I never actually set foot in her room. I always stayed in her doorway and talked to her from there. She had to turn her head to see me. Then I’d escape back to the kitchen, where there always seemed to be people, either Liz’s friends or mine, hanging out.
One day, I was sitting at the kitchen island barefoot with some friends, smoking a cigarette, when I heard Mom coming, wheeling her IV beside her. I dropped my cigarette on the tile floor and put it out with my bare foot. Mom came around the corner, all frail and worried. She said she smelled smoke.
“Really?” I said, looking her right in the eye. “I don’t smell anything.”
She just shook her head and wandered back to her room.
LIZ
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER my sixteenth birthday, Mom came back from the hospital with a plastic bag attached to her belly. It was her new bladder; her old one had been removed due to a “persistent tumor.” The months of chemo were supposed to shrink the tumor that was causing her lower back pain. Instead, she lost her hair, her strength, her smile, the shine in her eye, and even her throaty laugh. But not the tumor. It was persistent.
Mom’s first night home after her operation was in late February. She was weak from the operation and needed to take pills every few hours. Since we couldn’t afford a night nurse, I volunteered. I decided to sleep downstairs in the guest room to be closer to her.
I had a physics test the next day. That class bored me to distraction; I’d stare out the window or write Rita notes or make ideal mix tape lists on the back of my notebook. For the first time in my life, I thought I might fail. Still, instead of studying that evening, I sat in Mom’s room with her and went over the doctor’s notes. Mom said the name of the medication, and I found it in the clutter of white plastic childproof bottles on her bedside table. Then she read the doctor’s instructions:
“Two every four hours.”
And I wrote “2/4hrs” on the cap with a black Sharpie.
“One every twelve hours” became “1/12” on the cap.
When she said, “As necessary,” I paused.
“For pain,” she explained, and I marked it “AN” on the white pill cap.
After we finished, we watched Amanda’s most recent mixed videotape: MTV videos cut with TV concert footage. Instead of studying for physics, I watched Thomas Dolby sing “She Blinded Me with Science” with Mom. When Cyndi Lauper did “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Mom shimmied her shoulders back and forth. Then Wham! sang “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and Mom started bopping her head back and forth. Her neck was so scrawny, I was worried her head would snap off. But she seemed happy, listening to George Michael sing. She even started tapping her fingers on her thigh, thin and bony beneath the blue blanket. Fuck physics, I thought.
Around ten o’clock, I said good night, went next door to the guest room, and set my alarm for 2 a.m., when Mom was due to take her next pill. I crawled into the four-poster bed, which used to be in Auntie Eve’s room in the gray house. The canopy was made of white eyelet and matched the bed skirt, which brushed the floor with its scalloped edge. I fell into a deep sleep and had a dream about Dad, which was similar to ones I’d had before.
In this one, Dad was wearing a white cable-knit fisherman’s sweater and standing at the stern of a steamship, waving at me as the boat pulled away from the dock where I was standing, waving back. I was so thrilled to see him—he was alive after all! But then I realized that I had missed the boat, and panic set in as I watched him slowly disappear into the fog. My heart started pounding fast in my chest, and I woke with a jolt thinking, “He’s still alive!” But when my eyes sprang open, I saw stop-light-red digital numbers blinking at me: 2:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m. I fumbled for the button to silence the clock’s screech and felt a panic similar to the panic in my dream as I was lying in a strange bed, cocooned in eyelet and pink. Then I remembered why I was there. I jumped up and walked quickly and quietly to Mom’s room.
When I opened her door, she was sitting up, waiting. She looked tired and ghostly, and I wondered if she had slept at all.
“Did you hear my alarm?” I whispered in the dark.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “But I was already up.”
I started with the bottle closest to her bed, marked “AN,” unscrewed the cap, and shook two bright pink pills into her outstretched hand.
“These will help,” I said.
I poured a glass of water for her and watched as she threw the pills into her mouth and tilted her head back to drink. She was completely bald by then, and her veins looked like thin blue rivers, one breaking off to another and then another, etched all over her moon-white scalp. Her cheekbones jutted out like rocky outcrops over the deep canyons that were once full cheeks. And her lips were parched, cracked creeks. After she took all her pills, I asked if she’d like some Vaseline to soothe them.
“Thanks, Bitsy,” she said, puckering up as if to give me a fat kiss.
I dabbed some on her lips, which sucked the gel up, water disappearing into sand.
“Anything else, Mom?” I asked, now sitting next t
o her on the bed. My weight sank the mattress beneath me and raised her up a few inches. “A snack, maybe?”
She shook her head no, then squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head again. When she opened her eyes, they were glassy with tears.
“There is something else,” she whispered hoarsely and pointed beneath the covers. “I think it’s full.” Her eyes darted away from mine.
I pulled back her covers and saw the bag, the size of a sandwich, lying on her sunken belly. It was bloated taut with an amber brown liquid that strained at the plastic and connected to a pencil-size plastic tube that came out of a slit in her stomach, two inches northwest of her right hip bone. The tube had a nozzle that slipped into a slot on the bag, attached to a Velcro belt. I caught a glimpse, then, of her plastic pan ties and realized they were diapers. I was confused. I knew I had to change the bag—Mom needed to regain strength before she could do it on her own. But no one ever mentioned anything about diapers.
I concentrated on the bag. I unhooked it from the nozzle, which was attached to a long tube that emerged from Mom’s belly. I handed Mom the tube, which she held up in the air so that the liquid drained back into her body, and then I carried the bag to the bathroom. Holding it gingerly, as if it were a grenade, I was careful not to slosh or spill its murky contents, which I dumped into the toilet. That’s when I was hit by the smell, a fetid stench that forced me to use one hand to clamp my nostrils and lips shut as I rinsed the bag out in the sink.
I reattached the bag back to the tube that poked out of the small pink slit in Mom’s stomach. The incision looked like a small mouth without teeth. It looked hungry, scary, and raw. As soon as it was connected, the mouth started spitting and drooling brownish gold liquid back into the bag. I wondered how long it would take to fill up again.
“I hate that you have to do this, Lizzie Bits,” Mom whispered in the quiet darkness. She patted my hand with hers, which was all bony and webbed, like a creature, not my mother. “I hate that you have to see your mother this way.”
My jaw was tense as I mumbled, “It’s no big deal,” quickly slipping my hand from beneath hers.
She pulled her own hand to her chest and winced. I wondered what hurt more, the sickness that was consuming her or the realization that she scared me.
I felt suddenly claustrophobic: I had to get out of the room and away from this frail and bald figure more terrifying than any nightmare.
“You’re my rock, Lizzie Bits,” she whispered as I slipped out her door. Only when I was in the dark hallway and could no longer see her was I able to say, “Good night, Mom.”
But I was lying. That was not Mom.
DIANA
AFTER A WHILE, I started sleeping with Mom again, which was scary, too, but a different kind of scary. Now, I was the only danger in the room. Once my thrashing legs jostled her in the night and made her cry out in pain. “Sorry,” I whispered and curled myself into a ball, holding on to my knees so I wouldn’t kick in my sleep.
“It’s okay,” she whispered back, patting my hip. She had a tube that went into her belly, and in the daytime, I watched as dark yellow liquid traveled through the clear plastic and into a bag that made a crinkling sound as it filled.
“You’re peeing!” I said to her, giggling. She tried to smile. Her head was fragile, with skin stretched over her skull. Her hair was newly sprouting in whispers. She stank. The veins in her hands were puffy and blue. They moved when I touched them, over her bones, beneath her skin.
At night, that sound of the bag filling made me nervous, but I hugged her anyway. I imagined the tube getting yanked out as we slept, catching on my kicking leg and leaking out all over the sheets. There would be pee all over us, seeping along the mattress beneath my belly, up to my face. But the tubes never came out; they stayed in wobbly place, attached with bits of white cotton tape.
LIZ
MOM MUST HAVE realized that it was too hard for me to change her bladder bag because she started doing it herself. I moved back to my room upstairs a week or so later, and then a few weeks after that I got my driver’s license. That meant I didn’t have to depend on Rita. She was staying less and less at my house, more at her own. I think Mom’s illness scared her as much as it scared me.
One March afternoon, I was on my way into the grocery store when I passed a woman standing next to a large cardboard box full of wriggling, fluffy, black puppies.
“What are they?” I asked the woman, who was wearing an ASPCA T-shirt.
“Mixed,” she replied. “Someone dropped them on our doorstep–just the puppies. No mom.”
I knelt down to pet them, and one with a white blaze on her chest crawled into my hand. She flipped over on her back, exposing her pink belly, and then bit my index finger with her tiny teeth. I had to tear myself away from her and force myself to shop. I raced down the aisles, pulling things we needed from the shelves: soothing foods like Branola bread, tapioca, and rice pudding, the only things Mom could tolerate. Even though she tried hard to stay upbeat, I knew she was tired of being sick. Depressed even. I could see it in her eyes, which were more distant that they’d ever been. Her mouth would curve into a smile whenever I entered the room, as if on cue, but her eyes seemed far away. As I stood in line at the grocery store, I had an idea. Mom loved animals, especially puppies. We had to get rid of all the horses because they were too expensive and too much work, but a dog was easy. We still had Ralph and Max. What was one more?
I paid for the groceries and practically ran out of ShopRite pushing the full cart out the automatic doors and back to the puppy stand.
“How much for a puppy?” I asked the lady, breathless.
“Free,” she said, “though we’re happy to take donations.”
I handed her my twenty-five-dollar pocket money and pointed to the puppy with the white blaze.
I raced home and ran past Amanda, who was sitting in the kitchen, and into Mom’s room. Auntie Eve was there, watching The Merv Griffin Show with Mom.
“What on earth?” Mom said as I plopped the puppy down on her bed.
Auntie Eve shrieked. Mom looked stunned.
“Surprise!” I shouted. Mom’s expression shifted from shock to sheer horror.
“Elizabeth,” she said angrily. “What have you done?”
“I got you a puppy!” I shouted, jubilant. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
By now, Amanda was standing in the doorway, and Auntie Eve had gotten up to turn the TV off. I was puffed up proud, until I registered the look on Mom’s face.
“I can barely take care of you kids,” she said sort of loud but still under her breath. Then her eyes grew wide and she shouted, “What the hell am I supposed to do with a damn puppy?”
I’d never been slapped in my life, but I imagined that was what it felt like: the sting in my face, the red hotness that followed, trickling like molten lava from my scalp to my toes. I grabbed the puppy, stormed out of the room, and heard Mom burst into tears. As I left, Amanda said, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll help take care of it.”
I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling and listening to my Alarm album, the volume set high, when Amanda walked into the room. The puppy was crawling all over me, pawing up my leg, falling down on her back, then scrambling up to my belly.
Still stunned, I said, “What the fuck is her problem?”
Amanda looked at me and shrugged, then looked at the puppy and smiled. We decided to name her Bentley. By May, she had chewed through three pairs of my shoes, Amanda’s Vuarnet sunglasses, the corner of the gold brocade couch, and two family photo albums. But we loved her anyway. Even Mom came around. She apologized to me for getting angry and said that animals had good energy. That was all she needed to heal, she said.
DAN
MOM BELIEVED THAT Diana and I had special powers. Di might have had them, but I was pretty sure I didn’t. Mom really believed in that stuff, though. Whenever I rolled doubles playing backgammon, she said I had ESP with the dice. One time, she actually got a spoo
n and said, “Let’s bend it with our minds!” She literally thought we could bend that spoon. She also thought I could shrink her cancer.
For a while, it was just Mom and me doing it: I held my hands over her stomach and visualized the tumor. It looked like a sparkler in this dark vacuum, a radiating light that I was able to snuff out with my hands. I made it shrink and shrink and shrink until it totally disappeared. I tried as hard as I could.
Then these evangelical people came, one lady and four guys, all with perfect hair and big white teeth. I thought they were creepy, but I ignored the feeling because they encouraged me to help Mom. They told me that my hands had the healing power. We gathered around Mom’s bed. She was very thin by then and had a scarf wrapped around her head. I slapped my hands and rubbed them together to get the heat going, then held my hands above Mom’s stomach, closed my eyes, and imagined her tumor shrinking. But when I opened my eyes, I noticed that her glasses looked bigger on her face. And I realized that she was shrinking, not the tumor. And that I didn’t have any power at all.
LIZ
HER DOCTORS WERE hopeful that they had gotten rid of most of the cancer when they removed her bladder, and that the chemo would kill the rest of it. But Mom didn’t want to take any chances. She no longer trusted Western medicine, so in addition to weekly trips to Sloan-Kettering, she started going to healers, to church revivals, and to a macrobiotic nutritionist who designed a special diet for her. That meant I had to soak rye seeds in sauerkraut for Mom. That was her breakfast. Still, she insisted that “positive energy” would make her well. “That’s all I need!” she’d say.
So I did my part, reporting to her room every afternoon with daily updates: No, I was not dating anyone. Yes, I was going to the junior prom. Rita was going to the dance with this guy Jake just as friends, so when Jake’s friend Lance asked me to be his date, I said yes. Rita and I were more excited about dressing up than anything else. We spent over an hour getting ready—hair, makeup, the whole bit—and then walked into Mom’s room to say good-bye.
