Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (8 page)

Lily

C
hemotherapy is chemical warfare. You hope the chemicals, the same poisons that make your hair fall out and make you vomit and feel so tired even your eyelashes hurt, win. You hope your body loses.

In the beginning, Michael came with me to each session and held my hand as they started my I.V., and we watched the steady drip snake its way into my arm. However, after a couple of sessions, I decided I was a big enough girl to be dropped off.

“I’ll call you on your cell when you can pick me up.”

“You sure you’re okay alone?”

“Yeah.”

The cancer center where I get my treatment lines up lounge chairs in rooms. They want you to be comfortable for your chemical warfare. Our doctors tell us to bring personal CD players and music to relax to or music that will help us fight. They are into imagery. They tell us to picture Pac-Man gangs eating the bad cells, or little soldiers going to war. I found the whole idea preposterous, as if having a video game in my body would help me beat cancer. But I tell myself I will do whatever they tell me. If a fucking Pac-Man improves my odds, then bring on the little disembodied eating head that makes that weird noise as he munches away the cancer.

Usually, at the treatment place, I got my own cubicle-type room, with my very own lounge chair. Nurses brought Michael sodas and typical hospital snacks—crackers. It’s a regular party. But when I went for my third chemo treatment, the reception area was wall-to-wall bald people, and they asked if I would share a room.

My roomie for the day was an attractive, bald (what else?) man. The minute he grinned, I liked him, as he had dimples like great chasms in his cheeks and pale blue eyes. I suppose the dimples would have been handsome if he had hair, but without hair or eyebrows, they sort of made him look like a happy Kewpie doll. Adorable.

“Pete Bartlett,” he said, sticking out the hand that didn’t have chemo traveling into its veins.

“Lily Waters.” I smiled.

“Beautiful name.”

“Thanks.”

The nurse settled me into my lounge chair and asked if I wanted a blanket, which I did. Chemotherapy alternates between making me have chills and making me feel as if I am on fire. I asked her for an ice pack as long as she was getting the blanket, covering both my bases so I wouldn’t have to bother her again. She busied herself preparing my poisons, and I didn’t even blink when she poked for a vein. I used to break out in a cold sweat at the thought of needles. Cancer changes that. No flinching. It’s like boot camp for the medically chicken.

The nurse left after reminding me I could buzz her if I needed anything. She smiled at me. I usually have Carol, a real sweetie pie, but I guessed she was off. This nurse was also nice, efficient. She looked at my chart, and I tried to decide what she thought as she read it. Will I beat it or not? Then I banished the thought from my mind and tried to picture a Pac-Man.

After she left, Peter turned his head in my direction, “Mind if I ask what kind of cancer you have?”

“No. We’re part of the same club, aren’t we? I have breast cancer.”

“I’m sorry. That really sucks. And I’m sorry I said I’m sorry. I hate when people say that to me. Like…what? They caused it?”

“I hate that, too. And it does suck, doesn’t it? How about you?”

“Hodgkins. This is my last treatment.”

“Congratulations, graduate. You’ll have hair in no time. Unless, of course, you are actually a bald man. Then you’ll just get eyebrows.”

He laughed. “No. I usually have hair.”

“I don’t.” My bald head was wrapped in the Hermés scarf from Michael.

He looked at me, and then I laughed. “No, I’m not really bald.”

“You had me worried there.” He grinned at me.

“So your last treatment…. You’ll be fine. Hodgkins. Very curable.”

“You know,” he smiled, “let’s talk about something else. Like you have an unlimited budget and you can go on vacation anywhere in the world, so where would you go?”

“Disneyworld.”

“Really?”

“No. I hate that little mouse. Umm, no one ever asked me this before. Okay, I guess Bali.”

“Bali.”

“No, Ireland. Ireland, definitely. A fishing village in Ireland. Get lost and write for a while.”

“Are you a writer?”

I nodded. I felt hot and put the icepack on the back of my neck. “I write a column. For the
Tribune.
”

“Wait a minute….” He leaned back and grinned. “Even with that scarf on I recognize you from your picture. Lily Waters. Now I know why your name sounded familiar to me. I’ve read your column before. There was one about…what the hell was it? Oh yeah, there was one about your childhood crush that I thought was really funny. The David Cassidy column.”

“Yeah. Androgynous little guy. Who can explain childhood crushes? Glad you liked it. What do you do?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“What do you teach?”

“High school math.”

“Math?”

“I know. I’m a geek. That was me in school—nerdy guy. Pocket protector, the whole nine yards.”

“That’s hard to picture. Even bald you’re cute.”

His eyes welled up momentarily. I would have missed it, but I was looking at him closely. When you have cancer, you sort of feel like this asexual pinhead. Bald on top, dead below the waist. Who will want me? All that.

“Thank you. I’m cuter with hair, believe me. I could even stand being bald, but I’d like eyelashes again. And eyebrows.”

“Me, too.” I laughed. “I will never ever again bitch about plucking my eyebrows.” I felt less asexual myself being near him. He was warm and charming, and his voice was DJ-smooth. Deep. “So I still don’t believe you were a geek.”

“Yup. The worst. I even had Coke-bottle glasses until I got contacts. I wore anything hanging in my closet. Never cared about cool. I cared about science and math. Then I went through this hormonal revolution and started liking girls, starting with my lab partner, but she liked the quarterback of the football team.”

“Fool. Those guys go to pot after a while. It’s the geeks who later rule the world.”

“I agree. But I realized girls cared about whether or not you had a pocket protector and dorky pants. I took a good look at my wardrobe. My haircut—can you say buzz cut?—I grew it out again, not that you can tell…but I do look better with hair. Over time, I got less geeky but still loved science and math, and now I teach math. And the best part is nearly every kid comes to my class hating math and thinking the class is going to be the worst thing they’ve ever taken…and I make it fun.”

“I wish my daughter had you.”

“Oh…” He looked at my left hand. “How many kids do you have?”

“Two. Tara is in high school, and Noah is seven. He’s in second grade. I’m divorced.”

He smiled and looked relieved. About the divorced part. “I’m sorry. It must be tough on your kids, you having cancer. Even my students…they worry over me and fuss over me. And some of them seem angry with me, as if they’re mad I’m making them think about death. It’s complicated with kids. But they’re honest, too, so in a way that’s less complicated than adults who seem at a loss for what to say so they avoid me.”

I sighed. I related all too well. A couple of acquaintances disappeared when I got cancer. It was as if I was a living, breathing example of their own mortality and they wanted to avoid me at all costs. People think, “My friends would never do that to me.” But Carol, my regular nurse, told me it happens all the time.

I looked at the Kewpie cutie next to me. “Anyone who would avoid you is an idiot, Peter.”

“I try to tell myself that.”

We spent the rest of our chemotherapy bonding time talking about our lives. Who we were. It was as if our baldness stripped us of any need to be false with each other. We talked about God and whether we were angry at him. We talked about loneliness. We talked a little about death, and chemo.

“You know,” he said, “I have three students in my classes I think are bulimics. I hear the rumors about them, and they have some telltale signs. I went to talk to the school counselor about them—they need help. And sometimes, when I am throwing up, I cannot imagine the self-loathing that must cause you to
want
to make yourself throw up.”

“I know. That whole excessive saliva thing. The waves of nausea. Whoever coined the term ‘waves’ knew what he or she was talking about. It is like waves crashing over you.”

“God, it’s the worst.”

I looked across at him. Here was a man I could talk about puking with, for God’s sake. Most of my dates never made it past the “What do you do for a living?” stage. The two kids scared them off. Or the fact that I am opinionated. And then once I got cancer, forget it.

When we were both finished with treatment, he stood up. “Can I take you to dinner sometime, Lily? I really can’t believe I’m saying this but…I enjoyed chemo today.” His dimples deepened.

My heartbeat quickened, with dread, not happiness. He hadn’t yet figured it out, what had slowly dawned on me. “I can’t, Peter. Though Lord knows I would love to. I really, really would.” I faltered.

“So why not?”

“You’re going to get better, Peter. Hodgkins is the good cancer. I mean, if you have to get cancer, that’s the one to get.”

“Remind me to bet the lottery. Must have been my lucky day when I found the lump under my collarbone.”

I laughed. “I don’t mean it that way. I just mean, I guess, that right now I have this bit of a question mark. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me.”

“You’re going to get well.”

I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

“Don’t think that.” He took my hand. “Come on. There really is something to the power of thinking positive.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m fighting, but I’m sort of mentally putting my house in order, you know.”

“Have the doctors told you that it’s bad?”

“Not in so many words, but yes. And as much as I would love to go to dinner with you…and believe me, my tolerance for bullshit went out the window when I got sick—oh, who am I kidding? I’ve never had a high tolerance for B.S.—so I won’t lie to you. I would love to kiss you.” I touched his other hand and felt my stomach lurch with lust—one thing, apparently, chemo hadn’t killed. “What we shared today was really cathartic for me. It was special. And maybe if I really do get well I’ll call you. But if we go out for dinner, right now, I mean sometime soon, I can tell where this would head.”

“So can I,” he whispered.

“And you see…you’d be one more room in my house I would have to put in order. One more person I would grow to adore I might have to say goodbye to. So I can’t. Cancer pretty much rearranged my life.”

I moved closer to him and kissed him on the lips. As kisses go, I ranked it in my top three.

He stepped back, breathless. “God…Lily, I can handle a relationship with you even though you’re sick. Life
is
short. Cancer teaches you that in spades. Come on, let me take you out.”

“I can’t.”

He sighed. “Then just get better. I’ll expect a call from you when your hair’s grown back and you feel great and you’ve beaten this. I teach at St. Vincent’s. Call me. And don’t say anything else. I have to believe you’re going to call me or right now I’m going to fall apart.”

“Okay, Peter. I’ll call you.” I turned to go, and I felt a surge of tears. I knew I was going to sob, and I wanted my exit to be graceful, so I ran down the hall. I know he cried, but not half as bad as I did. When I got into the car with Michael, I couldn’t even speak.

“You’ll tell me later, right?” He knows me so well.

I nodded.

“Then put your head down on my lap and have a good cry.” He opened the glove box and handed me a tissue. “Just cry, Lily. Get it out.”

“Shit…” I felt the tears drowning me.

“Are you blowing your nose on my jeans? Ever since you got cancer, it’s like we’re in this constant body fluid stage. Puke, snot. It’s gross.”

I slapped his leg. “Shut up or I really will blow my nose on your leg.”

“That’s so seductive.”

I rolled my eyes. “You really drive me crazy, you know.”

“I know. That’s my job.”

I shut my eyes and thought of Pete. The connection with him was palpable. Maybe a date with a bald man with no eyebrows wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Michael

I
t’s hard to know exactly when Lily started giving up. I think it was piece by piece, day by day. Sometimes, Noah would wrap his arms around her, and she would breathe in that heavenly child scent and for moments or hours, she would fight. I could see it in her eyes. Other days, throwing up on a towel because she couldn’t reach the toilet, the indignity of being too weak and too tired to even wipe her nose when she cried, I saw the light go out. But she was changed after her third chemotherapy treatment. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I think it was simply the resignation.

Resignation has a weary connotation, and in Lily’s case, that simply wasn’t so. Or maybe she was weary at first, but in its place grew grace. She had a quality about her that I could not define. She was no saint, but Catholic that I am, I think in terms of grace. Lily was filled with serenity and dignity, and motherhood stopped being about cleaning up dirty dishes and driving the carpool every morning and became a religion. It all meant more to her. But I sensed it was because she believed she was leaving us. That she was losing the fight. So, even as Lily changed into this calmer person, less frenetic, less bitchy, less difficult, we fought more than we ever had before.

Our relationship, for twenty years, had been built on acceptance. The last time we fought with regularity was at the height of the AIDS crisis. I had refused to get tested. And I had refused to use condoms.

After our friendship weathered that, life was still life. It threw us curveballs. I started my novel a dozen times, only to give up when the memories became too painful. I’m only on track with it now, two decades after the events that changed me. She was the one to get me to write about it.

“You never talk about the assault.”

I shrugged. “There’s not much to talk about.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look, you’re not a guy.”

“So because I don’t have a penis means I can’t understand?”

We were sitting in our favorite watering hole, talking about my latest round of writer’s block. I hate that she’s never had writer’s block. But was it any wonder? She was never at a loss for words. She always had something to say—whether I and the rest of the world wanted to hear it or not. And she had to have the last word.

“A penis would be helpful.”

“You are so full of crap.”

“I’m not. Look, what do you think guys talk about in the locker room?”

“Women.”

“I know. But in what way? How graphic?”

Lily pushed back a stray curl and raised her shoulders in an I-don’t-know gesture. “Tits. Ass. Who put out. I don’t know.”

“Well, it can get pretty intense in there. They talk about women in ways that make porno seem buttoned-up. Like they’re things. No—worse. Like they’re holes. A mouth, a…well, you get the idea. For insertion. And nothing more. And in this hypersexed locker room environment, there is nothing worse than a guy being gay. It’s unheard of. On the collegiate level—at the level I was playing, where some of those guys were drafted by the majors—it just was beyond unacceptable. It was a crime. It was like I committed an act of betrayal.”

Lily lifted her martini and sipped. Put it down and shook her head. “By you saying that, you are somehow justifying what they did to you, as if you did something so wrong you deserved that.”

“No. I’m not justifying it. I just guess I understand in a way.”

“You know, Michael, we spend a lot of time talking about being honest in our writing. A lot of time. And I think the reason you have writer’s block is that by not writing about what happened and locking it up inside—and instead writing about just hints of yourself—that you’re blocking your whole creative side.”

I raised my hand in the air. “Paging Dr. Freud…. What a load of pseudointellectual bull-crap.”

“It isn’t.”

“So are writers only meant to write memoirs?”

“No. Writing is like a hall of mirrors. There are pieces of you there, but it’s all distorted in the funhouse glass until readers don’t know what’s you and what’s fiction. But the emotions, the reality, the blood of what’s on the page, that has to come from you, Michael. And the longer you hide behind that locker room door, the longer you’ll be blocked.”

“You know nothing about my problems.”

“Suit yourself, Gay Boy. But I bet you know I’m right.”

Of course, she knew a lot more than I gave her credit for. I didn’t tell her—or my agent—but it hit me like a bolt of lightning that what Lily was telling me was Writing 101. My creative writing professors in college had always demanded something of you in the writing. Feelings. So I went back to the assault, and I started writing. And I found that writing about Sam freed me to really say what happened.

The whole novel is like a love letter to Lily. It’s not about her at all, but the novel wouldn’t exist without her prodding.

God, our history went on and on. She couldn’t give up, because we were each too much a part of the other. We even weathered Spawn. She married David, which was a huge mistake, though I tried to like him despite his smug college-professor smirk. I introduced them—not to have them date or anything, but just casually at an English department function. He left soon after for greener pastures at NYU—a more prestigious university. In the adage of “publish or perish,” he was kicking ass with several pieces in literary journals and a piece in the
New Yorker.

Theirs was an intense, fast courtship—and sex was a big part of it. There was a combustible attraction between them.

Then Lily had Tara. A kid changes a marriage and changes a friendship—but we still talked as if nothing had changed, because for us, everything had changed but the friendship at our core. When she got pregnant with Noah, she had to be on bed rest for a few weeks. And then of course Spawn left her. Because, for him, not being the center of her universe was unacceptable. When he left, it almost killed her.

Funny to hear that expression now. Cancer puts a lot of things in perspective.

Anyway, I was convinced nothing could kill her if she could survive Spawn’s abandonment.

But this was different, and by the third chemo treatment, even the way she talked about it had gotten more resolved to the fact that she would not be there to watch Noah grow up.

“Will you make sure he doesn’t forget me?” she asked one night. We were lying in her king-size bed. She had a big soup pot next to her in case she needed to throw up in a hurry. She had an ice pack on the back of her neck and one on her forehead.

“Shut up! Because if you think I won’t bitch-slap you now that you have cancer, you’re wrong. Stop talking like that.”

“Michael, I need you to be the one person on this earth I can be entirely honest with. It’s truly exhausting for me to have to keep up this pretense that I am definitely going to live. I am buying time. Borrowed time. I lie here every night and try to figure out what I am going to do to get these kids ready for life without me. And every time you deny me the chance to be honest, I just—” She didn’t finish her sentence but took a tissue I offered her.

“I believe in miracles.”

“I don’t, damn you.”

“Miracles aren’t about kneeling in a church, or weeping statues, Lily. Miracles just happen. They’re part of the plan.”

“Whose plan?”

“The Big Man’s.”

She turned her head to face me. Pillow talk without the sex. I was sleeping over so I could take Noah to my mother’s for brunch the next day. The ice pack slid off to the side. Her nose was running. Her face was blotchy.

“See, that’s where I have a problem. Because if miracles are part of the Big Man’s plan, then me being sick is also a part of it. I mean, okay, into each life a little rain must fall. People get cancer, so why not me? But damn it, why me? When I’m a single mother? Where’s the goddamn plan in that?”

“I ask the Big Man that every night, Lil. But you still have to believe. What happened to Pac-Man and visualization?”

“I’m still doing my internal video game.”

“But you’re doing it thinking you’re going to lose. What if you did it thinking you could win? That you could get the high score on the Pac-Man machine of life.”

“Michael, that’s the worst pep talk I have ever heard in my life.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. I played baseball in college, remember. I had coaches who majored in cliché. One for the Gipper and all that.”

“You still didn’t answer me. Will you make sure he doesn’t forget me?”

“Lily, stop it. Noah is not going to forget you.” My voice rose. I stopped looking at her and stared up at the ceiling. “You’re his
mother.
And you’re not going anywhere.”

“But he will forget me. I mean, he won’t forget me because he’ll have pictures and memories, but after a while, I mean a long while, he will. Like when he’s fifteen or twenty-five, or when he’s getting married, he’ll try to remember what I smelled like, my voice, how it felt to have me hug him, and he’ll realize that I’m fading. That the pictures and videos are vivid, but what’s in his heart is more like a whisper.”

“You’re larger than life. Trust me. First of all, how could he forget all of the horrible meals you’ve subjected him to? Or the Halloween costumes you made him—never store-bought? I mean, what kid is going to forget the year his mother made him a shark costume, complete with the world’s biggest cardboard fin? Or the lobster costume when he was obsessed with crustaceans? And what about how you’ve never missed a Little League game? All this while Spawn is fucking the Child Bride and living in London. You were—are—there for him, Lily, and he will hold onto that forever. Along with all the new memories. Because I intend to dance with you at his wedding.”

“David can’t raise them.”

“No. He can’t.”

“My parents are both dead. I have a cousin who’s a lush in California whom I haven’t seen in fifteen years.”

“And you’re an only child. Which, frankly, beats the god-awful sister I have.”

“That leaves you, you know.”

“Please…I will always be here for them, you know that.”

“But you hear what I’m saying.”

“I hear you. But they belong with family.”

“
You’re
their family. We’ll table this for now. To be discussed in the near future.”

“Tabled. Now what do you say we pop in a video of Vivian Leigh in
Waterloo Bridge
, bawl our eyes out and mutually swoon over the late, great and very beautiful Robert Taylor.”

“Now there’s another man we can agree on.”

“Certainly. Not like that little boy-toy actor you like. Orlando Bloom.”

“Please. He is very sexy.”

“You need to like some real men.”

“I won’t even touch that one, Michael.”

“Want some popcorn?” I sat up.

“Couldn’t keep it down.”

“Warm ginger ale?”

“Sounds heavenly.”

I went downstairs to get her some ginger ale and to get the video. The house was quiet. Tara was sleeping at her girlfriend Jody’s house, and Noah was long since asleep. I found myself staring out at the lawn from the kitchen window. We’d had a snowstorm two days earlier, and everything still looked pristine out in the ’burbs. For some reason, the sight of the snow, the quiet house, the little stained-glass suncatchers Noah and Lily made and baked in the toaster oven and stuck with suction cups to the window, I felt this lurch of emotion inside of me and I started to cry. I slid down to the floor and sobbed into my knees for a good ten minutes. The thought that she spent nights wondering if Noah would forget her, if she would become this faded ghost in our hearts, destroyed me.

I collected myself, rinsed my face with some cold water, wiped my eyes in her ratty pale blue dish towel, and went back upstairs with soda and the movie. In hindsight, it was a bad choice. At first, we sighed over Robert Taylor as the dashing Roy. He swept Vivian Leigh, as the young ballerina, right off her feet. Every glance between them was straight out of old Hollywood. Roy was dreamy; she was the innocent. By the end of the four-hankie sobfest, Vivian Leigh’s character of Myra had given up on life. She walked in a trance, along Waterloo Bridge, dazed by her own heartache. For the second time that night, I cried. Myra died right there on the bridge. But Roy had a good-luck charm from Myra in his pocket, and there he was, thirty years later, standing on Waterloo Bridge remembering everything about her. It was as if Myra was still alive. Myra. Lily. Was there any doubt she would stay in our hearts?