What We Have (13 page)

As usual, she thought it was her job to catch us up on one another.

Sara had started substitute teaching at Jenny’s elementary school so she could teach where Jenny learned. “She’s so
involved
,” my mother added.

“That’s good,” I said, tight-lipped.

I missed Sara. She lived so far away—six hours of flying, plus a two-hour drive. We hadn’t seen each other since last Thanksgiving. Now that I was a new mother myself, I would’ve loved to reconnect with her. I was sure she had a million stories about taking care of newborns. But as always, my mother’s attempts to make us feel connected backfired. She’d tell each of us more and more great things about the others until we felt like we’d been pent up for years together on a desert island.

“Sara is a
wonderful
mother,” my mother concluded brightly, by which point I didn’t want to talk to anyone in my family for the rest of the day.

Julie and Jon were coming over later for dinner. My mother tried to stay off the topic of Maine, and Emily, and the move, but she kept veering back, like a compass needle tugged north.

“Have you seen the pictures yet?” she asked me. Meaning the pictures Julie and Jon had taken on their last trip to Maine, house hunting. Sweet Victorian cottages a stone’s throw from the bay. Yes, I’d seen them. Wrap-around porches, weather vanes. You could practically smell the sea.

“It’s a great place, isn’t it,” she mused, helping herself to more coffee. “A perfect place to start a family—when they’re ready, of course,” she added quickly. “When the time is right.”

“Mmmmm,” I said, looking longingly at her cup. Nursing, I was still stuck with herbal tea.

“The fresh air,” my mother added, deep in thought. “And the sense of community. I think a smaller town—”

I shifted around, trying to signal (body language) that I didn’t really want to talk about the advantages of Maine. Sacha started to whimper.

“Oh, by the way,” my mother added. “Did you notice there were some shifty-looking men hanging out in your alley the other day? Have you and Jacques thought about putting an alarm system in, now, with Sacha—?”

Yes
, we’d thought about it. Or actually
I’d
thought about it, but Jacques wanted to mull it over. Comparison shop. How did my mother know how to zero in on the one thing we’d been arguing about?

Sacha started crying now in earnest, and I tried nursing her again, this time on the other side. Nothing worked. Her cries got more frantic.

My mother (who’d bottle-fed all three of us) wondered if I held Sacha the
other
way, with my arm bent a little, whether it might be easier. Had we thought about giving her a bottle during the day? The earlier mood of plentitude was fading. I heaved myself up, Sacha dangling and squirming in my arms, and tried to find her pacifier on the counter. My mother’s stacks of thawing dishes were in the way. Our house was jam-packed, no surfaces anywhere, why was there so much
stuff
everywhere? Why was Jacques always right?

My mother meant well—she just thought out loud. Sara’s dentist had told her pacifiers hurt the baby’s upper palate—what did our pediatrician say? Didn’t I want to sterilize that pacifier after it fell on the floor?

After breakfast I caught her looking warily around our living room. She loved the way we’d set it up—
for now
, she told me.

I blinked at her.

“It won’t be long,” my mother predicted, “before she’s crawling, and then—”

Sacha was barely three weeks old, and my mother already saw her as an almost-toddler, aimed for disaster. At the moment, I just wanted Sacha to stop crying. I wasn’t in the mood for fast-forward. Why couldn’t we just relax and deal with where we were right now, without jumping ahead a year?

My response was to withdraw, a kind of emotional pleading the fifth, and all the while I was thinking that what my mother and I were, the ways we nudged and irritated each other, managed to be insensitive to each other’s sensitive spots and blurt out tactless things without caring—none of this had
anything
to do with Sacha and me, with the ways in which Sacha and I were connected, the way her cheek felt against mine. Sacha and I were different, would always be different, we were a separate species, there was no way my mother could ever have held me like this, I could never have been this small, she could never have bathed me or fed me or worried about me like this. I wanted to let my mother know this somehow—
you and I are different, this baby-and-me thing is different, it’s earth-shattering—

Of course, I couldn’t say any of this, for all the obvious reasons, so instead we kept bumping into each other in small spaces all day (Sacha’s closet, the third-floor bathroom), arguing about which part of Sacha’s ear should be cleaned and how, and how many months we could possibly get out of the three-to-six-month-size outfit Lori and Dave had given us, and why I should actually exchange it for a bigger size, and why it would be
really hard
to go back to work next fall, before Sacha was even a year old, and what Sara had done, and what Julie was planning to do, and finally the only thing I felt filled with was rage.

 

THEN IT WAS CHRISTMAS DINNER
and Julie and Jon came and we were almost our old selves again, with a few changes (Sacha swooping in her swing), and everyone but me drank lots of red wine and my father got sentimental and proposed a toast about family and then, clearing his throat, reminded us an important milestone was coming up.

I didn’t know what he meant. I looked over at Julie, and she looked puzzled, too.

“
Dale
,” my mother said, in that voice she used when she was annoyed with him, and then I remembered.

Of course. February would make five years since my mother had found the lump in her breast. Five years was the big milestone. It meant she was safe—like reaching home free in tag.

I felt bad, having forgotten this was coming up. But she’d done so well we all just let it go, little by little. Life had filled in around the original fear, like water rushing around a boulder.

Besides, so much had happened over the past five years, it felt more like decades. I tried to remember back to where all of us had been.

Five years earlier, I hadn’t even known Jacques. Julie had still been finishing law school, interviewing for jobs. Sara was pregnant with Rachel, her second daughter.

It was 1986, a year after Gail died. I was in graduate school, in that grueling period leading up to oral exams, and I remember I was in my tiny apartment in Eliot House when my parents called. Both of them together on the line, which should’ve been my first clue something was wrong. What they told me didn’t make sense at first. A lump in her breast? It all seemed so baffling, like somebody else’s bad news.

Nobody in our family had ever had breast cancer, except for one great-aunt who’d recovered and died decades later from Alzheimer’s. We didn’t have breast cancer in our family. We had
ovarian
cancer. Was it serious? Invasive? “No,” my parents said in unison, “not serious, not invasive.” Sara called me and I called Julie and Julie called my parents, and we went around in circles, confused, worried, trying to figure it all out.

Thankfully, the tumor turned out to be contained. And tiny—stage 1. They’d found it early, there was no lymph involvement. Her chance of complete cure was 95 percent. She reported all of this from Dr. Kempf, the gynecologist she’d been seeing for twenty years. Her favorite doctor. He was very reassuring. “If you’re going to get cancer,” he told her, “this is the kind to get.”

While my mother weighed treatment options, Sara, Julie, and I checked in with one another, trying to gauge how worried we should be. In our family, the word “cancer” clanged like a five-alarm bell. On the other hand, lots of women had breast cancer and did well. We all knew survivors—mothers of friends, colleagues, celebrities. This wasn’t the kind of cancer that had haunted us since childhood. In some dim, superstitious way, we all concurred: this was the trade-off. This was what medical sleuthing and foresight had bought her: the chance to be dealt this (much better) card. Obviously, it wasn’t great having cancer. But better this kind—so much better this kind!—than what Sylvia and Pody had. What Gail had. Given what we knew, what we’d grown up dreading,
tiny
and
curable
sounded good.

My father still had questions. He called someone he knew at the Mayo Clinic to ask whether my mother should get a second opinion. He didn’t like the fact that her tumor was nonestrogen receptive—that meant it could be harder to treat. Should they fly out for a consult?

My sisters and I were exasperated with him. What did that even mean, “nonestrogen receptive”? Couldn’t he focus on “tiny” and “curable,” like everyone else?
Ninety-five percent curable
, Dr. Kempf had said. Wasn’t 95 percent ever good enough in this family?

In the end, they didn’t fly out for a second opinion. My mother hated the idea. In any case, the doctor at Mayo approved the treatment plan laid out by Dr. Kempf. It looked like my mother had lucked out. Instead of getting horrible, stage 4 ovarian cancer like Sylvia, Pody, and Gail, she’d made it through her forties safe and sound. Now, at fifty-three, she’d gotten something—but not a fatal something. A tiny and curable something instead.

The pathology after her lumpectomy reassured everyone, even my father. She wouldn’t need chemotherapy or more surgery. Wouldn’t need an oncologist. She could keep seeing Dr. Kempf, which was a huge relief—my mother loved him. They spent each visit comparing cruise itineraries and grandchildren’s report cards. Dr. Kempf had been on a Baltic cruise one year, and to the Scandinavian fjords the next. My mother and father were saving up to take the same ship on a cruise of the South China Sea. They saw eye-to-eye, my mother and Dr. Kempf. For six weeks, she drove herself to radiation every day on her way to teach at Country Day. She was there when the clinic opened at seven so she could be at school by eight thirty, for AP History first period. Nobody knew she was having treatment, not even her department chair. That was one of my mother’s conditions: We weren’t allowed to tell anyone she had cancer. No one! She was fine, and that’s how she wanted people to treat her. Other than feeling a little tired—like she was coming down with the flu—radiation was easy, she told us.

She did well through it all. Well enough, in fact, that she made it to Julie’s graduation from law school in June without missing a beat. Before we knew it, she was all better, and—just the way she’d wanted—nobody knew. Nobody, that is, but us.

Now, four years and ten months since her diagnosis, she was safe. She was here, eyes sparkling, playing the Comparison Game, and I felt badly for having been annoyed with her all day. It was Christmas, after all. Wasn’t this what plenty was? All of us here together?

 

BEFORE I KNEW I T, DAYS
later, the visit was over, my parents were packed and ready to leave, the guest room bare, I was crying, Sacha was crying, even Jacques was crying; they’d given us so much, taught us so much, done so much for us, and now they were leaving and it would just be the three of us again. The cab came, their bags went in the trunk, they were hugging us, calling out things they’d forgotten to tell us, waving, and we stood in the alley waving back till our arms ached. Then they were gone. I stepped back into our house and thought,
This is it, the emptiness I’m always trying so hard to fill up.

And our first Christmas with Sacha was over.

For some reason, standing outside and watching them go, I remembered the last of the Sylvia stories: my mother’s first week home for the summer after freshman year, back in their tiny apartment in Lincoln Park, Sylvia wrapped in an afghan on the couch, her abdomen filled with fluid. She was forty-three. Her cancer was inoperable: They’d opened her up, looked inside, and closed her up again. “How long does she have?” my mother asked one of the doctors, the way people asked in those days. And back then, the doctors answered.
Two or three months
.
Maybe the summer, if we’re lucky
.

July Fourth, my mother’s nineteenth birthday, there was a lop-sided cake on the table in the kitchen that Jennie had baked, but Sylvia was too sick to get up. She sang “Happy Birthday” from the couch while my mother sat at the table alone, leaning forward over the candles, trying to get her breath. Fresh out of wishes.

That was the last of the Sylvia stories. The one my mother almost never told.

JANUARY. THE GROUND WAS FROZEN,
gift wrap trailing from trash barrels in the ice-slicked alley, the sky gunmetal gray. For the first time in conscious memory I wasn’t going back to school after the winter break. I was home, the holidays over, the house quiet as a tomb. After the buzz and tumult of the last few weeks, the stillness was deafening. The Bilirubin Lady had packed up her lancets and left us, liberating Sacha from her glowing aquamarine blanket. No baby nurse, no babysitters, my parents gone, all the presents unwrapped and put away.