by Wall, Carol
Not long after that, I started to put all the pieces together. I figured out that when Daddy asked me if I wanted to ride along with him while he ran an errand, this meant that he wanted to talk about Barbara. Daddy was just bursting with grief, and sometimes it overflowed. He told me how he used to take drives with Barbara, and he’d sing to her and she’d cock her head and look at him, almost as if she understood. I remember he said once, “You know that Barbara was the kind of child who never grows up.”
Perhaps this was where I first got the idea that there were two kinds of people in this world—those who take care of others, and those who needed taking care of themselves. I always figured I was the first kind. Then, after my cancer diagnosis, I had spent too long feeling like the second kind. It was only recently that I’d learned we are all the same. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ve never been sure, but I think that after Barbara died Mama and Daddy moved me into her room. It would have made sense, since it was the nicest room and now I was the oldest. As a child, I lay in that room thinking about Barbara and wondered if she was looking for me, the same way I was looking for her. One of the photos of Barbara that I often studied also included me—I am maybe four months old, lying on my back on the sofa. In the foreground is Barbara in a little walker. She paused and is looking at me as if to say, “Well, let’s see, who is that?” Or at least that’s what I imagined she was thinking. I did a lot of filling in of the blanks as a child. I think that’s how I got to be such a storyteller. No one was telling me anything, so I had to come up with a narrative of my own.
I was a child who often grew lost and frightened by my own thoughts. When I was getting to an age when I was starting to think about boys, I became very troubled by some of the images that were coming into my mind. I was raised to be a good girl, and these thoughts and feelings I was having seemed wrong. So I went to Mama, and I told her with great earnestness that I was having some bad thoughts about men and women. Mama looked at me and said, “You know what, Carol? What you’re thinking and feeling is normal. My minister told me that you can’t keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest there.” I found that advice so reassuring, and I tried to apply it so many times over the years—not always successfully. Mama wasn’t able to take her own advice either. Sometimes it seemed that all of Mama’s guilt and sadness had built a permanent structure in her head.
Mama had a strange way of coping with Barbara’s death, and it often came out in a weird sort of gallows humor. There was a story she loved to tell, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Although she usually completely avoided the subject of Barbara and her death, this was the one weird exception. She told the story over and over, and I learned to know when it was coming. Apparently, at Barbara’s funeral, after my sister’s little white casket had been lowered into the ground, my grandfather held me in his arms nearby and he tripped, nearly sending us both tumbling into the grave. This recollection always made Mama laugh. It just tickled her to death. Of course, the effect it had on me was altogether different. I found myself obsessing over what might have happened if we had really fallen in. How would I have gotten out?
That wasn’t the only thing that troubled me about Barbara’s grave. There was a photograph that deeply affected me. I found it one day when I was digging around in a drawer, no doubt searching for answers. It wasn’t long after that overheard phone call. In the photo, Barbara’s tiny coffin is resting just above the grave, waiting to be lowered. Around it are heaps and heaps of flowers. The image was black and white, but in my mind I imagined that the colorful petals were already wilting. At night, I tried to visualize the reds and purples, pinks and yellows pictured there, and even to count their blooms. Suddenly, I understood in a way that I never had before that they’d buried my sister, there in the ground, beneath the soil.
Daddy took Judy and me to Barbara’s grave, often in May, the month that Barbara was born. Mama never came, and it was understood that she’d be too sad to join us. Each time we visited, I placed some fresh-picked flowers on her grave. I knew even then that just like those flowers in the picture, the flowers that I left on Barbara’s grave would wilt and die. Was it any wonder that I never liked flowers? I preferred green things that grew in the ground, things that never bloomed only to fade.
We lived in a house of secret sadness. By the time I was a teenager I knew this as well as I knew my own name. But I wouldn’t find out until I was already married that there was one massive, as yet untold, secret that directly involved me in a terrifying way.
It went back to when I was just a baby, in the months before Barbara died. I was five months old, and apparently I had an awful case of colic. I screamed and cried all the time. My parents, no doubt already exhausted from coping with Barbara’s profound needs, now had two babies who cried for them all the time. Our regular pediatrician was serving in Korea, so they sought the advice of a doctor who was known for some innovative new therapies. It was his theory that I had an enlarged thymus, and that was causing swelling, which resulted in discomfort and crying. So he recommended three full treatments of radiation to my thymus gland.
To make matters worse, the radiation treatments given at the time weren’t targeted, and the entire upper part of my body was exposed to the radiation. Mama later told me that when our regular doctor returned from Korea, he shouted, “These treatments will kill her one day!” I can only imagine how she must have wept, her universe collapsing again.
When I was eleven, I had my first non-cancerous lump removed. I had no fear, and my parents certainly didn’t tell me the cause. I was just told that I had a little something in my neck and the doctor would remove it. By the time I was seventeen, the lump had grown back and I was sent to a different surgeon. Again, I don’t recall being scared and I think that’s because I wasn’t allowed to be. There wasn’t enough room in our lives for all of Mama’s anxiety, let alone adding any of my own. I was terribly sick in the hospital, but because Mama was so upset about the situation, Daddy would leave me alone there and take Mama home.
I don’t know if Mama and Daddy would ever have told me about the radiation if it hadn’t been for an article they read about increased cancer risks in adults who’d been subjected to radiation treatments as babies. I vividly remember their call. I was twenty-one, already married to Dick, and when the telephone rang I was ironing one of his shirts (probably the one and only time in our entire marriage that I did such a thing). Mama and Daddy were on separate extensions, and they were obviously upset. Picking up on their emotions as I always did, I became shaken myself and by the time I hung up the phone I was crying. I told Dick what they’d said—that there seemed to be an incubation period of about twenty-five years, and if you passed that without a cancer diagnosis, then it probably wasn’t going to cause any more trouble. Dick said, “So we can keep a check on that. It doesn’t sound so horrible.”
When Dick said that, I thought, Do people actually grow up in homes where they approach life with such optimism? I had always pretended to be optimistic for my mother’s sake, but I wasn’t actually an optimistic person. In truth, I pretty much always expected disaster. But I knew better than to show that fear to the world. I knew that when I wasn’t light and happy, bad things happened.
Not long after the first lump was removed from my neck, I started developing terrible headaches that I eventually learned were migraines. I was twelve years old, and one morning before school I was sitting at the breakfast table and Daddy said, “Carol, on the way to school we’re going to run by the emergency room.”
I had my homemade banners for the football game all around me, and I looked up at Daddy, wondering why on earth I needed to go to the hospital.
Clearly uncomfortable, his eyes darting around the room, he said, “Your mother wants you to have a head X-ray because you’ve been having so many headaches.”
I could have put up a fight and insiste
d I was okay and that I wanted to go straight to school. But I went along without complaint because I knew it was easier to mollify Mama’s fears than to contradict them. And of course it turned out that nothing was wrong.
The result of all of this quiet sadness and outsized anxiety was that I was truly at a loss for how to respond appropriately to anything emotional. On the one hand, I was relieved that Dick didn’t run around in a panic after my parents’ phone call and shove me into a waiting ambulance. But on the other hand, I never felt entitled to feel scared on my own behalf.
Each time I received a new diagnosis or potentially frightening news, I wasn’t allowed to run to my mother for comfort the way other women might have. Instead, my first thought had to be how I could minimize the bad news so as to spare my parents further pain. A therapist once told me that I was like a person who got shot and tried to wipe up my own blood before the photographers arrived.
When I was little, I used to fantasize about the day I was born and how happy my parents must have been. So much of my self-worth came from my ability to mitigate their grief—and the only way I could do that was by being perfect and never causing them worry. But cancer proved once and for all that I was not the perfect baby my parents had hoped for. I was damaged goods.
• • •
It was Saturday, the day after my parents’ move to an assisted living home, Heathwood Hearth. I sat on my kitchen floor, surrounded by boxes of their things that wouldn’t fit in their new apartment. There was so much of it—decades’ worth of memories mixed in with stuff that either had to be thrown away or donated. As much as I wanted to help them with this truly depressing task, the whole thing made me sad and angry.
The move had gone smoothly enough. The admissions director welcomed my parents personally and gave them a tour that began in the two-story grand foyer and ended in the dining room, where lemonade and oatmeal cookies still warm from the oven were served. My mother was pleased to see the nurses’ station and the bank of elevators quite near their apartment.
Early in the day, a pleasant, gray-haired nurse presented Daddy with his special bracelet, designed to set off an alarm if Daddy tried to exit the building. The nurse cleverly explained it was “something like what you wore overseas, in service, to get in the chow line,” upon which Daddy squared his shoulders and offered his wrist without hesitation. I thought for a moment that he was going to give a soldier’s proud salute. After this he wandered up and down the corridors, as if on patrol.
Daddy was much safer here, and Mama was, too, but there was no getting around how sad this day was for Mama. She probably could have held on to the house if it weren’t for Daddy’s illness. But he’d taken to wandering any time of the day or night, not to mention remarking on the size of women’s breasts. It was a startling development in a man who’d always been so gentlemanly.
My mother, even at eighty, was a smart, determined woman who could still put on airs of Scarlett at the barbecue if the situation called for it. It never failed to amuse me how, right in the middle of a conversation with someone, she’d excuse herself and leave the room. Then, after a minute or two, she’d return with freshened lipstick and hair. Mama could be fragile, as well I knew, but she was strong-willed, too, and it was obvious as the day wore on that this move had knocked the wind out of her. Mama and I spent the afternoon hanging some family photos on the walls of their apartment—or rather I hung while she directed me where to put things. Gradually, her enthusiasm fully drained away, and by early afternoon, she surrendered to a nap. I tiptoed out to go home and then collapsed on my own bed.
Today, I had returned to have lunch with them. My mother’s angry words an hour earlier were still ringing in my ears.
“Just wait till you get old,” she whispered fiercely as she stabbed a bite of chicken with her fork. “You’ll see. A person’s home is everything.”
“I hope I get to be old, Mama,” I snapped back. Then I felt guilty for reminding her of their innocent mistake that couldn’t be changed. I had so aspired to being the perfect daughter in this situation, but apparently it didn’t take much for me to lose my poise. I wished that I’d been able to bite my tongue and remind myself that Mama was only angry at me because there wasn’t anyone else to be angry at. She couldn’t blame Daddy for being sick. And even if she could, he was way past absorbing blame.
While Mama and I seethed over our meals, my father chewed his smothered chicken with mechanical precision. Swallowing mouthfuls of food and taking big, sloppy slurps of his coffee were all he seemed to care about. In the life before Alzheimer’s struck, he had always played the role of mediator and protector for my mother. Now he looked at both of us as if we were strangers he had encountered at a bus stop.
I reached into another of the boxes on my kitchen floor, flinging the top carelessly in the direction of the trash can. I was surprised to find a large black-and-white photo from my parents’ square dance days. I used to watch Mama and Daddy dancing with their wholesome group of friends on a summer night on the flagstone patio outside my bedroom window. I was sometimes allowed to join the grown-ups for bowls of homemade vanilla ice cream studded with nuggets of strawberries or fresh peaches, and they would pretend not to know I was up past my bedtime. I felt the joy of this as if it had happened last night.
During this walk down memory lane, I suddenly heard the ring of the doorbell. I jumped, as if I were just waiting for bad news. I pictured Daddy on the lam, having found my house with the help of a series of strangers. I imagined him striding into my foyer to announce that he was going back to Radford right this very instant, and he wanted his car keys given back to him at once.
My rational mind took over and I checked the clock on the microwave: 2:56. It was time for my meeting with Giles Owita.
I thought I had left a larger window of time for feeling sorry for myself. Instead, I splashed water on my face and pulled a comb through my hair as Rhudy trotted toward the foyer, issuing more of his “happy barks of warning.” I snatched an unused marble notebook I had found at the bottom of a box that morning. I also grabbed the list I’d made.
I opened the front door and rearranged my face into a pleasant look, but was surprised to find no one standing on our porch. I put Rhudy on the leash and stepped outside. On either side of me were sadly sagging boxwoods and no Giles Owita. A bright blue Neon was parked at Sarah’s house. Its driver was AWOL. Maybe I had imagined the doorbell ringing.
“Hello?” I called out.
Silence.
I closed my eyes. A gentle breeze lifted my hair. Soon a reedy, snapping sound floated toward me from the left side of the house where the azaleas were. Could Giles Owita have rung the doorbell simply to announce his arrival? Had he already plunged his shovel into the moistened earth to leverage an azalea from its hold in the ground, even as I looked for him?
As I walked along, I pictured the stubborn roots giving way, but not without a fight. I was happy to think of Giles Owita applying all his strength, acting on my request and then waiting for me to join him to discuss different options. Or maybe he was planning a surprise. I didn’t want to spoil the moment, but perhaps he didn’t realize how long it would surely take him to dig up just one of those azaleas with their deep-reaching, fibrous roots.
When Rhudy rounded the corner of the house, the mystery was solved. He gave a single, urgent bark and entered his version of a pointer’s stance. Soon I caught up with him, and oh, dear. It was Giles Owita, all right, wearing his navy work suit and occupied with the azaleas, as I’d hoped. But the shrubs were hardly under full assault. In fact, Giles Owita lovingly tended to the first azalea with fingers that carefully plucked away the crisp, dead leaves and dried debris that had fallen from the overhanging trees. His feet were planted firmly on the sloping, moss-covered ground, and his eyes were warm with concern as he inspected the healthy green parts now becoming visible on the azalea. On some level, I realized I should have been
grateful for these efforts. Secretly, though, I felt like the birthday girl whose candles had been blown out by a darting guest whose mother hadn’t taught him proper party etiquette. Any gratitude I might have felt for Giles Owita’s hard work dissolved into frustration and bubbling anger. I hated azaleas, and I was entitled to hate them. I wanted them out of my yard, and I was paying this man to remove them. What could he be thinking right now? Did he actually believe he was there to follow some internal drive to minister to each and every plant on earth and make it healthier?
Absurd.
I saw two plastic containers sitting on the ground beside the shrubbery. It was even worse than I’d thought, because a nozzle was attached to each, for spraying. These must have been the chemicals that he had referred to in his letter.
Was he being defiant? Or had he been merely pretending to understand when I told him what I wanted?
I pointed at the buckets and tried to keep my voice steady. “Fertilizer?”
“Yes, and an anti-fungal,” Giles Owita informed me in his earnest way. “Your plants are in need of both. But soon they will be blossoming!” Then he offered me a smile that was like a sunrise—and all of my anger and petty annoyance melted away.
This wasn’t anything to get angry about, I told myself. I just needed to be clear, to assert myself. This man was my employee, after all, and I shouldn’t have to be shy about having things done my way.
“I thought we agreed those shrubs are coming out,” I said in the firmest, clearest voice I could muster. “All three of them. Remember? I’ve never liked azaleas, as I think you know by now. They’re pretty on a golf course, maybe, but at home, the blossoms don’t last long and when you try to cut them back . . .” My speech trailed off and I found I had nothing left to say. Giles Owita looked blankly in my general direction.
