Naked (30 page)

“Please don’t call me stoned on pot and tell me there are lots of things I can do with my life,” she said. “I just got off
the phone with your brother, who suggested I open up a petting zoo. If that’s what being high does for a person, then what
I really need to do is start smoking marijuana, which would be a bit difficult for me since the last time I saw my right lung
it was lying in the bottom of a pan.”

In truth, her lungs were right where they’d always been. The cancer was too far advanced and she was too weak to survive an
operation. The doctor decided to send her home while he devised a plan. The very word sounded hopeful to us, a plan. “The
doctor has a plan!” my sisters and I crowed to one another.

“Right,” my mother said. “He plans to golf on Saturday, sail on Sunday, and ask for my eyes, kidneys, and what’s left of my
liver on that following Monday. That’s his plan.”

We viewed it as a bad sign when she canceled her subscription to
People
magazine and took to buying her cigarettes in packs rather than cartons. She went through her jewelry box, calling my sisters
to ask if they preferred pearls or gems. “Right now, the rubies are in a brooch shaped like a candy cane, but you can probably
get more money if you have them removed and just sell the stones.” In her own way she had already begun to check out, giving
up on the plan before it was even announced.
But what about us?
I wanted to say.
Aren’t we reason enough to carry on?
I thought of the unrelenting grief we had caused her over the years and answered the question myself. It was her hope to die
before one of us landed in jail.

“What’s Amy planning on wearing to this little Pepsi commercial,” my mother asked, referring to the mountaintop ceremony.
“Tell me it’s not that wedding dress, please.”

Lisa had decided to be married in a simple cream-colored suit, the sort of thing one might wear to work on the day of their
employee evaluation. Figuring that at least somebody ought to look the part, Amy had the idea to attend the ceremony dressed
in a floor-length wedding gown, complete with veil and train. In the end, she wound up wearing something my mother hated even
more, a pink cocktail dress out-fitted with detachable leg-o’-mutton sleeves. It wasn’t like her to care what anyone wore,
but she used the topic to divert attention from what we came to refer to as her “situation.” If she’d had it her way, we would
never have known about the cancer. It was our father’s idea to tell us, and she had fought it, agreeing only when he threatened
to tell us himself. Our mother worried that once we found out, we would treat her differently, delicately. We might feel obliged
to compliment her cooking and laugh at all her jokes, thinking always of the tumor she was trying so hard to forget. And that
is exactly what we did. The knowledge of her illness forced everything into the spotlight and demanded that it be memorable.
We were no longer calling our mother. Now we were picking up the telephone to call our mother with cancer. Bad day at work?
All you had to do was say, “I’m sorry I forgot to vacuum beneath the cushions of your very lovely, very expensive Empire sofa,
Mrs. Walman. I know how much it means to you. I guess I should be thinking of more important things than my mother’s inoperable
cancer.”

We weren’t the ones who were sick, but still, the temptation was so great. Here we could get the sympathy without enduring
any of the symptoms. And we deserved sympathy, didn’t we?

Speaking to our mother, we realized that any conversation might be our last, and because of that, we wanted to say something
important. What could one say that hadn’t already been printed on millions of greeting cards and helium balloons?

“I love you,” I said at the end of one of our late-night phone calls.

“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes
in a raised glass. And then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if I had it to do over again, I would
probably take it back. Nobody ever spoke that way except Lisa. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were
trying to talk them out of money or into bed, our mother had taught that when we were no taller than pony kegs. I had known
people who said such things to their parents, “I love you,” but it always translated to mean “I’d love to get off the phone
with you.”

We gathered together for the wedding, which took place on a clear, crisp October afternoon. The ceremony was held upon a grassy
precipice that afforded magnificent views of the surrounding peaks, their trees resplendent in fiery red and orange. It was
easy to imagine, looking out over the horizon, that we were it, the last remaining people on the face of the earth. The others
had been wiped out by disease and famine, and we had been chosen to fashion a new and better world. It was a pleasant thought
until I pictured us foraging for berries and having to bathe in ice-cold streams. Bob’s family, hearty and robust, could probably
pull it off, but the rest of us would wither and die shortly after we’d run out of shampoo.

My father wept openly during the ceremony. The rest of us studied his crumpled face and fought hard not to follow his example.
What was this emotion? My sister was getting married to a kind and thoughtful man who had seen her through a great many hardships.
Together they shared a deep commitment to Mexican food and were responsible card-carrying members of the North American Caged
Bird Society. The tacos and parrots were strictly between Lisa and Bob, but the rest of her belonged to us. Standing in a
semicircle on top of that mountain, it became clear that while Lisa might take on a different last name, she could never escape
the pull of our family. Marriage wouldn’t let her off the hook, even if she wanted it to. She could move to Antarctica, setting
up house in an underground bunker, but still we would track her down. It was senseless to run. Ignore our letters and phone
calls, and we would invade your dreams. I’d spent so many years thinking marriage was the enemy that when the true danger
entered our lives, I was caught completely off guard. The ceremony inspired a sense of loss directed not at Lisa, but at our
mother.

“No booze?” she moaned. My mother staggered toward the buffet table, its retractable legs trembling beneath the weight of
sparkling waters, sausage biscuits, and decaffeinated coffee.

“No booze,” Lisa had announced a week before the ceremony. “Bob and I have decided we don’t want that kind of a wedding.”

“Which kind?” my mother asked. “The happy kind? You and Bob might be thrilled to death, but the rest of us will need some
help working up the proper spirit.”

She didn’t look much different than she had the last time I’d seen her. The chemotherapy had just begun, and she’d lost —
at most — maybe five pounds. A casual acquaintance might not have noticed any change at all. We did only because we knew,
everyone on that mountaintop knew, that she had cancer. That she was going to die. The ceremony was relatively small, attended
by both families and an assortment of Lisa’s friends, most of whom we had never met but could easily identify. These were
the guests who never once complained about the absence of alcohol.

“I just want you to know that Colleen and I both love your sister Lisa so much,” the woman said, her eyes moist with tears.
“I know we’ve never been formally introduced, but would you mind if I gave you a big fat hug?”

With the exception of Lisa, we were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort, it was our belief that no amount
of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well-made cocktail.

“Hey, wait a minute. Where’s
my
hug?” Colleen asked, rolling up her sleeves and moving in for the kill. I looked over my attacker’s shoulder and watched as
a woman in a floor-length corduroy skirt wrestled my mother into an affectionate headlock.

“I heard what you’re going through and I know that you’re frightened,” the woman said, looking down at the head of thinning
gray hair she held clasped between her powerful arms. “You’re frightened because you think you’re alone.”

“I’m frightened,” my mother wheezed, “because I’m
not
alone and because you’re crushing what’s left of my god-damned lungs.”

The scariest thing about these people was that they were sober. You could excuse that kind of behavior from someone tanked
up on booze, but most of them hadn’t taken a drink since the Carter administration. I took my mother’s arm and led her to
a bench beyond the range of the other guests. The thin mountain air made it difficult for her to breathe, and she moved slowly,
pausing every few moments. The families had taken a walk to a nearby glen, and we sat in the shade, eating sausage biscuits
and speaking to each other like well-mannered strangers.

“The sausage is good,” she said. “It’s flavorful but not too greasy.”

“Not greasy at all. Still, though, it isn’t dry.”

“Neither are the biscuits,” she said. “They’re light and crisp, very buttery.”

“Very. These are some very buttery biscuits. They’re flaky but not too flaky.”

“Not too flaky at all,” she said.

We watched the path, awkwardly waiting for someone to release us from the torture of our stiff and meaningless conversation.
I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidently
ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of
what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without
our complaints, there was nothing to say. My mother and I had been fine over the telephone, but now, face to face, the rules
had changed. If she were to complain, she risked being seen as a sick complainer, the worst kind of all. If I were to do it,
I might come off sounding even more selfish than I actually was. This sudden turn of events had robbed us of our common language,
leaving us to exchange the same innocuous pleasantries we’d always made fun of. I wanted to stop it and so, I think, did she,
but neither of us knew how.

After all the gifts had been opened, we returned to our rooms at the Econolodge, the reservations having been made by my father.
We looked out the windows, past the freeway and into the distance, squinting at the charming hotel huddled at the base of
other, finer mountains. This would be the last time our family was all together. It’s so rare when one knowingly does something
for the last time: the last time you take a bath, the last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you know you’ll never
do it again, it might be nice to really make a show of it. This would be it as far as my family was concerned, and it ticked
me off that our final meeting would take place in such a sorry excuse for a hotel. My father had taken the liberty of ordering
nonsmoking rooms, leaving the rest of us to rifle through the Dumpster in search of cans we might use as ashtrays.

“What more do you want out of a hotel?” he shouted, stepping out onto the patio in his underpants. “It’s clean, they’ve got
a couple of snack machines in the lobby, the TVs work, and it’s near the interstate. Who cares if you don’t like the damned
wallpaper? You know what your problem is, don’t you?”

“We’re spoiled,” we shouted in unison.

We were not, however, cheap. We would have gladly paid for something better. No one was asking for room service or a heated
swimming pool, just for something with a little more character: maybe a motel with an Indian theme or one of the many secluded
lodges that as a courtesy posted instructions on how to behave should a bear interrupt your picnic. Traveling with our father
meant always having to stay at nationally known motor lodges and take our meals only in fast-food restaurants. “What?” he’d
ask. “Are you telling me you’d rather sit down at a table and order food you’ve never tasted before?”

Well, yes, that was exactly what we wanted. Other people did it all the time, and most of them had lived to talk about it.

“Bullshit,” he’d shout. “That’s not what you want.” When arguing, it was always his tactic to deny the validity of our requests.
If you wanted, say, a stack of pancakes, he would tell you not that you couldn’t have them but that you never really wanted
them in the first place. “I know what I want” was always met with “No you don’t.”

My mother never shared his enthusiasm for corporate culture, and as a result, they had long since decided to take separate
vacations. She usually traveled with her sister, returning from Santa Fe or Martha’s Vineyard with a deep tan, while my father
tended to fish or golf with friends we had never met.

The night before the wedding, we had gone to a charming lodge and eaten dinner with Bob’s parents. The dining room had the
feel of someone’s home. Upon the walls hung pictures of deceased relatives, and the mantel supported aged trophies and a procession
of hand-carved decoys. The night of the wedding, Lisa and Bob having left for their honeymoon, we were left on our own. My
sisters, stuffed with sausage, chose to remain in their rooms, so I went with my parents and brother to a chain restaurant
located on a brightly lit strip of highway near the outskirts of town. Along the way we passed dozens of more attractive options:
steak houses boasting firelit dining rooms and clapboard cottages lit with discreet signs reading HOME COOKING and NONE BETTER!

“What about that place?” my brother said. “I’ve never tasted squirrel before. Hey, that sounds nice.”

“Ha!” my father said. “You won’t think it’s so nice at three

A.M. when you’re hunched over the john, crapping out the lining of your stomach.”

We couldn’t go to any of the curious places, because they might not have a sneeze guard over the salad bar. They might not
have clean restrooms or a properly anesthetized staff. A person couldn’t take chances with a thing like that. My mother had
always been willing to try anything. Had there been an Eskimo restaurant, she would have been happy to crawl into the igloo
and eat raw seal with her bare hands, but my father was driving, which meant it was his decision. Having arrived at the restaurant
of his choice, he lowered his glasses to examine the menu board. “What can you tell me about your boneless Pick O’ the Chix
combination platter?” he asked the counter girl, a Cherokee teenager wearing a burnt orange synthetic jumper.