Out of the Woods (15 page)

Most days I saw Dean, always busy, mending a fence, unloading the pickup, feeding the horses. So, hear you've hit a spot of heavy weather, was all he said the first time I ran into him after the diagnosis, but the way he said it was comforting, containing as it did the assumption that I was up to the challenge.

Joanna, Dean and Harriet's next-door neighbor, tall and thin and unassuming, silver haired, quiet mannered, the terror of the tennis courts and a breakneck horsewoman, would come out to see how I was doing. Jill, beautiful, well coiffed, and elegant, who owned the house across the road, offered the use of her pond so I could swim without feeling self-conscious about my bald head. The young men doing roadwork or tree trimming or logging would wave a hand or indulge Henry when he reared up on his hind legs to thump his big muddy paws on their chests.

The walk pretty much did me in for the day, at least early in the three-week chemo cycle. But on the better days, I would go into the village for the endless medications I was taking, stopping at the Woodstock Pharmacy, where the staff would have cured me on the spot with their kindness. Once, when my fingernails were falling off and I could no longer get the pills of one prescription out of their fiendishly encapsulated wrappers, the women opened about a hundred of them and put them in a bottle. At the Creamery, where I sometimes went for lunch, the waitress, Tina, regaled me with tales of her annual trip to Disney World, and promised me a hot fudge sundae when my taste buds came back.

On the bad days, I stayed home and wandered through an odd sort of half-life, one in which my brain quietly packed its valise and headed for Cuba. There are many women who go through the business of breast cancer and barely break stride, who take care of young children and cranky husbands, who write briefs and run the numbers and do the laundry and remind the boss that his wedding anniversary is coming up and calmly note the dates for their chemotherapy or reconstruction or radiation sessions in their date books right alongside the eleven-year-old's soccer practice and the eight-year-old's Suzuki lesson.

I am in awe of these women, but I was not one of them.

I tried to work, to research and write the magazine pieces I had agreed to deliver and the book I was contracted to turn in, but I could not find my way to the place where I did these things. It was a little like the first months of my daughter's infancy, when, as a new mother, I felt as if all the boundaries in my world had exploded, that the safe place from which I worked and thought and sorted out emotion had vanished, my whole being invaded by the enormous fact of this baby who left only rubble in her path.

At least Zoë hadn't made me stupid. A gibbering idiot who would discuss the troubling infrequency of her child's bowel movements with total strangers, yes. But still someone who could read a book, if she had had the time, or follow the plot of a movie, if she stayed awake long enough.

With cancer it was different. In my head there was only static. When the static was really loud, I lay in bed and stared at the white birch and kept a picture of Zoë by my side, to remind me of why I was doing this. When it was quieter, more like white sound playing in the background, I knitted and listened to audio versions of Dickens novels. Dickens's characters, so cartoonishly oversize in character and personality, so heroic, so villainous, so idealistic, so energetic; the constant kinetic energy of light and dark, good and evil, tragedy and comedy, “in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon,” as he writes in
Oliver Twist;
the druggy high of the emotional roller coaster he takes you on, the breakneck plots you follow helplessly from turn to careering turn, and almost more important, the neat, and tidy, and orderly world of his plucky and utterly unbelievable heroines prevailing over absolute chaos, evil, and bad housekeeping: Dickens saved me, gave me strength, even on days when I was so tired that it took me three hours to change the sheets on the bed.

I cruised the TV listings for anything I could stand to watch. I don't know whether it was cancer or chemo or adrenaline, but for the most part I couldn't watch TV without being acutely aware that I was watching actors acting. The veil of the imagination, the hypnotic trance that usually takes over and makes you forget the artifice, was gone—I worried about them flubbing their lines, or wondered about the props falling down, and it made me anxious for the actors.

There were two performers immune from this phenomenon—Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock, and Vin Diesel. Luckily for me, one of their movies seemed to be playing on some channel somewhere day and night, and I watched them all in real time—sitting through the commercials made me feel weirdly safe. My favorite was
The Pacifier,
in which Mr. Diesel plays a former Navy SEAL who has to protect five lovable children from a host of bad guys. I must have watched it a dozen times and still feel a debt of gratitude to Mr. Diesel whenever I see him in a trailer or advertisement.

Most days I glued myself to the discussion boards on BreastCancer.org. The women there—scared, funny, angry, depressed, irresistible—got me through the entire process, from the forum called “Diagnosed and Scared” (“Am I going to die?” someone wrote; “I don't want to die”) to the one entitled “I Want My Mojo Back” (“Hey girls, this loss of libido thing is just unacceptable. If the genders were reversed, this would be the first problem they addressed”).

Over time, I noticed a shift. The fear that had seemed to emphasize my isolation in Vermont had dissipated, most of the time, permitting the return of the comfortable solitude that had set in just before the diagnosis. At least it was technically solitude—there was no one else in the house. But I had the oddest feeling that I wasn't alone.

Soon after I moved to Castle Dismal, I saw a luna moth for the first and only time. It was evening, and the creature, attracted to the light inside, attached itself to a pane of glass on one of the French doors that looked out on the woods. It was a thing of astonishing beauty—its wings were enormous, and green-blue, like a shallow sea on a sunny day, with markings in black and orange that looked like exotic eyes rimmed in kohl. The moth stayed for nearly an hour, until Henry loped into the room and startled it.

I had been lucky: luna moths, I read later, are common in North America but rarely seen because they are nocturnal and have a life span of only a few days. All summer I waited for another, though I knew such a thing wouldn't happen again. I wasn't sure I wanted it to—the singularity of the moment had been a proof that I was where I was meant to be, at a moment when such proof was sorely needed.

One night, sometime in the middle of the chemo cycle when the worst was over and I wasn't yet dreading the next round, I was sitting on the same sofa in the living room, staring out at the inky night and the woods beyond the French doors that led to nowhere. I saw something in the same pane of glass in which I'd seen the moth. It was large and pale and glowing and I was puzzled at first as to what it could be. No living thing surely, at this time of year—April nights were cold and unforgiving. The reflection of a picture on the wall? But I hadn't yet put up any pictures. I looked harder. It was an enormous white egg. No, it was a face.

An old man's face, oval like an egg, pale and nearly featureless, and bald, with a pair of thick brown spectacles delineating the eyes, a puffy face wearing a quizzical expression. My face.

I stared. Fascinated, repelled. Me and not me. All my life I had checked myself out in store windows and department store mirrors—that fascination you have as a child when you happen to see yourself, delighted, a little frightened perhaps, that the consciousness of self you have inside your head actually has a physical presence in the world, never really goes away.

That little girl holding on to someone's hand, the stringy-haired beanpole with bad posture, that massively pregnant person, that was me? Really? In my twenties there were moments I was amazed to find any reflection at all—I felt so invisible, fluid, so essentially unreal compared with other people. And then middle age, with its inevitable concessions to gravity, the time when you find yourself less inclined to seek such images out. Still, the changes come on gradually, and you make your peace with them, or at least you do until you see yourself as others see you, in a photograph perhaps. That's me? Really?

But nothing prepared me for this new version of myself, this old bespectacled egg-headed man. I called him Augustus Egg, after the Victorian-era painter who looked nothing like that reflection in the window but whose name was too perfectly suited to the image I saw in the window that night.

Augustus Egg became my cancer persona, an individual quite separate in his thoughts and temperament: me, yes, but also not me, not the woman who cried and dreamed her anxious dreams, but a doughty individual, ill-tempered, and slow moving, yes, but imbued with a Churchillian stubbornness that I would eventually come to admire.

But I wasn't very fond of Mr. Egg when he first made his appearance; in fact, he freaked me out. I just wanted him to disappear, so I got up from the sofa and went outside to let the dog out and to look at the moon. But that night, gray clouds had partially covered it, transforming it into a torn and ragged breast, and for once I wasn't frightened or anxious or searching the ether for answers. I was furious that even the comfort of the moon had been taken away from me, that everything I cared about was gone. I was full of rage and then and there I welcomed the entrance of Mr. Egg, who didn't seem to give a damn about any of the things I worried about.

7

Last Days of the Killer Wisteria

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

A
ugustus Egg was a good companion as the spring warmed and the countryside bloomed. In the evening, the cool of the approaching night filled the hollow with the scent of lilacs and issued such an imperative to joy that I wanted to run into the house and shut it all out. It had nothing to do with me, with the grayed-out landscape of illness. But Mr. Egg just laughed—you have to stand here and take it, he said, stand here, among the blue-black shadows of the blossoming trees, drinking in this scent and this night, and understand that the world in its infinite wisdom will go on, spilling its prodigal beauty and unmerited pain and what a very good thing that is.

As the weather began to settle, the workers waiting for their sandwiches at George's butcher shop were beginning to talk about barbecue weather and the first of the weekend people were back to order crown roasts and legs of lamb. On Pleasant Street, in the sunshine splintered by the chill spring wind, a small pod of teenagers walked, dripping wet and barefoot, rushing the season with a dip in the Ottauquechee. At Runamuck, Cathy's barnyard was in riot, with turkey chicks poking their ugly little heads out of eggs, ducklings strolling about, geese squawking, baby goats leaping over tricycles and wandering into the house, children careering about on bicycles with training wheels. On the green slope above, a proud red vixen sat, showing off three cubs nursing at her side, while improbably, on just the other side of the fence, a flock of sheep grazed. It seemed as if everyone in the village was outdoors, dressed in sun hats and mud boots, crouching over flower beds, wielding trowels and hoes and hoisting large bags of compost and fertilizer.

I stayed inside, reading about life expectancy rates and treatment options. On good days, when I was in Marcus Aurelian mode, I was simply grateful to have a shot at surviving. On others, I thought about the physical changes that surgery would bring, about whether or not to have breast reconstruction—was a fake breast a surrender or a reassuring return to normalcy? I still didn't know whether I would even need a mastectomy—the tumor showed signs of diminishing—but I couldn't stop thinking about it, because it was a way of thinking about so much more.

The idea of mastectomy without reconstruction was savage and drastic, and defiant—it was a jump off a cliff. I liked the extremity of it. Besides, there was something egregious about a fake breast, if only because I resented the idea that you need to have it—or any—to be “a whole woman,” as the proreconstruction literature stated. It also seemed vaguely retrograde, as if I was trying to hold on to something I no longer really needed. Mastectomy appealed because it seemed, at least to me, a perfect and irrefutable signal of the end of sex, a definitive answer to the nagging questions of love and loneliness, to my frustration that I could not yet give up on the idea of a shared life. My doctors tended to just roll their eyes when I ranted on like this, figuring, correctly, that my attitude would change when the time came.

Maybe it was this obsession with surgery, maybe it was a reaction to all the life springing up around me, but I developed a visceral need to cut things down. Anything; really, it didn't much matter what. The last of the stubborn pockets of snow were finally receding from around the house and the earth was giving way to the advance of the new season. Some days it seemed as if everything was falling down: a tree limb broke off high above my head and fell a few feet from where I was walking; the posts holding up the woodshed lost their hold in the wet earth and collapsed, sending some of the neatly stacked logs rolling down the hill to the creek, to the great delight of the beavers.

I wanted my part in this gleeful destruction, and on days when I had the energy I would put on a pair of muck boots and throw an anorak over my nightgown, and machete in hand, Augustus and I would go forth and do battle.

Most of the time I went out back to where the tall thorny raspberry canes tore at my clothes every time I hung the laundry, and obscured the view of the creek below. I whacked away blindly, stopping only when I could no longer lift the blade. But the real target lay in the front yard.

From the moment I had moved into Castle Dismal, I hated the ugly thick-stemmed green vine growing on the right side of the house near the porch. Over the past five years, it had grown out of control,
Little Shop of Horrors
–style, coiling up the porch columns. For the most part I left it alone, unable or unwilling to challenge its progress. But there were limits to my passivity. Whenever it extended its grasp to the porch furniture I would take action, snipping away the tendrils that were coiling around the rocking chair in which I liked to sit and hatch dark plots for its eventual demise.

I had assumed for a long time it was simply a great ugly weed, but recently I had been informed that it was in fact a wisteria vine, and that bit of news had stopped me in my tracks. A wisteria conjured an entirely different set of images than my rampaging weed: it bespoke graciousness, quaint well-tended cottages and the blooming, cultivated lives within. I would have to change my attitude, I decided, not without regret, for I had enjoyed hating the plant as much as I did. Now I would have to tend my wisteria and encourage it to bloom for me. Its delicate blue flowers would soften the severely practical lines of my house. It would thrive under my care, and I would learn to love it, because wasn't that why I had come to Vermont? To learn to take care of things, to be the kind of person who tended a garden with patience and care, and weeded and pruned and then basked in the results of her stewardship, proud that she had created this little Eden on earth?

No, said Augustus Egg. It's ugly and you hate it.

No, it's not, and no, I don't, I said. At least I won't when it flowers.

It won't flower, said Augustus.

It won't flower because it hates me, I said, and a tear trickled down—whether from exhaustion or from the Taxotere that kept my left eye watering constantly was unclear.

It won't flower because it's ugly and horrible and keeping it around isn't going to make you into the kind of person who keeps a beautiful garden or recites poetry by heart or opens her house to the public on the gracious home tour and it isn't even going to turn you into the person who wants to be that person, said Augustus.

You're right, I said, and got the machete.

I whacked away at the wisteria for a couple of hours. The machete's silvery sheen and keen edge, which I had so carefully honed in the beginning, were duller now, but the gleam of the metal against the matte green of the thick stems was still cruel and beautiful to look at, and the increased resistance of the stalks and the heaviness of the handle and the immediate ache in my arms turned each swing into a howl of anger and rebellion and joy and pleasure. It started to rain and still I whacked away. My hands were bloody from the thorns that had grown up around the vine and my feet were muddy and Henry danced in and out, trying to help, growling and pulling at whatever piece he could get ahold of. The wisteria grew on a trellis that had originally been a white fan-shaped structure, but which had weathered to a shabby gray and buckled under the weight of the monstrous vine, and so I got out the hatchet and hacked down the trellis as well. At the end the trellis was an ugly splintered mess and the vine was a stumpy ruin of its former self and everywhere was mayhem. The tangled vines I'd torn away from the porch railing lay in great heaps, threatening to suffocate the budding daylilies. I saved the daylilies but left the rest where it lay, and went into the house content.

Catastrophes provide a pair of parentheses in which to live apart from real life, depositing you rather abruptly on the sidelines for a bit while normal life continues to eddy downstream. And, like Dr. Johnson's hangman, it does serve to concentrate the mind wonderfully. I thought a lot about the disorientation that had brought me to this peculiar place while I drifted in the chemical fog and set the rhythm of my days to the timing of the next infusion, the rounds of white counts and blood tests, the progress of the tumor toward extinction.

Eventually the treatment would be over, and whatever the long-term outcome, I would return to real life. The current crisis forced a necessary optimism, a cheery determinism to get through this mess with as much courage as possible and back to life as it used to be. But did I want that life back? A brain beset by chemicals may not be the sunniest plateau from which to review the past—the bleak, scoured emptiness in which I lived shone an uncompromising light on what had come before, unmediated by softer memories. But I welcomed the harshness.

 

L
ooking back, I could see only failure and loss, and heard only the voice that asked, with increasing insistence, that age-old midlife question: Is the best of it over? The chemo had made me look my age (or, as Dr. Ruden had put it when he saw me during that time: You look great! All that weight you've put on has gotten rid of the wrinkles on your face!). And while the chemo may have paralyzed my brain, how long had it honestly been since I had taken any real interest in my work before I got sick? What was I living for, apart from blind instinct, apart from Zoë? I wasn't thinking about these things in anguished, apocalyptic terms, but in the cool dry logic that Augustus Egg favored—to him it merely seemed like an interesting question. He asked a lot of them: How do you judge if your life is a failure? I had often told myself mine was, but how did one define failure? Is it only about whether you have hit all the marks, the ones the others hit, and when did you decide that they were your marks as well?

When I was young and insufferable, I wrote a fair number of newspaper stories about cultural phenomena who had faded from the headlines but still had the temerity to ply their craft, what one editor called the surprise-he's-not-dead profiles. I liked working on these stories; the has-beens were invariably more interesting than the ones who were still floating along like those Japanese puffer fish, engorged on the attention and oblivious to the notion that they could lose it all. But I always felt a little sorry for the subjects who insisted they were happy with the way life had turned out, that they had found a richness or a source of satisfaction that more than made up for what they had failed to achieve or thrown away due to their own weakness, or excess, or bad luck. I didn't believe them, that's all.

But now I wondered at my youthful condescension (and the fear that fueled it): Wasn't it just a reflex, an echo of the sort of assumptions and received wisdom that we accept until we decide for ourselves which of them are weeds and which wisteria? I wasn't sure then that I had ever made that choice. Or had it always been the expectations of others that drove me forward, the desire to please, the shame when I failed to do so? And did being a failure—if that was what I was—make my life any less valuable? Less pleasurable, for that matter?

The questions never stopped; they followed me down the highway in the car, they kept me up at night in the dark dead silence, they cackled at me from the rafters. One afternoon while driving down my favorite road, Church Hill, the voices were more brutal than I could bear, drowning out even Mr. Egg, so loud, so merciless, that I had to pull over. I tried to do a meditation I had learned from
The Places That Scare You,
by the American-born Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, but which is common, I believe, to most Buddhist philosophy. It is a simple exercise in compassion, wishing that all who suffer may find peace. When breast cancer scared me, the act of wishing that all the women who were as scared as I was would feel better always calmed me down. So I tried it there, on Church Hill Road, parked next to a tumbledown barn looking over the green frosted hills that were just coming alive with bright yellow wildflowers. May all those who feel as lost as I do find their way, I said. Yes, said the voices, all of them but you.

As I started the car I wondered if it was possible to truly forgive yourself for your sins, real or imagined, whether I would ever escape the regret in which I steeped my version of the past. I knew by then that I had not left New York because I was ready for something new. No: I had run away from my old life out of a shame so large I hadn't even seen it for what it was.

All things fall and are built again . . .

And that, I finally realized as I headed toward home, was the giddy liberating glory of it: all things fall, even the hand that holds the scourge, done in by the incontrovertible insistence of the present. I drove on in the cool blue shadow of the hills, into the gathering dusk of the evening, as the diamond points of the first of the night's stars pricked the sky. Maybe they were all true, the crimes and shortcomings of which I convicted myself, and maybe, just maybe, it didn't matter, because at that moment, when I crested the last hill and turned into the driveway and stepped out of the car into the lilac-scented night, I was nearly knocked over by the beauty of a world in which my part mattered not one whit. All I could feel then was a surge of happiness and gratitude; I was that glad to be alive.

Go figure.

Cancer is a good teacher. It forces you to understand what you should have known when you were healthy: there is little time left and none at all for regret. I might not know what I wanted but I was beginning to know what I didn't. There were a lot of vines to be uprooted, most of them snaking through places in which a machete would be of no use. But I suspected that underneath them might lie a path to equanimity.

 

T
he rage began, as cataclysms often do, suddenly, like the first drops of rain that touch your cheek as you walk down a busy street. You blink, and look to the sky, and there is not even time to register the idea that a storm is coming before you are drenched to the bone.