Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (28 page)

But one morning, the message I found told me that I shouldn’t write to him anymore or try to call.

“I’ve told my wife about us, and the situation is delicate.”

I listened to the message again and again. It was a fist in my chest, a punch someone had landed there, refusing to retract his arm. The weight of it pushed into me and stayed. I was angry, didn’t know where to direct my thoughts or how to slow them down, how to go back to being the person I was before, the one who felt, suddenly, like a faraway stranger.

I lived like that for many days. I couldn’t explain much to anyone about what had happened or how I was feeling. I mentioned to Claire that my mentor—did I use that word or just describe someone to whom my relationship was that of a protégée?—had asked me not to contact him because I made his wife uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable
. Surely I knew his wife was livid, as I’d have been, too, had I been the wife, though I didn’t want to dwell on her stake in the situation. Claire didn’t say much, but at the end of the summer, as a going-away gift, she gave me a copy of
Anna Karenina
.

The affair—that’s what I had begun to call it in my mind, hoping that word might wean me of the desire to have it back—had left me heartbroken. I tried to tell myself that, in the grand scheme, I hadn’t lost so much, hadn’t even disrupted things to the extent I could have. I knew my life would go on more or less as it had been preparing to. I’d leave home, and time and distance would begin
immediately to do their work. I tried to tell myself that my teacher had been lucky, too. Nobody had fired him; there was no transgression that would have warranted it. I told myself our restraint had saved him, for there was nothing terrible or irreversible, nothing as bad, I thought, as physical betrayal to recover from. In the absence of palpable fallout, I was afforded the luxury of being swept up in a kind of manic, narcissistic grief, willing my own feelings of bereavement to blur into the losses and disappointments borne by the characters populating the novels I worked my way through before the summer’s end. I told myself I was becoming one of them, someone who had suffered, who had weathered something true and beautiful and therefore doomed to be short-lived. I told myself I was finally awake to what we’d sought together, my teacher and I.

When we did eventually speak, he suggested that we meet to say goodbye. On a sunny mid-summer afternoon—one too pretty and mute, too simple, it struck me then, for the occasion—we sat down for brunch at a restaurant more than an hour away, a place frequented by utter strangers, people in groups of two or four or six, smiling over baskets of pastries or stacks of French toast. We talked for only part of the time and spent the rest of the meal moving the food around on our plates and looking mournfully into each other’s faces. I don’t want to denigrate it now by trying to imagine how we must have looked to the other diners. I just want to say that we sat there filled with happiness at the sight of one another and with a very weighty kind of sorrow at the fact that we’d likely never see each other again. After the meal, we spent the next several hours walking the many passageways and colonnades of the Stanford campus. My brothers had long since graduated. It seemed imperative that we surrender to our separate futures in a
place where no one would recognize us, a place running over with so much deliberate beauty.

When he dropped me off at home, it was dusk. Before he left, he walked around to the trunk of his car and handed me a lawyer’s accordion file heavy with all the letters I had poured my young self into. It was a weight that dropped me to my knees as soon as I was safely alone behind closed doors.

POSITIVE

O
ne weekday afternoon toward the end of the summer, my mother stood in the kitchen facing my father, Jean, and me. We all knew she had been to the hospital recently for tests, though I was perhaps the only one who didn’t know with absolute certainty what exactly the doctors had been testing for. It was like her to keep such things quiet, not wanting to burden us with worry. She had probably gone alone not only for the tests but also for the results and kept them to herself until a moment when we were all together. Nevertheless, it shames me to think that I could have been so caught up in my own selfish dramas and excitement about school that I hadn’t even noticed her fasting before lab procedures, hadn’t read the deliberate tranquillity or the visible trepidation with which she moved during the days or weeks when the results she awaited were still unknown.

She had been hospitalized once when I was in first grade, after an episode of what had been described to me simply as “hemorrhaging.” When I’d asked what the word meant, I was told, “Mom’s bleeding, and they don’t know why.” I didn’t know to worry. But I was lonely for her when it was just my father and siblings and me on our own for a string of days, cooking our meals or eating food prepared by various neighbors. One particular devil’s food cake, which I dug into every day after school like a hungry orphan, stands out in my mind as an emblem of that time. And then, a
few days later, she was at home, our life was back to normal, and I never really thought about it again.

On that late-summer day, my mother told the three of us that her biopsy results had come back positive. Instantly, Jean’s face contorted in fear. She ran to my mother and bent over her, in tears. My father looked down and held his head in his hands. It took a moment for my mind to process it all.
Positive
, I reminded myself,
is bad
. I knew this much. The word
cancer
had circulated within my earshot for years. The tagline
KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER
had popped up so often that I’d started to view cancer as the destination to which nearly every route, one way or another, would likely lead. “Next thing you know, peanut butter will be known to the state of California to cause cancer,” Jean had scoffed once after a news segment identifying another compound found in Krazy Glue or diet soda or anything else in the average pantry as the newest in our state’s running list of carcinogens. But on that particular August day, in our kitchen, the word entered our home as if calmly, through the front door, looking us in the eyes and calling one of us by name.

When I was very young, I would sometimes awaken from nightmares furious with my mother for putting herself in harm’s way: going outside in her nightgown to shoo away a bear or letting strange men into our home when no one else was there to protect us. Underneath the anger, though, was always relief that the bear or the dangerous men weren’t real; already they were on their way to wherever dreams go when they disappear. Yet, on that particular late-summer afternoon, the danger in question was real. An assailant called Cancer had installed itself in her colon and was already launching its attack from within.

She wanted to be strong. She wanted to stand on faith there
in the kitchen with the windows open and cool air blowing the curtains up and back, but I could tell she was afraid by the way she steadied herself with both hands against the countertop and smiled an almost apologetic smile.

“I know that God can heal me,” she said. I was old enough by then to notice how thin her voice was and also to hear its timbre as distinctly female. Not weak but welcoming, cordial. As though she had just asked if we would like milk with our tea. She was not going to kick and scream or cause a scene. Certainly not before God, whom she had just allowed a loophole by employing the word
can
where I would have wanted her to say
will
. She was going to wake one morning soon, dress in a skirt, blouse, and pearls, pin her hair in place, and blot the excess makeup from her face. She was going to apply two dabs of perfume and enter the hospital with a smile for each of the doctors and nurses and technicians who’d be thinking whatever it is that people who see cancer every day must be in the habit of thinking. And then she was going to close her eyes and pray silently as the anesthesia dispersed into her lungs, saying to herself,
Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness
.

It was too big an upheaval to fit my mind around, and so I only attempted to parse it in part, by doubling back to the recent memory of a girl who’d graduated with me. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer during the first part of our senior year—or had my friend just been quiet about it until then? By then, she was coming only intermittently to classes, and it confused me that she should be behaving like the kids who broke rules and racked up Cs and Ds as a matter of course. It confused me that she should be taking what seemed like such a lax view of her own future.
Wouldn’t her mother have been happier knowing her daughter was set to follow a sounder path?

On that particular late-summer afternoon, while my mother did her best to relay to us the information provided by her doctor, thoughts of that friend seeped into every crevice of my mind. How I used to ride to school in her mother’s old burgundy Saab every morning of seventh grade. And how, nearly every afternoon, my mother would pick the two of us up and take us by the Thrifty drugstore for a ten-cent cone of rocky road ice cream. How during junior year that girl had taken a job at one of the department stores in the mall, and how I’d dropped in sometimes to say hello when I was there squandering time on weekends. How she’d written a poem, just months ago, that our teacher (before he had become
my
teacher, belonging to me alone, as I saw it) had thought enough of to liken to Sylvia Plath. During her mother’s illness, my friend took on an air of mysterious glamour in my mind. She came to seem more grown-up than the rest of us, staying home to attend to serious matters, driving herself around town behind the wheel of her mother’s old car. And, though she never revealed anything about her emotional state—not even in that poem, which, like Plath, had found a way to speak through some sort of a fierce or mythic mask—I’d spent part of our senior year envying what I guessed was her great complexity, my friend’s profound depth.

For a sliver of time on that late-summer afternoon, I allowed myself to blur into her in my mind. Again, it was like watching the reels of a film, only this time it was I who moved for a few frames through my friend’s life rather than my own, feeling older, just as my friend had seemed to become to me, a half-dozen months before. I was looking for the thing that made her life seem so much more real than mine and wondering if that thing would find me,
too, as a result of my own mother’s illness. My thoughts drifted for what felt a while, though it could only have been an instant, a quick flash of images that took up a fraction of a heartbeat. And how wrong, how awful, but also how true that a trickle of eagerness, a readiness to rise to the occasion, crept in before I put my thoughts back in perspective and put my mother back into the center of the scenario. Looking up, I caught my sister’s gaze, so like my father’s, with his high cheekbones and sharp, straight, perfectly sculpted nose. Her eyes held on to me, boring into me without blinking, as if she could see the gears racing in my mind and was willing me to remember that this was not an occasion for anything but sorrow or anger—or pigheaded faith.

My mother’s surgery was scheduled for early September. I realized with a start that I wouldn’t be there for it; I’d already be across the country for school. She decided to forgo chemotherapy, hoping it would suffice to have the cluster of small tumors—polyps, she called them—surgically removed. Knowing next to nothing about what happened to people with cancer, it didn’t occur to me that such an approach might not be aggressive enough. I didn’t ask Jean or our father or even Conrad, who would have known something about cancer, if they thought the surgery alone would be sufficient or the course of treatment correct. This was still a time when I fundamentally trusted the soundness of my parents’ judgment. It’s a funny thing to try to articulate now, because I can very clearly see the contradictions, the ways that I had even then already begun to discount my parents’ view of things—by picking apart the weaknesses in my father’s ideas about the world or by backing away from some of the features of my mother’s religious beliefs. One way or another, my decision to carry on the way I had with my teacher must also have necessitated a discounting of
my parents’ judgment. Yet, despite all of this, when it came to my mother’s cancer, I remained under the impression that my parents, merely because they were my parents, possessed inherent knowledge of what was right.

It wasn’t until years later, after we were both parents ourselves, that Conrad and I finally discussed the plan of action that our mother had taken in responding to her cancer. It turns out that he hadn’t been given the opportunity to weigh in when the tumors were first detected because he hadn’t been told. Our mother wanted to keep this a secret from as many people as she could, her family included. She came from a generation—a time and a place—that viewed sickness as a private matter, not a topic up for discussion. Disease, especially cancer, responded best to stoicism, charting its course according to fate, which my mother referred to as God’s will. It was for private reasons, then, that my mother didn’t seek recourse to additional opinions. Her doctor in the brand-new military hospital that my father’s service had entitled her to receive care in, free of cost, said the surgery alone would be enough, and my mother believed him. That became the narrative we aligned ourselves with. Besides, other opinions might have opened up room for answers that I, and perhaps they, wouldn’t have known what to do with. Answers that told us, with an unfailing certainty, how things would one day end. So we moved about during those next weeks, shopping, cooking, working in the yard, packing up my belongings for school, all the while repeating what we knew and what we hoped would bear out as truth: “The tests showed a few small malignant spots, which the doctor will remove in a couple of weeks.”