Live a Little (9 page)

Release? Enjoy? While?

Cowed beyond speech, I lie back and try not to groan while horrible Dr. Minh tugs and pulls at my flesh and everything vital underneath. I try to maintain an open mind about the wonders of Eastern medicine but cannot imagine what medical benefit this torture is bestowing on me, the victim. Tears slide down my cheeks. All in all, I feel my performance is befitting an inoperable cancer patient who is having her internal organs pummeled and being denied a burrito.

“Okay, all done. You can sit up now.”

Shakily, I raise myself. To my embarrassment, the thick roll of flesh around my middle has jumped my underwear like an Olympic hurdler and spilled over, revealing the hated ridges of pale stretch marks and the thick coffee-colored line from navel to pubic bone that has lightened but not disappeared in the fifteen years since I last gave birth. For some reason I find it tolerable to be accused of carnivorous behavior but not to be visibly overweight. I can handle cancer and even Dr. Minh’s idea of restorative massage, but I cannot handle this hippie-biker-doctor person charging me with overeating my way to breast cancer.

“It’s interesting,” he says, those amber eyes weighing mine. “Your pulses are fine. Your chi’s a little off, but that’s to be expected. I do have some suggestions for you. And a treatment regimen. I think we can do a lot for you. Are you going to be seeing an oncologist?” Minh must be the new kind of Chinese doctor: savvy, reimbursed by the HMOs, and ready to copilot with a cutter.

“Yes. Meissner over at Stanford,” I say faintly. Thoughts of burritos have flown out the window along with my spleen.

“Mrs. Rose, why don’t you get dressed, and Karen will show you to my office.” He slips away. I hear him conferring with beastly Karen, who has probably donned a Darth Vader helmet against my toxic incursion into her habitat.

I jump off the table and quickly throw my clothes on. Karen comes back and leads me to a beautiful room with French doors off the garden. Dr. Minh is pouring himself a cup of tea. His desk is just as big as Meissner’s. On it are two photos: one of him with Xia Chi-Hong outside a pagoda, and another of him with a petite Chinese woman with a punk haircut and a baby in a papoose.

“Green tea?” he says.

“Please.” Predictably, even though the man just finished torturing me in the name of integrative health care, I want to please him.

We sit down. Karen hands him a few messages. I see her finger, blunt of nail and too dirty for a respectable health-care professional, slide against his neck for a second.

“Mrs. Rose, have you ever seen a picture of a colon?” he says as a way of segueing into my treatment plan. Frankly, I think it needs improvement.

“Um, no.”

Lo and behold, Dr. Minh has one on hand! He whips it out and lays it on the desk. It isn’t a real photo, thank God, just a series of illustrations.

“This is what a carnivore’s colon looks like.” The organ in question is rotund and engorged, like a boa constrictor that has ingested a rat.

“And this is a typical herbivore’s gastric system.” The slimmed-down version fits comfortably among its friends, some of which I can identify as gallbladder, stomach, and rectum.

“Look at this.” Dr. Minh moves his finger over the third drawing. The figure is trim and content-looking, considering that he is sliced in half crosswise. “Have you ever considered giving up food?” he says.

“Actually, I was a vegetarian for years,” I say, proud of my veggie cred. “All through college, until I got married. It’s hard when you have to cook for a husband and kids, though. Who has time to make two versions of every meal?” I gloss over the fact that except for Sundays, clan Rose is lucky to get one meal.

Dr. Minh raises his eyebrows at me. They are finely arched and sensitive. I wonder if he has them waxed. I really want to know; I don’t think I can respect him anymore if he does. It’s just so, you know, womanly.

“I don’t mean giving up meat,” he says, cringing, as if the very word could cause a slice of pastrami to cross his tongue. “Historically, breathivores are almost immune to the heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and other systemic illnesses that plague ingesters.”

“Breathivores?”

“Yes,” he says patiently. “We drink green tea, a little water-based vegetable, a little seaweed. It’s a beautiful, clean way to live. Of course, it takes some getting used to. But it sure beats breast cancer.”

“What?” Did he say what I think he said?

“Mrs. Rose, you’re going to have to make some lifestyle changes in order to detoxify your body. I don’t want to shock you, but the cancer’s the least of your problems. It’s your body’s way of telling you—shouting at you, actually—to wake up and start taking care of it. You should listen.”

“What are you saying, that I gave myself breast cancer?” A vision of the other Raquel Rose pops into my head. Is she, in true desperation, also consulting a series of quacks, trying to “cover her bases” with visits to bossy herbalists and deranged chiropractors? Are they insulting her—our—dignity with such misguided accusations?

“We’re all responsible for the health of our own bodies,” Dr. Minh says.

“So if someone gets beheaded in a car accident, that’s their fault?” I can feel heat browning my cheeks.

“Unfortunate, but there are cycles to these things. We’d all benefit from a little consciousness-raising, a little self-reflection.”

“That should be challenging without a head.”

I stand up. I think Dr. Minh can tell I’ve had enough without reading my pulses, because he stands up, too. I flex my calves to my full height, which is quite a bit more than his.

“Mrs. Rose, if you change your mind, please feel free to contact me. Given a little time, you might see things differently. I mean, your colon’s so blocked right now—”

My latent rage boils up and over. “Shove it up your ass, you vegan freak!” I mutter, the magenta glove of bougainvillea along the path muffling my words as I run.

“You should have seen his face. I thought he was going to plotz.”

“What could he plotz, a tea bag?” Sue giggles, her hand coming up in a habitual gesture to hide her teeth.

“What a hypocrite. The prick was lecturing me on healthy living while he practically diddled his assistant.” I gave my friend an edited version of why I was at the acupressurist/ sadist’s in the first place. I was not worried about Sue seeing me on Laurie’s show before I could talk to her personally; she turns on her ancient black-and-white television for one purpose only—cooking shows—and that’s only when she’s depressed.

Sue pads over to the pantry. “Chocolate-chip peanut butter or backpacker?” she calls, naming my two favorites of her restaurant’s arsenal of delicious baked goodies.

“What do you think?”

Sue hands me one of each, and I stretch out to full length on one of her Adirondack chairs. Susan Banicek’s funky little Victorian on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill is my absolute favorite home in the world. She’s transformed it from a warren of dim railcar rooms into a loftlike habitat that resembles a cat’s dream house, complete with exposed beams, platform nooks, and vast windows.

“Where’s Fina?” I ask.

“With Arlo.”

“Ooh, I want to see her.”

“I know. I called when you pulled up. They’re coming home from the park.”

“Thanks, Soodle.” I lay my hand on my friend’s plump arm.

She squeezes it and inspects my nails. “You need a mani.” Her gaze drops to my feet, long and battered in old sandals. “And a pedi.”

“Yeah.”

“How about we go over to Mani/Pedi? My treat. They can meet us over at Klein’s after,” she says, naming a delicious delicatessen near the neighborhood nail salon.

“Let’s go.”

I follow my friend out the bright blue door. Sue and I have been friends since college. We met at U.C. Santa Barbara our first day. I knew instantly, taking in the pretty, curvy girl with wild curly hair, retro granny glasses, and Dalmatian-spotted suitcase, that we would be friends for life. Unlike my self-diagnostic romantic forecasts, which have been accurate only in their tendency to culminate in marriage—to somebody else, in every case but Phil—my friendship oracle has remained true.

I’ve stuck with Sue through thick and thin. Through her parents’ divorce in college and the financial disarray that followed. Through her first, unplanned pregnancy and the abortion that ended it. Through the menial jobs and bad relationships with bad men. Through culinary school. Through the commune. Through Sarafina’s birth. Through the long drought between her daughter’s commune leader–musician father and the gentle motorcycle mechanic Arlo. Through the restaurant’s lean early months, before Sue’s unique blend of Mediterranean ingenuity and California freshness became the toast of the neighborhood and, later, the town.

She was there for me when Ren broke up with me and pursued Laurie and I could eat nothing but jelly beans and creamy peanut butter for six weeks. When I pounded NoDoz and Diet Coke for five days to finish my thesis project, and when—courtesy of Sue’s tenaciousness and contacts—I won my first private commission. When I foundered in creative dry spells. When I married Phil. When we had the kids. When Phil dropped out of the Ph.D program and I went back to work.

When our paths led Sue and me circuitously—me to marriage and stay-at-home motherhood in the suburbs, her to bohemian entrepreneurship and single motherhood in the city— we sought the other out like a tonic, basking in everything our life wasn’t.

For the most part, it worked.

“This one or this one?” Sue asks, holding up two bottles: demure pink and vixen red.

“That one.” I point to a silver chrome instead.

“Okay, but I get to pick yours.” She scans the rows of neat bottles and plucks out an iridescent blue.

“Sue! It’ll look like toe fungus!”

“No, it’ll look cool. You’ll see. It’s a good color for you. It matches your eyes and brings out your olive skin.”

We sit down for a heavenly interlude of cleansing, exfoliating, massaging, and gabbing.

We are just finishing up when Sue’s lover, Arlo, and daughter, Sarafina, come in.

“Quel!” Sarafina flings her lanky six-year-old body into my arms. She smells of that scent unique to small girls, a heady mixture of grape juice, Play-Doh, grass, and string cheese.

“Fina, watch out for Raquel’s nails, okay?” Sue admonishes.

“It’s okay.” I tug on one of Sarafina’s tight faun-colored curls and peer into her face. The marriage of her father’s bronze skin and regal bearing and her mother’s enveloping sweetness produced a beautiful, strong-willed, sweet-spirited child.

“Do you like my bindi?” she says with just the right amount of gravitas.

“Yes. You look very spicy and Indian.”

She giggles madly. With her coltish body squirming in my arms, I feel gifted and cool-mom and fantastic, Ellen De-Generes on a good day.

“Hey, Quel. Nice to see you, baby,” Arlo says. We lean over and exchange a quick, fond hug. After I got over the initial surprise of Arlo Murphy’s intricately inked arms, grizzly-bear bulk, and grease-monkey dress code, I came to appreciate— love—what he brought to my friend’s life: fidelity, devotion, stability, and free oil changes.

“You taking good care of my friend here?” I say.

He chuckles. We go through this every time. “I know she deserves better than this old tomcat. But I do the best I can. The best I can.” Arlo is a good ten or twelve years older and served in Vietnam while we were still in kindergarten. He doesn’t talk much, but I know he considers himself lucky to have landed in Sue’s orbit.

“C’mere, you big Wookie!” Sue says. They kiss passionately. The flock of Korean women around us stops filing toenails and collectively blushes.

“Gross,” Sarafina says.

“Yep,” I concur.

After our nails dry, we move on to Klein’s Deli.

“Don’t forget to leave the conditioner on her hair while you pick it out,” Sue tells Arlo as he gets ready to leave with Sarafina. “Otherwise it frizzes.”

He nods and kisses the top of Sue’s head. Something about the way Arlo’s rawboned hand, with its row of hieroglyphic-marked knuckles, smoothes Sue’s hair makes my breath stumble in my throat.

Sue and I watch them exit, Sarafina skipping alongside Arlo’s massive, leather-clad frame. Then Sue turns to me and fixes me with her potent gaze, which has always been as clear and resilient as gray pearls.

“What’s going on with you?”

Drat. The woman sees everything. Like a witch.

“Nothing,” I say. “This salad is good. I like the cranberries.”

The gray pearls glisten faintly, as if lit from within.

“Okay, there is something,” I confess.

She waits. Experience has proved that Susan Calliope Banicek can wait a long time for things. I don’t bother prevaricating further.

“This is hard to say,” I begin, chewing my thumbnail. It already has a ridge in the blue polish, sort of like my life, which is unable to maintain its smooth veneer for longer than a few minutes at a time.

“Jump in fast, like in cold water,” Sue suggests. “It’s easier.”

“Okay. I went to the doctor two weeks ago. I mean, actually, I went earlier than that, but they called me back to get the test results, then . . .” I see my friend’s normally healthy color drain away and feel both sick and foolish at the way I am doing this. “Don’t worry! I’m fine. At least now