Things You Should Know (16 page)

A deer crosses the road. My wife swerves. The car goes up a hill, trees fly by, the car goes down, we are rolling, we are hanging upside-down, suspended, and then boom, we are upright again, the air bag smashes me in the face, punches me in the nose. The steering wheel explodes into her chest. We are down in a ditch with balloons pressed into our faces, suffocating.

“Are you hurt?” she asks.

“I'm fine,” I say. “Are you all right?”

“Did we hit it?”

“No, I think it got away.”

The doors unlock.

“I'm sorry,” she says, “I'm so sorry. I didn't see it coming.”

The air bags are slowly deflating—losing pressure.

“I want to live,” I tell her. “I just don't know how.”

There are things I do not know. I was absent the day they passed out the information sheets. I was home in bed with a fever and an earache. I lay with the heating pad pressed to my head, burning my ear. I lay with the heating pad until my mother came in and said, “Don't keep it on high or you'll burn yourself.” This was something I knew but chose to forget.

 

The information sheets had the words “Things You Should Know” typed across the top of the page. They were mimeographed pages, purple ink on white paper. The sheets were written by my fourth grade teacher. They were written when she was young and thought about things. She thought of a language for these things and wrote them down in red Magic Marker.

By the time she was my teacher, she'd been teaching for a very long time but had never gotten past fourth grade. She hadn't done anything since her Things You Should Know sheets, which didn't really count, since she'd written them while she was still a student.

 

After my ear got better, the infection cured, the red burn mark faded into a sort of a Florida tan, I went back to school. Right away I knew I'd missed something important. “Ask the other students to fill you in on what happened while you were ill,” the principal said when I handed her the note from
my mother. But none of the others would talk to me. Immediately I knew this was because they'd gotten the information sheets and we no longer spoke the same language.

 

I tried asking the teacher, “Is there anything I missed while I was out?” She handed me a stack of maps to color in and some math problems. “You should put a little Vaseline on your ear,” she said. “It'll keep it from peeling.”

“Is there anything else?” I asked. She shook her head.

I couldn't just come out and say it. I couldn't say, you know, those information sheets, the ones you passed out the other day while I was home burning my ear. Do you have an extra copy? I couldn't ask because I'd already asked everyone. I asked so many people—my parents, their friends, random strangers—that in the end they sent me to a psychiatrist.

 

“What exactly do you think is written on this ‘Things to Know' paper?” he asked me.

“‘Things You Should Know,'” I said. “It's not things to know, not things you will learn, but things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “And what are those things?”

“You're asking me,” I shouted. “I don't know. You're the one who should know. You tell me. I never saw the list.”

 

Time passed. I grew up. I grew older. I grew deaf in one ear. In the newspaper I read that the teacher had died. She was eighty-four. In time I began to notice there was less to know. All the same, I kept looking for the list. Once, in an old bookstore, I thought I found page four. It was old, faded, folded into quarters and stuffed into an early volume of Henry Miller's essays. The top part of the page had been torn off. It began with number six: “Do what you will because you will anyway.” Number twenty-eight was “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.” And so on. At the
bottom of the page it said, “Chin San Fortune Company lines 1 through 32.”

 

Years later, when I was even older, when those younger than me seemed to know less than I ever had, I wrote a story. And in a room full of people, full of people who knew the list and some I was sure did not, I stood to read. “As a child, I burned my ear into a Florida tan.”

“Stop,” a man yelled, waving his hands at me.

“Why?”

“Don't you know?” he said. I shook my head. He was a man who knew the list, who probably had his own personal copy. He had based his life on it, on trying to explain it to others.

He spoke, he drew diagrams, splintering poles of chalk as he put pictures on a blackboard. He tried to tell of the things he knew. He tried to talk but did not have the language of the teacher.

I breathed deeply and thought of Chin San number twenty-eight. “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.”

“I will begin again,” I announced. Because I had stated this and had not asked for a second chance, because I was standing and he was seated, because it was still early in the evening, the man who had stopped me nodded, all right.

“Things You Should Know,” I said.

“Good title, good title,” the man said. “Go on, go on.”

“There is a list,” I said, nearing the end. “It is a list you make yourself. And at the top of the page you write, ‘Things You Should Know.'”

In the big bathtub in my parents' bedroom, he ran his tongue along my side, up into my armpits, tugging the hair with his teeth. “We're like married,” he said, licking my nipples.

I spit at him. A foamy blob landed on his bare chest. He smiled, grabbed both my arms, and held them down.

He slid his face down my stomach, dipped it under the water, and put his mouth over my cock.

My mother knocked on the bathroom door. “I have to get ready. Your father and I are leaving in twenty minutes.”

Air bubbles crept up to the surface.

“Can you hear me?” she said, fiddling with the knob. “Why is the door locked? You know we don't lock doors in this house.”

“It was an accident,” I said through the door.

“Well, hurry,” my mother said.

And we did.

Later, in the den, picking his nose, examining the results on his finger, slipping his finger into his mouth with a smack and a pop, he explained that as long as we never slept with anyone else, we could do whatever we wanted. “Sex kills,” he said, “but this,” he said, “this is the one time, the only time, the chance of a lifetime.” He ground his front teeth on the booger.

We met in a science class. “Cocksucker,” he hissed. My fingers were in my ears. I didn't hear the word so much as saw it escape his mouth. The fire alarm was going off. Everyone was grabbing their coats and hurrying for the door. He held me back, pressed his lips close to my ear, and said it again, Cocksucker, his tongue touching my neck. Back and forth, he shook a beaker of a strange potion and threatened to make me drink it. He raised the glass to my mouth. My jaws clamped shut. With his free hand, he pinched my nostrils shut and laughed like a maniac. My mouth fell open. He tilted the beaker toward my throat. The teacher stopped him just in time. “Enough horsing around,” she said. “This is a fire drill. Behave accordingly.”

“Got ya,” he said, pushing me into the hall and toward the steps, his hard-on rubbing against me the whole way down.

My mother came in, stood in front of the television set, her ass in Peter Jennings's face, and asked, “How do I look?”

He curled his lip and spit a pistachio shell onto the coffee table.

“Remember to clean up,” my mother said.

“I want you to fuck me,” he said while my father was in the next room, looking for his keys.

“Have you seen them?” my father asked.

“No,” I said.

“I want your Oscar Mayer in my bun,” he said.

He lived miles away, had gone to a different elementary school, was a different religion, wasn't circumcised.

My father poked his head into the room, jiggled his keys in the air, and said, “Got 'em.”

“Great tie,” I said.

My father tweaked his bow tie. “Bye, guys.”

The front door closed. My father's white Chrysler slid into the street.

“I want you to give it to me good.”

“I want to watch
Jeopardy,
” I said, going for the remote control.

“Ever tasted a dick infusion?” he asked, sipping from my glass of Dr. Pepper.

He unzipped his fly, fished out his dick, and dropped it into the glass. The ice cubes melted, cracking the way they do when you pour in something hot. A minute later, he put his dick away, swirled the soda around, and offered me a sip.

“Maybe later,” I said, focusing on the audio daily double. “‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon.'”

“I'm bored,” he said.

“Play along,” I said. “I've already got nine thousand dollars.”

He went to the bookcase and started handling the family photos. “Wonder if he ever sucked a cock,” he said, picking up a portrait of my father.

“Don't be a butt plug.”

He smiled. “I love you,” he said, raising his T-shirt, pulling it off over his head.

Dark hair rose in a fishbone up and out of his jeans.

I turned off the television.

“We need something,” he said as I led him down the hall toward my room.

“Something what?”

“Slippery.”

I ducked into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and grabbed a tube of Neosporin.

“Brilliant,” he said. “An antibiotic lube job, fights infection while you're having fun.”

Piece by piece I undressed with him, after him. He peeled off his socks, I peeled off mine. He unzipped his jeans and I undid mine. He slipped his fingers into the band of his underwear, snapped the elastic, and grinned. I pulled mine down. He slipped the tube of ointment into my ass, pinched my nipples, and sank his teeth deep into the muscle above my collarbone.

My parents got back just after midnight. “It was so nice of you to spend the evening,” my mother said. “I just hate to leave you-know-who home alone. I think he gets depressed.”

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging. He left with my father, who was giving him a ride home.

“You don't have to come with us,” my father said to me. “It's late. Go to bed.”

“See you in school tomorrow,” I said.

“Whatever.”

A week later he sat in my room at home, jerking off, with the door open.

“Stop,” I said. “Or close the door.”

“Danger excites me.”

“My mother isn't dangerous,” I said, getting up and closing the door myself.

“What we've got here,” he said, still jerking, “is virgin sperm. People will pay a load for this shit.” He laughed at himself. “Get it—pay a load.” Come shot into the air and landed on the glass of my fish tank.

“Very funny,” I said. I was working out an algebra problem on my bed. He came over to me, dropped his pants, and put his butt in my face. “Your luck, I haven't used it for anything except a couple of farts all day. Lick it,” he said, bending over, holding his cheeks apart. It was smelly and permanently stained. His testicles hung loose and low, and I took them in my hand, rolling them like Bogart's
Caine Mutiny
balls. “Get in,” he said. I buried my face there, tickled his asshole with the tip of my tongue, and made him laugh.

Saturday, on her way to the grocery store, my mother dropped us off at the park. “Shall I come back for you when I'm finished?” she asked.

“No,” he said flatly.

“No, thanks,” I said. “We'll find our way.”

“Ever fuck a girl?” he asked as we cut across the grass, past the playground, past the baseball fields and toward the woods.

“No.”

“Ever want to?”

“No.”

“Wanna watch?” he said, taking me to a picnic table where a girl I recognized from school was standing, arms crossed in front of her chest. “It's twelve-thirty, you're late,” she said. The girl looked at me and blinked. “Oh, hi. We're in history together, right?”

I nodded and looked at my shoes.

“Miss me?” he asked, kissing the girl's neck, hard.

My eyes hyperfocused and zeroed in on his lips, on her skin, on the feathery blond hair at the base of her skull. When he pulled away, the hair was wet, the skin was purple and red. There were teeth marks.

She stood in the clearing, eyes closed. He reached for her hand and led her into the woods. I followed, keeping a certain distance between them and me.

In the trees, he pulled his T-shirt off over his head. She ran her fingernails slowly up and down the fishbone of fur sticking out of his Levi's. He tugged at the top of her jeans.

“Take 'em off,” he said in a familiar and desperate voice.

“Who do you think you're kidding,” she said.

“Show me yours,” he said, rubbing the front of his Levi's with an open palm, “and I'll show you mine.”

“That's okay, thanks,” she said, backing away.

He went toward her, she stepped back again. He stuck his leg behind her, tripping her. She fell to the ground. He stepped on her open palms, holding her down with his Nikes.

“This isn't funny,” she said.

He laughed.

He unzipped his pants and peed on her. She screamed, and he aimed the river at her mouth. Her lips sealed and her head turned away. Torrent released, he shook it off on her, put it away, and stepped from her hands.

She raised herself. Urine ran down her cheeks, onto her blouse, and into her jeans. Arms spread, faces twisted, together she and I ran out of the woods, screaming as though doused in gasoline, as though afire.

My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end she could be dead. It started suddenly, on a country weekend, a movie with friends, a pizza, and then pain. “I liked the part where he lunged at the woman with a knife,” Eric says.

“She deserved it,” Enid says.

“Excuse me,” my wife says, getting up from the table.

A few minutes later I find her doubled over on the sidewalk. “Something is ripping me from the inside out.”

“Should I get the check?” She looks at me like I am an idiot.

“My wife is not well,” I announce, returning to the table. “We have to go.”

“What do you mean—is she all right?”

Eric and Enid hurry out while I wait for the check. They drive us home. As I open the front door, my wife pushes past me and goes running for the bathroom. Eric, Enid, and I stand in the living room, waiting.

“Are you all right in there?” I call out.

“No,” she says.

“Maybe she should go to the hospital,” Enid says.

“Doctors don't go to the hospital,” I say.

She lies on the bathroom floor, her cheek against the white tile. “I keep thinking it will pass.”

“Call us if you need us,” Eric and Enid say, leaving.

I tuck the bath mat under her head and sneak away. From the kitchen I call a doctor friend. I stand in the dark, whispering, “She's just lying there on the floor, what do I do?”

“Don't do anything,” the doctor says, half-insulted by the thought that there is something to do. “Observe her. Either it will go away, or something more will happen. You watch and you wait.”

Watch and wait. I am thinking about our relationship. We haven't been getting along. The situation has become oxygenless and addictive, a suffocating annihilation, each staying to see how far it will go.

I sit on the edge of the tub, looking at her. “I'm worried.”

“Don't worry,” she says. “And don't just sit there staring.”

Earlier in the afternoon we were fighting, I don't remember about what. I only know—I called her a bitch.

“I was a bitch before I met you and I'll be a bitch long after you're gone. Surprise me,” she said. “Tell me something new.”

I wanted to say, I'm leaving. I wanted to say, I know you think I never will and that's why you treat me like you do. But I'm going. I wanted to get in the car, drive off, and call it a day.

The fight ended with the clock. She glanced at it. “It's six-thirty, we're meeting Eric and Enid at seven; put on a clean shirt.”

She is lying on the bathroom floor, the print of the bath mat making an impression on her cheek. “Are you comfortable?” I ask.

She looks surprised, as though she's just realized she's on the floor.

“Help me,” she says, struggling to get up.

Her lips are white and thin.

“Bring me a trash can, a plastic bag, a thermometer, some Tylenol, and a glass of water.”

“Are you going to throw up?”

“I want to be prepared,” she says.

We are always prepared. We have flare guns and fire extinguishers, walkie talkies, a rubber raft, a hundred batteries in assorted shapes and sizes, a thousand bucks in dollar bills, enough toilet paper and bottled water to get us through six months. When we travel we have smoke hoods in our carry-on bags, protein bars, water purification tablets, and a king-sized bag of M&Ms. We are ready and waiting.

She slips the digital thermometer under her tongue; the numbers move up the scale—each beep is a tenth of a degree.

“A hundred and one point four,” I announce.

“I have a fever?” she says in disbelief.

“I wish things between us weren't so bad.”

“It's not as bad as you think,” she says. “Expect less and you won't be disappointed.”

We try to sleep; she is hot, she is cold, she is mumbling something about having “a surgical belly,” something about “guarding and rebound.” I don't know if she's talking about herself or the NBA.

“This is incredible.” She sits bolt upright and folds over again, writhing. “Something is struggling inside me. It's like one of those alien movies, like I'm going to burst open and something's going to spew out, like I'm erupting.” She pauses, takes a breath. “And then it stops. Who would ever have thought this would happen to me—and on a Saturday night?”

“Is it your appendix?”

“That's the one thought I have, but I'm not sure. I don't have the classic symptoms. I don't have anorexia or diarrhea. When I was eating that pizza, I was hungry.”

“Is it an ovary? Women have lots of ovaries.”

“Women have two ovaries,” she says. “It did occur to me that it could be Mittelschmertz.”

“Mittelschmertz?”

“The launching of the egg, the middle of the cycle.”

At five in the morning her temperature is one hundred and three. She is alternately sweating and shivering.

“Should I drive you back to the city or to the hospital out here?”

“I don't want to be the doctor who goes to the ER with gas.”

“Fine.”

I am dressing myself, packing, thinking of what I will need in the waiting room: cell phone, notebook, pen, something to read, something to eat, my wallet, her insurance card.

We are in the car, hurrying. There is an urgency to the situation, the unmistakable sense that something bad is happening. I am driving seventy miles an hour.

She is not a doctor now. She is lost, inside herself.

“I think I'm dying,” she says.

I pull up to the emergency entrance and half-carry her in, leaving the car doors open, the engine running; I have the impulse to drop her off and walk away.

The emergency room is empty. There is a bell on the check-in desk. I ring it twice.

A woman appears. “Can I help you?”

“My wife is not well,” I say. “She is a doctor.”

The woman sits at her computer. She takes my wife's name. She takes her insurance card and then she takes her temperature and blood pressure. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Yes,” my wife says.

Within minutes a doctor is there, pressing on my wife. “It's got to come out,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“Appendix. Do you want some Demerol?”

She shakes her head. “I'm working tomorrow and I'm on call.”

In the cubicle next to her, someone vomits.

The nurse comes to take blood. “They called Barry Manilow—he's a very good surgeon.” She ties off my wife's arm. “We call him Barry Manilow because he looks like Barry Manilow.”

“I want to do right by you,” Barry Manilow says, as he's
feeling my wife's belly. “I'm not sure it's your appendix, not sure it's your gall bladder either. I'm going to call the radiologist and let him scan it. How's that sound?” She nods.

I take the surgeon aside. “Should she be staying here? Is this the place to do this?”

“It's not a kidney transplant,” he says.

The nurse brings me a cold drink. She offers me a chair. I sit close to the gurney where my wife lies. “Do you want me to get you out of here? I could hire a car and have us driven to the city. I could have you medevaced home.”

“I don't want to go anywhere,” she says. She is on the wrong side of it now.

Back in the cubicle, Barry Manilow is talking to her. “It's not your appendix. It's your ovary. It's a hemmorhagic cyst; you're bleeding and your hematocrit is falling. We have to operate. I've called a gynecologist and the anesthesiologist—I'm just waiting for them to arrive. We're going to take you upstairs very soon.”

“Just do it,” she says.

I stop Barry Manilow in the hall. “Can you try and save the ovary, she very much wants to have children. It's just something she hasn't gotten around to yet—first she had her career, then me, and now this.”

“We'll do everything we can,” he says, disappearing through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”

I am the only one in the surgical waiting room, flipping through copies of
Field and Stream, Highlights for Children
, a pamphlet on colon cancer. Less than an hour later, Barry Manilow comes to find me. “We saved the ovary. We took out something the size of a lemon.”

“The size of a lemon?”

He makes a fist and holds it up—“A lemon,” he says. “It looked a little funny. We sent it to Pathology.” He shrugs.

A lemon, a bleeding lemon, like a blood orange, a lemon souring in her. Why is fruit used as the universal medical measurement?

“She should be upstairs in about an hour.”

When I get to her room she is asleep. A tube poking out from under the covers drains urine into a bag. She is hooked up to oxygen and an IV.

I put my hand on her forehead. Her eyes open.

“A little fresh air,” she says, pulling at the oxygen tube. “I always wondered what all this felt like.”

She has a morphine drip, the kind she can control herself. She keeps the clicker in hand. She never pushes the button.

I feed her ice chips and climb into the bed next to her. In the middle of the night I go home. In the morning she calls, waking me up.

“Flowers have been arriving like crazy,” she says, “from the hospital, from the ER, from the clinic.”

Doctors are like firemen. When one of their own is down they go crazy.

“They took the catheter out, I'm sitting up in a chair. I already had some juice and took myself to the bathroom,” she says proudly. “They couldn't be nicer. But, of course, I'm a very good patient.”

I interrupt her. “Do you want anything from the house?”

“Clean socks, a pair of sweat pants, my hairbrush, some toothpaste, my face soap, a radio, maybe a can of Diet Coke.”

“You're only going to be there a couple of days.”

“You asked if I needed anything. Don't forget to feed the dog.”

 

Five minutes later she calls back, crying. “I have ovarian cancer.”

I run out the door. When I get there the room is empty. I'm expecting a big romantic scene, expecting her to cling to me, to tell me how much she loves me, how she's sorry we've been having such a hard time, how much she needs me, wants me, now more than ever. The bed is empty. For a moment I think she's died, jumped out the window, escaped. Her absence is terrifying.

In the bathroom, the toilet flushes. “I want to go home,” she says, stepping out, fully dressed.

“Do you want to take the flowers?”

“They're mine, aren't they? Do you think all the nurses know I have cancer? I don't want anyone to know.”

The nurse comes with a wheelchair; she takes us down to the lobby. “Good luck,” she says, loading the flowers into the car.

“She knows,” my wife says.

We are on the Long Island Expressway. I am dialing and driving. I call my wife's doctor in New York.

“She has to see Kibbowitz immediately,” the doctor says.

“Do you think I'll lose my ovary?”

She will lose everything—instinctively I know that.

We are home. She is on the bed with the dog on her lap. She peeks beneath the gauze; her incision is crooked, the lack of precision an incredible insult. “Do you think they can fix it?”

In the morning we go to Kibbowitz. She is again on a table, her feet in the stirrups, in launch position, waiting. Before the doctor arrives she is interviewed and examined by seven medical students. I hate them. I hate them for talking to her, for touching her, for wasting her time. I hate Kibbowitz for keeping her on the table for more than an hour, waiting.

And she is angry with me for being annoyed. “They're just doing their job.”

Kibbowitz arrives. He is enormous, like a hockey player, a brute and a bully. It is hard to understand how a man gets gynecologic oncology as his calling. I can tell immediately that she likes him. She will do anything he says.

“Scootch down a little closer to me,” he says, settling himself on a stool between her legs. She lifts her ass and slides down. He examines her. He looks under the gauze—“Crooked,” he says. “Get dressed and meet me in my office.”

“I want a number,” she says. “A survival rate.”

“I don't deal in numbers,” he says.

“I need a number.”

He shrugs. “How's seventy percent?”

“Seventy percent what?”

“Seventy percent live five years.”

“And then what?” I ask.

“And then some don't,” he says.

“What has to come out?” she asks.

“What do you want to keep?”

“I wanted to have a child.”

This is a delicate negotiation; they talk parts. “I could take just the one ovary,” he says. “And then after the chemo you could try and get pregnant and then after you had a child we could go in and get the rest.”

“Can you really get pregnant after chemo?” I ask.

The doctor shrugs. “Miracles happen all the time,” he says. “The problem is you can't raise a child if you're dead. You don't have to decide now, let me know in a day or two. Meanwhile I'll book the operating room for Friday morning. Nice meeting you,” he says, shaking my hand.

“I want to have a baby,” she says.

“I want to have you,” I say.

Beyond that I say nothing. Whatever I say she will do the opposite. We are at that point—spite, blame, and fault. I don't want to be held responsible. She opens the door of the consulting room. “Doctor,” she shouts, hurrying down the hall after him, clutching her belly, her incision, her wound. “Take it,” she screams. “Take it all the hell out.”

He is standing outside another examination room, chart in hand.

He nods. “We'll take it through your vagina. We'll take the ovaries, the uterus, cervix, omentum, and your appendix, if they didn't already get it in Southampton. And then we'll put a port in your chest and sign you up for chemotherapy—eight rounds should do it.”