White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  Mesut nodded for me. “It must have been the camp,” he said, angry not at me, but at the memory of Afghanistan and the tent village we’d visited. “It was those kids.”

  I nodded weakly. I had thought for sure that I would have known, would have sensed something, if the children were really sick. Apparently, I was wrong.

  After giving me an IV, the doctor at the International Hospital sent me home and instructed me to rest.

  Eventually, the fever subsided. But my body was not the same. I lost weight—­one entire clothing size in just a week—­and my skin grew pale. My hair was in bad shape, but I attributed that to too much hair-­dryer and hot-­roller use. When it came to my health, I was in denial.

  I was in denial about a lot of things—­not the least of which was my layoff.

  One moment—­before that trip to Afghanistan—­I was a jet-­setting producer and on-­camera reporter for an international news network. The next, after that fateful call, I was an unemployed nobody coughing up a lung.

  The layoff didn’t just strip me of a monthly income or of a job to report to—­it also robbed me of my sense of identity.

  For eight whole years, CNN had been my one constant in a dramatically changing world. College had ended, my circle of friends and addresses had changed, my father’s boyfriends had come and gone—­but CNN was my steady ship. The network had allowed me to see the world. It had taken me light-years from the cold, messy house in Beaver Dam. The layoff felt like an epic failure and an epic breakup all at the same time. Without CNN, I didn’t know quite who I was. And without CNN, I didn’t know how I was going to pay the bills.

  A month before the CNN layoff, I had invested in a condominium in downtown Atlanta. I was still dividing my time between Atlanta and Istanbul but was spending ever-­greater swaths of time in Atlanta. And since Atlanta was where I thought Mesut and I would ultimately settle, friends had pressured me to take a ride on the real estate bubble that was rocking the city. Colleagues bought properties one year for one price, then flipped them the next for considerable profits.

  “Don’t rent,” lectured my friends. “You’re throwing your money away. Turkey or no Turkey, you need a place to crash when you’re in Atlanta. It might as well be a place that you own.”

  What do I have to lose? I reasoned, settling on a one-­bedroom place in a 1929 building in the heart of Virginia Highlands. Priced in the low six figures, it was deemed a “bargain” by my enthusiastic and decidedly ambitious real estate agent. I showed up at the closing all by myself, check in hand, and signed my name to the thick stack of forms. I, Mary Pflum, was a property owner at the ripe old age of twenty-­eight.

  And now, also at age twenty-­eight, I, Mary Pflum, was unemployed and saddled with a mortgage for a place I couldn’t afford and hadn’t even moved into.

  I was mortified. About all of it. For weeks, I was too embarrassed to tell my family about the layoff.

  “Tatlim, jobs come and go,” said Mesut, before heading off to his own job, which remained secure. “This will pass.”

  He was right, of course, but I felt like the kid who had been thrown from her bike for the first time in her life—­now that I was aware of the destructive forces of gravity, the world would never be the same.

  Eventually, I broke the news to my mother in a late-­night phone call.

  “Mom, I lost my job. I really lost my job,” I said, my voice cracking. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the condo. And I don’t know where to live. Atlanta. Or Istanbul. Or—­

  “But the point is I’ll be all right,” I told my mother, hurrying to convince myself more than her.

  “I know you will,” she said gently. “But maybe it’s time to sell your place in Atlanta and say goodbye to Turkey and come home.”

  I shook my head into the phone. My stomach churned at the idea of seeking refuge in the house in Beaver Dam with its mold-­covered lampshades. I knew what she was getting at: she hoped my unemployment would drive a wedge between Mesut and me. In the end, the layoff didn’t tear us apart. Instead, 9/11 did.

  When those planes struck the World Trade Center, it was a watershed moment for the world—­and for my relationship with Mesut. At first, he and my Turkish friends were sympathetic. “We’re so sorry for your and America’s loss,” many told me. “We are crying, too.”

  But soon came the conspiracy theories that were anti-­U.S. in nature. One night in late fall, after a long day of Ramadan-­related fasting, Mesut took me to break fast at a dinner party at the home of an old friend from his university days. I was just one of a ­couple of women who had been invited, and was seated across from the friend’s father, an elderly Turkish man who eyed me suspiciously and pounced upon me between the first and second courses.

  “You know the CIA was behind all of it,” he said, watching me over the top of his glass filled with raki, a milky-­looking concoction that consisted of a potent mix of alcohol and water.

  “Behind all of what?” I asked, confused. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I felt unexpectedly exposed.

  “Behind what?” he asked, smiling. “Behind that World Trade Center attack.”

  “Osama bin Laden was behind the attack,” I said, my stomach turning. I narrowed my eyes as the man stared me down.

  “That’s what your government wants you to believe. They don’t want you to know the truth. That it was Israel who worked with your government to do it. They wanted to make Islam look bad and Israel look good. That’s what’s behind all of this.”

  I looked at the man in disbelief. Like so many other Americans, I was in a period of mourning over what had happened to New York and to my homeland. Thousands of innocent ­people had perished. And now a strange old man was trying to tell me that my country had killed them.

  “Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda—­they’re who killed those ­people,” I said, looking for Mesut, seated to my left, to rescue me from the conversation.

  But Mesut and his friend and his friend’s brothers sat in silence. And now an entire table of Turks stared at me.

  “Tatlim, there is a lot of evidence to suggest the U.S. and its relationship with Israel had a lot to gain by allowing the attacks to happen,” Mesut told me with a shrug.

  My heart sank. I had come to the dinner thinking we were a team. Now I realized that we were two distinct entities. I was the odd one out. I was the lone American. It was one of the loneliest moments of my life.

  In the months that followed, Mesut made his mixed feelings about the U.S. increasingly clear. The U.S.—­the land he had once said was the place of opportunity and liberty—­was now, according to him, self-­serving, freewheeling, and morally loose. And its ­people, whom he had once described as friendly and tolerant, were increasingly labeled obese, ignorant, and spoiled. Many of the charges had merit. But it was my home he was talking about. And it was a home I increasingly realized I needed to remain in. Full-­time.

  The situation came to a head in October 2002. After more than a year of working as a freelance journalist in New York and in Istanbul, I at last succeeded in finding a staff position as a producer at a mainstream American news program with a mainstream American network: Good Morning America. The idea was that I would move full-­time to New York and take the job and that Mesut would follow.

  “It will be better for us to live in the U.S.,” Mesut reasoned, even after his love affair with the U.S. began to wane. “It will be better for us to marry there. To raise a family there.”

  Before I left for New York, we decided to go on one more Turkish adventure: I wanted to go to Hissarlik in western Turkey, to see the site of the ancient city of Troy. As both a history major and a fan of Greek mythology, I’d long wanted to see where the epic battle for Helen of Troy had taken place. It would be our farewell tour.

  The beginning of the trip was lovely. We hiked. We ate amazing food and watched sunrises and
sunsets. But on the day before we were slated to return to Istanbul, our trip—­and our relationship—­went up in flames.

  At a market on the way to Troy, Mesut bought a jar of homemade honey from a local vendor. Without telling me, he placed it in my bag, then put the bag in the backseat of a cab. When the honey jar broke because of a sudden stop and its sticky contents spilled all over my things, including a favorite red dress, I screamed in exasperation.

  “That stupid honey!” I yelled, stepping out of the cab moments later. “I knew we shouldn’t have bought it!”

  Mesut’s eyes widened in surprise. So did the eyes of the taxi driver, who had been helping me with my bag at the time. Feeling the eyes of the cabdriver upon him, an embarrassed Mesut yelled back. “Don’t be a stupid little girl. Don’t be a stupid American!

  “That’s what you are!” he yelled even louder now, so that ­people on the street stopped to look. “A stupid, spoiled American!”

  I knew then that this was it. This was what our relationship would forever boil down to. When I spoke my mind, the way most American women are raised to do, I wouldn’t be just a woman speaking her mind, I would be a stupid American. I would be the loathed American. The traits Mesut and I had once found so adorably enticing in each other—­his machismo and national pride, my forthrightness and independence—­were now the very things driving us apart.

  In the moments after the public scolding, as I worked in vain to wipe the honey from my red dress, my mother’s words from that awkward meeting in Indianapolis rang in my ears: “What are you doing? Are you running away from something? Or to something?”

  We muddled through the rest of the trip. But Mesut and I knew what was coming. After three years together, our lives were veering in decidedly different directions.

  Days later, when Mesut saw me off at the airport in Istanbul, as he had a dozen times before, he bade farewell with a different kind of kiss: warm, sweet—­and tentative. This was goodbye.

  The week after I arrived in New York, this time to live full-­time, a package came in the mail. It was a series of photos from Mesut of our last journey together. Us in Troy. Us at dinner. Us cuddling. With the photos was a note, written in his familiar scrawl: “Thank you, Mary, for teaching me the meaning of love. I will love you forever.”

  Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. I had found a new job—­but I was on my own.

  Waiting to fill the void: New York City. And my mother.

  “You’ll get through this, Mary,” she barked at me via phone at night, channeling both the gentle early childhood teacher and former nun within. “Remember: put one foot in front of the other.”

  When I secured my new apartment in midtown Manhattan—­a one-bedroom in a walk-­up that boasted two big fireplaces and exposed brick walls—­she cheered.

  When I managed to temporarily rent out my place in Atlanta, which enabled me to pay off some more bills, she celebrated.

  And when I tried my hand at dating again, post-­Mesut, she applauded, though not without a bit of armchair quarterbacking. “Why not join a singles group at church?” she asked.

  For Christmas that first year that I was back in the U.S. full-­time, she came to stay with me in New York, never complaining once about her travels. For Easter, she offered to treat me to a weekend in Milwaukee. We stayed at the historic old Pfister Hotel downtown and shared delicious plates of cheese and Caesar salad and a bottle of Chardonnay. We avoided talk of the house in Beaver Dam, concentrating entirely on the lovely weekend at hand.

  Anne Diener Pflum had her daughter back, and she was loving every moment of it.

  And just when she had me back, just when I was starting to feel settled, those darn lungs reared their ugly heads.

  A few months after settling into my position at Good Morning America, the coughing and fevers that had plagued me post-­Afghanistan began anew. At first, I was able to keep the condition under control, balancing the occasional trip to a hospital emergency room with my growing roster of assignments. I had pneumonia, the emergency room doctors told me—­not once, but twice. Rest, they told me. Take some pills. I didn’t question the diagnosis, nor did I think much of the increasingly violent hacking attacks that left me breathless and in pain.

  It wasn’t until a coughing fit took hold of me in the presence of Dr. Tim Johnson—­ABC’s preeminent medical contributor—­that I realized my coughing fits needed more serious medical attention.

  “How long have you had that cough?” Dr. Tim asked, putting down the script he and I had been going over before I started hacking.

  It was August and I was producing a piece about the flu for Good Morning America, to which Dr. Tim was supposed to lend his voice.

  “Eighteen months,” I said between coughs. I was embarrassed. Dr. Tim was an institution within the hallowed halls of ABC News. This was one of my first times working with him, and I couldn’t stop coughing.

  “Eighteen months?” Dr. Tim asked in surprise. “What does your doctor say?”

  “I don’t have a regular doctor,” I managed to spit out between coughs. “I keep going to the ER. They’ve told me every time it’s pneumonia.”

  I cringed at how stupid I sounded. The truth was I worked so much—­sixty to eighty hours a week, depending on the assignment—­that I didn’t feel as if I had time to find a doctor, especially in a city as big as New York.

  “You mean to tell me you’ve been told you’ve had pneumonia multiple times in a year?” asked Dr. Tim, shaking his head. “You need to see a specialist.”

  Within a day, at Dr. Tim’s behest, I was in a pulmonary specialist’s office. X-­rays were ordered. Then a CT scan. Then came the phone call. I was sitting at my GMA computer on a Friday morning.

  “Miss Pflum, I’m afraid we’ve found spots all over both of your lungs,” the doctor said.

  “From the pneumonia, right?” I asked, distracted. I was trying to concentrate on the script I had pulled up on my computer screen at the time.

  “No,” said the doctor. “Pneumonia doesn’t cause that kind of spotting.”

  “What does?” I asked absently, concentrating more on what possible cuts I could make to the script than on the phone call.

  “It’s more consistent with cancer. We need to schedule a lung biopsy.”

  My heart pounded loudly in my chest. A biopsy? Of my lungs? That was bad. Not just bad—­but potentially really bad.

  I hastened to get off the phone with the doctor. Mom, I kept thinking, as the doctor talked, Mom! I needed my mom. She would know what to say, what to do. She had to.

  I saw that it was just ten A.M. in Wisconsin. My mother, I knew, was at work. Her new school year had just gotten under way. But since she had neither a cell phone nor a phone in her classroom, I called the home phone. The phone rang once, twice, then five times before I finally heard my mother’s recorded voice and a beep. Gulping, I blurted out a panicked message. “Call me. As soon as you can. Please?”

  The next two weeks were a blur as I prepared for the procedure. There was a PET scan, a series of blood tests.

  “Why are you taking so much blood?” I asked the lab technician who filled vial after vial with the blood that flowed from my arm. She was a pretty young woman with dark skin who wore her hair in cornrows; around her neck was a gold necklace that bore the face of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

  “We’re looking for markers,” she said, her gaze fixed on the needle in my arm.

  “What are markers?”

  “Markers,” she said, looking from my arm to my eyes, “tell us if there’s cancer in other parts of your body. If it’s cancer that’s in your lungs, it started someplace else.”

  This was news to me. “Where?” I asked.

  “Could be anywhere,” she said, giving me a sad smile. “Lung cancer looks like one big mass—­one tumor—­if that’s where it started. You’v
e got spots on your lungs. And lung cancer only looks like spots if it spread from someplace else.”

  I left the doctor’s office feeling as if I needed to flee. Not just from the city—­but from my life. I was young, I kept telling myself. Too young to deal with markers and cancer. Too young to think about death. I hadn’t gotten married yet, hadn’t had children. Those things came before the C word, didn’t they? At least that’s what I’d always thought.

  I repeatedly tried to turn to my mother in my hour of need. But my conversations with her about the biopsy hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped—­nor did any subsequent conversations.

  “Mom, what am I going to do?” I’d cry, sobbing into the phone.

  Usually, even at my lowest, my mother had something to say, some pearls of wisdom to impart. Even when I was at my most serious with Mesut, she still worked to comfort me when I needed her. But now she didn’t know what to say. Instead, the phone line was filled with silence. Deafening silence.

  “Mom?” I’d cry. “Mom? Please say something. What am I going to do?”

  I hadn’t counted on how sad my sadness would make her—­how helpless my helplessness would render her. The depression that she was still being treated for was something she generally kept carefully hidden in our conversations. And that’s the way she liked it. She seemed to understand my mind—­that of an often self-­absorbed twenty-­something—­and generally let me blather on about my latest night on the town with my girlfriends or a work assignment that had proved especially stressful. We’d talk about her, too—­about her school year, or her teacher friends, or her ongoing worries that her car might be on its last legs after racking up more than 125,000 miles. But she always seemed to prefer to talk about me and my life.

  When the talk of cancer entered the conversation, that changed. She seemed to not want to talk about anything at all. The fear in my voice—­and the sobs—­was too much for her. I realize now that her long pauses weren’t because she didn’t know what to say—­but instead because she likely couldn’t speak. I know now that she was silently crying alongside me.