One True Thing (8 page)

“I can’t say how well it’s working yet,” Dr. Cohn said. “I’ll be doing some tests and I’d like to hear how well you felt, Kate, after the first time.”

“She threw up the entire next day. Everything. Every bit of food she ate. And when that was gone she had the dry heaves. Plus her hair is starting to come out all over her pillow.”

Dr. Cohn’s smile was so faint that it was little more than a pucker at the corners of her mouth. “Those aren’t unexpected side effects. But I’d like to hear from Kate about how she’s feeling.”

“It’s not too bad. I do hate the tinny taste. I’m losing weight, although I never thought I’d see that as a problem. And my hair looks pretty awful.” My mother ran her fingers through her thinning red curls.

“Oh, come on, Mama. You must have thrown up ten times the last time.”

“Any pain?” said Dr. Cohn.

“Nothing to speak of,” said my mother.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Ellen,” said my mother.

When Dr. Cohn left I followed her out into the hallway. Her stride was long, and I had to hustle to catch up with her.

“Doctor, I really feel at a loss here. I don’t know enough about what they found during her hospital stays. I don’t know enough about her prognosis, about what to expect. I really need ten or fifteen minutes of your time.”

She put a hand beneath my elbow. “Come,” she said, and walked me back down the hall.

“Privately,” I added.

“I won’t do that,” she said evenly. “This is your mother’s illness. She deserves to be part of any discussions we have about it.” She pushed open the door and walked over to the cubicle.

“Kate,” she said, and my mother opened her eyes and smiled. “Ellen has some questions about your condition and I wonder whether you’d like me to answer them now or to see you both upstairs later?”

“What kind of questions?” my mother said, and for a moment I could not answer.

“About where the cancer started. About whether it’s spreading. About what comes next.”

My mother looked into Dr. Cohn’s eyes and not mine as she answered. She recited like a child called to give an answer in class. “The scan showed it was in the liver. And maybe in the ovaries, too, although they can’t find that on the scans. There’s something in the blood test that makes them think maybe the ovaries are involved. The doctor in the city who looked at the pictures and the slides and gave us a second opinion said that’s highly unusual but not unheard of. Do I have it right so far?”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Cohn.

“What else, Ellen?” my mother asked.

“I just feel as if I need to be filled in.”

“On what?”

I knew what I would have said if the doctor and I had been in the hallway together. I would have said: how long? I would have asked: how bad? I would have wanted a blow-by-blow of disintegration, the road to death. But I could not ask the questions with my mother there. I suspected she already knew the answers, that she’d wanted the same ones I did, and wanted to keep them to herself.

“That’s all,” I said. “I’m going down to the cafeteria for coffee.” Dr. Cohn followed me out.

“I’m the kind of person who likes to know things,” I said.

“So is your mother,” the doctor said. “Why don’t you ask her about some of them?”

Suddenly I stopped and snapped my fingers. “I just thought of something,” I said. “My mother’s parents owned a dry-cleaning shop. Do you think the chemicals there could have caused this?”

“Your father asked the same thing,” Dr. Cohn said.

“And?”

“And your mother said ‘What does it matter now?’”

The only time I saw my mother break down during those weeks was when we were passing through the lobby just as a woman was
rising from a wheelchair at the automatic doors, turning to take a sleeping newborn from the arms of a nurse to carry it out to a waiting car. The baby’s hand was splayed on the swaddling, a pink star, and my mother’s mouth began to work as she stood and watched mother and child move through the doors. “Ah,” she breathed, and she pressed a tissue to her face.

Within weeks she knew the names of all the nurses, their family backgrounds, the ages of their children. As she waited they would smile and say her name: Good morning, Kate, how are you? Just a moment more and we’ll get you in. And naturally, the county being what it was, they knew us. One of them had a son who had gone to school with my brother Jeff. Another had a daughter on scholarship at Langhorne. “She says your father is one of the best professors there,” she said. “She says when you get an
A
from him it really means something.”

“She is absolutely right,” my mother said.

“I remember when you won the essay contest,” said a nurse named Gina as she ran a needle into the catheter the doctors had implanted just above my mother’s heart so that the nurses wouldn’t have to hunt around for veins. “The Port-A-Cath will be a lifesaver later,” she’d said to me. “For the morphine.”

“The morphine?” I’d asked.

“Well,” she’d said, looking down at a tray of instruments, “maybe not.”

Usually the two of us were alone, but one morning, I remember, there was an elderly woman who described in detail her hip replacement and the subsequent convalescence which had cast a long shadow over her life. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she asked my mother why she was there. “I need a chest X ray for a life-insurance policy,” my mother replied.

“If I had told her the truth, I would have been there forever,” my mother said after her treatment was done that day.

The woman could not have been from Langhorne, or she would have known about my mother’s illness. Everyone in town did. They were all a little too bright, a little too chatty when she
went to Phelps’s hardware or the supermarket. “How nice that Ellen’s home,” they said, but no one asked what I was doing there, because they already knew. “How well you look, Kate,” they lied. Lord, I thought, what a shock it would be if any of them ever had the guts to lean across a counter and say, “How’s the cancer?” But despite the scarves and hats my mother began to wear over the ruin of her pretty curls, despite how thin she became, I never heard the word “cancer,” not ever, until after the cancer was gone.

The only person who used the word was Mrs. Forburg, my senior English teacher. One day soon after I came home I received a note in the mail addressed to me in her angular vertical script. It was short and straightforward, just as she was. “Ellen dear,” she wrote, “I think of you fondly and often, not only because of your mother’s illness but because of your own responsibilities. Would you come to dinner soon? My own mother died of cancer when I was young and perhaps we could be of help to each other. All love, Brenda Forburg.”

I tucked it in a corner of my desk blotter and took it out from time to time to call. But there never seemed to be the time.

For despite the chemotherapy, and the days afterward when I could hear her heaving pitiably in the master bathroom, despite the weekly blood tests and exams, I suspect that my mother would have said that those were wonderful and full months for her. She and her daughter finally had the relationship she had always imagined would accompany the canopy she had made for the four-poster bed in the attic bedroom, the scrapbooks she kept of report cards and literary magazine poems, the hours she spent on birthday parties and Care packages to college and camp.

We went to the movies, took a day trip to the beach, ate lunch a few times at little restaurants whose ads she had clipped from magazines and newspapers. She got tired very easily, and once or twice the way she breathed made me frightened. But she refused to be housebound, or to let me be.

“What exactly are you doing all day?” Jules asked one night
when she called to regale me with the stupidity and arrogance of the Yale man who had my former job.

“I’m being a girlfriend,” I said.

“Picking over the perfidy of men?”

“Shopping,” I replied.

I suppose today that I should say that those months were wonderful for me, too, a chance to make amends for a lifetime of taking for granted. The truth is that while it was happening I tolerated it, and when I thought about it I hated it all. In the beginning I thought it was because of all that I was missing, because of the life just an hour away that was passing me by, in the city where you could become yesterday’s girl in a weekend.

But it was more complicated than that, and simpler, too. As my mother guided me to the right sort of wax for the cherry bow-front chest or sent me out to buy cheese or berries, I felt as though I was sinking beneath the weight of a life I had always viewed with something even more dismissive than contempt, a life I had viewed as though it were a feature in
National Geographic
, the anachronistic traditions of a distant tribe.

It was a world without men, too, with my brothers gone away and my father scarcely there, letting my mother take care of her own disintegration as she’d taken care of her house, her children, the life which she had devoted to him.

“I know what you’re saying,” I told Jules. “I know someday I’ll be able to walk away from this. But what if I just get back into it again? What if I marry Jon and it turns out that what he really expects is a suburban matron who knits sweaters for his children?”

“What Jon will want in his first wife is the kind of woman who runs charity luncheons and hires good staff. His second wife will be the trophy wife, the one who designs jewelry or something and wears leather pants.”

“You’ve just reduced three lives to a set of clichés,” I said. “And one of them is mine.”

“True clichés, El. And I’m betting that one of them won’t be
yours. I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on Jon, but how often has he called you? How often has he written? When will he come to visit? Your mother needs you and you need him and he’s nowhere to be found.”

Jules was right; Jon had called only twice since I had come home. But I did not care much. The Ellen Jon knew was the other Ellen, the one who always shone with the luster of success. The Ellen who sat in the hospital corridor with Kate Gulden was inevitably a loser; after all her triumphs, this endeavor was doomed to failure.

One afternoon in early October we went to the big mall outside of town and across the racks at one store my mother saw a woman who had once been part of the group that decorated the village green for holidays—the Minnies, they called themselves, after the childless Mrs. Langhorne.

“Oh, Ellen, do you remember Sheila Fenner? She was in the Minnies when you were in high school.”

“And I miss it,” said Mrs. Fenner. “But I’m a working woman now, and there’s no time for anything but the grandkids and Bill’s dinner, and even that comes out of the microwave. But look at you, Kate, you’re a shadow. When did you lose so much weight? You’re a bone.”

“Oh, you know,” said my mother shrugging. “Running around. Keeping up with Ellen.”

“Weight Watchers?” said Mrs. Fenner archly.

My mother looked at me sideways. She knew what I would say if left to my own devices: “No, Mrs. Fenner, it’s the chemotherapy plan. A delicious shake for breakfast, one for lunch, an IV in your chest at teatime, and before you know it you weigh ninety pounds.”

“No,” said my mother, “I hate those plans. The food is just awful.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you,” Mrs. Fenner said. “And Ellen. Jill said she saw your byline in a magazine a while ago. That must be terribly exciting.” I smiled. “Jill’s husband is at Cornell Medical
School. I wish he’d finish up so they could get out of the city. I just worry terribly. Where do you live?”

“Greenwich Village,” said my mother.

“Lovely. And how are the Minnies?” added Mrs. Fenner, in the slightly condescending way we speak of the lives whose usefulness we have outlived.

“I’m having them over for lunch next week,” my mother said.

H
ow I remember that lunch for the Minnies. Years later, when I was on call at the hospital, when my scalp began to feel rank and gritty and my face slack after a night of screaming and suffering and pleas for painkillers on the medical wards, I would try to gauge my fatigue and always I would come back to the same basis for comparison: I was as sweaty and drained as I had been at the end of the day I cooked for those women, the day I learned how much work it took to make lunch for ten, or at least to do it the way my mother did.

The day before, she sent me shopping, and when I returned she laid her ingredients out on the kitchen counter: the chickens, the zucchini, some cream, some carrots, I can’t recall exactly what else. I was in the basement loading the dryer and I heard her making clanging noises, pulling pots and pans out of the lower cupboards, the tympani of my childhood. I could conjure up winter evenings at my desk, writing in my journal or taking notes on index cards, hearing that
crash-bang
and knowing that the engine of my world was running smoothly.

“I can do that,” I said, as I came upstairs. My mother was squatting, the top half of her inside a cabinet, looking for a lid in the back. When she emerged she was clutching it triumphantly. “I should have redone this kitchen years ago,” she said, getting to her feet, using the edge of the counter for support, panting a bit.

“I can do that,” I repeated.

“You can make a chicken paillard and zucchini soup?” she said. She lifted her big stockpot onto a back burner and began to fill it with water from the tea kettle. “I should have redone it years ago,” she said, as though to herself. “At least I would have had a sink deep enough to put a pot in.” Then she turned, hand on her hip, narrowed her eyes and looked at me.

For just a moment she looked hard, calculating, as though she was sizing me up. Then she wiped her hands on a dish towel and sat down in one of the chairs at the oak table. She was wearing a big blue butcher’s apron; she untied it, pulled it over her head, and handed it to me.

“The torch is passed,” she said. “Take the chicken and put it into the pot with a carrot, some peppercorns, a stalk of celery and a handful of parsley and cover it with water. And put the kettle on for tea. You can’t cook without tea.”