Suzanne Davis gets a life

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Circumstances had made me more tolerant of do-gooders (note that I have dropped the adjective “insufferable,” which I used to automatically affix to this group). But though I could admire Stephen and his blond companion for their presence at this event, I couldn’t bring myself to go over and say hello. Indeed, my concern was that they would see me and come over, and I would have to explain why I was there (not that it needed explaining, given that I was as bald as a billiard ball). Fortunately, as I was thinking about all this, the area began to grow more crowded, and Stephen and his blond companion vanished from sight. There was now a good deal of laughing and chanting, hugging, crying, chattering—and all the other stuff that happens when lots of women with something dramatic to talk about get crammed together in one place.

  So there we were, gathering for the start of the race. Women with microphones were blasting out empowering messages, and young girls wearing tee shirts that read “I got my HPV vaccine, have you?” were handing out flyers. Never had cancer seemed to be so much fun, which I took to be a tribute to what good PR can do for almost anything.

  A whole area was marked off for the Survivors Parade, giving them special visibility and possibly additional perks. I didn’t know if I qualified as a survivor, being still in treatment and not yet having technically survived (at what precise point one qualified seemed an interesting philosophical question in itself). In any case, my mother, in an uncharacteristic lapse, had not signed me up for this special group, which allowed me to mingle freely with the rest of the pink-clad throng. It was all very upbeat and “we shall overcome”-ish, the sort of thing that in my earlier life I wouldn’t have been caught dead attending—but now that being caught dead had taken on a less metaphorical aspect, here I was.

  Along with the many corporate-sponsored teams, many of the women had formed groups of their own, variously designated on their tee shirts with such rousing titles as Breast Reconstruction Buddies, Chemo Comrades, and Vegetarians Against Breast Cancer. As I mentioned, I have a problem with group activity—in part, because I think it incites a lynch-mob mentality but also because it hearkens back to high-school field hockey when Sonia Goldstein bashed my skull in with her stick. But I found myself willing in this instance to put my prejudices aside. It was nice to see that all these people who had had run-ins with a deadly disease were still alive. My mother, I noted, was chatting happily with a group of women, informing them of the details of my treatment with typical usurping relish, and getting pointers on handling side effects of drugs I wasn’t taking but which were nice to know about just in case. Wordsworth was also having a good time. He was leaping happily among the women, who were exclaiming how cute he was and what good hair he had. Cancer runs and wheaten terriers sort of go together, especially on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and there were quite a number of his breed in the crowd, many with the foolish wheaten cut, which made him, by contrast, look even happier and more regular guy-ish.

  My mother, who usually minds Wordsworth, had handed me his leash and gone off with her new friends to sign up for a mammogram, when a team with Cancer Warriors emblazoned across their pink-tee-shirted chests approached where Wordsworth and I were standing. They too had a dog, an over-coiffed Lhasa apso, who appeared to take an instant dislike to both Wordsworth and me. This dog had turned in our direction, bared its teeth, and was growling with malevolent relish as though we were just the sort of dog and owner that it would like to bite. Wordsworth, as was only natural, growled back. I had been here before at the Doggie Meet and Greet, where Philip had been on hand to take over. This time it was just me and Wordsworth in a sea of pink jogging suits. I was, however, a more forceful and confident me than the pre-cancer version and not so easily intimidated.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the woman holding the leash of the growling Lhasa apso, “can you please pull back your dog? He’s threatening mine.”

  The woman looked at me. She happened to be as bald as I was, but that we were both bald and encountering each other at Race for the Cure did not matter, since I was impugning her dog’s behavior and, by extension, herself. She, like me, seemed to have been empowered by her cancer, only her empowerment had made her nasty while mine had made me assertive—although the difference between these two states, I admit, may be a subjective one.

  “Delilah happens to be female,” said the dog’s owner pointedly, as though I had committed an act of gender discrimination by not using “she” as my default pronoun in referring to her dog. “And she doesn’t threaten other dogs,” she added, choosing to ignore the fact that her dog was pulling at the leash and flagrantly baring its teeth. My shaved head, which should have established a bond between us, appeared to antagonize her further, as though daring her to compete about whose cancer was better or worse (it’s not clear to me what, in this context, the winning position would be). Perhaps she thought I was an impostor who had shaved my head in order to crash the event. This may seem like an unlikely thought, but given my own paranoia, I never underestimate the bizarre ideas that other people are capable of entertaining.

  “But she’s acting very aggressively toward my dog,” I said, not backing down but taking what I thought was a conciliatory tone.

  “Then take your dog elsewhere,” said another woman, who was part of the Cancer Warrior group accompanying the dog’s owner and appeared to be from the same school of pugnacious baldness.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, growing testier, “but your dog started it.”

  “It’s true,” said another woman nearby, whose hair was growing back in patches. “This dog was behaving himself. Your dog was the aggressor.” I was pleased to have an ally in the fight—it was rare that someone spontaneously took my side.

  Unfortunately, this championship by a stranger seemed to activate the team spirit of the group allied against me. “What does she know?” asked one of the Cancer Warriors, indicating my ally, who, sensing she may have gotten in over her head, quickly slipped away into the crowd, leaving me to face this mean and hairless group alone.

  “Delilah isn’t aggressive,” said another Cancer Warrior, who had a pierced nose along with her bald head, thereby ratcheting up her intimidation quotient. “She only responds like this when she’s provoked. Your dog provoked her.”

  Despite my now impressive opposition, it seemed to me that this was a test of the new me. I was not going to back down. “Wordsworth was very happy minding his own business until your dog growled at him,” I said. “Wheatens are known to be nonaggressive by nature.” I had no idea if this was true, but I wasn’t going to be hemmed in by facts. I was going to do whatever it took to give Wordsworth the upper hand.

  I should add that by now both dogs were straining at the leash to get at each other, and a circle of pink-clad bystanders had begun to form at a safe distance.

  The Lhasa apso’s owner handed the leash to the pierced-nose member of her team. “I wouldn’t want Delilah to get hurt,” she said, then, turning back to me, “You owe me an apology. I don’t take shit from no one anymore.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. My mother had materialized from the mammography sign-up area, and I handed Wordsworth’s leash to her.

  The other woman and I now faced off unencumbered, our bald heads shining in the morning sun. We were both breathing heavily inside our Race for the Cure pink tee shirts and jogging suits.

  “Bitch,” said my antagonist.

  “Wordsworth happens to be male,” I corrected.

  “I wasn’t talking about your dog.”

  I don’t know quite how it happened but I threw the first punch. She reciprocated, at which point an avalanche of pink-suited women descended on us, pulling us apart. But not before a photographer had snapped our picture. Two women in pink jogging suits with bald heads having a fist fight at Race for the Cure makes for good copy, and that’s how I happened to appear on page 6 of the New York Post. The caption: “Fight for the Cure.”

  THE I-ACE ANNUAL CONVENTION was held in the Parsippany New Jersey H
ilton over a weekend in March. Although the group is, by nomenclature, international, most of the membership, as I have noted, is from the tri-state area. Other areas of the country may have higher temperatures, but they don’t produce the sort of undiluted nerdishness that devotes itself passionately to air conditioning.

  There were, nonetheless, a smattering of foreigners at the convention—i.e., several Pakistanis and a contingent from South America, where the whole issue of air conditioning is bound up with mosquitoes, creating a special category in itself. Yves was possibly the only representative from the European Union. He had returned for the conference, bringing his wife, Marie-Therese, to whom he seemed completely unabashed about introducing me. Marie-Therese had the aquiline features and tightly coiled chignon proper to the cold and disdainful Frenchwoman.

  I had worn my blondish wig for the occasion, and he immediately said that he liked my hair, while Marie-Therese, in keeping with her reputation for being cold and disdainful, ignored me. When she was out shopping that afternoon, Yves asked if I wanted to go for an aperitif, and, when I demurred, shrugged Gallicly and sidled up to one of the female air-conditioning engineers—there were very few of these but he had spotted a youngish if stoutish one—and began talking to her animatedly about his no-chill system. I could see that said youngish, stoutish air-conditioning engineer was dazzled and ready to go for an aperitif to talk more, and I wondered whether I should warn her about Marie-Thérèse, not to mention Gilles and Lorraine. I thought better of it when I saw she was wearing a wedding ring. Despite her stoutness, she had managed to have a spouse of her own, which put her one up on me. If she was going to two-time her husband in (according to her name tag) Yonkers, who was I to stand in her way?

  Roy, Walt, and Dave huddled around me early in the conference. They were by nature shy, and the arrival each year of so many people, albeit people like themselves, had a disorienting effect. Gradually, however, they were acclimated and drawn into conversations about precipitate levels, evaporation systems, air-conditioning set points, and other exciting facets of the field. I was left picking at the browning cauliflower surrounding the empty container of dip in the far corner of the Parsippany Hilton Grand Hall.

  During the conference sessions that followed the greeting period, I handed out some of the latest fact sheets on air-conditioning standards and chatted up the media, those wild and crazy guys covering the conference beat for publications like Air Conditioning News and Heating and Air Conditioning Digest. These guys were waiting for their big break—i.e., a job with one of the sexier trade journals like Chemical Engineering News or Physics Today.

  Ironically, the air conditioning in the Parsippany Hilton was not working well, a fact that became a leitmotif of the conference. Throughout the Grand Hall, men in high-belted pants and pocket protectors were swinging sling psychrom-eters—devices that consisted of two thermometer-style bulbs, one to ascertain humidity, the other temperature. Readings from the devices were called out at intervals during the proceedings, which caused the assembled throng to groan and pontificate on what needed to be done to recalibrate the faulty system. The dilemma would have been an amusing conversation piece had we all not been sweating buckets. Yves, I have to say, looked especially displeased since, in this environment, his no-chill air-conditioning system held little allure. Everyone wanted nothing more than a good blast of cold air, even if it meant putting on a sweater.

  At one point, Dave ran excitedly up to drag me into what he said was a groundbreaking session on “moisture management in natatoriums”—which is to say, wetness control in swimming pools, a seeming contradiction in terms. The session, upon further exploration, turned out to be about how to keep the tiles around indoor pools dry so as to reduce slippage and prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits each year. “This is going to make the front page of Air Conditioning News,” rejoiced Dave. “I just know it!”

  I was also commandeered to attend a session pithily titled “Reassessing the Comfort Zone.” Air-conditioning standards had been set in the 1930s by a seminal comfort study. Recently, however, air-conditioning engineers from South Jersey, seeking more accurate data, had gathered 100 naked people in a room and polled their response to temperature. The result: the comfort zone had shifted by a good .3 points, a source of much excited speculation. One philosophically inclined participant suggested that it might represent a paradigm shift in what it meant to be comfortable; others insisted that the important factor was not temperature but humidity. I myself couldn’t help being hung up on how the researchers had managed to get so many people to take off their clothes in the interests of air conditioning.

  At the gala banquet following these sessions, the keynote speaker, a venerable air-conditioning engineer from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, presented a paper proposing that a “global warming constant” be used to calculate cooling needs over the next fifty years. This paper was controversial, and said by the conservative members of the group to reflect “Al Gore rearing his head in air conditioning.” After a lively Q&A, in which a group of engineers from Delaware passed around a petition objecting to political bias in I-ACE proceedings, we settled down to our rubbery chicken française and overcooked julienne vegetables. As we finished our crystallized ice cream parfait, the awards were given out for air-conditioning innovation and service to the industry. Yves, I suspected, had hoped to win the innovation award but, according to Walt, his system was too untested to qualify, air-conditioning engineers being disinclined to rush things. The prize was instead given to a very old engineer who had done “groundbreaking work in coolants” sixty years ago.

  As we neared the end of the evening, Walt got up and told the gathering that he now wanted to present a special award to someone not actually in the field who had nonetheless served it loyally and well. That person, it turned out, was me. I assumed it was a pity award, given that Dave, Walt, and Roy had been so distressed about my cancer, but I was touched nonetheless. Everyone applauded, and Yves ran over and kissed me on the lips to the apparent indifference of his cold and disdainful wife. Even Roy showed a lot of emotion for a borderline autistic person, and the amount of hugging I received from the air-conditioning engineers in general, many of whom were of the bulky variety, added to the aches and pains resulting from my cancer regimen. Still, it was a nice event overall, and made me realize that my job wasn’t so bad. It even occurred to me that if the position with the sanitation workers finally came through I might decide not to take it. I mean how often do you find a job where you can get so much acclaim for doing practically nothing?

  NOT LONG AFTER the I-ACE annual meeting, I had my last day of chemo. This is traditionally a big day in Dr. Farber’s office. It’s like a graduation, and since you’re graduating, hopefully, into a cancer-free life, there’s real cause for celebration. Flanagan brought champagne, and Mr. Dryer baked a pound cake (from a recipe my mother gave him). Ellen wasn’t there—she had gone into home hospice—but she called in to wish me good luck and to thank my mother for the new duvet cover.

  After Aidah and Mary Lou had infused me with my last dose of chemo, they did a pole dance on the IV pole. Flanagan, even with half a voice box, made a raspy wolf whistle, and Mr. and Mrs. Dryer clapped along as though they were at a church revival. It was all very weird and also kind of touching, and I could see that my mother who, though she likes to send Hallmark cards for practically every occasion, isn’t sentimental, was teary-eyed.

  “I’ll visit,” I said, as my mother handed out gifts she had spent the week picking out, including a package of chocolate cigarettes for Flanagan and a cookbook for Mr. Dryer. She had also bought several books about raising self-esteem for Aidah and Mary Lou and a striped red-and-yellow tie for Dr. Farber to “brighten up his look.”

  “Those are good people,” she told me after we left. “Even that Flanagan has a good heart. Not that I’d consider going out with him. He’s at death’s door and he’s too young for me.”

  “Did he ask you?” I queried in
wonder.

  “You don’t have to be so surprised about it. I’ve had my admirers since your father died,” she said.

  This was indeed a shock. My mother was getting more dates than I was, and she was sixty-five and unbelievably annoying.

  But this was the new me, not inclined to be annoyed about anything. Instead, I was happy—happy for her that Flanagan had found her attractive, and happy for myself that I had ended this stage of my treatment and was going to be able to go on and lead my life, in whatever form it took.

  My cancer had turned my capacity for comparative thinking into something more long-lasting. My sense of gratitude didn’t evaporate; it endured. I had options, real ones, while other people I had seen pass through the chemo room didn’t have any. In a few weeks, I would start radiation, to be followed by tamoxifen for five years to prevent recurrence. Tamoxifen could cause birth defects, so, as I’ve already noted, pregnancy during this period would be impossible. But I was OK with that. I was glad I hadn’t frozen my eggs and wouldn’t have to worry about defrosting them—it would have been just a new, sub-zero version of my biological clock. Even my mother had reconciled herself to my decision. She’d initially been disappointed, if only because she likes to freeze things (she still has a piece of cake from my college graduation in the back of the icebox). But she’d come around and seemed to have an inkling that they were my eggs, not hers, and I could do with them what I pleased. She’d become a more accepting person—another thing, if I may say so, that my pretty good cancer had helped to accomplish.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I ended chemo, my mother happened to be sitting on my sofa, draped with the afghan which she had picked up at one of the overpriced discount warehouses she likes to frequent downtown, sipping one of her fruit smoothies. I may not have mentioned that, having made so many new friends and having now gotten so close to me, her only child, she had decided to move back to New York to be with us all. This was not exactly my idea of a windfall, but she had improved substantially—or perhaps I had just developed more tolerance for her. And it is a big city.