On the Road to Find Out (24 page)

“Sylvia,” I said, interrupting, and then felt bad about interrupting.

“Sylvia,” Joan said, nodding.

“And sure enough, your mom was right. Ricardo had to go through radiation therapy and chemo and even a stem cell transplant. He was so strong,” Joan said, and her voice wavered. “It was awful. For him, the worst part was not having that first doctor take him seriously. Ricardo knew his body. He knew what muscle pain was and he knew this was different. Your mom didn't doubt him for a minute.”

She fiddled with her necklace. “He died four and a half years later.”

“Oh god,” I said.

“Before he died, I got to tell him everything I wanted him to know. How much I loved him.” She swallowed. “How he'd helped me to refocus my life, to learn to enjoy things and give up being tortured by my own competitiveness. Even though the treatments were rough, we had Sylvia and your mom with us all along the way. He liked Sylvia, but boy was he crazy about Sarah.”

I wondered where I was during all of this. Ricardo must have been diagnosed around the time Jenni's mom had died. Of cancer. And my mother's own mom had died of cancer.

Joan said, “You may think what she does is cater to wealthy women who care about their appearance, but your mother is one of the finest people I've ever known—smart, capable, and caring. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better role model, Alice.”

 

21

That night, when Mom was reading
Vanity Fair
magazine, I asked, “How do you know Joan?”

She looked at me kind of funny. Then she said, “I can't tell you that.”

“She already told me she was a patient of yours. She also told me about Ricardo. And about what you did for him.”

She turned a page of
Vanity Fair
without reading it.

“I didn't do anything for him,” she said quietly. “I wish I could have.”

“Joan told me,” I said, insistent. “She said you figured out what was wrong with him after his own doctor couldn't.”

She looked in my eyes as if there was something lost in them.

“She told me you were trained in oncology. That's not true. Is it?”

She put down the magazine. She held her hand in front of her and examined her French manicure. The white half-moons on the tips of her fingernails caught the light.

“Yes,” she said, after a long pause. “Originally I wanted to be an oncologist. After my mother died, I was determined to find a cure for cancer. Or many cures for the many different cancers. I was young.”

She glanced up and to the side, as if to excuse her own silly thoughts. Then she continued. “I got into an onc residency at Duke. When I was nearly finished with my third year, Dr. Agrawal, my mentor—the woman I hoped to become—took me aside and said, ‘This is not the right field for you.' I thought she was telling me I wasn't good enough. She said no, it wasn't that I couldn't do the work, but what the work was doing to me. I got too attached to the patients, many of whom were very, very sick. I'd sit with them for too long and run late, and when they died—and most of them died—I'd be destroyed. Residency's no picnic, but I was more ragged than most.”

“Her photo. On your dresser?”

She nodded. “I was Dr. Agrawal's star student. She was a consummate clinician and was also doing important research. I thought I'd have a job with her when my residency was over. She said she wouldn't hire me. She said it would do me in.”

I couldn't imagine my fierce mother not getting a job she wanted. I thought she'd always gotten everything she'd ever wanted. I didn't interrupt, just listened.

“Dr. Agrawal steered me toward dermatology. She said I'd have lots of happy patients and would be able to treat them over many years. She knew how much my mother's death had affected me. She also knew I was always going to choose the hardest path and she thought it was unhealthy. I dismissed the whole idea until she told me dermatology was the most competitive residency to get into.”

She laughed. “Funny, right? I worry about how hard you push yourself and worry that you're never satisfied with anything less than perfect.”

I wondered how I hadn't known this before.

I knew my parents had met at Bowdoin, their cozy college in Maine, and had both gone to graduate school at Duke, where I was born. The only stories I had wanted to hear from them were about me, about after I'd come onto the scene. I hadn't really thought of my parents—especially my mother—as people who had lives before me.

“As it turns out, I love derm,” she said. “I love being able to fix things. Because I've seen so many cases, I can, often in the blink of an eye, recognize patterns and make diagnoses that general practitioners miss. I love that I get to check in with people for so many years, see them grow up and age, hear their stories, become a part of their lives. And, even though I know you don't approve, I like being able to make people feel better about the way they look. It makes them happy, and I'd rather see happy patients than people in pain who are going to die anyway.”

I listened and said, “I never knew.”

She said, “You never asked.”

 

22

The next day, when Jenni and I were at the Coffee Shop after school, I said, “Get this. My mom started out as a cancer doc.”

Jenni said, “Yeah.”

“What?”

“I know. She's told me all about it. She worshipped Dr. Agrawal.”

“
What?
Why'd she tell you, not me?”

Jenni stared into her double mocha caramel cappuccino and blew on it until some foam floated up and landed on the table.

Finally she said, “I don't know, Al. Maybe she thought you'd judge her.”

I stopped eating the chocolate chip scone I'd been craving, the whole reason we'd gone to the Coffee Shop.

“She thinks you don't approve of her. She thinks you look down on her choices—not just about career, but about everything.”

“Since when does Sarah Davis give a hoot about what anyone thinks of her?”

“I guess since she had a daughter who cares even less.”

“When did she tell you all this?”

“Geez, I don't know. Over the past few years. You think we only talk about shoes and makeup, but when we drink coffee in the kitchen while you're playing with Walter”—she broke off, but I motioned with my hand that it was okay—“when we go on shopping trips, mostly what we do is talk. Sure, we look at clothes and we experiment with testers at the Chanel counter, but wandering around department stores gives you a lot of time for conversation.”

“You talk about me?” It came out sounding like an accusation.

“Of course,” she said, and laughed. “You're the most important person in each of our lives.”

I didn't know whether to feel betrayed or flattered. Mostly, I was surprised.

“Alice,” she said. “We love you. And we know you love us in your own sometimes obnoxious and self-absorbed way, though you're better at showing that to me than you are to your mother. You push her away. It's hard for her.”

“You're
my
friend.”

“We talk about lots of things. You don't really like to hear about Kyle and you tend to say mean things about Tiffany. And there's other stuff.” She looked into her cup.

I thought about Jenni's face after her mother died. And about how she didn't like to be at home when her dad was drinking.

“I'm lucky to have her. It's like you and Walter-the-Man. I mean, he's okay, but I find him a little—”

“A little what?” I said, prepared to defend Walter-the-Man.

She hesitated.

“Intimidating. The two of you together are a force of nature. There's no room for anyone else when you guys are going at it.”

She pointed to my scone and said, “Are you going to eat that?”

Even though I still wanted it, I pushed the plate over to her.

 

23

Joan was right: I was not the slowest person on the Saturday-morning group run.

Nikki and Miles and a tall balding computer programmer named Owen, who cracked jokes that were snarky but funny, and a few other guys whose names I didn't learn, were the speedy group, but there were a bunch of other people there as well.

After the first ten minutes the runners spread out and the fast ones got far ahead, though you could hear Nikki's laugh for a long time. I ended up running with Candace, a graphic designer, and Jeff, a professor of economics who used to be fast, he said, but was recovering from knee surgery, and Valerie, who ran a local nonprofit, and Ruth, who seemed to own a lot of property, and David, who was fast but thought the conversation at the back of the pack was more interesting. We ran slow and did a lot of talking.

It was amazing how much easier it was to run with a group. It felt like we'd only been out a short time before we got to the turnaround where Joan had dropped off water and cups. I could not believe how quickly the time passed and how good it felt.

The best thing was that after, when we got back to the parking lot, Candace pulled out a cooler filled with drinks and a tin of homemade treats. The fast people had added on another few miles so we all finished at the same time and everyone stood around refueling with neon-colored sports drinks and peanut butter cookies.

These runners seemed so different, with different body types and different backgrounds and even different systems of belief—when the conversation turned to politics, Valerie started talking about what races were coming up—but they all seemed devoted to being there each Saturday, and to really care about one another.

Miles and I stayed in the parking lot long after everyone else had left.

We were by far the youngest—some of the runners had kids they had to get home to, or gardens to weed, or work to do. But for me and Miles, 10:30 on a Saturday was still when most of our peers were sleeping in. We walked a few laps around the edge of the parking lot, then sat on the warm asphalt.

“Do you really think Joan is a failure?” I asked. I'd been spending a lot of time thinking about this. If the question surprised Miles, he didn't show it.

“She choked during her last race. She lost confidence.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “she changed her focus. Maybe she didn't really want what she thought she wanted.”

“Why wouldn't you want to go as fast as you can?”

“Well,” I said, nibbling on my last bit of cookie, “because there are other things that matter. You can't be fast forever. No one can. ‘Nothing gold can stay,'” I said.

“Can stay what?”

“It's a quote. Google it.”

“Huh,” Miles said again. He was quiet for a while, and I thought we'd bumped into a place where we were going to argue.

“You know,” he said finally, “she's probably made more of an impact with the store than she ever did as a runner. There are lots of people who used to be fast—and then didn't do anything significant with running, except complain about how the new crop of runners isn't good enough.”

We didn't speak again for a while, just sat on the pavement, leaving big wet spots from our sweat-soaked shorts.

“How's the Tater Tot?” I said. “Haven't seen the little guy in a while.”

“He misses you,” Miles said, and then he blushed. “How about a spud run on Thursday after school? We could go out to the Kanawha State Forest and do a longish loop on the trails. Harry says he needs to get out more, that he's in danger of going from a hot dog to a summer sausage.”

“Can't let that happen,” I said. “How long is longish?”

“About eleven, but we'll take it easy.”

Eleven miles? Today I'd done nine and it felt good. Could I do two more?

I wasn't sure, but I wanted to go.

So we agreed I'd pick him up at Harry's and drive us to the forest on Thursday.

 

24

When weeks went by and I never heard back from the rat lady at the college in Boston, I felt embarrassed. I figured she must have thought I was a dweeb to write her such a long and personal message, if she even bothered to read it.

But when I'd finally stopped cringing every time I remembered it, I got a reply from her.

To:
Alice Davis
Subject:
Internship?

Dear Alice,

Rodentiaphilia! I love it!

Thank you so much for writing. I've been out of the country (I had to take my students on a trip to Prague!) and am just now catching up on e-mail. I almost missed this wonderful message from you.

Have you figured out what you're going to do next year? It's too bad that your applications didn't work out, but there are so many wonderful colleges and universities in this country, and so many incredible professors to work with, surely you will have a lot of options.

Here's one you might consider: I could offer you a place in my lab for the fall semester. You could do an internship with us and sit in on some courses while you reapply to colleges. I've mentored students who have gone to graduate school all over the country and I'd be happy to put you in touch with them.

This is also a self-interested offer. I rely on students to help me think through experiments and carry them out. Since I'm at a small undergraduate institution instead of a big research university, I don't have a surplus of labor. I do have a student coming in the spring for the second part of her gap year, so having you in the fall would work out well for me. The undergrads are a great group and you would likely enjoy it here.

Think about it and let me know. It would be easy to find you housing and Boston is a great running town.

Best,
Marnie

I had assumed I'd go to one of the two schools that admitted me, neither of which I was crazy about. I knew I only got into Bowdoin because both my parents went there and have given lots of dough to the alumni fund, and I'm pretty sure I got into Trinity because I wrote my supplemental essay about the dad who had the heart attack during our information session. They probably felt like they owed me something.