by Sigrid Nunez
* * *
—
What gave me pain was seeing him so much older. Not that he’d ever been handsome, but still. The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.
* * *
—
She was just thinking, she said.
Flaubert said, To think is to suffer.
Is this the same as Aristotle’s To perceive is to suffer?
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Alfred Hitchcock.
Sufferin’ succotash. Sylvester the cat.
II
The cancer treatments my friend had been receiving—and which included one course that was still experimental—succeeded beyond what cautious doctors had allowed her to hope.
She was going to live.
Or rather, as she put it, she was not going to die.
Actually, what she said was I don’t have to leave the party just yet.
Now she was swinging between euphoria and depression. Euphoria for the obvious reason; depression because, well, she wasn’t exactly sure why, but she’d been warned to expect it.
It sounds absurd, she said. But after thinking all this time that this was the end, and trying to prepare myself for it, survival feels anticlimactic.
In fact, her first thought upon receiving her diagnosis had been that she wouldn’t accept any treatment at all. When she learned the survival rate for someone with her type of cancer at the stage at which hers had been found (fifty-fifty, according to her research, though her oncologist would not be pinned down), she foresaw a long period of painful and debilitating treatment during which she would be too sick to do anything that could properly be called living and that, in all likelihood, would fail to save her anyway. She had seen it happen too often, she said. So had I. So had we all. Still, we urged her not to give in, we insisted that she must do everything possible to fight the disease. Fifty-fifty: not the worst odds.
And, in the end, it had not been hard to persuade her. She didn’t want to leave the party early. And why not be a guinea pig (over her doctor’s repeated objections, she kept calling herself that).
Only one person did not try to change her mind. Her daughter said simply: It’s your choice.
When I heard this I had a sinking feeling. The two women had a fraught history. Enough bones of contention between us, my friend joked, to make a whole skeleton. She often joked about her relationship with her daughter, partly because humor had always been a strong feature of her personality and partly because it was her way of dealing with difficulty. I remember when her daughter was born: an unusually troubled pregnancy ending in a grueling labor with postpartum hemorrhaging severe enough to require a transfusion—I guess that’s what happens when you bring a monster into the world was how she’d joke about it later.
They lived two thousand miles apart, and although on speaking terms at the time of my friend’s diagnosis (unlike the many times I could recall when they were not), they had not had much contact in years.
I’ve never even met the man she lives with, my friend told me. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear only after the fact that they’d got married.
It’s your choice. It wasn’t for me to judge this response. No need to put the cruelest and most sinister connotation on it, either. But I knew how it might sound to my friend and how much pain it could cause her.
Unnatural is a word that keeps coming to mind when I think about this mother and daughter. For as long as I can remember, there seemed to be only misunderstanding between them. Instances of affection were rare enough when they shared the same roof. Once the daughter moved out, they vanished altogether.
When my friend began a sentence If I had known how it would be, I was certain that she’d go on: I would never have had a child. But I would have tried to have at least one more was what she actually said.
Once upon a time, faced with a child that mystified or repelled because of some trait—illness or disability, lack of affection, bad behavior—parents were only too willing to believe that their real child had been stolen and that the thieves (according to many folklores, most likely devils or fairies) had left a replacement that was really a troll or a devilkin or some other nonhuman thing. Imagine how many times the myth of the changeling has been justification for child abuse: corporal punishment, neglect, abandonment, infanticide even.
Any notion that my friend’s daughter might have been accidentally switched at birth was easily scotched: She had her mother’s fine blue eyes down to the gold rings around the pupils. The same heart-shaped face, the same bowed legs, voices that couldn’t be told apart. But I remember hearing my friend say it more than once: If we were living in the Dark Ages, I’d swear the kid was a changeling.
When pressed, an exasperated sigh. She just doesn’t feel like mine.
Which never failed to chill me.
And when she made the comment—if she’d known how things would turn out she’d have tried to have another child—that too chilled me. But I thought I understood. If she’d had another child, and if she succeeded in having a better relationship with it, wouldn’t that prove that it wasn’t all her fault how badly things had turned out with her daughter? I understood. Or, at least, I tried to.
She would also insist that everything would have been different—meaning better—if her daughter had been a son.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, begins one of the twentieth century’s most famous novels. Often this comes to mind when I hear people talk about their messy lives, especially about their unhappy families.
There was a father, of course. Or rather the ghost of one. They’d been in the same crowd all through high school, and at the end, briefly, just before he was drafted into the army, a couple. When he returned from the war they had tried but failed to make a go of it. The daughter had been, my friend confessed, the result of break-up sex.
We knew it was over, she said. But we weren’t angry with each other, and I had no idea when I was going to have sex again. It was me who insisted on one last time.
The thought of marriage never entered her mind, she said. She was not in love with him, she had never been in love with him—besides nostalgia for high school they had no interests in common—and she had no desire to have this man in her life for years to come. When she told him she was pregnant, she also made it clear that she expected nothing from him. She had wealthy parents, who, as it happened, were more delighted than upset to learn of their daughter’s condition. They had always regretted not having been able to have more than one child themselves. Whatever the circumstances, the promise of a grandchild was cause for celebration.
And since my friend’s boyfriend had returned from the war feeling lost and unsure of just about everything except that he was not ready for fatherhood, he was all for a plan that subtracted him from the story. In any case, he longed to leave his hometown and start a new life elsewhere. He didn’t even wait for the baby to be born before taking off.
A decade of silence ended with news of his death. One day, he and his wife happened to be out driving in the country when they came upon a house whose second floor was in flames and from which, the wife later explained, her husband said he’d heard screaming. He had run into the house and up the stairs and then, overcome by the heat and smoke, suffered cardiac arrest. Firefighters arriving just minutes later were unable to revive him. As for the screams, the wife herself had heard nothing, she said, and it turned out that, at the time of the fire, no one was home.
I should never have told her that story, my friend said. I should’ve pretended all along that I had no idea who her father was.
In the mother’s eyes, the father, insignificant enough to begin with, had diminished with time to practically nothing. For the daughter, absence had only made him loom ever larger, and in death he became a colossus.
Strikingly handsome—
see the high school yearbook. (You’d have expected him to be with someone a lot prettier was one of the sharper arrows in the daughter’s quiver.) A soldier: brave, romantic. A hero who’d sacrificed his life to save strangers from a burning house. A man like that doesn’t simply abandon his own child. And yet she had never met him. She had never even spoken with him.
And whose fault was that?
It broke her heart, said my friend, when she was cleaning out her daughter’s closet one day and found the letters she’d been secretly writing him.
And in which, it seemed, she had poured out all her resentment against mother and grandparents.
I know they didn’t give you a chance. I know what my mother is like and what she’s capable of doing to get her own way.
She hated being the child of a single mother—the only such among her friends when she was growing up. She could never shake her feelings of shame for her fatherlessness. Equally lasting was her hostility toward anyone her mother dated. Though she would never marry, my friend had affairs with several men while her daughter was growing up, and with every one of them the girl had behaved as rudely as possible. It would not be unfair to say that she helped drive some away.
She hated growing up in her grandparents’ house as if she and her mother were siblings. (To be honest, said my friend, I left a lot of the child rearing to my mother, which was how Mom wanted it too, and I really did feel more like an older sister than like a mother myself.) The daughter could not tolerate seeing how well mother and grandparents got along. She was an alien among them, her father’s daughter, not like any of her mother’s people, with whom she could not get along at all.
I will never forgive that woman for coming between us.
That woman of course being me, my friend said.
Love letters was what they were.
She had managed to turn him into a great passion, my friend said. She would’ve sold the rest of us into bondage to spend one hour with him.
And that’s what bothers me most, she said. Okay, hate me. I’m the one who got knocked up and said no to a shotgun marriage, I’m the terrible mother. But what about my parents? All they ever did was love and take care of her, and she made what should have been their golden years miserable. That’s what I’ll never forgive.
If she’d known how things would turn out, she’d have tried to give them another grandchild.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
In middle school, she wrote a poem about her father that included the lines “I was the one in the burning house / I was the one you heard screaming.”
All about what a tragedy her whole life was, her mother described it. This much-loved, much-wanted child who grew up with every conceivable privilege in a world full of suffering, and here she is, acting like she’s an orphan, a refugee, a goddamn boat person. She even had the nerve to call herself that.
“I am an emotional boat person” was another line from the poem.
Her grandparents had also been upset by the poem, in which they were accused of being unfeeling rich snobs, more enemies than loving family.
It was the last fucking straw, my friend said. And then the school went and gave it a prize!
Might as well disclose it here: I never had much sympathy for the daughter. I never liked her. She was, it must be said, an extraordinarily unlikable little girl. I recall how guilty my aversion to her used to make me feel: she was just a child, after all. But I had never before met a child so disagreeable. She lied with the skill of a con artist. She broke her toys on purpose. She stole things that she could have had just by asking for them. She bullied smaller children. When her grandmother gave her a kitten she teased it so relentlessly that it became almost feral.
When it came time for college, she applied only to schools in distant states (She wants to get as far away from me as possible, her mother said, accurately), and later, for postgraduate work, she went farther still and lived for a few years abroad. She had always shown both a gift and a passion for writing, but rather than pursue a literary career (Follow in my footsteps? said my friend. Never happen), she went into business, specifically the business of advising others how to manage their businesses, eventually specializing in hospitality and entertainment. At this she turned out to be something of a whiz, and because it was work that involved a lot of travel, and travel was the one thing she loved more than work itself, and because, thanks to her job, travel usually meant complimentary luxury travel, she had turned out to be happier than we who’d known her as a girl would ever have predicted.
Once she’d established her complete independence from them, her hostility toward her family diminished. Her grandparents’ deaths, which fell one right after the other, triggered feelings of remorse of which her mother had come to fear she was incapable. It would be an exaggeration to say that mother and daughter reconciled—there would never be true peace between them—but there was less tension, and for a few years, at least, they managed to be in each other’s lives in a manner resembling a normal family relationship.
But it was too late. There was too much history, too much bad blood between them. (With typical dysfunctional-family logic, my friend easily forgave her parents for voting Republican but not her daughter, ever.) In the end, it was simply easier to let go, to do without each other. Just as my friend had yet to meet the man her daughter was living with, her daughter had no idea that her mother also had been seeing someone (a man whose interest cooled, however, once it was clear that she might be seriously ill).
This is where things stood at the time of my friend’s diagnosis.
It’s your choice. What a thing to say, my friend said. It’s your choice. Period. Like it was a small thing. Like it had nothing to do with her.
I held her hand, I tried to soothe her. I said, People say the wrong things—
You were smart not to have children, she said.
It was not, by any means, the first time she’d said this to me, but this time it was said with unusual force. Then, as if realizing that maybe she ought not to have spoken so to me: You know, I specifically told other people not to come see me this afternoon because I wanted it to be just us.
I did not have any real news to share so I talked about other things, the usual things, books I’d been reading, movies I’d seen, and how everyone who lived in my building was freaking out because one apartment was reported to have bedbugs. My friend and I had met in our early twenties when we worked at the same literary journal. The editor in chief, our old boss, had died earlier that year, and we talked about him, about our old days at the journal and what its future might be, now that its founder and editor in chief was gone, and I told her about the memorial service, which I’d attended, and which she said that she, too, would have attended had she not been ill.
We talked about other people we knew in common, others we’d first met at the journal, the ones with whom we were still friends, the ones with whom we’d lost touch. The dead. I worried about all this talk about death, some of it about people (like our old boss) who’d succumbed to the same disease now threatening my friend’s life, but it was she who directed the conversation, as she pretty much always did when we were together: it was her way.
Though she was somewhat groggy from medication (and, though she denied it, I believe also in pain), she carried on in the emphatic manner she was known for, unmistakably someone who’d spent a good part of her life behind a lectern. I was reminded that she had always been known for her vigor. She was the kind of person whom others describe as a fighter, a survivor, and it was because of this that we who knew her were surprised when she announced that she intended to forgo treatment. And unsurprised when she changed her mind. She had not been wrong, however, to dread treatment. At first I hardly recognized her. White as an egg and skinny as a chopstick was how she’d tried to prepare me. And minus every strand of what had once been a thundercloud of hair.
About an hour into my visit we were interrupted by her oncologist, a youthful and classically handsome brown man, like a movie star cast as the hero doctor, and I was touched to see how she flirted with him (and how he, subtly, good-naturedly, flirted back) before I was asked to step out of the room. A private room. (You won’t believe what this is costing, she told me, but I couldn’t bear the idea of lying here all day with some roommate watching TV or gabbing on the phone. I can’t stand it even for a few minutes in the lounge. And I, in turn, told her about being in the hospital overnight for minor surgery the year before, and how I’d had to listen for hours to the woman in the next bed phoning updates on her condition to an endless series of people, including her hairdresser, and, weirdly enough, one apparently bewildered person to whom she had to explain how it was that they even knew each other.)
After her doctor had finished his consultation we picked up where we’d left off. Then, all at once, she fell back, exhausted. It was that sudden, as though she’d been shot. She no longer had the energy to talk, but she asked me to stay a bit longer. A nurse came to take blood and my friend snapped at her, I no longer remember what, ostensibly, for. (I don’t like that one was all she said later.) The nurse, the picture of professional poise, winked at me as she went out. They are trained to forgive, in cancer care.
