Live a Little (22 page)

“Well, okay, bye.”

I turn back to Phil without hanging up. Thick smears of Taylor’s completely unnecessary concealing foundation stain the receiver. It is gross, and I resolve to make her clean it herself before the maid, Estrella, sees it. With alcohol.

“I want you out,” I tell Phil.

He scratches his ear. This enrages me. Doesn’t he know how insulting it is to engage in the mundane business of personal grooming when our marriage is imploding?

“No,” he says.

“No,” I repeat. Behind me, the cuckoo clock, an albatross of a family heirloom courtesy of Phil’s penny-squeezing nana Vanderhoeven, chirps out midnight. At a quarter till six. The screechy gong shreds my last nerve.

“Philip, it is customary for the
dickhead
to go to a
hotel
in these situations. I’m sure
Tate
can spot you if you can’t afford it. Or you could try that Motel 6 by the freeway. You know, the one where the
crackhead
was gutted with a potato peeler last year.” The incident, so bizarrely horrific at the time, now unfolds almost sweetly, like one of Aesop’s fables. My eyes dart to the cooking-implement drawer, where our own peeler rests alongside its dangerous friends, spatula and garlic press.

“Get out!”
I scream. This time he does.

CHAPTER 16

Things That Come in Flavors

It is 2:48
A.M.
, and I am staring blindly into the vacant eye of the computer, e-mailing, propelled by three coffees and a singular desire to grill my husband up nice and crispy on the Weber. Without the outlet Web surfing provides, I was starting to feel a little like the mystery brick I took out of the fridge for dinner last night: frozen, animal in origin, and too many years beyond freshness.

“Mom?”

Taylor is in the doorway, her Paul Frank pajamas slipping down her hips, her face rosy with sleep.

“What are you doing up, hon? Can’t sleep?”

“Where’s Dad?”

I had expected this, just not at three
A.M.
, and not so soon.

“Dad and I had a little disagreement, and we decided together to give each other some space to cool off. He went to spend the night with a friend.”

Taylor’s brow puckers. “So you’re getting a divorce?”

“What? What makes you say that?” On the computer screen, the name Duke Dunne jumps out at me, causing a sliver of self-recrimination to wiggle its way into my dehydrated little heart. In a fit of desperation, I e-mailed Surfer Boy. I move over a little, hoping to block Tay’s view of the monitor.

Taylor shrugs. She has my shoulders, broad and brown as a swimmer’s. Unlike me, my daughter is still nubile enough to make shrugging in a camisole pretty. “I don’t know,” she says. “When Quinn’s dad left, her mom said the same thing, that they were giving each other space or whatever. But he never moved back, and then he got an apartment with Zora.”

A small spark of horror alights at the back of my neck at being tarred with the same brush as Marlene and Avery McWhorter, delusional social climbers who pretended marital bliss for about thirty seconds sometime in the early eighties. I happen to know that Avery’s former-babysitter girlfriend, Zora, is Ukrainian and all of twenty and that Marlene has a pixie-haired girlfriend in the city whom her kids know as Mom’s therapist, but I don’t tell Taylor that.

Taylor continues, “Besides, Dad doesn’t have any friends except Uncle Ren, and I seriously doubt he’s going over to Aunt Laurie’s if you’re divorcing him.”

I do not have a ready answer for this. Now that she has dismantled my propaganda as easily as she would a preschool LEGO set, Taylor flops into her father’s swivel chair, tucking her legs under herself. Recalling the occasional stealthy hiss and stifled shout of my own parents’ thirty-year marriage, fundamentally ideal though it may have been, I dredge up a feeling of panic at being talked down to, of being “protected,” that inevitably left me with fears worse than any reality could have been.

“Dad and I had a fight—”

“About Micah?” Taylor says it so quickly I can tell some buried truth has been partially excavated. The haze of alarm that has been hovering over me for weeks thickens

perceptibly.

“What about Micah?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really. I just thought . . .” Taylor glances back at the hallway, as if afraid Micah is going to burst out of his room and put her in a big-brother chokehold. “I just thought you were worried because he didn’t meet curfew,” she improvises.

“Mike called in earlier, around one o’clock. He’s spending the night at Ronnie’s.” After the call, which calmed my worst death-by-Ecstasy-tab visions but did almost nothing to assuage my longer-term worries, I bit the bullet and called Ronnie back on his home phone to verify my son’s story. Barb Greenblatt answered with the same terrified hiss I would have used if awakened in the middle of the night in the same manner. After apologizing, I asked if Micah was indeed safely ensconced in Ronnie’s bedroom, without explaining why I wasn’t calling him myself. Barb sighed and told me she’d heard them come in after she’d gone to bed, and did I want her to get up and go check? No, I said, I’m sure everything’s fine.

“So why did you and Dad fight?” Taylor prods.

I test-think telling my daughter that her father has gotten naked with Ross Trimble’s skeletal excuse for a wife. This causes nausea to roil through my gut. The whole lying-toyour-kids-to-protect-them thing makes perfect sense to me. What’s so great about the truth, anyway? When I was Taylor’s age, I was cloddish, desperate, and hairier than is generally considered attractive outside of a few Kurdish villages. Would having these facts confirmed by an outside source have helped me any?

“It doesn’t seem that important now,” I fib while shutting off the computer. “Let’s go to bed. Things will be better in the morning.”

The breast-cancer support group meets in an Edwardian in the Lower Haight that houses the creepily named Institute for Attitudinal Adjustment. This just bugs me. For one, does a bad attitude really require an entire institute to wrestle it back into compliance? Can’t they just send my mother over to deal with it? Plus, aren’t there more important matters of personal growth at stake that could benefit from having their own institute—for instance, having a mullet or the inability to look good in low-cut jeans? More significantly, who gets to decide if an attitude is bad or just having, say, a bad day?

All told, there is something self-recriminating about cancer victims meeting here, supporting, as it seems to, the proposition that all one needs to do to increase one’s white blood cell count is put on a happy face and think about all the poor wretches out there who have cancer
and
halitosis, for instance. Then again, maybe the sign is a typo and they’re just borrowing the basement room from the adenoids people.

“I’ll get you a name tag. First names only,” Jean says, already scribbling my name on one of those stickers favored by conventioneers.

I pick up a flyer from the table, which features a rainbow of handouts and selected reading, including
Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber; Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book; Holding Tight, Letting Go;
and the alarming
Estrogen & Breast Cancer: A Warning to Women.
What, did estrogen go out of favor while I was in Mexico? I wonder if I’m supposed to know who Dr. Susan Love is, and quickly scan the jacket bio before Jean returns.

The support group is called Women Expunging Cancer of the Breast Because Life Endures. I’m not kidding; it’s really called that. The acronym, WE COBBLE, is printed, plain as the knot of spider veins on my left calf, on the upper-righthand corner of the flyer. Beneath it is a logo of a well-rounded woman with hair flowing in a modesty veil over her womanly parts, raising hopeful arms toward the sky, where, presumably, Dr. Susan Love awaits. Cobbling.

“Raquel? You want some coffee? Tea?” I accept an herbal tea from Jean and follow her to the semicircle of chairs.

So far, the support group is as I imagined it: the rickety card table of reading materials, the hushed chatter, the lovingly baked pastries, the weary ferocity of the women, the mood of mingled reprieve and dread at who may not show up this week. I hope I don’t have to stand up and confess my diagnosis, A.A.-style, because even with my newfound flair for storytelling, that would feel seriously wrong.

Part of me wants to be gone from here immediately. Another part wants to stay because, frankly, I deserve the torture. Sick people made me uncomfortable before; now they make me downright agitated. A third part is just plain curious. Call it empathy, voyeurism, or simple inquisitiveness, but after having spent a little time with these brave women, I want to hear more of their stories firsthand. I owe them that much and considerably more. Maybe, when I come out next month—and it
is
next month, I’ve even calendared it!—they’ll remember that I was here. Being supportive. Eating pastries. Holding tight. Letting go.

Cobbling.

A slender, well-dressed woman in front waves her hand. “Can everyone take a seat, please? Don’t be afraid— we don’t bite. Okay, Sharon bites, but we always stick her in the back near the zucchini bread.” A few laughs. “There’s plenty of room over here. There we go. So. Welcome. This is the primary-diagnosis support group. We focus on the needs of those facing a recent breast-cancer diagnosis, surgery, and treatment. Some of us are just entering this cycle, and others have transitioned to the other side and offer their wisdom and courage to our sisters.” Next to me, Jean squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers back, surprised by the rush of comfort I feel.

“I see some newbies I particularly want to welcome today. The way we do things is, nobody’s ever forced to share. If you want to talk, talk. If you want to cry, cry. If you want to run over there and eat every last Rice Krispie bar, go right ahead.” Giggles filter through the group. “I’m Kendall Calloway, group moderator. I was diagnosed in late 1998, treated in 1999, and I’ve been cancer-free since.” The assemblage applauds. “Lost and gained a husband along the way, but that’s neither here nor there.” Kendall looks around the room. “Does anyone want to begin today’s session?”

A fiftyish woman with thick faded auburn hair twined in a bun and a supermarket clerk’s green apron raises her hand. Kendall nods at her. “Doreen.”

“Thanks.” Doreen scratches her forearm, which seems to have a bad case of psoriasis. “Hi. I, uh, had an okay week. I’m actually feeling okay now that they’ve got me on the Zofran. The Compazine wasn’t doing a darn thing for my nausea, but the Zofran is great at taking the edge off. Anyway, I was sort of hoping now that I’m feeling better, I’d have a little more energy and Cliff and I might, you know, be able to spend a little more time doing something we like. Together, I mean. I’m at the hospital all the time, and when we’re home, most of the housework is falling on him. He never complains, but I can tell he’s having a hard time. He seems a little—I don’t know what you’d call it—depressed? He’s just not himself. The other day I went out to the garage to get some wrapping paper—I keep extra in there, ’cause why buy new when you’ve got all those nice gift bags from people—and I saw Cliff sitting in the passenger seat of the Taurus. Scared the bejeezus out of me. So, I’m like, ‘Cliffie, what are you doing sitting out here in the dark in the garage?’ And he starts crying, which I’ve never seen him do, not even when his father died of an aneurysm or when I was diagnosed or anything.” Doreen pauses to wipe a tear from her own eye. “He couldn’t stop crying, not even when I brought him back in the house and
CSI: Miami
came on. That’s his favorite.”

Vigorous discussion and several rounds of hugging ensue. An Asian woman recommends a book called
Breast Cancer Husband,
and Jean observes that maybe Cliff doesn’t feel comfortable revealing his grief because he thinks he’ll be stealing attention from Doreen. An older woman who can’t stop fiddling with an expensive wristwatch suggests that Doreen and Cliff attend another WE COBBLE group just for couples; it helped her a lot, and even though they ultimately divorced, they were able to use a mediator to divide the assets instead of a judge. A girl in braids and a short skirt, far too young to imagine having breast cancer, starts sobbing in a controlled, almost dignified way, and several ladies gather around her, clucking with sympathy.

Overall, I am impressed by the grave consideration given to other people’s minutiae and close to awed by the capacity of the women to dissect their experiences in a darkly funny manner. Confessions are made. Jokes are cracked. Topics close and open. One minute someone is crying in abject grief; the next, everyone is laughing the hysterical laughter of those who know enough about temporality to grab at a chance for release and squeeze every last bitter calorie out of it.

“Raquel, you’re newly diagnosed. How is your husband coping?”

So much for not forcing newbies to talk. I glance around the room. Several ladies nod encouragingly.

Oh, the usual way: an affair with his boss’s wife, lots of televised sports, and prolonged stays in the bathroom with the Sunday crossword.

Instantly, I feel guilty. Phil
has
made an effort. There was the awareness walk. And the knitting circle. And that night he made dinner.

“Phil seems to be holding it together all right,” I finally say. An image of the last time we made love pops into my mind. Phil did all the usual things, but with an almost terrified gentleness, as if afraid I would shatter and rain toxic bits of tumor all over the bed. I remember thinking at the time:
If I were really sick, there would be something terrible about this.