“Not a teacher,” said Carter. “A schoolmarm.” He removed the backgammon board from the hot tub and wrung his hair out all over it.
That night, in bed, Julian and Mia played backgammon themselves, falling asleep in the middle of a game, and when they awoke the next morning, the backgammon pieces were strewn across the mattress.
Julian laid the red pieces along his stomach. “I’m a pepperoni pizza.”
Then the phone was ringing, and Mia, still half asleep, trundled across the floor to get it.
It took Mia several moments to understand what he was saying; her father was so elliptical and obscure. He spoke of a development, of a growth, as if this were a parking structure or an economic chart, when he was talking about her mother and she had a lump in her breast. A malignant lump, Arthur Mendelsohn was saying over the telephone—the biopsy had already come back positive—and Mia still wasn’t sure she’d heard this right, so she asked him to say it again. “It’s malignant?”
“Yes.”
“I’m driving home right now.” Already she was calculating the time it would take, the miles and traffic flow, whether the police would be out and how fast she could drive, how she hadn’t packed her clothes yet but maybe she could get home by dinner.
“You’ll be home in two weeks, darling. Take your finals and then come home. You have winter break to be with Mom.”
“Finals?” There was no argument she needed to muster, nothing more she had to do than echo that preposterous six-letter word.
“It would be best.”
“For whom?”
“For you,” he said. “For all of us. It’s what Mom wants, too.”
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
Mia didn’t believe him. It was best for her to be sitting in the library while her mother was back home with breast cancer? Best for her to be reading the English Bible and Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristophanes and whatever else she was supposed to be reading for Western Civ? “I want to speak to Mom.”
“She’s asleep,” her father said. “She’s resting.”
“Is there going to be a mastectomy?”
“Yes.”
“Chemotherapy and radiation?”
“It looks like it.”
“Mastectomy is surgery.”
“I know.”
Was her mother really asleep? Or was she next to her father, listening in, too frightened to talk to her? Sometimes when Mia called home, her parents would both get on the phone and Mia, not realizing this, would think she was talking to just one parent and would suddenly hear the other’s voice. That was what she wanted now. She needed to hear her mother. “Which breast is it?”
“What?”
“Which one has the lump?” She wanted to know this; she had no idea why.
“The left one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Christ,” she said, and hung up.
Mia ran out of the house and into the garden, and not knowing what to do, she came back upstairs, with Julian trailing her.
She called her father back. “What stage is it at?”
“What do you mean?”
“Cancer goes in stages, Dad. One through four.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Maybe they don’t know yet.”
“Probably not,” her father said, buoyed, it appeared, by the doctors’ ignorance. Her father was an idiot, she thought; for a genius, he was a fool.
“Mom might die,” she said.
“You have to believe,” said her father, a man so atheist he found the word “believe” contemptible, a man who generally believed in nothing save for the fact that there was nothing to believe in.
“All right.” She stifled a sob. She’d disappointed him, and herself. She was letting them all down by saying—by even thinking—her mother might die.
“People recover from breast cancer all the time.”
“I know,” she said, trying to sound hopeful.
Now her father was telling her about an obituary he’d read for a woman who had lived to be a hundred and thirteen. An illiterate, her father said, her obituary in a newspaper she couldn’t even read, yet she was the longest documented survivor of breast cancer. She’d lived cancer-free for eighty-five years.
Mia was silent. If her mother lived cancer-free for eighty-five years she’d be a hundred and thirty-four. Let her mother live till seventy, Mia thought, and she’d get down on her knees and thank God.
Now her father was saying she had a choice. She could go about her life as if everything had changed, or she could act as though things were normal, which was what he and her mother hoped she would do.
“But things aren’t normal,” Mia said. “Isn’t that what cancer is, Dad? Abnormalities of the cells? ‘Proliferations,’ as you like to say? You’re the scientist around here.”
“I’m a physicist,” Arthur Mendelsohn said calmly, “not a biologist.”
“I’ll fail my finals,” she said, half prediction, half threat. “I’m switching my status to pass-fail.”
“Mia…”
“I’m enrolling pass-fail retrospectively.”
“Retroactively,” he said.
“Whatever.” She knew what the words meant. Now wasn’t the time for a vocabulary lesson. “Did you tell Olivia?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“She’s scared. We all are.”
But her father didn’t sound scared. He sounded collected and imperturbable, as he always did. And maybe, Mia thought, that was a good thing; someone had to play that role in the family. “Daddy,” she said, “promise me something.”
“What?”
“Promise me Mom isn’t going to die.”
“I promise.”
She started to sob. It was days, it seemed, before she stopped.
Later that week, she talked to her mother, and her father was right; her mother didn’t want her to come home, either, not until the semester was out. So Mia stayed at school, sullenly passing the time, feeling like an orphan, only worse, because she had a family and they didn’t want to see her and her mother was at home, sick.
“I’m worried about you,” Julian said.
“Don’t be.”
“You need to talk to someone.” He took her in his arms, in a grip so strong she thought she might asphyxiate. She felt her heart beat against him like something caged in, wings batting, slapping against themselves.
She called her mother again, but the conversation was unsettling, for her mother didn’t want to talk about the cancer, which left them nothing to talk about. “Speak to me, Mom. Are you all right?”
“Yes, sweetie. I’m just tired.” Her mother started to cough, and when she spoke again her voice was raspy, as if dice were being shaken in her throat. “I fell asleep for a few moments.”
“It’s three in the afternoon.” It made Mia wonder, Has the cancer spread?
“I’m up all night,” her mother said.
“Worrying?”
Her mother was silent.
“You need to get some sleep, Mom.”
“I sleep during the day.”
Then there was more silence, and Mia realized her mother must have hung up, or maybe she’d fallen asleep again, because a recording came on saying the phone was off the hook and there was an incessant beeping like a car alarm.
That night, Mia lay in bed with Julian and they tried to have sex, but she couldn’t do it. She raged at herself for even thinking about sex and she raged at her mother for having gotten sick and she raged at Julian for simply being there, for falling asleep while she remained sleepless. “Oh, God, why am I burdening you?”
“You’re not burdening me.” He folded her in his arms, tied her in the lanky ribbon of him, and everything was all right while he was holding her. But then he left for the library, to do the things he needed to do, and she started to come unbound.
One night, she woke him at f
our in the morning and got him out of bed. Naked next to her, he stood in the shadows rubbing his eyes.
She said, “Punch me.”
“What?”
“Hit me in the stomach.”
“Are you insane?”
“I want you to hit me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” She wanted to feel something. Or not to feel something. She wanted to prove she was tough.
And when he just stood there not doing anything, she said, “Okay, then I’ll hit you.”
On this, he relented. He tightened his stomach muscles and she hit him, once with each fist, and then again and again. Then they got back into bed and fell asleep, and in the morning it was as if she had forgotten about it.
The next couple of days she pretended to study while Julian went to the library to look up articles about breast cancer. He flipped through the bound copies of The New England Journal of Medicine and Science and JAMA and The Lancet, copying the articles that mentioned new treatments.
Then Mia was going to the library, too, where she looked up breast cancer in the medical encyclopedia and typed “cancer” and “breast” into the computers. There was “bilateral breast cancer” and “osseous metastatic spread” and “malignant neoplasm” and “histologic subtypes” and “suboptimally debulked disease” and “electrophoresis” and “neoadjuvant chemotherapy” and “thrombocytopenia” and “tumor cell necrosis” and “erythrocyte count” and “lymphadenopathy.” She had no idea what these terms meant, couldn’t figure out whom these articles were intended for, certainly not for people like her, and with the change jingling in her pockets, she went downstairs to the copy machines, feeling like a laboratory mouse running through this maze of journals and dictionaries, through this web of incomprehensible jargon.
She laid out the articles on the floor of their bedroom and stamped on the pages as if they were bubble wrap. Then she removed her T-shirt and bra and stood half-naked in front of Julian, hands on her hips, staring at him. “Look at me.”
He did.
“Look at my breasts.”
“Okay.”
“Well?”
“They’re nice.”
“Nice? Julian, you don’t get it, do you?” Everyone she knew had breast cancer. There had been her high school history teacher, and her music appreciation professor first semester at college: one week she was in class, and the next week she wasn’t. And Cynthia, her friend back home, whose mother had endured what lay in wait for Mia’s mother, the enervation and nausea, the wasting away, the hair falling out, the vomiting.
Mia took her finals, quietly, perfunctorily, without complaining or changing her status to pass-fail, and without caring in the slightest.
Now she was home over winter break, sitting in the hospital room across from her mother, who was recuperating from surgery. Her mother dozed off.
“Do you want me to come back later, Mom?”
“No, darling, stay.” Her mother had a hospital bracelet on, a pale plastic thing yoking her wrist, like half a set of handcuffs.
Joan Mendelsohn was small-breasted, and Mia had imagined that as long as her mother was dressed she might not notice the difference. But now she was so intent on not looking at her mother’s chest that it was all she could look at. She glanced away, and when she turned back she focused on her mother’s hair, which was gray and unkempt, shooting out in all directions like stalks of hay.
“I haven’t had a shower,” her mother said.
“Here, Mom, I’ll help you.”
In her bra and underwear, Mia stood behind her mother while she showered, hands pressed against her mother’s shoulder blades. She closed her eyes and soaped her mother’s back and arms, thinking her mother had lost weight, praying that this was the last of it, that after the chemotherapy and radiation the cancer would be gone. “Are you okay, Mom? Is the water too hot?” But her mother was too weak to answer. She ran the shower scrubber across her mother’s buttocks, down the backs of her thighs to her ankles and toes, soap dripping off her mother and onto her as she squatted at her mother’s feet. The steam had fogged the shower up and all that was left was the feel of flesh and skin.
Mia guided her mother back to bed, doing her best to make her comfortable, but seeing she was as comfortable as she could be, she just hovered over her. “I don’t want to go back to school,” she said.
“It’s vacation, sweetie.”
“I mean ever. I’m going to spend all my time with you.”
“I’ll be asleep a lot,” her mother said. “What will you do then?”
“I’ll watch you.” Mia folded back her mother’s sheets. “You used to watch me sleep, didn’t you, Mom? When I was a baby?”
Her mother nodded. A neighbor of theirs had a child who had died of SIDS, and after that Mia’s mother would spend the night reading beside Mia’s crib, looking up every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing. Sometimes she would place a finger directly beneath Mia’s nostrils so she could feel the air coming out. “I counted the days until you turned one.”
“Why one?”
“Because that’s when the risk of SIDS diminishes.”
“And then you stopped worrying?”
Her mother smiled. “Then I moved on to other things.”
“Talk to me, Mom. Tell me stories.” And as Mia, her eyes closed, listened to her mother, she kept thinking, Tell me again, tell me again, conveyed back to when she was small and prunelike, when her mother drove her to day care past the hospital where she lay now, just another building stitched to the sky, a backdrop to the day that lay ahead of her. “Mom,” she said, “will you ever forgive me?”
“For what?”
“I was so insolent.”
“Oh, Mia.”
“Don’t you remember what I was like as a teenager? We fought all the time.”
“I thought it was a requirement that a girl fight with her mother.”
The worrywart, Mia and Olivia had called her, for the smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors she installed in the house, the fold-up ladders in closets in case the family had to escape, the fire drills they were forced to participate in. What other teenager, Mia thought then, was required to run fire drills in her own house? From the instant she was born, she’d been preparing to leave. My little wanderer, her mother had called her. Summers at the beach when she was four, and already she was running off. So her mother tied a piece of twine around her wrist. “Stay in touch, pumpkin,” her mother said.
“We’ll fight again,” her mother said now. “I’m looking forward to having many more fights with you.”
“I don’t want to,” Mia said.
“In that case, we don’t have to.”
Mia stared out the window, at the trail of traffic winding through the city, the vehicles so close to one another it seemed as if they were attached.
“I bumped into Glen’s mother last week,” her mother said.
Glen had been Mia’s high school boyfriend. Her mother had loved him, though Mia herself hadn’t managed to love him, at least not the way he had wanted her to. Yet he was bighearted and handsome, and Mia liked watching him hit tennis balls on the local clay courts and in his varsity tennis matches after school. Sitting with her mother in the hospital room, feeling that everything from the past was better than the present, remembering how fond her mother had been of Glen, Mia thought she should have stayed with him, that as much as she loved Julian, he didn’t know her mother the way Glen did and, she feared, he never would.
“Do you remember when I used to knit?” she said. “I made a sweater for Olivia.”
“It was beautiful,” said her mother.
“It was a little misshapen, but it was all right.”
“Why did you quit, darling?”
She didn’t know. She’d abandoned knitting like everything else, convinced it was time to move on.
“I’ll need a wig,” her mother said.
Mia nodded.
“I don’
t want to wear one.”
“You don’t have to, Mom.” When Mia was a girl, her mother had made her wear hats in the winter. According to her mother, people lost forty percent of their body heat through their heads. Every year the figure went up. First it was forty percent, then it was sixty percent, then it was seventy-five percent. It was as if her mother worked for the hat industry.
“Your hair will grow back,” Mia said, and because she wasn’t sure of this, she said it again.
There were flowers beside her mother’s bed and several more vases on the windowsill. The only cheerful place in a hospital, her mother had once said, was the obstetrics ward. Recalling this, Mia excused herself to go to the bathroom, but instead she went upstairs to obstetrics. The babies lay like take-out orders beneath the warm lights, the boys with blue hats, the girls with pink ones, everything determined already; Mia, hating this, swore that if she ever had a baby she’d have the pinkest boy in the world, she’d have the bluest girl. Her mother was wrong—obstetrics didn’t make her happy—and she ran back downstairs to her mother’s room.
She thought of the nausea that would accompany the chemotherapy. She had never seen her mother throw up. When she got fevers and stomachaches as a girl, when she came down with the flu, when she awoke at three in the morning and vomited, her mother cleaned up after her. That was what it meant to be a mother. And now Mia felt nausea herself.
A week later they got the news. Her mother’s cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. She would begin chemotherapy immediately.
Julian drove up to spend New Year’s Eve with her, but they went to bed before midnight, and were it not for the fireworks outside her bedroom window, she wouldn’t have known what day it was. She heard a distant hooting, like owls celebrating some nefarious feast, and she lay in bed as one o’clock passed, and then it was two and she was still sleepless. She could see the tropical fish swimming in circles in their tank, casting their aqua glow. “Those things never die,” she said. “I neglected them in high school and my parents still neglect them. I think they’re essentially unkillable.” She could hear the rain falling on the roof, tapping its relentless code. “Look at you,” she said. “Your feet stick out.”
Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 8
