by Margo Rabb
Why had Richard sat down with me? There were other families of his patients in the cafeteria. I studied his face. From time to time he glanced at me, between swallows, and there was an expression in his eyes I’d seen before—sad, almost regretful. It was how my mother’s oncologist had gazed at us when he told us there was nothing more he could do for her. My sister had started sobbing while I’d stared at him blankly, stupidly. He’d wrapped an arm around my sister’s shoulders; it looked strange, the sudden touching, mistaken and accidental, like a dancer falling.
I put down my spoon. “My dad’s dying, isn’t he?”
“No.” He laughed nervously. “No. I didn’t mean for you to think that. It’s just—you looked worried here, all alone.”
“I’m not worried,” I lied, stirring my dissolving whipped cream.
“I was thinking, maybe with someone to talk to you probably wouldn’t be so anxious about it all.”
At first I thought by “someone to talk to” he meant himself, but he went on, “We have a great social work staff. Usually they talk to the patient and family when the case is terminal, but I was thinking because of your mother, we could have someone talk to you and your sister.”
I thought of the social worker assigned to us while my mother was dying; he’d taken notes while she vomited in the bathroom. “I don’t think—”
“It could be a real help. To you and your father. Usually families don’t realize the kind of power they can have.” He gently prodded a tomato with his fork. “Although your father’s already lucky, with a daughter like you. Seems like you’re at the hospital every night.”
I wondered if he knew I spent more time leafing through the Harlequin Romances in the gift shop than in my father’s room.
“He’s lucky to have you,” he repeated, smiling.
Suddenly, I knew why he’d sat down with me: in the last couple of months I’d been looking much older than I usually did. Yesterday a businessman had handed me his card on the 7 train, trying to pick me up; the cashier at the corner deli had asked where I went to college; a nurse had mistaken me to be older than Alex. My expanded morning routine was paying off—I’d been spending nearly two hours getting ready each day. I’d settle in front of my mother’s lighted Clairol makeup mirror and curl my hair with her Style Pro. I applied her Estée Lauder Nude Mood eye shadow and Cool as Coral lipstick. I wallowed through her closets, plunging my hands into the silk shirts, sniffing the wools that still held her smell. Some of her clothes still had the tags on; I clipped them off and wore them. My father and sister hadn’t noticed, and I was thankful—I didn’t think they’d be pleased. After we’d picked out a dress for the burial my father had shut her closet doors with a certain finality, like closing a shrine.
“After you talk to the social worker, we can meet here so you can tell me how it went,” Richard said. “Do you usually eat at this time?”
“Yes.” I felt a sweet sort of chill. How old could Richard be? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? It wasn’t so much: my friend Lucy’s parents had been nine years apart, my grandparents fifteen. And lately age had begun to seem like a vague, immeasurable thing, like when I saw Mrs. Kopecki, our neighbor who lived in a basement apartment across the street, for the first time after my mom had died. I’ve never lost someone close to me, I can’t imagine, Mrs. Kopecki had said, suddenly distant and quiet. Oh, you manage, you do, I’d said, comforting her.
“What do you think? Should I arrange it?” he asked.
I nodded. It wasn’t faith in the social worker that made me agree, but the knowledge that this would be a repeated thing, this shared meal. I ate breakfast alone on the subway platform and had stopped bringing my lunch to school; I bought cookies and Munchos at the snack truck across the street instead. Alex and I rarely ate together; she refused to even enter the hospital cafeteria, preferring to bring her beloved Turkish meat and spinach pies from the Turkiyem store near our house and gnaw on them in the solarium. But what a difference it made to eat leisurely, pleasantly, with somebody new—the clinking of their fork, their happy munching, the questions and glances, the whole fact of them beside you. When Richard and I finished and placed our trays on the conveyor belt, for the first time in weeks I felt full.
“I feel good,” my father told Gina Petrollo, the social worker. “I feel great. I’ll live till I’m eighty—another fifty-five years.” He grinned at his own joke.
Gina laughed, her red nails clicking on the windowsill. Alex and I couldn’t stop staring at her. Her butt mushroomed out of her white suit like a detachable cushion; her hair sprayed in black whirls from her barrette. She spoke with a Long Island accent, like the girls with teased hair and gold jewelry we saw in the dressing rooms of Filene’s Basement, fighting over discounted panty hose. Richard had told me, when he’d come by with the team of doctors earlier that afternoon, that the woman assigned to us was known as the best on the staff. You can tell me how it went at dinner tonight, he’d said, and all afternoon I’d been cradling the thought of dinner, like a secret. While I pretended to do my biology homework, I’d scrawled Richard Bridgewald in different handwritings in the margins of my notebook. I added up the letters in our names to see if we were eternally fated to be together. It worked out.
Alex leaned toward me and whispered, “She wears even more makeup than you do.”
“Her butt’s even bigger than yours,” I said.
“Up yours.”
“Up yours.”
“Girls,” my father warned, “I can’t hear Miss Petrollo speak. And you’re disturbing Mr. Grossman.” Morty Grossman was the nearly comatose man in the next bed whom my father had befriended. He befriended everyone in the hospital, as if it was a big social club. It’s better than the Howard Johnsons here, he’d said. I get my TV, my Times, my Sanka, the river view. And now he was offering Gina some coffee, like she was a guest in our home.
“The girls are always like this, kvetching,” he told Gina. “But they’re smart kids—my older daughter here, she’s the mathematician and scientist. She won the Westinghouse science competition.”
“Dad,” Alex groaned.
He grinned at me. “The younger daughter wrote a book that’s in the school library.”
“That was, like, fourth grade,” I said, staring down at the floor, wondering why he always had to refer to us in the third person.
“What a great book. What was it called?” He looked toward me, but I pretended I didn’t remember.
“Smelly the Blue Sock, Superdetective,” Alex volunteered.
“A great book,” he reassured Gina.
I shook my head. He was acting so differently than he had when my mother was in the hospital. She’d put off the chemo three days, though the doctors told her it was her only chance; when my father and the doctors pressured her into doing it, she grew even sicker—she threw up, stopped eating, was barely conscious enough to speak until she died. She’s handling it all wrong, our father had said to Alex and me when our mother wanted to stop taking the chemo. She’s weak. She can’t cope. The words still echoed in me, rolling into a tangled ball of anger, but I couldn’t stay angry at him. Even before he went into the hospital, whenever I’d tried to be mad at him he’d suddenly say or do something unbearably loving, like when he explained why he’d been coming home so late after work: I’ve been stopping by the cemetery to talk to Mommy, he’d said. To tell her about you girls, and the shop. He’d said it so deadpan, so matter-of-factly, in his quiet, plain way, that his love for us stunned me, it was so constant and overwhelming.
Gina turned to Alex and me. “Why don’t we talk in the solarium, so we can let your father and Mr. Grossman get some rest?” She spoke slowly, like she was teaching new vocabulary on Sesame Street.
We followed her butt to the solarium. I stared at the nondescript paintings on the walls, the wispy pastels. In the far corner a man snored on the leather couch; a woman in a wheelchair gaped out the window.
“You have such a nice family,” Gina said.
She scrawled something on her clipboard, as if we’d already answered wrong. “How do you feel about your father’s surgery?”
Alex and I gazed at each other. “Okay,” Alex said. “I mean, he’s going to be all right, isn’t he? That’s what everyone keeps saying. We shouldn’t be upset, right?”
“No, you shouldn’t be,” Gina said, smiling like a Crest ad. “Have you been feeling upset, Mia?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I was embarrassed by the worries I had—as if they were paranoid or pessimistic. The hospital was like a perpetual purgatory, a holding place where all doubts and questions were frozen off, sucked into the sterilized, cotton-ball walls. It was as if no one wanted to admit that people actually died here. Everyone had been optimistic at first with my mother, too.
I stared down at the glossy white of Gina Petrollo’s shoes until Alex answered for me.
“Mia’s upset,” Alex said. “She’s failing her history class—”
“No, I’m not.” How had she found out? I thought I’d successfully hidden my midterm report card.
She rolled her eyes. “She’s not taking care of herself—she leaves late for school every morning and eats the most disgusting things.” She poked me. “I mean, you don’t even have breakfast, do you?” She turned back to Gina. “I think she has, like, Twinkies on the subway.”
“That’s not true,” I said, wondering how she knew.
“Erratic eating is a common symptom of anxiety,” Gina said, pleased with her diagnosis. “What you can do”—she reached into her handbag and pulled out another blue pamphlet, Convalescence and Your Family—“is read this through so you’ll feel prepared to help your father recover. I think he’s going to do wonderfully. He has a great attitude. He is so strong. And in the meantime, what you need to do to take care of him is to take care of yourself.” She slid the new pamphlet toward me on the coffee table.
“I keep telling her he’s going to be okay,” Alex said, “but she doesn’t believe me.”
“For God’s sake, they’re sawing through his chest,” I said. “They’re rearranging his heart.” I paused and stared at the pamphlet on the table. Convalescence. It sounded like the name of a perfume. “Everyone said Mommy was going to be fine at first,” I added quietly.
My sister glared at me. I watched her fist come at me in slow motion, like they do in boxing movies. She punched me on the shoulder—not hard, but I toppled off my chair and gripped the table. A year ago, when Alex was studying behavior modification techniques in a psychology class and briefly decided to stop cursing, she’d taken to hitting me whenever I swore. I never hit her back, since she was bigger and stronger than me, but I screamed enough to make up for it.
“Fuck you!” I screeched. “You goddamn bitch!”
Gina’s eyes widened like those of a farmer wandering upon fertile land.
Alex started crying. “That isn’t the only thing,” she told Gina, her voice quavering. “I see her every day—she’s wearing Mommy’s clothes.” Her mouth twisted and widened as she sobbed, and she stormed off toward our father’s room.
I gazed down at the floor guiltily. “Well,” I said. Gina stared at me, as if awaiting some explanation. “You know, I should probably get back to my dad,” I said.
She smiled gently. “We can continue our discussion later.”
“That’s okay. We don’t have to.”
Gina thoughtfully raised her plucked brows, as if struck by a sudden insight. “I know what you need.” She rummaged through her pocketbook. I thought she was going to pull out another pamphlet—I hoped for Romancing Doctors and Your Family—but instead she handed me a tiny street map. “Macy’s is right down Thirty-fourth Street. You walk fifteen minutes, you buy yourself some nice thing, you come back, and you’ll feel so much better. You just need to get out of here. No one should be in the hospital this much.”
I gawked at her. Where had she gotten her social work degree—Wilfred Beauty Academy? She patted my shoulder, said good-bye, and clicked off toward the elevator. In the solarium, the man still snored; the woman still wordlessly gaped out the window.
I didn’t go to Macy’s or return to my father’s room right off; I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, the cancer floor, and walked down to the public ladies’ room, tucked away at the far end of the corridor. It was empty, as it had always been in January. It was the only place in the hospital where you could be alone.
I stared at myself in the mirror. I washed my hands with the disinfectant soap and dried them. They smelled like Lysol. I took out my mother’s blusher and reapplied it. This bathroom was virtually the only place I’d cried while my mother was dying. I never did it in front of her, with the doctors and nurses coming in and out. Crying felt like failure, like admitting we’d lost; it was breaking the hospital’s unwritten code, the hopeful façade that we were supposed to maintain.
The doctors had never sat us down and explained to us exactly what was going on with my mother; we were told of the dwindling prognosis only during quick exchanges in the hall. The day of the diagnosis, a Monday, she’d been given a good chance of remission; the next day she was given five years. Day by day the outlook worsened: on Saturday they said she might live two years, on Sunday one year, on Monday months, and then weeks. On Wednesday the gastroenterologist said to me in the hall in passing, throwing his hands up in the air, “Your mother comes in with a stomachache and finds out she’s a dying woman!” He sounded exasperated with her, as if she’d somehow been deceptive, thoughtless, and unfair to hide such a grave state with so forgettable a symptom.
The following Saturday she’d fallen into a coma, and in the late afternoon, while my father, my sister, and I were in her hospital room, my mother stopped breathing. I had been watching her mouth opening and closing, and suddenly it stopped.
There’d been no chance to say good-bye like there is in the movies, no tearful resolutions and shared confessions. My sister moaned and screamed and hollered. I stood frozen, completely stunned; I didn’t cry. The nurses came in, and then an orderly arrived; they asked us to take her jewelry off. I slid her rings onto my fingers, held her hand, which was already cold. I kissed her forehead. They wheeled her out. That was the last time I saw my mother.
And now I was wearing her maroon sweater, her print scarf. I couldn’t keep away from her closets, the mysterious treasure trove of my mother. Each time I creaked open the huge wooden doors my stomach still clenched, as it had when we’d picked out a dress to bury her in. The closet had loomed before us, overflowing, shelves sagging, dress racks packed tight. Beautiful, expensive dresses towered out; twenty unopened packages of panty hose, stacks of belts, scarves, pants with the tags still on. We’d flinched in surprise—we’d known she’d bought lots of things, but it had never seemed this much, and we stood mesmerized by these clothes without their owner, like shed skins, discarded cocoons. The sheer amount even overwhelmed the usual criticisms parading from my father’s and sister’s mouths about our mother’s spending habits. Why? Alex would ask when mail-order packages clogged the doorway, or our mother came home from work loaded down with shopping bags. Why does she buy so much stuff? My father would shrug and say, Your mother had hardly any clothes as a child, or some similar mystifying statement. Were our grandparents nudists? Could they not stand the fashions? Omi and Opa came here with one suitcase was my father’s explanation. I thought of the unfamiliar names of the dead relatives on my sister’s family tree—Friedl, Julius, Lotte, Gadi—and the question marks.
A tear slid from my eye. It was strange to watch it, as though it was somebody else’s face, the eyes reddening, squinting. I had done it so often now I was a quiet-crying pro; I could do it without sobbing, without noises or heaving, just the tears flowing as if they were apart from the rest of me.
“I just spoke with Miss Petrollo,” Richard told me at the salad bar that night. “She said she enjoyed your talk. She really likes you and your sister.”
“I bet she does.”
We set our trays down at the same table we’d eaten at before. Though I’d gazed longingly at the sundae station, I hadn’t indulged; it seemed too childish beside him.
I stared down at my carrot shavings. I’d read magazine articles about how to tell if a guy liked you. His pupils will dilate. He’ll smile a lot and may even stutter. He’ll stare at his feet. He might pinch or tickle you. He may act like a jerk.
“She had a suggestion. She thinks it would be good if you could see your father after the surgery, on the sixth floor. He’ll still be under the anesthetic then, but you’ll be able to see he’s fine.”
The sixth floor: in the elevator, a little white cube with red lettering encircled that number, warning No Visitors Allowed. I doubted that any suggestion of Gina Petrollo’s could possibly bring any good, and was about to tell Richard that we could just wait to see my father when he was awake, but Richard kept talking.
“I know it isn’t much of a help, but I’m glad I’ve had this chance to at least try to make things easier in some way. You’ve only spoken to Miss Petrollo once and already you seem relieved.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, slicing my lettuce into bite-size pieces. I didn’t tell him that the relief was because of him.
After we finished eating and placed our salad bowls on the conveyor belt, I returned to my father’s room. The heart monitor still broadcast every rhythm, and my sister hardly looked up from her Quantum Mechanics III, but the thought of Richard made it all affect me less, somehow. Part of me knew that it was unrealistic to hope for something, to transform our brief meeting into some whirlwind of eternal devotion. A tiny memory of Jay Kasper’s pity date also poked through—but I still couldn’t help hoping. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I didn’t have Richard to think about. Even if it was unrealistic for us to be together now, what was to stop us from connecting in the future, like the characters in a romance novel, meeting on page two and again on page two hundred? I could see Richard and myself at more appropriate ages . . . me, having graduated from college, in a job (anything but social worker), until some minor incident—a friend’s baby, a sprained wrist—took me to the hospital. Years would have passed—no matter. He’d have been through girlfriends, many of them, but never married. In hours, it would happen as we’d always known it would: we’d kiss outside the hospital, a deep, shocking kiss, and the other doctors, the passengers in traffic, the visitors, the social workers—the whole world—would stop and stare in surprise.
