Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (14 page)

A Daughter’s Turn
by Tara Waters

My mother asked me to write her column today. Kind of like a school project.

My mom has cancer. When I tell people that, they look at me like they feel really sorry for me. When they find out my father lives in London and I never see him, and my favorite uncle, Michael, is gay, they think I have three heads. Add a pesky kid brother and you have a teenager’s nightmare.

But I decided to write about my family for this column because family isn’t about having everything picture-perfect. I’m not even sure I would want everything perfect. Why? Well, my mom has shown me that having cancer isn’t the end of the world, and you can have cancer and still take care of your family. Being sick can give you courage.

My uncle Michael has shown me that you don’t have to be related to someone for them to be family. He gets on my nerves, but he is more of a father to me than my real father. Which leads me to my next point. Anybody can have a baby. Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

And my brother…he’s a pain. But my mom has raised us to know that we have to stick together. She is always telling us how important family is.

There are people who try to make other people feel bad for having different families. But isn’t it about love? I mean, does God care whether a white person loves a black person? Or if two men love each other? Or if a Jewish person loves a Christian?

I don’t think God cares
who
you love. He just cares
that
you love.

My mom having cancer helped me figure some of this out.

So even though my life isn’t perfect—and believe me being a teenager is really hard these days—I still like my life. Most days. But don’t tell my mom. She might make me clean my room.

Lily

T
his is a list of questions I have for the Big Man Upstairs when I die. I’ve been compiling them ever since I got sick. I have a notepad, and as I think of a question, I write it down. I don’t know why, since I can’t take the notepad to heaven—or wherever it is we go. Still I have them. For some reason, they help me.

Michael

O
pening day.

What is it about baseball that makes grown men rhapsodize?

It’s no secret I adore the game. Maybe because it was a way of communicating with a distant father, a product of the 1950s, a man watching control slip away from him in the turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s. Amid the familiar rhythm of playing catch, we didn’t have to speak. We could just be: father and son.

Maybe the reason is the boys of summer. The idea that grown men can make a living doing what little boys love to do. They can put on their uniforms and jog out onto freshly mowed grass, baselines painted white, punch their gloves and throw the ball. They can live a fantasy for the rest of us working stiffs who have to grab the subway to work or jostle along the crowded streets, stuffed into shirts and ties. They passed up wingtips for cleats. Briefcases for gloves. Papers and legal briefs, or jackhammers and nails, for dust kicked up on the pitcher’s mound.

Perhaps it’s the ritual of the game I love. Watching the ticket-taker rip my ticket in half and hand me the stub for my scrapbook. Going to my seat and watching the guy clean it with a whisk broom for a tip and a smile. Ordering peanuts, lousy hot dogs and a beer, all of which now cost more than the tickets. Still, at the seventh-inning stretch, it’s as if time stands still.

Is it the innocence we long for? The days when we picked sides by choosing captains and doing rock-paper-scissors to see who would bat first. Do we long for the uncomplicated? Do we long for a time when we played until the sun went down and games were called on account of darkness—or Mom’s voice ringing out that dinner was on the table?

This season, for me, is particularly poignant. Baseball is all of those things for me. But this year has been the hardest of my life, I think. This year has been about loss and grief, about love and loneliness. It has been about learning what the word “family” really means, and that “I love you” is more than three little words mumbled in the darkness. This year, I think I finally grew up. And it was harder than I ever could have imagined.

I measure my life from baseball season to baseball season. Sometimes I measure a good day or bad one by how the Yankees did at bat. But now, more often than not, good days and bad days are calculated in different, more excruciating ways. So this season, I will look to get lost in the game, to escape for nine innings into a world of dandelions on a Little League field of dreams. Lost in a world that makes sense.

You see, baseball is also, for all its poetry and beauty, about statistics. There are rules. If you pitch the ball inside the batter’s box and the batter misses, it’s a strike. Outside…a ball. A few of those, you have a walk. There are RBI’s and pitching stats. It is controlled. Sure, sometimes the ump makes a bad call. There’s the occasional fight on the field. Back in childhood pickup games, there’s even such a thing as a do-over.

But life’s not like that.

Right now I have no do-overs. And a lot of what I’m going through makes no sense. I can’t look up something in a rule book. I can’t ask the ump. I can’t ask my pitching coach. It’s life. Not a game.

So opening day arrived for Noah. And so did Spawn. We got to the field and there he was, a few weeks after Lily’s trip to London. He sat in the stands. With a Mets baseball cap on—his first mistake. I recognized him right away, but Noah didn’t. Maybe it was the incongruence of his dad being there. But Noah took to the field. Pete was there too, standing off to the side. Lily was home in bed. And Spawn watched his son play.

I was pretty busy. Little League, at Noah’s age, means keeping them focused on the game and not on who brought the snack and what’s the snack and when do we get to eat the snack…the snack is pretty fucking important.

Before the boys took the field, I pulled Noah over.

“Noah…your dad’s in the stands.” It seemed like the right thing to do to get Noah to wave. Man, I was glad Lily wasn’t there, though ’cause she would have ripped David a new one—he hadn’t told her he was coming. I kind of guessed that was a bad sign. Like maybe he was going to try to take Noah back to London with him or something.

Noah looked in the direction I pointed and gave an unenthusiastic wave. Then he went out to his shortstop position, and I did what I always did. I kept them focused on the ball and not on the snack that Mrs. Connor brought. I had a bunch of kids to keep track of—and then two of them had to pee, so Pete took them over to the concession stand, which had a restroom in it.

I tried to coach them and remind them to throw to first, throw to first, throw to first. It’s my mantra. Hey, we start with the basics.

So we played the whole game, and I was only vaguely aware of Spawn. Then it was snack time. Then passing out notices about the next game. Parents collected their kids, and finally, finally, I brought Noah over to his father.

Noah stuck out his hand, like a little gentleman. His father bent over to hug him, and Noah let him in the way a kid won’t resist a hug from his great-aunt Gertrude, who’s ninety-nine and has a mustache, although the kid is cringing inside.

“You played well, Noah. I know you must be surprised to see me.”

Noah shrugged, then looked up at me. “Can Pete take me for a soda?”

“Don’t you want to talk to your dad? Maybe go for something to eat.”

“No, let him go,” David said. “I was hoping to talk with you anyway, Michael.”

So Noah scampered off to Pete. “What’s up, David? You can’t have stopped here by accident.”

“No. I wasn’t sure what I would find here. But I brought these.” He handed me a legal envelope.

“What’s this?”

“They belong with you, Michael. I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“He’s part of you. He doesn’t make a move, doesn’t run a base or punch his glove, without looking over to you adoringly, making sure you approve. And you…you let him know you love him with every wink, every glance, the way you wave him home at third.”

“It’s just baseball, David.”

“No. It’s life.”

“Maybe, but you’re still his father.”

“I know, but I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. That’s the thing. I even got a vasectomy after Drew was born. I don’t have it in me. I love them, but I love my world the way it is even more. I guess…I turned out to be the selfish one after all.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “That’s why I came. To be sure. I sat here for nine innings and knew I’d never even play catch with him. It’s not who I am, Michael. I’ll keep in touch.” He stuck out his hand and then turned and walked across the field to his rental car. Looked like a rental anyway.

About ten minutes later, Noah came back with Pete. He didn’t ask where his father was. He only said, “Come on. Let’s go. I’m hungry.”

I shrugged, and we went back to Lily’s house. She was sleeping upstairs. I tiptoed up there and cracked the door.

“Hmm?” She rolled over sleepily.

“David was at Little League.”

“
My
David?”

“Well, technically he hasn’t been that in a long while.”

“Shut up. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, your David. Spawn.”

“What did he want?” The panic in her voice was palpable.

“To give you these.” I put the papers on the bed. Maybe he wasn’t the Spawn of Satan after all.

And then I saw it. She relaxed. She finally relaxed for the first time since her diagnosis. She touched the envelope like it was a holy relic.

“Thank you,” she whispered out loud. I wasn’t sure to whom.

Goodbye
by Lily Waters

This is my last column. I’m taking a leave of absence, and I’m not sure if I’ll be back. My hair is back, after chemo, and it’s curly—without a perm! But I’m afraid cancer is in my lungs and there’s also a suspicious spot on my brain. So it’s time to take a break from the column. Or, more specifically, from my editor Joe, who is an ornery type of the old school of journalism, but who taught me an awful lot in my years here.

I wanted to also say a few things before I go. For one thing, having cancer does not make you brave. It doesn’t. It makes you sick. I know it’s terribly romantic to sort of picture me lying in bed like the dying Camille, looking ethereal and beautiful, my new-grown hair splayed out. But dying is really an ugly business, and I would greatly prefer not to be doing it.

Another thing. David Letterman once asked Warren Zevon, the great rock and roller, when he was dying of cancer, what he knew. The ever sarcastic rocker said something about taking time to eat more good sandwiches or something like that. At the time, I kind of thought it was a smart-alecky thing to say. But since then, I’ve realized a few things. One of them is that people who are dying really don’t have a handle on any great theory. It’s not like I can tell you whether the Big Bang theory is correct, whether the shroud of Turin is real or why bad things happen to perfectly wonderful people.

However, Zevon was right. It is about the sandwiches. And the hugs. And the ordinary. It’s about that moment you wish you could preserve forever, when your kids are laughing uproariously, as only kids can, with wild abandon, and you’re smiling, and thoughts of bills and grown-up responsibilities are miles away. It’s those moments that are heaven on earth. Dying just makes you realize it. You realize it’s about the love and not much else.

You discover, when you’re dying, that he who has the most toys at the end does not win. Nope. He who has someone, like I do, to hold their hand as they go gently into this good night…they win.

If I were to die tomorrow, I leave a house with a leaky roof, a pile of credit card debt and a dog who eats me out of house and home and who has bad gas. I also leave, I hope, love.

I have loved my editor Joe—yeah, ornery old saw that he is.

I have loved my best friend Michael. I’ve written enough over the years about him that to say anything more would be redundant. I promise to find out for him what happened when disco died. Did it get to go to heaven?

I have even loved my ex-husband. Because the closer you get to death, the more you realize that even though people disappoint you, they usually are doing the best they can—and that even lost love is beautiful in its own poignant way.

I have loved Pete. It was my luck to meet a great guy at the least convenient time. But that’s me. Always about bad timing.

And finally, I have loved Noah and Tara. It all comes down to them. The one love that is so large it consumes you, in a way, so that you cease to be this entity unto yourself and instead have this cosmic umbilical cord forever binding them to you, heart to heart.

Oh, and maybe one more thing. I have lived. I mean, yes, I have lived and breathed. But beyond that, I lived with passion each and every day. I was type A, driven to live on the edge, feel it all, love it all. When I was younger I loved hard, played hard. I have grabbed on to life like a rodeo rider grabbing on to that crazy bull—the killer one everyone else is too scared to sit astride. And man…I have ridden it for all it’s worth. I have no regrets.