The Girl With Nine Wigs (6 page)

When Sue and I get home my mother is as tense as an electric wire. All her muscles seem to have contracted, making her look like a statue. I think it's her way of keeping out the demons. It's strange how fear can make people look ice cold on the outside while they are actually boiling hot with love on the inside.

Suddenly the phone rings. I stopped answering it a few months ago—all the well-meaning chitchat is just too much for me—but I'm standing right next to it, and my arm instinctively picks it up. It's Dr. L. My entire body breaks out in a cold sweat and sends my heart racing. The world shrinks to the corner of the kitchen where I'm standing. Everything around me goes silent, only to silence: the conversation between my mother and the neighbor who came by a few minutes ago with fresh flowers, but also the sounds from the street outside. Only my breathing and the sound of Dr. L's voice remain.

“Well, Sophie, I've taken a look at the photos straightaway. The official report will follow, but…” Then there is a long and complicated story that I can't follow. He seems to have forgotten that I'm the unwilling patient and don't share his scientific passion. He pauses.

“Is it good?” I ask tensely.

“Yes, Sophie, it's good.”

A long, deep sigh. “Are you satisfied?”

“Yes, Sophie, I'm satisfied, but we're not out of the woods yet. There's a long road ahead of us.”

Screaming erupts in our kitchen. I put my hand on my head, stroking Sue, thanking her in silence.

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 2

T
ODAY WAS ACTUALLY A REALLY
nice day. It passed by without scary thoughts, and I just
enjoyed
being home. I don't recall being home ever being such a treat.

It was just Mom and me at the house. My dad was unwinding in a rowing tournament for veterans, and my sis had left for a romantic weekend with her still perfect boyfriend.

Mom walks up and down the stairs, cleaning, rearranging, cooking. She is always on the move. Someone must have told her when she was little that sitting still and leaning back is something that we do at night in bed, and if we are lucky at the very end of the day when everything that could be done is done.

But my being ill affected the household. She seems much more relaxed now. Although I assume she runs even faster up and down the stairs the weeks I'm at the hospital.

I'm sitting on one sofa watching a movie while the rain is attacking the high windows that overlook the canal. Mom sits on the other sofa, not fighting the stairs anymore, and sorting out her collection of little soldiers. Mom has all sorts of collections of antiques. When Sis and I were still small she had her own antique shop two streets up. Almost everything in our house has been found in antique shops or markets. Before Mom professionalized her hobby, she flew around the whole world as an air hostess for KLM in a smart blue suit. She left home quite early, eager to see the world and eager to close a certain door behind her, the one of her parents arguing too often. In those years, being an air hostess came with many advantages: luxury hotels, enough days to visit and enjoy the destinations, and serving her favorite actor, Robert Redford, another glass of champagne.

It's where she met Maud, one of her friends I like most. Maud once told me that she was intrigued by my mother, who wore red lipstick and permed her hair even though KLM rules restricted it. It's only when I see them together and they start laughing or digging up memories that I realize my mom has been a girl too.

 

SUNDAY, APRIL 3

I
T'S BUSY TODAY ON
the Noordermarkt. Shoppers, vendors, bread, mushrooms, flowers, crowded terraces, apple pie. Sun and blue skies galore. I arrive outside Café Winkel just before one o'clock. Today I'm Daisy, light and careless. I feel as energetic as a squeezed lemon, but Daisy is full of laughter and life. That's what I call an easy pick. Wearing a pair of large black sunglasses, a black hairband, and a mane of long blond curls, I scan the terrace for a boy I'm meeting named Jurriaan. Like me, he was diagnosed with cancer when he was twenty-one. Today he's twenty-six and full of energy.

Beneath one of the umbrellas on the terrace, a young man sits reading the newspaper. I take off my sunglasses.

“Are you Jurriaan?”

The young man looks up. “No.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.” I walk on and take a seat farther up the terrace.

“Sophie?” I look up into a set of dark eyes. “Hi, I'm Jurriaan. Have we met before? You look familiar.” That's nice to hear after the big transformation.

He takes a seat next to me. Three kisses on two cheeks. Jurriaan is wearing a blue T-shirt, not too baggy. The perfect cut to show off a great body. A pair of Nikes on his feet, a satchel full of records on his shoulder. Messy hair framing a beautiful face. It's difficult to imagine he once walked the streets with a bald head and eyes without eyebrows. Mine are almost all gone by now. I take another good look at his full eyebrows and long curly lashes. Looks promising. I had no idea that eyebrows have such a significant task in a face. With them nearly gone my face looks like an unfinished painting.

We order mineral water and decide to share an apple pie with whipped cream. The hospital will be happy to see me eating. Anything really; as long as I eat. They don't put much stock in the old saying “You are what you eat.” I'm in a constant debate with my nurses because every cancer diet—no matter how much they vary—predicts that cancer feeds on sugar, meaning I avoid sweets as much as possible. But today is an exception. Today is the day I meet Jurriaan.

“Jurriaan—”

“Please, call me Jur.”

Must be a fellow-cancer-patient privilege
.

“Was it bad?”

“Yeah, you could say that. The chemo wasn't working and neither was the radiation. In the end they managed to contain it.”

“Contain it?”

“Yeah. The doctors can't quite explain it.… It just stopped spreading.”

“Oh. But is it gone?”

“No, it's still in my body. Like I said, they can't really explain it.”

I tell him my diagnosis and what the doctors think my chances are. “I try to take it day by day, but…”

“Sophie, it's rough, and it's going to be a long process before you get better. You know as well as I do that one good scan doesn't mean you're healed. The best thing you can do is try to find some peace.”

“Maybe, but I'm still terrified. Sometimes I can't handle the fear. It gets so overwhelming.”

“Don't let the fear get to you. You can't face everything all at once. Try to break up your fear. The fear of being alone, of dying; fear of the pain and of everything you'll miss out on. Just the way you take your illness day by day, face your fears day by day. If you break it down and see each fear for what it is, you can overcome them.”

“Did that work for you?”

“Yes, and it will work for you, too. You're strong, anyone can see that. I'm sure you'll get through this.” Jur makes it sound so easy. His dark eyes look at me intently. So intently that I lose everything around me and nothing else exists but him.

“You know, you can always call me. Even at night. I know what you're going through.”

After two hours Jur is the first to get up to leave. I could have stayed much longer, but I keep that a secret. I watch him as he crosses the now-deserted square. My heart is still beating fast from our conversation. I never expected a cancer buddy to come in such a nice-looking package. In two hours he took away all my loneliness of the past two months. I could eat apple pie à la mode with this guy every day.

 

MONDAY, APRIL 4

B
ACK IN THE SEVENTIES,
my father used his inheritance to purchase a run-down seventeenth-century canal house in Amsterdam. It soon turned out to be a good investment. He moved in with five friends and they all renovated it together, and now each of them has their own tile engraved in the hallway: Ton (my father), Raymond, Henk, Mark, Geert-Jan, and another Ton. Loes, my mother, was the last tile to be added. My parents' romance started just a few houses down from ours, where Mom used to live before my father snatched her away from her basement apartment.

Visitors compare our house to the house where Anne Frank was hidden because of all the stairways and unexpected corners, but it was still just a construction site when they fell in love. The staircases hadn't been built yet, and the house was filled with construction debris. Every night they would climb three stories up ladders to the top floor and fall asleep on a pile of cement bags.

The rest of the group moved out when my mom's first baby bump appeared. Sis came, and three years later I was born, in what is still my parents' bedroom. Sis and I were soon followed by three cats: Keesje, Tiger, and Saartje. Keesje was sent to a “petting zoo” early on. My parents couldn't bear to tell their little girls the truth, even though that cat was meaner than mean. Tiger got run over when he was only three; cause of death: two collapsed kitty lungs. Fifteen-year-old Saartje is the survivor. Her sight isn't as sharp as it used to be, and unfortunately she suffers from dementia, which could explain her poorly calculated attacks on passing Rottweilers.

*   *   *

Some colors just don't match, but my father's never been able to see that. This morning he pulled on an apple green shirt with an olive green jacket.

“For a special occasion!” he says. Bless him. The occasion in question is dropping me off at the hospital again.

These days he hates to shop; he can't be bothered. But it was different when he was younger. Back then he had a mustache at least twenty centimeters long that curled up at both ends like Dalí's. Before he went to sleep each night he clamped the ends with two clothespins to keep them curled. And when he went to parties he brought his “pet” with him: a stuffed crocodile on roller skates with a leash around its neck. My father pulled him around all night long, dressed in striped boat shirts with an Italian silk scarf around his neck. Both the mustache and the crocodile are gone now, but all the rest has stayed.

When my father met my mother she was still running her antique shop. In the evenings she worked for a fashion designer, sewing costumes and evening dresses. By the time my sister and I were born, she had swapped her fishnet stockings and cowboy boots for pencil skirts and vintage heels. I don't know if it's Amsterdam or them, but I've come to realize that my parents are kind of cool. Nothing's ever been taboo in our house. Although it's easier to talk to my mom about stuff, my father turns everything into a joke, not leaving much untouched either. Like the other day in the hospital when I went to pee and he waited in the hallway for me, and I discovered my pubic hair was now parting from me too.

“I wonder if they sell bunches of pubic hair at the wig store?” he joked.

“Or maybe they'll throw some in for free with the purchase of a wig?” I replied.

“The colors do need to match of course.”

“Of course.”

*   *   *

For the same occasion for which my father wears his green ensemble, I have put Sue on my head and packed Blondie and Daisy—in the hospital I prefer to blend in rather than stand out. I've left Stella home, whom I haven't taken out in months. On the way to the hospital it's always a bit quiet in the car, because we have to prepare ourselves for Dr. L, rhabdomyosarcoma, fear, and all the other misery the hospital has to offer.

But the moment I set foot in the building I switch gears, and the only thing on my list is survival. Despite the ward smelling like chemo and death, I do feel safe in the hospital. It's a small and lonely world but also a cozy and warm one. That switch gets me through my hospital days but makes the distance between my two worlds feel greater than ever. In the hospital I'm a girl too sick for her age, seeing time pass by while lying in bed. But the outside world is so full of life, being so many women at the same time and being occupied with only one thing: having a good time.

Today I get to see the images from my scan. There's a series of small, dark images hanging in front of me that Dr. L has clamped to his projection screen.

Dr. L laughs when I walk into his office as fierce Sue, and then turns to the matter at hand: my lungs. I can see it for myself, the tumors are smaller. The contour of my right lung shows much fewer abnormalities than it did two months ago, when the battle had only just begun. The pleura around my left lung runs in a curve so nice and smooth I could copy it with a compass. The fleece around my right lung, however, is not geometric in the least. It looks like spaghetti with some odd pieces of ravioli. The biggest ravioli is down low, close to my liver. I named the three hanging around the middle of my lung “Huey,” “Dewey,” and “Louie.” There's a loner up at the top, hidden deep behind my right breast. I christened him “Naughty Norbert.” “Rhabdo” means rod-shaped, “myo” means muscle tissue, and a “sarcoma” is a malignant growth. In a myosarcoma, the tumor cells attach themselves to the body's soft tissue. It can be connective tissue, muscle tissue, or any other type of tissue. This kind of cancer can occur anywhere in the body but usually occurs in the arms and legs, due to the diagonal tissue that makes up those muscles, and occasionally leads to amputation. I count my lucky stars that my cancer cells are swimming around my lungs.

On the scan the abnormalities are not much bigger than a needle point. In the first scan, the largest tumor was the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Now it's half that. The fact that the tumors are attached to an organ and that that organ is a lung pretty much rules out an operation. That gives me one less weapon to fight with, but there's always radiation.

There are three discernible stages of my disease, and Dr. L tells me I fall in the middle category. Not the toughest group, but not the easiest either. Unfortunately, because my disease is so rare, scientists haven't been able to collect much information on the cause or the recovery process. Most believe it to be caused by an abnormality that developed when I was still just an embryo, but no one can tell me why this abnormality has suddenly decided to try and kill me now, twenty-one years later. In any case, all this has led to plenty of discussion among the pathologists, anatomists, and oncologists at my weekly diagnosis sessions. Apparently, this all-star team doesn't always agree, not even on my diagnosis, but Dr. L tells me I don't need to worry about that too much as long as the treatment is working. Which it is.