Live a Little (10 page)

I am.”

“Cancer,” Sue whispers.

“Yes.”

“Oh, my ever-loving goddess—”

“Why are we whispering?” I murmur.

“You better save this woman,” Sue goes on in fierce sotto voce as if she hasn’t heard me. “Because she’s the best god-damn friend in the world, and a loving mother, and a creative . . . creative, fuck,
spirit
. . . so if you think you can just do this to her, I’m here to tell you—”

“Sue! Just listen!”

“
I won’t stand for it!
” Sue nearly shouts.

“I don’t have it,” I say.

“What?”

“I said I don’t have cancer.” The words make me feel a little giddy. And guilty, of course. Super guilty.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they gave me somebody else’s test results. Then they realized the mistake. She has it. I don’t. End of story.”

“How does
that
happen?” Sue’s round, freckled face is stormy. “You should sue their ass! For scaring you!”

“Well, there’s more.” I wait a moment while two construction workers with hefty guts squeeze past us to a corner table. I lean in close enough to shift Sue’s Raphaelite curls with my breath. “I haven’t told Phil and the kids yet. Or my mom. Or Laurie and Ren.”

As I say this, I feel my face freeze in a weird parody of a smile. It’s like I’m talking about somebody else, living out one of those sad-sack stories in the
National Enquirer
where the one-legged guy loses his sprinkler-factory job and doesn’t tell his Dairy Queen–clerk wife and seventeen kids until after the bank has foreclosed on the trailer.

“Haven’t told them,” Sue repeats slowly. Then her face brightens. “Hey, it’s okay, since you’re fine anyway!”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

I draw a deep breath. Clarity is everything when it comes to deception. “I told them I was
sick.
”

The gray pearls cloud over. Sue is looking at me in a way that does not say
friend
or
mutual respect
or
remember that time in Cancún when we screwed the Canadian Football League twins?

“It’s just that. . . Okay, listen, I tried! I cooked dinner, and we sat down and I tried to tell them the doctors got the results mixed up, and honest to God, Sue, they didn’t believe me! They didn’t listen!”

Sue’s face is still stormy. I see that I am going to have to dig deep.

“Here’s the thing: The timing has been off. First Phil and the kids shanghaied me into bed. I was planning to try again last night, but then Laurie called and harangued me for, like, fifteen minutes about God knows what, and then she told me something Ma said about me and the cancer that really pissed me off, and by the time I got back to the table, the kids had taken off for their friends’ and Phil was watching the game and it just didn’t make sense to tell them then.” With great effort, I cut off the flow of word dung and just let it sit there steaming in front of us.

“What complete bullshit,” Sue says quietly.

“Sue!”

“Well, it is. You just found out that you
don’t
have cancer, and you’re letting your family think you do? Quel, I’m worried about you, I really am. I’m more worried than if you had cancer, girl, because this is so not normal, it is scaring the crap out of me. This is
sick,
Quel. Really, really sick.”

“I know.” I do. I do. I am going to tell them. It is insane to let this go on just because Laurie will lose her show, Ma’s being her usual hard-ass self who needs to remind me on a regular basis what a prototypical fuckup I am, the kids are treating me like a goddamn queen because they think I’m dying, and Phil thinks he owes me because he hasn’t fulfilled the feel-up quota since Donohue ruled daytime TV.

I work at the knot in my throat. “Sue, I know it sounds bad, but there’s more. I went on Laurie’s show last week and talked about my diagnosis. They did a telethon and everything! They had a corporate sponsor!
I
had a corporate sponsor! On TV! And don’t ask me why, but the audience loved my ass—like, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of love! So there’s a lot of money on the line here, and frankly, I don’t know what to do about it. There’s this BC support group that’s getting all these programs started with the donations, and Laurie could maybe lose her job over this if they thought I faked it, plus her ratings have tanked, and if this comes out now . . . I guess what I’m saying is, it’s complicated.”

Sue’s eyes narrow to slits. When she does this, she looks like Judi Dench, all stern and Church of England and intimidating. Predictably, I collapse under the pressure.

“I know what I’ve done is really wrong—yeah, I know, it’s unforgivable. It’s just . . . Yeah, okay, I’m going to fix it. Tonight. When I get home. I mean, as soon as Phil gets home from the gym and Micah finishes baseball practice and Taylor is done studying after volleyball. Then I’ll tell them.”

“You better. Or I’ll do it.”

“You would,” I say sourly. I know she is dead serious. If I don’t tell them soon, I’ll come home one day and find her sitting at the kitchen table with Phil and the kids, everyone shaking their heads in aggrieved consternation while they plot my stay at Shady Acres and divvy up my miniature Snickers collection.

“Hey, Sue!”

A sleek reed of a woman slides up to our table. She has a cap of dyed apple-red hair and is wearing black from head to toe: black crocheted poncho, black tank top, black studded belt, black skinny jeans tucked into black wedge boots in crinkly, fashionably abused leather. She looks about fifty, her skin and body and voice cigarette-cured down to bone.

“Hey, Saskia. It’s been ages,” Sue says. The women hug, and I pick at my salad, grateful for the reprieve.

“How’s the restaurant?” Saskia says.

“Good. The
Chronicle
updated our review, and it was good. They said the stacked crepes—I love this— ‘are lighter than freshly fallen snow.’”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Oh, Quel, this is Saskia Waxman. She runs a gallery South of Market”—Sue widens her eyes at me, needling me, as always, to promote my dubious (and increasingly untested) talent—“Saskia, this is Raquel Rose. We went to college together a hundred years ago. It’s so fortuitous, us running into each other like this, because I was going to introduce you anyway. Raquel’s an amazing sculptor and visual artist. She has a studio on the Peninsula and has been talking to some galleries about a show,” Sue improvises shamelessly. “You should really see her work.”

“Oh, I’m sure Saskia has other projects going on right now,” I say quickly. “But thanks for the suggestion, Su
san.
” I kicked Sue’s shin under the table, wincing as she kicks me back.

“What are you working on?” Saskia Waxman says bluntly. The woman’s eyes are hazel and cold, with no buffer between her gaze and the mechanical precision of her thoughts.

I feel my mind—sluggish and atrophied from so many years of nonartistic work that centered on provision of frozen food, cycling of laundry, and minivan travel—contort itself, grappling for purchase on something compelling and comprehensible to say. No thoughts coalesce in the dim space upstairs, but my mouth moves anyway.

“Right now I’m doing a series of plaster casts of women’s torsos,” I hear myself say. “Women with breast cancer. All the women have had lumpectomies or mastectomies. I use plaster-of-paris strips for the mold and seal it in gesso, but they’re embellished with mosaics or decoupages that symbolize the, um, identity politics of breast-cancer treatment. I’ve done a couple in bronze patina and even one fountain”—the lies are flowing so freely that I almost believe I have indeed fashioned a fountain out of some poor woman’s papier-mâché nipples—“my idea is that while society focuses on what these women—we—have lost, physically, that is, the women have gained much more in the search for self than they’ve, as I said, lost,” I finish rather lamely.

Saskia Waxman’s feline eyes glow. “This is personal, your plaster casts,” she says with calm assurance. Again, as with Ross Trimble’s awareness of my diagnosis, my not-cancerdriven sixth sense kicks in, and I know she herself has survived the disease.

In a flash, I see the string of numbers on
Living with Lauren!
’s computerized pledge tracker, and I know what I have to do.

“Yes,” I whisper. Sue’s gray eyes widen further.

What have I done?

My hand comes up involuntarily to stroke my long, thick wavy hair back from my forehead, as if in anticipation of its impending absence.

“Yes,” Saskia Waxman echoes. We lock eyes like would be lovers who once made out briefly and find themselves together again in another stolen moment. After a second, Saskia manages to snap out of it and pull herself together.

“I’ll send a messenger to pick up your portfolio.” She hands

me her card. “You’ll e-mail me your address?” “Perfect.” “It’s been really nice meeting you, Raquel. I can’t wait to

see your work.” She turns to Sue. “Darling, I want to book

something for Jacob’s birthday.” “Just e-mail me, and I’ll talk to the reservationist myself.” “Great. See you.” We watch as Saskia Waxman’s trim backside and dark presence disappear behind a wall of matzo boxes and gefilte fish. “Fuck,” I say too loudly. The construction workers look up at me, corned beef stuck in their teeth. “Double fuck,” Sue concurs.

CHAPTER 7

Francis Hale’s Manicure

The waiting room is comfortingly bland, wallpapered with smears of asylum-approved salmon and sage that smother dark thoughts, and filled with the sort of nubby-upholstered chairs that never show wear, no matter how much effluvia spills on them. Nice magazines, not random or dog-eared or germy-feeling. Firm yet caring receptionist with subtle, not tacky highlights. Kleenex for the teary. Soothing music.

I am a nervous wreck.

Phil is downstairs somewhere, hopefully prowling the flower shop or watching TV or sipping watery coffee in the hospital cafeteria. At any moment he could show some uncharacteristic initiative and breach the office of Samuel Meissner, M.D.—down the hall and to the left fifty feet—and unearth my moral depravity. Or he could get lucky and stumble into the restful interior of the oncology office I selected at random because I liked the combination on the nameplate: Lourdes Ruiz-Milligan, M.D. This is where I currently wait out my sentence, clenched in terror at my own audacity.

You see, it is one thing to decide you are going to temporarily not correct your family’s misapprehension that you have cancer while you swan about raising money for the cause. It is another thing entirely to continue as if the wheels of Western medicine are churning onward with your treatment regimen.
That
is some kind of tricky.

“Is this your first time seeing Dr. Ruiz?”

I put down the
Dwell
magazine I was fiddling with. The woman sitting next to me is about my age, freckled and blowzy in that Shelley Winters way. Her red hair is pulled back in a careless knot. It is flattened on one side. I notice this at the same time I realize that her velour sweatsuit has the pilled, shiny look that comes from sleeping in your clothes.

“Yes,” I almost whisper. For some reason, deceiving this woman, a stranger, presumably one with actual cancer, feels worse than lying to Phil, Ma, the kids, or Laurie’s old-lady viewers as they scratch out spidery signatures in checkbooks. I want to help this woman somehow, take her home and launder her clothes, or go to a salon for one of those blowouts so sleek you can’t help but feel important and nurtured afterward.

“What are you here for?” the woman asks. She pops open her purse and fondles a king-size bag of nutless M&M’s. In stark comparison to all other aspects of her person, her manicure is flawless, her nails long, arched, and coated in coral enamel.

“Sentinel node biopsy.” I have done my research. This dye test for lymph node involvement is the latest if not the greatest. It is also the best way to stop Phil from trying to come in with me, since it can be done under local anesthesia and isn’t as nauseating as chemotherapy or as momentous as tumor removal. In other words, it is the perfect way to keep Phil out of the doctor’s office and roaming the hospital, waiting for me to stumble out, frail and ripe for emotional succor.

The woman nods and gives me her hand. “Frances Hale. Stage three, two-neu-positive, lymph-node-positive.” She takes in my wedding band. “Do you have kids, honey?”

“Two.”
Hellion One and Tasmanian Devil Two,
I don’t say. “You?”

“Five boys.” Frances Hale pauses with practiced good humor. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. The twins are mama’s boys, and the older ones are away at school. And I have some help.”

My promise to gallery owner Saskia Waxman to show her my (fictitious) series of plaster casts pops into my mind. A bubble of excitement fizzes in my chest. I recognize the feeling as the one I used to have as an artist when I figured out the missing crucial element in understanding a piece.

Frances Hale’s manicure.

Those nails are that single, uncompromising act of resistance that says,
You can attack my body, decimate my blithe sense of normalcy, burgle my will to do laundry, even murder my marriage, but you cannot take away my conviction that I deserve to be adorned.
To be gilded. To be cherished. To be
honored.