The Hypothetical Girl (7 page)

For this reason she was pleased when she found out she would be teaching a course called “Irony in Western Literature” in the spring at the college, rather than English 102, which she had been assigned to teach on her arrival. She wasn’t sure exactly what they would read
yet, or what she would teach, but she simply loved the sound of the course, the way you might look forward to a large unsweetened beverage on a hot day. The right sort of drink, one that would not give you cavities or cancer or add a spare tire around your waist. An irony cocktail.

Late at night, when she got home from the new college in the new town, she went online to a cancer “discussion forum” and shared her feelings about the diagnosis with people as far away as Hong Kong and Cape Town and Iowa City. There was even a man on a boat somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland in the cancer discussion forum.

“The funny thing is, I just don’t feel that different,” the man said. His name was Henrik. He was a lifelong fisherman.

“I do,” said Rita. “I feel like I have been invaded by an alien.”

“But that is how you feel in your mind, do you feel any different in your body?”

“Not yet,” she said, “but they start the radiation next month.” That was how it worked. First the surgery, then chemo and radiation.

“Yeah, I hear that kicks your ass.”

I
t was hard to imagine anything kicking Henrik’s ass. He had faced storms at sea and several bouts of pneumonia, and had lost a finger once in a machine that cleaned fish. He was a tough guy.

Her surgery was quick and easy enough, the lumpectomy. It was actually an outpatient procedure. She had it on a Friday and was back at work on Monday. Her breast didn’t even feel any different. She had been afraid to feel for the pea, that it might still be there.

Days, Rita taught
Hamlet
and
Pride and Prejudice
and geared up to teach
Things Fall Apart
and
The Good Earth
. Nights, she went online to talk to Henrik and a woman named Anna Lin, who taught English in Japan. After four weeks, she began radiation and chemo.

It may have been her imagination, but Rita began to sense something happening between Henrik and Anna Lin, a kind of attraction, blossoming. While she would talk about her classes and the treatment, her nausea, the way she would vomit in secret at a bathroom in the janitor’s office at the college, how she hid her illness like a crime she was committing, Anna Lin and Henrik would talk about their favorite movies, the best foods to eat after chemo.

They would share articles they found online about people who had survived the disease and done amazing things. Henrik’s favorite book was Lance Armstrong’s
It’s Not About the Bike
. Rita secretly suspected the athlete’s cancer could have been caused by the steroids he used over the course of his career as a bike racer, but she didn’t say anything. Cancer patients, on the whole, try to avoid the topic of blame.

In mid-November, when she was handing back some essays to her 102 class, a student raised his hand. His
name was Bruno, he was on the ice hockey team, and he had a head of thick, curly black hair. Rita had recently become aware of hair and how much or little people had of it, since hers had begun to come out in clumps when she combed it, the way you might pull up flowers, accidentally when you are weeding. She had purchased some extensions she clipped onto her remaining hair that were actually kind of attractive, she thought. She might even look better than she ever looked. Cancer was honing her features, refining them. Or chemo was. In any case she thought she looked more real somehow.

“How do you think we are supposed to keep up with all this reading?” Bruno asked. “We’ve got games this week and next.”

Are you joking?
she thought. It was such a cliché, the college athlete complaining about the actual academic work.

“Coach says you are giving us too much; he is going to report it.”

Rita could see some of the other students nodding.

“Okay, poll: How many of you think this class has been too much work? We have a total of five books and five short essays in here,” she said. “One final. Is that really too much?”

A slight girl with a pierced nose raised her hand. “It is just the reading. It’s a lot. Some of these books are long, and kinda hard to read.”

“Okay, poll: Does everyone feel like that?”

The class nodded in unison. “Okay, duly noted,” Rita said. “I’ll get back to you on this.”

After class she went to the janitor’s closet bathroom and threw up.

She was certain she had read much more than she was assigning in her own college 102 class. She was certain she had had to write more essays and take more tests, too. Nevertheless, she decided to lighten the load. “You have to choose your battles,” she told her mother, on the phone, explaining the decision.

“That you do,” her mother said. She still hadn’t told her about the cancer.

That night, she went online and saw that Henrik and Anna Lin had created their own private chat room. She could see it but not enter; they had it “locked.” There were four other cancer forums she could go to, but somehow none of them appealed to her. She felt sort of left out of the discussion with Henrik and Anna Lin. She had begun to think of them as her secret cancer family. They were in there talking for over two hours, without her. Then, at about eleven, just as she was turning off her computer and about to go to sleep, she got an IM from Anna Lin.

“Rita—you still up?”

“Yeah, planning my classes for the week. Gotta scale back, apparently I assigned too much work!”

“Guess what?!”

“What?”

“Henrik is coming to visit me! He is coming to Japan!”

“Are you joking?”

“No, he is coming this weekend!”

“But what about his chemo?”

“He just finished it up. And he says he feels okay. He said I make him feel better.”

“Wow.”

“I know, double wow, right?”

“Right!”

Anna hung up and Rita just sat there, feeling surprised and a little jealous. It wasn’t that she wanted to be Henrik’s best cancer buddy. She just didn’t want to be nobody’s cancer buddy.

The weekend went by and Rita bought apples and made applesauce, which she had heard was good for nausea. She graded papers and picked which book to take off the reading list. All the books were classics, and she didn’t like the feeling she was snubbing one. But it had to be. She was choosing her battles. On Monday she told her class. “Okay, I want you to know I am hearing you. And I am taking
The Good Earth
off the list for this class. It makes me a little sad because it is a truly great book, a book of triumph over adversity, and hope and love, and I hope you all read it someday, like over the holiday …” She heard a snicker. “But for now we will omit it.”

The class broke out in applause. It was the biggest rise she had gotten from them since she began teaching. That afternoon a clump of hair fell out that was so big
it could no longer be hidden by the extensions. She was going to have to get a wig.

Rita thought about it. Why was it that rock stars and actresses could go bald and everyone loved them more for it, but she felt it would make her vulnerable at work? She was a new hire, and here she was already sick. And with the big C. She felt she had to
hide
it. But hiding it was getting harder and harder.

Then, it happened: She ran into the department secretary at the hospital as she was coming out of the place where she got her chemo, a large bank of chairs hooked up to the drip-drip-dripping bags of the medication that eradicated the cancer, tethered to a mysterious fluid, liquid poison, meant to all but kill you, knocking out the little pea plants on the way.

They would all sit there like that, some people reading magazines, others listening to their iPods, every now and then taking a swig of a drink. Nobody spoke. It reminded Rita of the banks of women sitting under the dryers at the beauty parlor when she’d gone with her mother as a child. Each one wrapped in a plastic mechanism, separate, eyes glued to a magazine, or the rare book. All in a row.

“Hello, Dr. Friedman,” said the secretary. “How are you? I mean, are you … sick?”

“Hi, Lucy,” said Rita, pausing. Right over her head was the bold “Chemotherapy Unit” sign. “Yes, I am. I have breast cancer.”

“Oh, so do I!” said the secretary, sort of excitedly. It was like a big club, this thing, breast cancer, inducting new members daily. “Maybe we can go on the walk together.”

“The walk?”

“The breast cancer awareness walk. You missed this one; we have one every October, downtown.”

“Of course,” said Rita. “We’ll have to.”

The next day, in her mail cubby in the department, she found a soft pink ribbon pin.
Pink is the color of little girls’ bedrooms, of cotton candy and breast cancer
, Rita thought.
Now I will have to wear pink clothes and go on walks and be a rah-rah cancer cheerleader
. It was something her sister—the life coach—would have been so much better at. Her sister was better at most things, and she would have been better at being sick as well, the whole gestalt of it. Rita, on the other hand, just wanted to chat online again with Anna Lin and Henrik, grab some midnight solace, their deeply sardonic yammer. But they had disappeared from her computer screen, enjoined in their own cancer support group of two, somewhere in Japan.

Her students, Rita thought, were looking at her differently. What was it? They seemed kinder, gentler, a whole new breed of student, as if someone had been washing them with fabric softener. “Dr. Friedman,” said one, after class, “I read
The Good Earth
. I loved it. I know we didn’t have to, but it was on my shelf and I …” It was the girl named Amanda, who had big cornflower-blue
eyes and short hair, who wore interesting yet bizarrely violent-looking earrings.

“You did? I am so glad. What did you like about it?”

“I liked how Wang Lung and his wife were so poor but happy and then how they became wealthy and unhappy. And how she, well, didn’t she get … breast cancer, his wife?” The girl looked straight into Rita’s eyes.

“You never know for certain, but yes, that is indicated.”

“My mother has it,” the girl said. “Breast cancer.”

“Oh,” said Rita, “I am so sorry.”

She felt the girl waiting, standing there, as if Rita would say something else.
Now I am supposed to do it, out this thing, this illness, tell the world. This is the moment
. She felt certain that the department secretary must have told this girl, and maybe everyone. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t say anything. No word would form in her mouth. She felt it had to be a silent thing. Something only Henrik and Anna Lin and others in the cancer chats could know about. Nobody in her walking, driving, teaching, or family life.

That night she got an e-mail from Anna Lin. “Rita!” it said. “I am engaged to Henrik! I had to tell you, you are the only one who might understand. We fell in love, it is so amazing, and strange and … beautiful even, two sickos like us, all kissy face and sweetie-pied out.”

Rita wrote back: “I am so happy for you, Anna, and for Henrik. Please tell him. Mazel tov, as we say in my tribe.”

The next day she got two e-mails. The first was from Anna Lin. “Thank you,” it said.

The second was from her mother. “You might have told me, Rita, that you are sick! You might have told your own MOTHER. But I guess we really aren’t that close. I would have wished for you to be able to come to me.”

Like your sister
, Rita thought, filling in the rest of the sentence. The department secretary knew somebody who was a friend of somebody who was a friend of someone else, so that somehow through the web that becomes a vine that is Facebook, her mother had read the news. She’d been outed. She had breast cancer. And she felt truly sick now, from the chemo, and weak, and all her hair was gone. Even her eyebrows. She had begun wearing a bad wig, like an orthodox woman.

Her mother was angry! It actually was as if Rita had joined some elite club and left her out. Her mother would have liked to have gone on cancer awareness walks and worn a pink pin and embraced this disease for her. Made some happy times of it. Some memories! She could have made an album with her friends in their scrapbooking club. Helping Rita get through breast cancer! She felt it was her RIGHT as a mom. And Rita had denied her this, selfish as she was. She had hoarded her cancer and kept it to herself. A secret treasure chest of cells, multiplying within her. A whole booty of special cells, twirling and whirling, jitterbugging and spiraling through her.

In the spring, Rita began teaching the class on irony but without the initial zeal she had felt for it. She stood before her class, feeble and thin, wearing the pink pin and her wig, trying hard to be the soldier in the army of the stricken everyone seemed to want her to be. She passed around a handout on all the different flavors of irony: Socratic, dramatic, verbal, literary, situational. “Let’s talk about irony,” she said. “What does this word mean to you?”

“The use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning,” said a student in the front row, who had obviously been boning up on it, in preparation for the first day. She looked over at the woman. It was Amanda, she of the blue eyes, the virulent earrings, the boyish-cut hair.

“Hello, Amanda! Nice to see you in here. Can you give an example?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “An infatuated boy leaves a girl flowers to wish her luck during her upcoming recital. Her protective father becomes upset that she’s getting flowers from boys and as a result of the argument over the good-luck flowers, she is late and misses the recital …”

“Very good, anything else you can think of?”

The class was silent. Minds spinning, trying to think of examples.

“A gourmet cook eating Chicken McNuggets?” asked one kid.

“Yes!”

“A swimming instructor who drowns?”

“Yes!”

Then Amanda raised her hand. “Can you give us an example, Professor Friedman?”

Rita hadn’t been prepared for it. In fact, she was feeling unprepared for just about everything these days. “Well, I heard about a pop star who got malaria while filming a malaria awareness commercial. But wait, I have a better example.” Rita walked to the front of the desk and leaned against it, looking out at the sea of faces. They looked at her with anticipation. They were hungry for the other example of irony.