The Husband now lies next to her in bed, sighing. “Poor little guy could survive all this, only to be killed in a car crash at the age of sixteen,” he says.
The wife, bargaining, considers this. “We’ll take the car crash,” she says.
“What?”
“Let’s Make a Deal! Sixteen Is a Full Life! We’ll take the car crash. We’ll take the car crash, in front of which Carol Merrill is now standing.”
Now the Manager of Marshall Field’s reappears. “To take the surprises out is to take the life out of life,” he says.
The phone rings. The Husband gets up and leaves the room.
“But I don’t want these surprises,” says the Mother. “Here! You take these surprises!”
“To know the narrative in advance is to turn yourself into a machine,” the Manager continues. “What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and—let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.”
The Mother, though shy, has grown confrontational. “Is this the kind of bogus, random crap they teach at merchandising school? We would like fewer surprises, fewer efforts and mysteries, thank you. K through eight; can we just get K through eight?” It now seems like the luckiest, most beautiful, most musical phrase she’s ever heard: K through eight. The very lilt. The very thought.
The Manager continues, trying things out. “I mean, the whole conception of ‘the story,’ of cause and effect, the whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.”
Did they own a gun? The Mother begins looking through drawers.
The Husband comes back into the room and observes her. “Ha! The Great Havoc that is the Puzzle of all Life!” he says of the Marshall Field’s management policy. He has just gotten off a conference call with the insurance company and the hospital. The surgery will be Friday. “It’s all just some dirty capitalist’s idea of a philosophy.”
“Maybe it’s just a fact of narrative and you really can’t politicize it,” says the Mother. It is now only the two of them.
“Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on the Baby’s side.”
“Are you taking notes for this?”
“No.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I can’t. Not this! I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.”
“Then write nonfiction. Do a piece of journalism. Get two dollars a word.”
“Then it has to be true and full of information. I’m not trained. I’m not that skilled. Plus, I have a convenient personal principle about artists not abandoning art. One should never turn one’s back on a vivid imagination. Even the whole memoir thing annoys me.”
“Well, make things up, but pretend they’re real.”
“I’m not that insured.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
“Sweetie, darling, I’m not that good. I can’t do this. I can do—what can I do? I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I can do succinct descriptions of weather. I can do screwball outings with the family pet. Sometimes I can do those. Honey, I only do what I can. I do the careful ironies of daydream. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built. But this? Our baby with cancer? I’m sorry. My stop was two stations back. This is irony at its most gaudy and careless. This is a Hieronymus Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs. This is a nightmare of narrative slop. This cannot be designed. This cannot even be noted in preparation for a design—”
“We’re going to need the money.”
“To say nothing of the moral boundaries of pecuniary recompense in a situation such as this—”
“What if the other kidney goes? What if he needs a transplant? Where are the moral boundaries there? What are we going to do, have bake sales?”
“We can sell the house. I hate this house. It makes me crazy.”
“And we’ll live—where again?”
“The Ronald McDonald place. I hear it’s nice. It’s the least McDonald’s can do.”
“You have a keen sense of justice.”
“I try. What can I say?” She pauses. “Is all this really happening? I keep thinking that soon it will be over—the life expectancy of a cloud is supposed to be only twelve hours—and then I realize something has occurred that can never ever be over.”
The Husband buries his face in his hands: “Our poor baby. How did this happen to him?” He looks over and stares at the bookcase that serves as the nightstand. “And do you think even one of these baby books is any help?” He picks up the Leach, the Spock, the What to Expect. “Where in the pages or index of any of these does it say ‘chemotherapy’ or ‘Hickman catheter’ or ‘renal sarcoma’? Where does it say ‘carcinogenesis’? You know what these books are obsessed with? Holding a fucking spoon.” He begins hurling the books off the night table and against the far wall.
“Hey,” says the Mother, trying to soothe. “Hey, hey, hey.” But compared to his stormy roar, her words are those of a backup singer—a Shondell, a Pip—a doo-wop ditty. Books, and now more books, continue to fly.
Take Notes.
Is fainthearted one word or two? Student prose has wrecked her spelling.
It’s one word. Two words—Faint Hearted—what would that be? The name of a drag queen.
Take Notes. In the end, you suffer alone. But at the beginning you suffer with a whole lot of others. When your child has cancer, you are instantly whisked away to another planet: one of bald-headed little boys. Pediatric Oncology. Peed Onk. You wash your hands for thirty seconds in antibacterial soap before you are allowed to enter through the swinging doors. You put paper slippers on your shoes. You keep your voice down. A whole place has been designed and decorated for your nightmare. Here is where your nightmare will occur. We’ve got a room all ready for you. We have cots. We have refrigerators. “The children are almost entirely boys,” says one of the nurses. “No one knows why. It’s been documented, but a lot of people out there still don’t realize it.” The little boys are all from sweet-sounding places—Janesville and Appleton—little heartland towns with giant landfills, agricultural runoff, paper factories, Joe McCarthy’s grave (Alone, a site of great toxicity, thinks the Mother. The soil should be tested).
All the bald little boys look like brothers. They wheel their IVs up and down the single corridor of Peed Onk. Some of the lively ones, feeling good for a day, ride the lower bars of the IV while their large, cheerful mothers whiz them along the halls. Wheee!
The Mother does not feel large and cheerful. In her mind, she is scathing, acid-tongued, wraith-thin, and chain-smoking out on a fire escape somewhere. Beneath her lie the gentle undulations of the Midwest, with all its aspirations to be—to be what? To be Long Island. How it has succeeded! Strip mall upon strip mall. Lurid water, poisoned potatoes. The Mother drags deeply, blowing clouds of smoke out over the disfigured cornfields. When a baby gets cancer, it seems stupid ever to have given up smoking. When a baby gets cancer, you think, Whom are we kidding? Let’s all light up. When a baby gets cancer, you think, Who came up with this idea? What celestial abandon gave rise to this? Pour me a drink, so I can refuse to toast.
The Mother does not know how to be one of these other mothers, with their blond hair and sweatpants and sneakers and determined pleasantness. She does not think that she can be anything similar. She does not feel remotely like them. She knows, for instance, too many people in Greenwich Village. She mail-orders oysters and tiramisu from a shop in SoHo. She is close friends with four actual homosexuals. Her husband is asking her to Take Notes.
Wher
e do these women get their sweatpants? She will find out.
She will start, perhaps, with the costume and work from there.
She will live according to the bromides. Take one day at a time. Take a positive attitude. Take a hike! She wishes that there were more interesting things that were useful and true, but it seems now that it’s only the boring things that are useful and true. One day at a time. And at least we have our health. How ordinary. How obvious. One day at a time. You need a brain for that?
While the Surgeon is fine-boned, regal, and laconic—they have correctly guessed his game to be doubles—there is a bit of the mad, overcaffeinated scientist to the Oncologist. He speaks quickly. He knows a lot of studies and numbers. He can do the math. Good! Someone should be able to do the math! “It’s a fast but wimpy tumor,” he explains. “It typically metastasizes to the lung.” He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination of traits, tries to think and think, and can only come up with Claudia Osk from the fourth grade, who blushed and almost wept when called on in class, but in gym could outrun everyone in the quarter-mile fire-door-to-fence dash. The Mother thinks now of this tumor as Claudia Osk. They are going to get Claudia Osk, make her sorry. All right! Claudia Osk must die. Though it has never been mentioned before, it now seems clear that Claudia Osk should have died long ago. Who was she, anyway? So conceited: not letting anyone beat her in a race. Well, hey, hey, hey: don’t look now, Claudia!
The Husband nudges her. “Are you listening?”
“The chances of this happening even just to one kidney are one in fifteen thousand. Now given all these other factors, the chances on the second kidney are about one in eight.”
“One in eight,” says the Husband. “Not bad. As long as it’s not one in fifteen thousand.”
The Mother studies the trees and fish along the ceiling’s edge in the Save the Planet wallpaper border. Save the Planet. Yes! But the windows in this very building don’t open and diesel fumes are leaking into the ventilating system, near which, outside, a delivery truck is parked. The air is nauseous and stale.
“Really,” the Oncologist is saying, “of all the cancers he could get, this is probably the best.”
“We win,” says the Mother.
“Best, I know, hardly seems the right word. Look, you two probably need to get some rest. We’ll see how the surgery and histology go. Then we’ll start with chemo the week following. A little light chemo: vincristine and—”
“Vincristine?” interrupts the Mother. “Wine of Christ?”
“The names are strange, I know. The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called ‘dactinomycin.’ People move the D around to the front.”
“They move the D around to the front,” repeats the Mother.
“Yup!” the Oncologist says. “I don’t know why—they just do!”
“Christ didn’t survive his wine,” says the Husband.
“But of course he did,” says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery.” And with that, the Oncologist leaves.
“Or, rather, Christ was his wine,” mumbles the Husband. Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell. “His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea.”
“A little light chemo. Don’t you like that one?” says the Mother. “Eine kleine dactinomycin. I’d like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o’ cash.”
“Come here, honey,” the Husband says to the Baby, who has now pulled off both his shoes.
“It’s bad enough when they refer to medical science as ‘an inexact science,’ ” says the Mother. “But when they start referring to it as ‘an art,’ I get extremely nervous.”
“Yeah. If we wanted art, Doc, we’d go to an art museum.” The Husband picks up the Baby. “You’re an artist,” he says to the Mother, with the taint of accusation in his voice. “They probably think you find creativity reassuring.”
The Mother sighs. “I just find it inevitable. Let’s go get something to eat.” And so they take the elevator to the cafeteria, where there is a high chair, and where, not noticing, they all eat a lot of apples with the price tags still on them.
Because his surgery is not until tomorrow, the Baby likes the hospital. He likes the long corridors, down which he can run. He likes everything on wheels. The flower carts in the lobby! (“Please keep your boy away from the flowers,” says the vendor. “We’ll buy the whole display,” snaps the Mother, adding, “Actual children in a children’s hospital—unbelievable, isn’t it?”) The Baby likes the other little boys. Places to go! People to see! Rooms to wander into! There is Intensive Care. There is the Trauma Unit. The Baby smiles and waves. What a little Cancer Personality! Bandaged citizens smile and wave back. In Peed Onk, there are the bald little boys to play with. Joey, Eric, Tim, Mort, and Tod (Mort! Tod!). There is the four-year-old, Ned, holding his little deflated rubber ball, the one with the intriguing curling hose. The Baby wants to play with it. “It’s mine. Leave it alone,” says Ned. “Tell the Baby to leave it alone.”
“Baby, you’ve got to share,” says the Mother from a chair some feet away.
Suddenly, from down near the Tiny Tim Lounge, comes Ned’s mother, large and blond and sweatpanted. “Stop that! Stop it!” she cries out, dashing toward the Baby and Ned and pushing the Baby away. “Don’t touch that!” she barks at the Baby, who is only a Baby and bursts into tears because he has never been yelled at like this before.
Ned’s mom glares at everyone. “This is drawing fluid from Neddy’s liver!” She pats at the rubber thing and starts to cry a little.
“Oh my God,” says the Mother. She comforts the Baby, who is also crying. She and Ned, the only dry-eyed people, look at each other. “I’m so sorry,” she says to Ned and then to his mother. “I’m so stupid. I thought they were squabbling over a toy.”
“It does look like a toy,” agrees Ned. He smiles. He is an angel. All the little boys are angels. Total, sweet, bald little angels, and now God is trying to get them back for himself. Who are they, mere mortal women, in the face of this, this powerful and overwhelming and inscrutable thing, God’s will? They are the mothers, that’s who. You can’t have him! they shout every day. You dirty old man! Get out of here! Hands off!
“I’m so sorry,” says the Mother again. “I didn’t know.”
Ned’s mother smiles vaguely. “Of course you didn’t know,” she says, and walks back to the Tiny Tim Lounge.
The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the Peed Onk corridor. There are two small sofas, a table, a rocking chair, a television and a VCR. There are various videos: Speed, Dune, and Star Wars. On one of the lounge walls there is a gold plaque with the singer Tiny Tim’s name on it: his son was treated once at this hospital and so, five years ago, he donated money for this lounge. It is a cramped little lounge, which, one suspects, would be larger if Tiny Tim’s son had actually lived. Instead, he died here, at this hospital, and now there is this tiny room which is part gratitude, part generosity, part fuck you.
Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself—a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!
Sitting with the other parents in the Tiny Tim Lounge, the night before the surgery, having put the Baby to bed in his high steel crib two rooms down, the Mother begins to hear the stories: leukemia in kindergarten, sarcomas in Little League, neuroblastomas discovered at summer camp. “Eric slid into thi
rd base, but then the scrape didn’t heal.” The parents pat one another’s forearms and speak of other children’s hospitals as if they were resorts. “You were at St. Jude’s last winter? So were we. What did you think of it? We loved the staff.” Jobs have been quit, marriages hacked up, bank accounts ravaged; the parents have seemingly endured the unendurable. They speak not of the possibility of comas brought on by the chemo, but of the number of them. “He was in his first coma last July,” says Ned’s mother. “It was a scary time, but we pulled through.”
Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess—an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”
I could get out of here, thinks the Mother. I could just get on a bus and go, never come back. Change my name. A kind of witness relocation thing.
“Courage requires options,” the man adds.
The Baby might be better off.
“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede head-band. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”
“No, you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.” Then the lounge falls quiet. Over the VCR someone has taped the fortune from a fortune cookie. “Optimism,” it says, “is what allows a teakettle to sing though up to its neck in hot water.” Underneath, someone else has taped a clipping from a summer horoscope. “Cancer rules!” it says. Who would tape this up? Somebody’s twelve-year-old brother. One of the fathers—Joey’s father—gets up and tears them both off, makes a small wad in his fist.
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