by Charles Bock
A laugh. “I guess this is what they call chemo brain. I overheard a nurse say it happens.”
—
Oliver now set to the renewal of certain nightly rituals, dusting off the procedure for changing Alice’s bandage and washing her wound. First step: running the damp red cloth over the transparent tape around the bandage. Next: he peeled a curdled strip of gauze from off her neck. Alice continued playing with Doe, feeding her child a thumb, enjoying the suckling sensation. Oliver finished taking off the last strip, reached for the soaked blue cloth. Alice felt his eyes studying the back of her neck, heard the undertones of his subdued breaths. She leaned backward, met his washcloth’s circular motions. Both of them ignored the ringing phone. Besides, when her mom answered, whoever was calling hung up.
North Shore Oncology, Long Island City, Suite 4
It was during her first week, working the front desk at an oncology office, that she felt a lump in her right breast. It wasn’t imagined, that Patty Hearst syndrome thing. Quite the opposite: the lump was hard, and present, most definitely, a knob in her lower right quadrant. A person might think an oncology office would be the best place to work if you were going to feel a lump in your breast, but this wasn’t the case. It was more complicated than that. The receptionist didn’t have insurance before getting hired, for one thing, and the clinic didn’t offer insurance until after three months on the job. The out-of-pocket costs of tests, consultations, diagnosis, therapies, treatments—all that would bankrupt her, that much was obvious. So without talking to her husband, ex-husband, or her grown children, without letting them know what she’d discovered or planned, she endured. Until her insurance kicked in, she’d just hope for the best.
And that’s what she did. For three months: five days a week, eight thirty to six, the receptionist checked in patients who’d been diagnosed and were going to begin therapy and were plainly terrified. As a formality she made sure there had been no changes to the insurance policies of patients who were undergoing chemo. She relayed medications questions from patients who’d gone through the hell of chemo and thought they’d made it, only to have the cancer return. Patients with less than six months left spent hours of their lives in her waiting room. She kept her head down and bit her lip and tried to control her pounding heart so nobody could hear it. She did her job. There was one young woman the same age as the receptionist’s daughter: suffering from ovarian cancer. Her uterus had been bombarded with so much radiation that putting on a seatbelt caused her pain. The receptionist overheard this and excused herself from her desk. She went into the ladies’ room and hid in a stall and felt whether her lump was growing and sobbed until her body heaved.
Employees of the clinic received their insurance through a health management organization, whose contract contained a clause dictating that new members were only allowed to join on the first of the month. Therefore, the receptionist had to wait an extra three weeks before she could have any doctor’s appointment that would be covered by her company’s plan. Still she jumped through the requisite hoops and scheduled an appointment for the first day her insurance kicked in. Medical ethics forbade being treated by a doctor by whom she was employed. So, when the secretary finally confided her worries to a co-worker, the office referred her to a colleague.
From there things moved quickly. The receptionist was diagnosed with an aggressive stage two breast cancer. No word as to whether detecting it within the past four months would have kept it at an earlier phase—nobody wanted to think about that. A double mastectomy was scheduled, the first surgery date being available in mid-October.
Like any rational woman, she’d been aware that there was a month when all the pink ribbons appeared on blouses. But which month exactly? Not the kind of thing you paid attention to, until you had a reason. But in the weeks leading up to her double mastectomy, the receptionist noticed pink ribbons everywhere. Pinned to blouses. Adorning coats. One Saturday afternoon, while lounging on her couch and tuning in for the women’s finals of the U.S. Open, she noticed pink tennis balls in the commercials. She and her husband ate chicken wings and watched Monday Night Football, and she took in the pink cleats worn by the quarterbacks and running backs and wide receivers. The overpriced pink teddy bears in the gift shop next to her clinic. The pink donuts at the donut place. Special-issue pink lipstick and nail polish. Designer breast cancer T-shirts. Gloves. Scarves. Winter hats with that pink ribbon sewn onto them. Jewel-encrusted earrings in the shape of pink ribbons. Breast cancer awareness necklaces. Pink zippered tote bags. Umbrellas. Car magnets. Moist towelettes. The receptionist felt even more isolated, as if her suffering were somehow an electricity source—being plugged into, taken advantage of. Look, we are with you! Celebrate us for our support! Everyone so great and informed and aware and together and so helpful. Meanwhile, she had to get both of her breasts sawed off.
As luck would have it, her double mastectomy was scheduled on the day of the Breast Cancer Awareness Walk for the Cure. Who schedules a double mastectomy for a weekend? Her doctors said they got more time to work, a quiet environment, it was better this way.
Naturally, York was blocked off. Throngs along the sidewalk made it all but impossible to cross over toward the hospital. After coming up from the subway, she had to hail a cab, which was forced into a long, circuitous route.
In years to come, every year when she had to come in for her annual tests—which were best done to the exact day—she’d have the same problem. She’d come to hate that damn walk.
But the surgery got everything, and, knock on wood, the cancer did not return.
I would search every cloud
THE WOMAN AT the door to the loft was cheery. Dirty blond hair, streaked with gray, cascaded down beyond her shoulders, overwhelming a face that was at once hard, and gentle, and pretty. Greeting Oliver, her eyes glowed with the kind of peace and clarity that, Alice knew, came from profound daily meditation. Most likely, Oliver would declare that same glow a sign of psychotic insanity (each privately admitting that both possibilities could be correct). Specializing in massage, trauma therapy, and holistic healing, based somewhere in the Northeast, Sparrow had been recommended to Tilda as having achieved amazing results with cancer patients, and had come to the city after Tilda’s letters of unabashed pleading. Consecutive sessions during the early days of Alice’s consolidation had been relaxing enough to leave Alice in a state of excitement and bliss. That was before her arm had reclotted, creating the quarantine.
As if she were viewing the scene through a thin haze, Alice watched Sparrow bow slightly to Oliver, and tell him the arrangement had worked out perfectly, she’d gotten his message, hopped on the 9 train, and just walked over. It was such a gorgeous evening. Now Sparrow handed over a bouquet.
The gaffe registered: a healer unaware that fresh flowers could compromise an immune system. Precisely the kind of thing that would get Oliver mocking Sparrow’s legitimacy, Alice knew. But Oliver thanked her, asked if she could leave them outside. Speaking simultaneously to Sparrow and—Alice could tell—for her benefit, he said he knew how rough discharge days were, and he’d wanted to take care of Alice when she got home. Alice recognized the irony to his politesse, the hurt beneath his enthusiasm. But by then Sparrow had reached her, and was leaning in, all coconut oils and Eastern spices; Alice accepted the warmth of her embrace with as much appreciation as she could muster.
“It’s time,” Sparrow said. “Ready to begin?”
Alice blinked a few times, her eyes twinkling with kindness. Seconds passed before she gripped the edge of her sewing table. Forearm shaking, she pushed off, by which time Sparrow had managed to ease beneath Alice’s pits, and was lifting with her.
The bedroom purifier soon shifted into second gear; a compact disc broadcast the chirping birds and babbling brooks and wind rustling through trees that constituted an Amazonian rainforest; votive candles were lit; incense sticks burned. Alice lay facedown, her head resting on a side. She was asked to close her eyes.
<
br /> Sparrow lifted Alice’s right foot off the bed and raised it. Hands that were hard and compact, powerful as a boxer’s, gently pushed Alice’s leg backward, testing. Sparrow similarly tested each of Alice’s limbs and joints, found the limits of their flexibility. She ran her fingers down Alice’s spine, kneaded the space between Alice’s shoulder blades with closed, hard fists, her knuckles pressing. Raised indentations along Alice’s back revealed the outline of her rib cage; Sparrow’s fingers made soothing runs. She scooted and sat at the base of Alice’s back, her weight pleasant on Alice. She pressed along Alice’s scalp, finding those points along the bottom ridge where the neck gave way to skull. Through a delicious veil of sleep, Alice vaguely heard the healer: “You have a brave and strong body. What a boon and friend this body is to you.”
—
If Alice died in her sleep, the way he figured it, Tilda would have to come and hustle the baby away, out to her apartment; although, if Tilda wasn’t answering her beeper, or couldn’t get downtown quickly, then it fell to Oliver’s cousin and his wife to jet over. This had all been arranged. Alice’s mom, if she was still in town, was a possibility, but Oliver assumed she’d be a wreck. He kept Tilda’s beeper number at the ready, and had purchased a second clunky Motorola—one just like his—for Jonathan. Smaller and lighter and slightly better looking than those bricks from the eighties, the phones weren’t going to win any kind of design contest, in fact were basically repulsive; people on the street universally gave Oliver shit looks when he used his, which was doubly humiliating, because reception was never better than spotty, anyway. But there was comfort in the theory that Oliver and his cousin—again, in theory—always could reach one another, that in a crisis he’d get ahold of someone. Only afterward would he contact a coroner. That was his plan. This way the baby would be protected: no chance the deepest part of her mind would get imprinted by the sight of Mommy being zippered.
Two in the morning. Alice and the child long asleep. Oliver imagined how it could go—the dilemma of simultaneously caring for what he imagined as Alice in emergency, spasming, in pain, body panicked and out of control, plus an infant. Game theory demanded Oliver plan for the worst. Meaning Doe awakening, sensing the chaos, then bawling her little head off. Similarly assume Tilda would be uptown, doing whatever the hell she did for rent, maybe plying some poor schlub with alcohol so she could drag him back to her lair. Figure Jonathan and his wife having complicated plans and important arrangements from which all kinds of disentangling would be required. Meaning Oliver had to plan for a good half an hour spent handling this crisis alone. Alice wouldn’t be able to wait for the cavalry, would need help immediately—so Oliver was going to make sure each desktop had an instruction file, just in case the Brow might be at a terminal. Oliver was going to ask anyone who’d be around the apartment semiregularly to familiarize themselves with the instructions (they wouldn’t; still he’d ask). He’d already been assured that select waiters at Florent had been through their share of AIDS tragedies and were more than capable in a crisis situation, Florent would even come himself if need be. Worst-case scenario, something happens at three in the morning, one of the transvestite hookers from the corner could take Doe into the bedroom; Oliver could put him or her on a retainer, have the pre-op hang with the baby, just watching, keeping Doe mollified and oblivious while paramedics attended to Alice in the main room. Shit might get stolen, but so be it; Oliver had to make sure the child did not scar from the sight of Mommy flailing and foaming, let alone the paramedics strapping Mommy onto a stretcher, carrying her away.
The apartment’s large main area was dormant, just his desk lamp and screen light providing illumination. Printing out his list of emergency info from a gray laptop, Oliver taped a copy to the inside of the computer desk’s top right drawer, so it would be easily available to him, but out of Alice’s purview—yet another thing she didn’t need to know about. When he finished he reclined in his rolling chair, staring out into nothing. It felt to him as if he were a little boy rising onto his tiptoes, reaching toward a shelf, his fingertips barely touching something, feeling smooth curves. That unseen object remained too large for him to fully comprehend.
It was fear. That their daughter would grow up without ever knowing her mother, that this void would dominate her life; that she wouldn’t have a choice but to idealize her absent mother, and would blame her mother for her absence, and would curse her, as well as every woman her dad brought home (family friends who carved time in their schedules to try to assuage how sorry they felt; well-meaning girlfriends wanting to do good; all other sorts of potential stepmothers); she would curse her father; curse the world and, most of all, herself, herself, herself; that lonely teen years would be spent holed up in a corner with Mom’s journals, reconstructing her own version of who this woman was—these were the broad strokes. And there were specifics as well. Even if he could not fully grasp them all, the imagining was endless.
—
The four-year-old ambles out of her prekindergarten classroom and into the hallway, where she sees all those different women, every one of them expectant, joyous, opening her arms. Every day she does this, ambles out of her class, into that hallway. Every day she watches mommies hug all the other children. Caribbean nannies are gathering kids, too, but his little girl sees those mommies, with their packages of fresh fruit, their baggies of newly steamed broccoli, their applesauce pouches and yogurt containers and Goldfish crackers. Her daddy is late again, out of breath, trying to figure out which of his coat pockets has that paltry-ass cheese stick.
He is up in the small hours, practicing on her Barbie, refining his technique for French twist braids. His thumbnails are slathered with pink sparkle polish, the result of an hour before bedtime when he needed to keep her occupied. His hands fumble, his manual dexterity light-years away from that of women who’ve been braiding hair since they were six. The next morning: he is woozy, but concentrating, making sure to follow each comb stroke so his daughter’s hair falls according to the swirling part along the top, pulling and struggling to separate clumped ends, tangled strands. Fumbling with hairpins, Oliver gets surly, ordering: Sit still already. On cue, the girl pulls away, cries. Yet another school photo where stray thin hairs form around her head a backlit halo.
To honor his dead wife’s wishes he won’t let television raise his child, meaning that unless Oliver’s paying for a sitter, cooking dinner’s not a real option, at least not until Doe’s like six or seven. The real-world translation: half-opened take-out containers, a fridge that wafts with strange smells, a kitchen sink piling with used dishes.
Relying on one or two distressingly attractive, semicompetent young women fresh out of art school who earn extra spending money through sitter work. Learning to have more sitters. To have a list of backups. To juggle their schedules. The girls are always looking for a real job, counting down the days to some internship, nurturing a relationship with his daughter but, as the job continues, showing up later and later. Doe wide-eyed, listening as Oliver explains still another departure; Doe’s eyes not as wide, the child becoming accustomed to this whole attachment-abandonment cycle: you trust people, you believe in them, they leave, you have no control.
Another tantrum; constantly determined to show that her will is greater than his; overturning her chocolate milk. From the other booths around him come the stares, men who’ve brought their young children to this diner at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning—hoping to kill some clock this long weekend day. Faces entering the first pangs of middle age. As they watch Doe’s meltdown, each man shows a certain sympathy, but also betrays something else. Coming from a place deeper than sympathy: a terror that is pure, whole.
But a learning curve can also work for adults, and Oliver moves from the overmatched griever, lashing back at the other diners with a look of vehemence (What do you want? I had this thrust upon me. That’s a different animal from your divorce). He ferments into the panicky uptight dad who jerks across the table and lift
s his daughter too hard, scaring her, What did you do now? Look at this. Jesus, Doe. He becomes the beaten man with his face in his hands, listening to his girl cry and wishing so hard that he could disappear. And then he survives, evolves: lifting his daughter out of the path of the pool of milk so her clothes don’t get more muddied; pulling more napkins from the holder, telling her it is fine, and wiping away the mess.
And that name, yet again, always that name. The child falls and cries and says it. She doesn’t get the desired amount of sprinkles on her donut and blubbers, I want Mama. She doesn’t want to clean up her toys, Mama. Wants to stay in the playground longer, I want Mama. Wants to play yet another imaginative game with her classmates where they are the brothers and sisters, and who is she? Mommy Mommy.
And then he’s survived until that sweet soft-ice-cream-pleasant and best time of the night, when they are in bed together and she is comfy under the comforter and flirty and loving toward him, gazing at him with what seems unabated love, paying attention to stories and pulling on his ear with affection. He’s read two full stories and she’s rubbing at her eyes with her little hands and it is time for lights-out, that part of the evening where he knows it will start.
I want Mama, she says.
The hope has been that each time Alice tells her daughter Mommy is in your heart. You are in Mommy’s heart, Doe absorbs these words, they are lodged in her, somewhere.
Oliver tells his daughter to take a deep breath. He tells her to feel the warm syrup of Mommy’s love spreading through her. He tells Doe to take another breath and start with the top of her head, now down into her forehead, the syrup of Mommy’s love spreading behind her eyes.
The girl tries. Her lids open now. The whites of her eyes are large and liquid. Wide hazel irises focus on him. “Why can’t I go to Mommy?
“I know Mommy is in the sky,” she says.
