Alice & Oliver

by Charles Bock

  She did not know, she did not know, she did not know. But she was going to find out. “Honeysuckle,” she said. “I am on a mission. I swear to you.”

  Whitman Memorial, 1220 York Ave., 3d floor, Children’s Oncology, Rm. 323

  Sure, it made him feel low to watch other second graders run around the playground. But he’d made it up to three push-ups, was getting decent at fielding a tennis ball against a wall. He wanted to play T-ball that summer, wanted that team jersey, and to be in Cub Scouts, too. When you were eight years old, anything that meant you got to wear a uniform, he wanted to do. He was coming up on three years in remission, so he could still crash from a common cold, side effects from the Coumadin, whatever, but they’d gotten used to it, knew how to handle it.

  This time seemed different, although maybe not so much, his mom couldn’t tell for sure. But the boy’s eyes were glassy, and, at dinner, she didn’t like the way he held his fork, his grip limp like that. His forehead felt clammy. But the nodes around his neck didn’t seem swollen. Now her hand along the side of his stomach, the way she’d been instructed. She kissed her son on the cheek as if blessing a rosary.

  At the ER they did the boy a favor and let him venture out of his little cordoned area long enough to watch, on an elevated television in the corner, a report about that day’s negotiations between the players’ union and the owners. Handing over the case files to the desk nurse, his mother double-checked to make sure the boy’s oncologist had been contacted. The boy’s father had answered the message from his service and called the hospital: “Still at the office, leaving now.” The boy’s mother felt as if she knew something she did not want to know. The television was at a commercial, the report was over; she wheeled her compliant child back into his exam area, where he promptly zoned out. She watched him sleep for a while and headed over to the vending machine for their shitty coffee, and had an awful sensation, a kind of déjà vu. It wasn’t so much that the boy’s mother remembered all the times during the first go-around when she’d gotten coffee at this shitty vending machine, but feeling all of her exhaustion and terror during those months, what it was like to not know what was going to happen. She was already seeing a therapist twice a week. Taking Zoloft to get through the day, Valium to get to sleep. The boy’s father had signed a lease on a small apartment two blocks from their home, a sign of his hopes for reconciliation, but also so he could be near in case of emergencies.

  The next morning the oncologist performed a spinal tap. Grimly, he confirmed that the boy had come out of remission. The nurse-practitioner and the boy had become close as well—for his seventh birthday, she’d bought him a customized Yankees cap with a pinstriped brim. She teared up at the news. The large soft hands of the boy’s father acted as a mitt, encompassing the boy’s fingers. Mom rubbed his back. A course of action and treatment was laid out. Survival rates were reiterated. The boy listened with questioning eyes, seemed a bit shocked. He asked if any Yankees were going to visit the ward while he was there, or whether the baseball strike meant they weren’t doing any more visits.

  The exam room had no windows and nothing to look at and nowhere to go. The doctor was talking about checking him back in to the ward, new rounds of chemo, looking for a donor. His dad was blinking and nodding, staring straight ahead. There wasn’t really any other direction, was there? You just had to strap up. He agreed to stay with his son. Later today he was going to take up smoking again. After he finished in midtown and got home to his empty, shitty little apartment, he usually had a beer or two. He told his son that whatever the ward offered they were going to milk the hell out of it. The mom gave him a look that conveyed unhappiness about the language he was using. She was about to head home to pack for a longer stay. (When she leaves the hospital, the mother will raise a hand in the air and flip off God, something she has not done since the last time the boy was ill.) Bring his Strat-O-Matic baseball set, the boy reminded her. He stressed the importance of the blue binder he used to keep the game summaries and statistics for his fantasy season. It should be on his desk but if not, under his bed. Sometimes during their afternoons together the boy and his dad played Strat-O-Matic and the boy made reference to one of their recent contests, in which he’d eked out an extra-inning victory. He asked if his mom could bring his lucky Air Jordans, the 3s.

  Reinduction would start as soon as all the tests were done and his Hickman was back in. They’d start searching for a donor ASAP. The boy was pretty jazzed, actually, about being able to go back into the children’s ward. His room was brightly painted, the walls luminescent with glow-in-the-dark planets and rockets and shooting stars. The boy wondered if any of his friends were around. He looked at the laminated menu and bit down on his bottom lip and made a long farting sound. Then the boy saw pizza tacos. He said those were new.

  The ward may not have been a Ronald McDonald House, where kids were having fantasy wishes granted left and right, but it still housed children with cancer, and it was in New York City. It got more than its share of celebrity visitors. Every week the community service outreach lady and the public relations people brought in someone. Wrestlers Owen and Bret Hart stopped by and put everyone in headlocks. Mark Messier spent an afternoon and got choked up more than once. The boy took all offered hats and T-shirts, had Messier sign a puck with a silver Sharpie. Baseball players commonly visited the ward, the community relations lady promised. Logic held that they needed all the good press they could get, especially seeing how the All-Star Game had just been flushed down the tube. They’d be coming. But the schedule worked out so no baseball player was visiting until the boy’s third week in the ward. Even then it was a member of the Mets, the deformed stepbrother of New York City baseball.

  The boy turned away from the nurse, refused to get his temperature taken. His father raised his voice. Said this was unacceptable. Buddy. Come on now.

  Dwight Gooden may not have been thirty years old, but he was a good half decade removed from the fireball-spewing heroics that had once captivated the city. Though his face was still smooth and bright, around the eyes there was some wear, some sorrow. Although he was known as Dr. K, it had been a while since Doc’s last winning season, and the tabloids had taken a special glee in chronicling his most recent string of problems: his suspension for cocaine use, his Nike billboard taken down in Times Square. Doc had untold reasons to bail on his visit. He really didn’t need to be there. He was wearing a collared cotton shirt that was open at the collar and had a thin band of gold around his neck. His smile was shy. When he spoke—Hey, man, how you doing?—it was low and quiet, just a few words. Hanging in there is pretty good, I think. He seemed friendly, but also reserved, as if a little embarrassed.

  By then the boy was deep into reinduction. He’d lost all his hair. His pulse was weak. There had been complications. The easiest thing for him was to sleep. But he kept himself awake for this, asked Doc to sign his Yankees jersey.

  Libertines

  EISENSTATT FLASHED THE pointer at her eyes, promised he’d be quick. He made a sound that intoned recognition. “Chemical conjunctivitis. It’s pretty much a standard side effect, especially in younger patients.”

  Alice kept blinking, her expression pained. As soon as the device clicked off, she looked down. She worked to focus, concentrated on that middle floor square, its inner flecked pattern. A single fleck. Feeling more centered, she grabbed for her Versaces.

  “Three days,” continued the doctor. “Admittedly that’s atypical for conjunctivitis.” Now Eisenstatt had the voice of a slightly vexed father. “And explain this again: why you didn’t call the urgent care center.”

  The horrid hospital chill, the typical iced air of exam rooms. Once again Alice wrapped herself in the hospital blanket and shut her eyes—as if that would keep out the question.

  “She didn’t want to have to go back into the hospital.” From his corner stool, Oliver blessedly bailed her out.

  “Our goal is to get your wife to a transplant,” Eisenstatt said.
“Not to keep her out of the hospital.” Speaking to Alice, he continued. “The marker for whether you call is very low.”

  “It wasn’t getting worse,” she managed. “Over the phone they told me to come in if it got any worse—”

  “It wasn’t getting any better, either.”

  Do you remember that part? She and Oliver searched out each other, his tinted confusion matching how she felt. For not the first time, Alice thought of the doctor via the same name that her husband used: Dickenstein.

  “What was the point of going in?” She sighed. “What would you have done?”

  “We could have increased your dosage. We could have changed your medicine. We definitely would have checked your eyes. Could have had you take an MRI.”

  “I certainly hope you’ll be as thorough about my hot flashes.” She laughed.

  “Hot flashes?” Eisenstatt looked at his pad. Boyish lips pursed. “Yeah, we did that to you.” He asked an unseen nurse to take a prescription down to the pharmacy once he was done: stronger drops for her eyes. “We’re doing a lot to you,” he continued. “But good things are happening as well. Your whites have started to come up, point seven. After bottoming out from the chemo, that’s an encouraging start.”

  Eisenstatt continued, rattling off more numbers. Down the list: hemoglobin eleven, platelet count fifteen.

  Here his lips pursed, a child considering a fish. “This is something to talk about.”

  Brightness somehow penetrated her sunglass protection, she felt the room’s chill, her blanket itching.

  “It’s nothing monumental,” the doctor assured. “Red counts are always the last to rise. But in our situation, we don’t want to wait. These numbers—see here—put you right on the border for a transfusion. The safe answer is to give you plasma today. Fresh blood will shore up your platelets for a while.” Eisenstatt asked the nurse to call right now and see about a transfusion, if any slots were available after this consultation.

  “They take how long?” Oliver asked.

  “A few hours.”

  “I can call your mom,” Oliver said. “We should be fine. And I’ll get ahold of Tilda just in case.”

  Alice reached toward him, a gesture of thanks. He ducked his head, searching through a backpack for that obnoxious brick of a phone.

  “If your numbers don’t stay up, if your marrow gets to where it’s not producing blood, we might start giving you transfusions when you come in for your consultations. This would be every couple of days.”

  “And I’d be doing this until the transplant?”

  Her heart crashing five floors.

  Eisenstatt acknowledged her question with quietude, perhaps considering the phrasing of his response. “The U.S. registry hasn’t hit any perfect matches yet.”

  He admitted this, and Alice felt light-headed, and had to grip the railing alongside the bed.

  The doctor was firm: “I don’t want you to go there.” His hands went out in front of him. “We still have plenty of moves to play. There are always new donors. Every day. And we’re starting on other possibilities, including whether we can find a donor with enough key matching categories that we might proceed. Until that comes in, blood can get you jump-started, give you the energy we need you to have.”

  “The hardest part is waiting.” This came from some other part of the room. Alice recognized her mincing voice. “But when it happens it all happens very fast.”

  “Oh, Dr. Bhakti,” she said. “I hadn’t even realized you were here.”

  “And rooms on the transplant floor are the best in the hospital,” Bhakti assured. “Even better than those private suites up on obstetrics.”

  With a glance, Alice cut her off. “Thank you, Doctor. You are always a help.”

  —

  Returning from the little Indian place on the other side of Sixty-seventh, juggling overloaded bags whose scents were causing havoc with his saliva glands, Oliver was a few yards from his intended elevator bank when he heard a mangled version of his name—called as a question, uncertain in its pronunciation.

  It had come from the business office. A woman stood there looking like a preteen girl, only done up to look like a secretary in her school play: hair pulled back. Oversize plastic glasses. Black polka dot blouse, pencil skirt, clompy shoes. Nearing, she struggled with a stack of manila folders that were about to capsize. “I thought it was you. Looks like we both got our hands full.”

  Now he recognized her: Miss Culpepper. She shifted back and forth on her heels. She had a chance to catch something before it slipped out from beneath her elbow, but instead watched the pages spill to the floor. Eyes Oliver often swore to be dead had grown some kind of inner life. Her face—pretty, if naïve—betrayed exhaustion. It took a second for Oliver to realize she was waiting for him to make conversation.

  “I was really glad to see you all got that insurance problem handled,” she said. “Make sure you give my best— Tell Alice my prayers are with her.”

  —

  Adjacent to the mighty Connecticut River, nestled near the picturesque joining point of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, downtown Brattleboro was full of handsome old brick: a food co-op, gourmet coffee, old-town diners, and high-end bistros. It had head shops and tattoo parlors, as well as a number of bookstores (both new and used), furniture stores (antiques mostly), video and record shops, a classic art deco hotel and adjacent theater that showed new releases and hosted community theater. Former academics gravitated for retirement; college-educated, white-collar hippies found the town a safe place to raise kids. It was civilized without being urban, rural without being too rural, a hub where burnouts and townies and foodies and barbecue aficionados could coexist with old-time country folk and ski bums, and everyone tolerated the healthy flow of weekend warriors: the leaf watchers and motorcycle-riding types.

  It was ideal backdrop scenery for a precocious teenager: rehearsing for her high school drama productions and pulling all-nighters so she was ready for the rhetoric sectionals; replicating the best styles and patterns from classic movies and fashion magazines, studying their cooler cousins, Paper and Interview, for missives from Manhattan’s downtown scene.

  When Alice looked back, she remembered adolescence as a string of nights twisting herself with longing into a phone cord as she spoke in hushed tones to a best friend, yakking deep into the cold night about boys who barely knew she was alive. It had been endless drives down back roads with the leaves turning above her while Alice and her clique lit clove cigarettes, ate magic mushrooms, and adjusted the dial to get reception on the nearby college’s radio station. Alice relished those sun-dappled summer afternoons at swimming holes, rubbing high-SPF lotions on herself and lying out on rocks high above the falls. She remembered the winter storms she’d survived by holing up with a Ouija board and a stolen bottle of Mom’s sauvignon, steering her dead father toward one absurd question after another: Do you miss me? How hot is it down there?

  How many daddy figures had she chased—in books, in movies? How many corner booths in ethnic and world restaurants had she appropriated, she and the rest of that self-proclaimed deadbeat club of friends, cherishing every townie’s glance at her blue hair, their secondhand ensembles? On prom night she’d sat on the steps of the city hall and passed a bottle back and forth and watched the sun rise over the mountains, her head firmly lodged on her best friend’s shoulder. From a few trips a year to real cities, Toronto, Boston, Manhattan, she’d gotten enough sophistication—what she’d thought of as sophistication—to realize, totally, she needed more.

  When she arrived in Manhattan for college, she gravitated—inevitably, insistently—toward the East Village, the concentric circles of its colliding worlds. She trolled art gallery openings for free liquor, bluffing and nodding her way through conversations about the pieces; she missed a friend’s horrid band when they finally made their drunken, two-in-the-morning CBGB debut, instead occupying the abattoir that passed as that club’s bathroom, doing a bump off
the end of an apartment key held by a lanky boy with perfectly feathered hair. The status quo: flailing to hold a pose at Integral Yoga; struggling to keep the beat to live drummers at a Saturday afternoon Afro-Brazilian dance class; grinding her hips all night at Pyramid, or Save the Robots, or Area, or Limelight; scraping together, in change, at three in the morning, the five dollars necessary for one of Yaffa’s sunshine veggie burgers (“side of quinoa thanks”). One New Year’s Day, green-gilled and still hungover, she’d sat for hours, until she seriously could not feel her ass, atop one of the side-row pews in St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, watching the Poetry Project’s marathon fundraiser with her gay friend, and had gotten what she’d waited for: Jim Carroll, mop-headed and junkie-thin (just how you wanted him to be), had read a short story, and, after him, downtown goddess Patti Smith had scratched out a gravelly, goddessy chant of a song, and then, to top it off, a wonderfully round and cheery Allen Ginsberg had ambled up and, to the holy hush of the packed, breathless church, read a half-assed, dashed-off excuse for a poem. Afterward, in the church’s back room, she’d felt privileged and joyous when Ginsberg had slicked down his famous bushy eyebrows and—showing far more grace and charm and effort than he had onstage—unabashedly hit on her friend.

  Discovering just who you were, refining who you wanted to be, choosing to root that life below Fourteenth, on streets free of franchises, amid a small teeming outpost that stood against the white-bread homogeneity that Reaganism kept jamming down your throat; for Alice, this included an added bonus: sightings—all of the other spectacular one-of-a-kind freaks; club kids coming back from a bodega with some veggie juice while in full night-crawling regalia (hair conically spiked, faces shining with glitter, wearing only high-heeled combat boots and newspaper-made bikinis); dreadlocked girls in geisha robes and corsets of body latex busily hauling bongos from rehearsal. That so many others were making their own explorations—grabbing, discarding, combining, without any kind of map, purposefully throwing away all instructions—excited her. So Alice hosted sushi-rolling parties where her girlfriends chanted rap lyrics; she attended seminars on Transcendental Meditation, staffed a tent that did free Wigstock touch-ups and fixes. Between slurps of borscht from the all-night Polish diner, Alice argued about foreign film with modern dancers, volunteered to sew the costumes for underground theater troupes who had no choice but to be unwatchable. She let herself be drawn in the nude, photographed in bondage gear, doing it for friends, for love, for art, for the hell of it; yes, even that de rigueur, eyeball-bleeding stretch where she fell under the seductive spell of the death of the author. And still kept winding herself in phone cords, despite her hangovers and cotton mouth, trying always to get to the other side of yet another cute, selfish, shitty, unreliable boy. She studied her patterns and color schemes, made skirts gratis for friends, haggled for a secondhand mannequin at the Chelsea Flea Market, used the flimsy dummy to model outfits that she re-created from film stills. She cried and delivered food, both for and with God’s Love, marched and chanted and raged against the police protest barriers with other ACT UP protesters until her hands were frozen and her throat was raw. Alice mourned the gorgeous lanky boy Ginsberg had hit on. She celebrated the man he had been. She was a woman now, indulging, absorbing, borrowing, embracing, pushing against, piecing together.