What We Have (22 page)

Sometimes, the two calendars overlapped: Northwest Airlines, Boston to Detroit, Terminal D, Friday, June 12, 11:00 AM. Sometimes they didn’t.

Everything changed. It was hard to work or think. When Sacha napped, I sat in the study and stared out the window, books and papers in front of me, but real thought seemed impossible, it had been wiped out, and now all I had left was feeling. Guilt, longing, sadness. During the day, when Sacha was up, I lived in the old calendar: I made appointments (pediatrician, child-care agency); I ran errands (Star Market, CVS, Boston Baby); I worked on syllabi for the fall, I wrote things on the whiteboard in the kitchen.
House on Myrtle Street with Sandi, ten am. Call vet.
When Sacha napped, I slipped back into Cancer Calendar, into worry and sadness.

I called my mother to check in. She had an appointment with Dr. Brenner first thing Monday morning, and she had started taking the Megace right away. You could either pick a lemon-lime drink or pills, and she picked the pills, which she said were big enough to cure anyone of anything.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “Were you able to sleep?”

Her voice had a crisp, dismissive sound. She couldn’t really talk, she told me. She had one foot out the door to meet the head of the history department at Country Day. “End-of-the-year nonsense,” she added.

I didn’t want to hang up yet. “But—how are you?” I asked again, unsatisfied.

She was fine. In the Kübler-Ross model, the first of the five stages of grief is denial. In my mother’s case, this meant she was dealing with the news the cancer had come back in a highly specific way.

She’d decided to put their house on the market and move to Birmingham.

For years, only half seriously, my mother had had her eye on houses “uptown.” “Uptown”—Birmingham—consisted of a few square blocks of upscale restaurants and boutiques that sold designer clothing and kitchen gadgets. My mother loved Birmingham—the library, the village park, the sense of things opening. At heart she was still a Chicago girl, and she thought our house—a square colonial on two acres—was too isolated and too much work.

First, we assumed she was kidding. Then, we decided this was a chemically induced lapse in judgment, a rare, previously undocumented side effect of the Megace.

Megace, my mother told us, was a miracle drug. Just a few days on it, and already she was feeling better.

She was in high-planning mode. “It’s time to live life,” she told us. “Seize the day.”

“She sounds like the Lifetime Channel,” Julie said, when the three of us checked in with one another later to compare notes. “Soon she’ll be talking about silver linings.”

None of us was used to conference calls, and it felt funny. Jockeying for airtime, the way we used to around the dinner table when we were little. We’d all start talking at once, then all fall silent.

“Well,” Sara said uncertainly. “It’s not easy, dealing with all of this . . .” Sara, either by temperament or training, isn’t as ironic as Julie is. She’s softer. Julie is the “funny” one. Sara is compassionate. And I’m in the middle. Seeing both sides, and sure of neither.

“I think she’s losing it,” Julie said.

“I don’t know,” Sara said slowly, defending her. “I think it may be about energy now. Maybe she thinks if she throws herself into moving, it’ll keep anything awful from happening.”

Since my mother had told us about the cancer coming back, Sara, Julie, and I had started checking in a few times a week. Julie set up the conference calls, and we traded information. Timelines. Cancer Calendar: Megace Month, Day Three.

How did she sound to you today? What did Brenner say? What was the deal with changing the dose of Megace?
Sara was looking into organic therapies. She’d read somewhere soy could be helpful. A macrobiotic diet. There were pesticides all over those Granny Smiths she ate.

Julie, keen believer in Alpha Medicine, had also been doing her homework. “There’s some question,” she said, “about how effective Megace is. What about starting something more powerful sooner?”

She’d read an article about a radical approach. If you did a bone marrow transplant early, there was a chance—if not of a cure—of a longer period of remission.

“Or,” my mother said cheerfully, when Julie suggested this to her, “it could just kill you outright and you wouldn’t have to hang around and wait.”

My mother didn’t want to talk about macrobiotic diets, or flying out for a second opinion at the Farber. She was confident Dr. Brenner was on top of things. She was doing fine, thanks very much. If we didn’t mind, she actually didn’t want to talk about cancer. She wanted to pin down the number of condos we needed in Charlevoix over Labor Day weekend. How certain was Julie’s doctor about her due date? If she had the baby the first week of August, Julie and Jon could still make it to Charlevoix for Labor Day, couldn’t they? My mother knew it wouldn’t be easy traveling with an infant, but it would be so great to have us all together.

Apparently, my mother had forgotten her own admonitions about taking a baby on an airplane. Among other things.

“Next, she’ll probably suggest scheduling a C-section,” I told Julie later, comparing notes. “That way you’ll have a date, and she can just go ahead and book the rooms.”

“Very funny,” Julie said.

Mostly, what my mother wanted to talk about was moving. Every place she looked at got defined by its proximity to the library. Six blocks from the library, there was a Victorian someone was rehabbing. Right around the corner from the library, there was a big colonial being turned into condos. My father didn’t want a condo, she admitted. “But the location . . . ,” she added wistfully.

“Mom,” Sara said, thinking this through. “What about teaching? How are you going to manage putting your house on the market and selling it and getting a new place ready before fall?”

Silence on her end.

“Teaching,” she said, “is another thing.”

We waited.

“It’s too much,” my mother said crisply. “I’ll miss my ‘bubbies’—that was what my mother called the cream of the crop, the most type A of her AP History gurus. The ones who got into Stanford and Yale, on her recommendation. “But I’ve decided. Your father and I talked it over, and I’ve already been over to see the head of the department, and I told him I’m not going back this fall.” She paused, considering. “I’ve decided to retire.”

We were stupefied. My mother, not working? She’d fought for her job, tooth and nail, having come to teaching relatively late in life, competing with the twentysomethings, the superstars who could coach as well as teach. She’d struggled with the department to let her broaden the curriculum, working her way up to teaching the AP course, which she’d made her own, spending hours every evening preparing lectures, bringing it all to life. The Babylonians. The Hittites. The Egyptians. She turned every part of history into a colorful pageant, filled with personal anecdotes. What Charles the First said just before he was beheaded. Which emperors had venereal diseases. How little boys were given beer for breakfast in early modern England.

My mother adored her students. What was even more impressive was how much they loved her back. They called her “Nails,” as in “Tough As,” claiming she was the hardest grader in the department, but they got on waiting lists to be in her classes.

She wasn’t going back?

This was much more serious than the idea of moving. I had that cold, sick feeling in my stomach again.

Things must be worse than she was letting on if she’d given up her job.

“I’ve wanted more flexibility for a long time,” she told us. “It’ll mean I can come out to see you guys more.”

We were silent.

“And I’ll be able to travel with Dad,” she added. “I never get to go with him when he gives papers.”

More silence. For once, all three of us were tongue-tied.

“So there’s plenty of time for moving,” she added, as if the case were closed.

 

JULIE AND I MET FRIDAY
morning at Logan. Never one for traveling light, I had a mountain of baby equipment with me: Sacha’s umbrella stroller, her car seat, her new baby backpack (she’d outgrown the Snugli). Not to mention Sacha herself, wriggly and irritable, and an ungainly duffel, its strap digging into my shoulder.

Julie was carrying a bag, too. Plus seven months of baby.

“Do you really think Mom’s serious about selling the house?” she asked me, once we were settled in our seats. Last-minute tickets, coach, last row of the plane. We could hear the toilet flushing behind us.

“Maybe she thinks it’s her last chance,” I said, shifting Sacha on my lap. I’d saved money by not getting her a seat, which now seemed like a bad idea. All Sacha wanted now was to be mobile. She was learning to crawl, and keeping her still was next to impossible. “I think that must be it. It’s now or never.”

Julie agreed. “I think the suburbs feel dead to her right now,” she added. “It’s probably all about energy.”

Julie was right—nothing moved on Lakewood Drive. Even the dogs seemed listless and immobile behind invisible fences when we showed up hours later in our rented Explorer. It wasn’t a lively neighborhood. On Halloween, our neighbors used to leave candy out in baskets with instructions: Take One, please! or Two Apiece! “It’s like Herculaneum here,” Sara complained during her archeology phase when she was twelve or thirteen. All three of us had left as soon as possible, to college, to graduate schools farther away, out of state, out of the country,
out
. No wonder my mother wanted to leave, especially now.

My father had always been the holdout. For years he’d said no, he loved the yard, he didn’t want to be on top of their neighbors, but after my mother’s cancer came back he couldn’t deny her anything. When we got to Lakewood Friday afternoon the house was swarming with Realtors, each with a clipboard, and my mother was sitting on the couch icing her leg, which had developed a blood clot from the Megace.

Julie and I fell on her. What was this? What was going on?

My mother was undeterred.

Dr. Brenner said this could happen sometimes. The Megace did something to the circulatory system. It wasn’t common, but it happened. She’d always had bad veins, so this just figured. Par for the course.

She was supposed to ice the clot for twenty minutes every hour. That didn’t leave much time for real estate, but she was doing her best.

The front door was open and Realtors were coming in a few at a time, peering into rooms, taking notes. This was the Realtors’ open house, and apparently it was important to set the right tone so the agents would all like the house and show it to their clients. My mother seemed delighted they were there. It was like she was hosting some bizarre party—she kept calling out to them from her perch on the couch, naming each room in turn:
foyer, family room, kitchen
, gesturing like a flight attendant to the left and right.

She was in fine form. She made a huge fuss over Julie, patting her belly, making her stand sideways so she could assess her girth. And Sacha! So much more grown-up since May!

“She can turn over now,” I said proudly, forgetting for a moment why we were here.

My mother was herself, just harder, fuller volume, urgency pulsing below the surface. She introduced us to a Realtor named Sherry who would be taking us all over later to see a new listing in Birmingham. The perfect house for “empty nesters,” Sherry told us.

Julie and I glanced at each other.

How was my mother planning to traipse over to look at a prospective house when her leg was so swollen?

“What,” I asked, “does Dr. Brenner say about walking on that leg?”

Never mind Dr. Brenner, it was all set, we were meeting my father at the house at four o’clock—“
the
house,” my mother said, as if it were now the one and only. According to my mother, the house sounded perfect. “There’s a ravine,” she told us, “and it drops off at the back, no yard, no lawn, no upkeep.” A tiny tributary of the Rouge River ran through the ravine. Apparently you could see it from the back deck. My mother had already nicknamed the house “A River Runs Through It.”

“
Your mother
,” Sherry said, putting her hand on my arm, “is a stitch.” She was wearing a raft of gold bangles, and they chimed when they touched each other, like tiny bells.

Julie and I looked at each other. Under my mother’s hard-edged ebullience, we both sensed fear. She was playing at something, and neither of us trusted it.

 

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
had been empty for a while. We could tell as soon as we opened the front door—the rooms echoed, I could smell a faint residue of perspiration and newspaper; there was gray rubber industrial tiling on the first floor and an enormous atrium ceiling that lifted skyward two stories. I had strapped Sacha into her new backpack, and I could feel her getting heavier as I walked. “The previous owners,” Sherry murmured, “make exercise videos, which is why so much of the first floor has been turned into a ‘gymnasium.’”
Jim-NAH-see-um
, Sherry pronounced it, like an SAT word she hadn’t had the chance to say out loud.

My mother’s eyes widened.

The house was shockingly ugly. Instead of a living room or dining room, most of the first floor was taken up by a mirrored gym; the kitchen, oddly sited on the second floor, was tiled black, with the look and feel of a glove compartment. Room after room appalled me, but my mother got over her initial shock, managing on her cane with only the slightest limp, seeing potential where we saw problems. She shared the possibilities with my father, who—implausibly—seemed willing to go along with her sense of what a change here or there could accomplish. They tossed around conditionals.
If we just widened that—if that could be lifted—if the ceiling were lowered again to allow—if we just—

Julie pulled me aside in one corner of the mirrored gym. “They’ve gone nuts,” she hissed. I could feel Sacha getting heavier on my back, suggesting she was falling asleep. In the softening light, my parents seemed like strangers: my mother, with her shrinking body and Lucite cane; my father speaking louder than usual, his voice full of optimism, but his eyes behind their heavy glasses had a lifelessness that suggested agony.