Growing Girls (17 page)

My
girls. Girls with a history that really only begins with me. Girls taken away. Girls left behind but girls taken away. Was one of those manicurists thinking me wrong and the other setting her straight? Or perhaps the reverse was true: one was saying how laudable it was of me to take these girls from the orphanages, and the other was furious at her for not seeing my crime.

That day at the mall, I wanted to participate. I sat there in that vibrating chair getting my calves massaged and my feet scrubbed and my shame exposed, wanting to explain that there was really nothing to this picture. Really! I was just a mom and these were just my girls and we hang out at the mall and we make jokes about underpants.

Couldn’t we just be that?

By the time BK arrived at the mall, my toenails were dry and my fingernails needed only a few more minutes and BK decided to forget the whole manicure idea anyway. “Let’s get pizza,” she said. She was wearing “Buffy,” her wig. She named the wig as a way of trying to make light of the situation. She was doing better ever since the doctors started pumping her up with antidepressants. She never fought the idea of having to take pills in order to cope.

When BK got sick, we all wanted to help. It was strange because she didn’t seem sick, or at least she didn’t until the day they found the lump. It was sometime midway during the second season of
The Apprentice;
one morning she called me, as usual, to complain about the way they had to dub Trump’s
boardroom speech, only that wasn’t why she was calling at all. “They found something,” she said. I swear she was completely healthy up to that point, but then as more news came in, you could see her start withering, like a potted plant in October.

They told her the tumor was tiny. They said “lumpectomy.” They said maybe she wouldn’t even need radiation, and that she would almost certainly be spared the ravages of chemo.

After the surgery the lab results came in and the story grew considerably bleaker. Her cancer was a particularly aggressive one, and so it would require aggressive treatment. Even with that, the five-year survival rate was low enough to actually become a fact worth mentioning.

We rallied. Nancy, Beth, Chris, Wendy, friends who had helped each other through scores of boyfriend and work and home-remodeling emergencies, but never anything approaching the severity of this. BK didn’t have a husband or kids; we were her family and we felt all the tugs of that responsibility. We called each other a million times. BK was spiraling down. She seemed incapable of the smallest act of helping herself. She stopped eating not as an act of defiance nor even an expression of misery but, simply, because she “forgot.” It was ridiculous. None of us knew what it felt like to have cancer, but we couldn’t understand BK’s surrender, her utter lack of muscle when it came to the fight. We would call each other and whisper our intolerance, release it, then return to battle on her behalf. We imagined ourselves soldiers, brave and tough marines, although none of us ever found the courage to utter a phrase as scary and hideous as “five-year survival rate.”

This was complicated by the fact that earlier in the year the
singer Melissa Etheridge had appeared on stage at the Grammy Awards with her post-chemo bald head singing her guts out with such passion and triumph it made you half want to get cancer so you, too, could see what you were made of and display it in your own chosen artistic form. When BK’s diagnosis came, we all made the Melissa Etheridge link. We told BK to use that performance as her model. We told her to be strong and be cool, like Melissa Etheridge. We told her she might even have the chance to do the world some good, like Melissa Etheridge. Having a friend with cancer was like having your own personal symbol of strength and resolve.

That she was failing to live up to this was confusing and upsetting and disappointing.
Come on, BK. Be strong. What is the matter with you? You have to fight this thing. You have to stand tall
.

In my house we have a little guest room. The walls are lemon yellow, and the ceiling is all bead-board painted glossy white, falling into steep slopes around the bed. I go there when I have the flu. It’s a cocoon. It’s a room that holds you in its embrace until you get good and claustrophobic. I usually come out screaming within twenty-four hours. BK never came out screaming. She would tiptoe out reluctantly, usually just to pee. Weekend after weekend she came to the house and stayed in that room, her escape. It was an odd choice, coming to my house. She had never been the farm type, wasn’t the sort of person who found solace in wide-open spaces. She avoided our baby ducks, and when we bottle-fed our sweet lamb, BK faked a smile. I couldn’t understand any of this. I couldn’t understand a person who wasn’t healed, instantly, by the sight of a baby
lamb. “Or, look at the magnolia tree in bloom!” I’d say. “Look at this beautiful day!”

She would look at me with eyes full of tears. I wasn’t helping. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t helping. In time she became the crazy lady in our attic, a resident to avoid. I finally had to ask her if she thought coming to my place was in her best interest. She said being surrounded by family noise was the comfort. She said her own house was too quiet, no one there making noise but the cats.

One of the things I started doing was arranging outings. I just thought it had to be good to get her out of that room. And there were errands to do. And on Saturday mornings the girls had horseback-riding lessons, which BK did not want to ever attend because horses stink, so she would sleep in and then she would meet up with us afterwards, often at the mall, a place where she felt safe. She was a good little shopper. She had, in fact, already determined that while other aunts would be responsible for introducing my girls to the arts, and the equestrian life, and sports, BK would be “the aunt who taught them how to shop.”

So that’s how BK and I ended up at the food court in the mall that Saturday, like so many Saturdays, and this time on the heels of some manicure confusion. The girls ate their pizza and then went over to climb on the jungle gym ingeniously provided by the food-court design team. BK stared down at her pizza. I told her I was sorry about the missed manicure. She shrugged. The last thing on her mind was nail polish. She shook her head. Back and forth, looking down at her pizza. I was going to tell her about my crisis, my swirling guilt over the
fact that I had no white American guilt, but somehow it all seemed so … privileged compared to her crisis. My friend was a drowning woman. And I was a skinny tan girl standing there wondering if my bikini made me look fat. That was the difference. She had her problem and I had mine, and that was the difference.

“I never thought I would be like this,” BK finally said that afternoon. “I thought I was a fighter.”

“You are a fighter!” I said. Much of my role with her had been that of boxing coach, getting her ready for the next round. “Come on, now!”

She shrugged. I reminded her once again of Melissa Etheridge’s performance at the Grammys. “We should get a tape of that. You know, you need to look to her and borrow some of her strength.”

“I’m
trying”
she said. “That’s the thing. I’m
trying
. Don’t you think I want to be a rock star instead of some scared little girl?”

We both sat on that one for a while. I think she was surprised to finally see things so clearly. “I just hate who I am in this,” she said, as if this were the conclusion, the end of the story. “You know? I’m stronger than this.
lam better than this.”

“So you’re beating yourself up for being a scared little girl?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “Because I’m better than this.”

I sighed. I could see in an instant that the whole Melissa Etheridge strategy had bombed.

I looked over at my girls, who were taking turns jumping off a giant rubber pig. They were not, in that moment, scared little
girls, but I could recall witnessing plenty of recent fear-filled afternoons—an easier and more immediately accessible source of material than all the scared-little-girl days of my own youth. Who doesn’t have a hundred chapters of those? I reminded BK of the day she had accompanied me to the girls’ swimming lessons. Sasha was the little swimmer everyone wanted her to be, a fearless tumbler who would throw herself into the water, leaping like a flying squirrel off the side and landing in a belly flop. People actually applauded. Then there was Anna, sitting there on the edge dangling her toes. Over and over again the instructor pleaded with her to come in, and when she finally did it was only to wade. The instructor showed her how to put her head under water, but the most Anna could manage was to touch that water with her lips protruding into a kind of pathetic kiss. Then she would run out of the pool as if for dear life and sit again on the edge.

“Do you think we should have yelled at Anna?” I asked BK. “Do you think we should have taken her out back and given her a whuppin’ for being scared?”

She smiled, shook her head no, got the point.

“You don’t beat up a scared little girl for being scared,” I said.
“You take care of her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She sat there nodding. I sat there nodding.

“I’m not Melissa Etheridge,” BK finally said. It came out like a big exhale and an apology all in one. Even I felt the relief.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s really okay.”

“I feel like I’m letting a lot of people down,” she said.

“We’re just all trying to figure out how to help,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s okay to be scared,” I said. “It’s really okay.”

“I don’t want to die, okay?” she said.

She sipped her soda and I curled my straw around my thumb, both of us falling into a silence stripped free of the awkwardness of before.

“You know what,” she wisely said, “I don’t think even Melissa Etheridge is Melissa Etheridge.”

“No, probably not,” I said. Fear isn’t something people flaunt.

Even Melissa Etheridge isn’t Melissa Etheridge
. It was a good line. We used it as a mantra for much of the rest of that day, and beyond.

The thing that gets me still is how easy this is to fall into, all this vicarious living. We pick people to act out our fantasies, and we demand a certain standard. The roles are usually those of heroes or villains. (Why bother imagining anything but the good parts?) So we all wanted BK to be a tough girl rock star shouting away her cancer—and a colleague of mine at the university wanted me to be a hapless participant in some white supremacy machine. I’m sure I made for that woman the perfect idiot, a paper doll to hang horrible clothes on and watch bend and go limp under the weight of my own ignorance. And BK made for us the perfect hero, a paper doll to hang cool clothes on and watch on the stadium Jumbotron singing and writhing and sweating and believing.

Oh, well. So she wasn’t that.

Oh, well.

Theory is luxury. Analysis is a dance. Survival—whether it’s a cancer victim, a baby abandoned on a street corner, or a woman desperate to become a mom—isn’t fancy or stylish, political or hypothetical.

BK and I agreed she should go ahead and do her cancer the BK way, and we wondered together what that way was. “There’s a lot of funny stuff that happens,” she said. “I haven’t really allowed myself to laugh yet.”

“That’s a great start,” I said.

We wondered together about Buffy, her wig. Was that really the BK way to do cancer? I told her I figured her as someone who would just go on ahead and be bald. “Or maybe as the baseball cap type.”

“Yeah, that would be more like me,” she said, and she considered whipping that wig off right then and there at the mall.

“But Buffy does look good on you,” I said. “That bob is the perfect hairdo for your head.”

“I
know,”
she said. “I love this stupid wig. Who would have guessed?”

“I
know”!
said.

“Buffy stays,” she said.

“You go, girl.”

I found this announcement on a website run by and for internationally adopted kids now all grown-up and unhappy, or, as they identify themselves, “angry pissed ungrateful little trans-racially abducted motherfuckers from hell.” The group rejects the term
International adoption
in favor of
transracial abduction
, a slight compromise, for the sake of attracting a wider audience, over its preferred
transraclst abduction
. The site offers numerous links to “abduction literature,” and discussions of the ways in which the U.S. State Department is aiding abductions, as well as recommended outlets for “Resources & Revenge.”

I spent a few days clicking, and reading, and clicking, exploring a way of thinking I could have never imagined on my own. It was like lifting a log in the woods and finding a whole new and strange colony of bugs; you stand there marveling at the oddly iridescent colors of those squirming insects, oohing and ahhing and saying, “Good Lord!”